2026-2027 Literature and Culture Courses
Harvard Slavic Literature and Culture Courses Fall 2026
Slavic 126: Structure of Modern Russian
Professor Steven Clancy. Meeting Time TBA
Course description: Introduction to Russian phonetics, phonemics, morphophonemics, and inflectional and derivational morphology. Course goal is to give a deeper understanding and appreciation of the regularities and complexities of Russian through a close study of its sounds and words
Recommended prep: Russian B, BAB, BT or placement at the third-year level. No knowledge of linguistics required.
Slavic 132: Russia's Golden Age: Literature, Arts, and Culture
Professor Julie Buckler Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:00-4:15 p.m.
Course description: Explores major works of imperial Russian culture (1703-1917), including literature, drama, opera, ballet, music, visual arts, and architecture. At the center of this course stand the works themselves, their artistic qualities, and cultural-historical contexts, as well as the intentions of their creators, and the responses of their initial audiences. What mythologies of national identity did these works propose? In what ways were these works radical: formally, aesthetically, ideologically? How did these now-famous works achieve canonical status beyond their own time? How have these works been variously reinterpreted since then? Works by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and others.
Course notes: All readings in English. Students who wish to read Russian texts in the original may attend a special weekly section with the instructor.
Slavic 144: Communism and the Politics of Culture: Czechoslovakia and the Cold War in Eastern Europe
Professor Jonathan Bolton. Tuesdays and Thursdays 10:30-11:45 a.m.
Course description: We will examine the literature and film of Czechoslovakia within the larger context of European history during the Cold War, with a focus on how the intense political pressures of revolution, invasion, and occupation can shape a country’s literature, drama, art, and music. Starting from the 1948 Communist takeover in Prague, we will learn about the show trials of the 1950s, the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of 1968, the rise of the music underground and dissident movements in the 1970s, and the 1989 Velvet Revolution, a hallmark of the peaceful overthrow of Communism in Europe. This course will introduce you to the history of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with special attention to key problems in the study of ideology, aesthetics, and politics (including censorship, samizdat, “underground” culture, dissident movements, and the “New Wave” in Czech film). Readings from Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Václav Havel, Heda Kovaly, Eva Kantůrková, and others; films from Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Agnieszka Holland and others; music from the Plastic People of the Universe.
Course notes: All readings in English. No prerequisite.
Slavic 175: Between East and West: A Critical Mapping of Polish Culture
Professor Aleksandra Kremer Wednesdays 12:00-2:00 p.m.
Course description: This course will introduce you to the history of Polish literature and Polish cultural imagination, focusing on several questions that remain resonant to this day, such as Poland’s entangled relations with Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Jewish, German, and Russian cultures. Critical discussions of Polish literature and film (including readings of Polish Nobel Prize winners: Tokarczuk, Szymborska, Milosz, and Sienkiewicz) will be confronted with Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Yiddish texts. Polish culture offers examples of both the colonized and colonizing voices, offering unique insights into the study of racialization, forced displacement, dual identity, complicity, resistance, and genocide. We will discuss why Poland’s national epic poem begins with the words “Lithuania! My homeland!” and was written in France by a poet born in the area of today’s Belarus. We will consider East-Central Europe’s often-changing borders, contested memories, and the ways in which the region’s complicated past is reworked and discussed today.
Note: All readings in English. It is an introductory course – no background in Polish literature is required. Students who take this course are eligible to apply for the Slavic Department’s Jurzykowski grants for the summer language study in Poland.
Course notes: No prior knowledge of Poland required. All readings will be in English.
Slavic 187: Soviet Musical Imaginaries
Professor Maria Sosnevytsky Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:30-2:45 p.m.
Course description: This course surveys the relationship between musical culture and the state in the Soviet Union, focusing on musical politics in Ukraine alongside comparative case studies in Uzbekistan and Russia. We explore how the lives, listening practices, and creative activities of musicians and audiences were negotiated through the interplay of top-down cultural policies and the bottom-up initiatives of culture workers and ordinary people. Topics include Soviet revolutionary-era debates in Ukraine over popular, folk and elite music in the 1920s and 1930s; the invention of Soviet Uzbek opera; the so-called Shostakovich Wars; the Kyiv Avant-Garde of the 1960s; Soviet “Flower Children” in 1970s Western Ukraine; the effect of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster on Ukrainian protest genres; the politics of 1980s punk in Ukraine and Siberia; the role of various media technologies in facilitating or constraining forms of musical activity; and the Marxist-Leninist engineering of folk music in diverse venues. Students will gain a critical understanding of how Soviet cultural policy conceived of musical practices as both a political resource and a potential threat in everyday and symbolic life, and what happened when ideological imperatives shifted, eroded, or were replaced after 1991. Readings draw from Slavic studies, music studies, anthropology, and history.
Course notes: No knowledge of musical notation is required. All readings will be available in English.
Slavic 188: Classics of Short Fiction: Reading the Novella
Professor Jonathan Bolton Wednesdays, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Course description: Short enough to read in a single sitting, but more complex and absorbing than short stories, novellas give us some of our most intense reading experiences. In this discussion seminar, we will read some of the enduring classics of the novella from around the world, including Anton Chekhov, Henry James, Herman Melville, Bohumil Hrabal, Katherine Anne Porter, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Eileen Chang, and others; we will also consider how the novella’s compression and acceleration of plot make it ideal for horror, suspense, and other forms of "genre” fiction (H. G. Wells, H. P. Lovecraft and contemporary science fiction).
Course notes: All readings in English; no prerequisite.
Slavic 193: Introduction to Russian and Soviet Film
Professor Daria Khitrova Mondays 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Course description:
The course introduces students to some of the most influential films in the history of cinema, such as the dynamic and politically-charged montage movies of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, and their avant-garde contemporaries of the 1920s and 1930s. We will examine early Russian melodramas, the film culture of the Bolshevik Revolution, the exotic and eccentric movie-land fashioned by Russian emigres in Paris and Berlin, and the strictures of Stalin-era Socialist Realism. Students will learn about the analysis of film style, from framing to editing to acting, as well as the political and social contexts of filmmaking and film-going. Films to be considered include: Cameraman's Revenge, Child of the Big City, The Man with the Movie Camera, The Battleship Potemkin, and Ivan the Terrible. Readings (all in English) include classic film theory of the era and critical reviews.
Slavic 294: State Socialist Childhoods
Professor Maria Sonevytsky Thursdays, 9:00-11:45am
Course description: What was childhood in twentieth-century state socialist societies, and what came next? How did the Soviet Union attempt to educate, discipline, and mobilize children—and how did children variously inhabit, appropriate, or refuse those projects? This seminar explores childhood as a key site for the production of socialist subjectivity and state socialist governance, with particular attention to Soviet Ukraine. Drawing on childhood studies, Soviet history and anthropology, feminist theories of social reproduction, and memory studies, we examine the USSR as an anti-imperial empire and consider Ukraine’s place within its structures of power. Topics include debates over childhood agency; Cold War epistemologies; internal Soviet discussions of pedagogy and discipline; youth organizations and ritual life; feminist analyses of social reproduction; temporality and developmentalism; and post-socialist memory, nostalgia, and reassessments of the state socialist past. Literary, visual, and musical sources are analyzed alongside historical scholarship. Comparative readings address childhood in Maoist China, Hoxha’s Albania, Soviet Russia and Central Asia, and other Eastern bloc contexts. Students will also work with materials from the digital archive of the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers.
Course notes: All readings will be available in English.
Slavic 298: How to Teach Contemporary Russian Culture
Professor Stephanie Sandler Wednesdays, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Course description: Our seminar will focus on a single question: how, after February 24, 2022, to teach undergraduates about Russian culture and about the issues it surfaces, including authoritarianism and freedom, exile and diaspora, public rhetoric and hidden resistance? We will develop conceptual frameworks for several kinds of undergraduate courses: first-year seminars; general education courses which might be comparative; introductory Slavic department courses: and Slavici department courses advanced undergraduates and graduate student. We will read a range of texts, including recent work by Maria Stepanova, Linor Goralik, Sergei Lebedev, Vladimir Sorokin, Oksana Vasyakina, and discuss films by Sokurov, Zviagintsev, Loznitsa, and others. We will assess what works in translation, discuss strategies for choosing material, and practice assembling background mini-lectures that foster lively discussion among undergraduates. We will construct syllabi and modules, collectively and independently. Our aims will thus be largely pedagogical, but we will also seek to create a community in our own classroom that can generate new translations and new scholarship based on contemporary material.
Course notes: Requires reading knowledge of Russian.
Slavic 299A: Slavic Graduate Proseminar
Instructor TBA. Meeting time TBA
Course description: Introduction to graduate study in Slavic. Selected topics in literary analysis, history, theory, and professional development. Students must complete both terms of this course (parts A and B) within the same academic year to receive credit.
Course notes: Reading knowledge of Russian required.
Harvard Slavic Literature & Culture Courses Spring 2027
Slavic 97: Introduction to Slavic Literatures and Cultures
Professor Bohdan Tokarskyi Wednesday 9:45-11:45 a.m.
Course description: An interdisciplinary introduction to major issues in the field of Slavic Languages and Literatures, including critical theory, modes of interpreting literary texts, the forces structuring national and regional identities, as well as major authors of the Slavic literary traditions, including Russian, Czech, Ukrainian, and Polish works.
Course notes: This course is required for concentrators in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Other students are welcome and should contact the instructor before the start of the semester.
Slavic 118: Reading Tolstoy's War and Peace
Professor Julie Buckler Thursday 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Course description:
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1865-69) is a magnificent work of art by a world-class writer tackling life’s “big questions” and it is also a pleasure to read. We will go through War and Peace closely together, savoring the details, while exploring Tolstoy’s artistic biography and the larger cultural and historical contexts for classic Russian novels. We will also consider the significance of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) in Russian history. How many different ways are there to interpret Tolstoy’s work? What issues arise in translation? How does the pacing of the novel relate to nineteenth-century conceptions of time, space, narrative, and genre? What are the problematic distinctions between history and literature that the novel raises?
Course notes: No knowledge of Russian required
Slavic 165: Poetics of Resistance: An Introduction to Ukrainian Literature
Professor Bohdan Tokarskyi Thursday 9:45-11:45 a.m.
Course description:
This course will provide an overview of Ukrainian multicultural literature through the lens of the poetics of resistance. Our exploration will span the period from the genesis of modern Ukrainian literature in the 17th century to contemporary works emerging in the face of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Starting from the discussion of Ivan Kotliarevsky’s travesty of Virgil’s Aeneid, Nikolai Gogol/ Mykola Hohol’s hybrid identities and Taras Shevchenko’s resolutely anti-imperial poetry we will go on to discuss the groundbreaking feminist writing of Lesia Ukrainka and Olha Kobylianska. A significant part of the course will be dedicated to the Soviet period: we will study how Ukrainian modernists both reflected Soviet culture and subverted it; we will look at how Ukrainian dissidents defied the Soviet order and managed to create outstanding literary works even in the extreme circumstances of the Gulag. Finally, we will analyze some of the poetry, prose, and film that seek to articulate the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, shedding light on its causes and stakes. In studying some of Ukraine’s literary masterpieces, we will tunnel to the heart of the phenomenon of resistance: its philosophy, aesthetics, cultural practices, and historical reverberations. Fundamentally, we will reflect on the nexus between literature and ethics, focusing on themes such as resistance against political violence and oppression, human rights discourse, feminist struggle as well as justice and solidarity.
Course notes:
No prior knowledge of Ukrainian literature is required or expected. All materials will be provided in English.
Slavic 177: Fugitives from Utopia: Polish Poets Across the Iron Curtain
Professor Aleksandra Kremer Wednesday 12:00-2:00 p.m.
Course description:
Immigrants and travelers, dissidents and eccentrics—there were many ways Polish poets created spaces of personal freedom from the communist regime and the discourse of propaganda. In poetry, they contrasted utopian slogans with reality, but they also questioned more generally the idea of any human-made collective paradise, choosing instead irony, distrust, and singularity. In this course, we will study Polish poetry as embedded in the lived experiences of home meetings and experiments with tape recording, censorship and internal exile, struggles with emigration and translations into English, as well as dramatic decisions whether to stay abroad or come back from one’s journeys. We will read poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and Adam Zagajewski, alongside many other authors.
Course notes:
All readings in English. Students who would like to read Polish texts in the original may arrange a special section with the instructor.
Slavic 189: The Other Russia: Twenty-First Century Films, Fictions, States of Mind
Professor Stephanie Sandler Wednesday 3:00-5:00 p.m.
Course description:
Russia is in the news these days: grotesque war in Ukraine, election interference in the US, violent repressions of free speech and countless arrests at home. But Russian culture has a long history of channeling creative forms of resistance through literature, drama, and film. How have the stories, poems, plays, movies, memoirs, and documentaries of the last thirty years set up current cultural activists to find their voices and use them effectively? What has diaspora come to mean, and how have cultural figures in far-flung places created a sense of shared identity?
Our course will ask how we got to this place, and how to read its ethics and aesthetics. We will trace the chaotic transitions of the 1990s, the disparities of wealth and polarized politics of the 2000s, and the protests of the 2000s and 2010s, and the complex rise of religious thinking (Orthodox, Islam, Jewish).
We will read works set within Russia’s borders, in former Soviet republics, and much further afield, in sites of emigration and self-exile. Themes of historical trauma and reconciliation, of war and rebellion, of sexual expression and sexual freedom, and feminist and LGBTQ resistance will be explored.
Writings by Svetlana Aleksievich, Joseph Brodsky, Keti Chukhrov, Elena Fanailova, Alisa Ganieva, Linor Goralik, Boris Khersonsky, Vladimir Sorokin, Maria Stepanova, Lida Yusupova, and others. Films include The Blockade, Leviathan, Four, Alexandra, My Joy, and Beslan, Remember.
Course notes:
All readings in English, with added section for those able to read in Russian.
Slavic 253: Pushkin
Professor Daria Khitrova Tuesday 12:00-2:00 p.m.
Course description:
In this course we will focus on the works of Aleksander Pushkin (1799-1837). We will read a wide range of Pushkin's lyric poetry, longer poemy, dramatic works, and prose in the original Russian and discuss them as both literary facts, as Formalist critics would put it, and as reflections on Russian cultural, social, and political history. We will employ a range of approaches to Pushkin and discuss the major touchstones of Pushkin criticism.
Course notes:
Open to qualified undergraduates with permission of instructor. Reading knowledge of Russian is required.