ELEM BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepares students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

• TWF 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Aleksandar Boskovic
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

ELEMENTARY CZECH II

BEGINNING CZECH II

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepare students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

• TRF 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Christopher W Harwood
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

ELEMENTARY POLISH II

BEGINNING POLISH II

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepares students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

• TRF 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Christopher Caes
  Info
• 4 points

FIRST-YEAR RUSSIAN II

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.

• MTWR 8:50 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• MTWR 10:10 a.m.-11:15 a.m.
• MTWR 11:40 a.m.-12:45 p.m.
• Instructor: Marina Grineva
  Info
• 5 points

ELEMENTARY UKRAINIAN II

Designed for students with little or no knowledge of Ukrainian. Basic grammar structures are introduced and reinforced, with equal emphasis on developing oral and written communication skills. Specific attention to acquisition of high-frequency vocabulary and its optimal use in real-life settings.

• MWR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Yana Prymachenko
  Info
• 4 points

INTERMEDIATE CZECH I

Prerequisites: CZCH UN1102 or the equivalent Rapid review of grammar. Readings in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, depending upon the interests of individual students.

• TRF 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Christopher W Harwood
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

INTER BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN

Prerequisites: BCRS UN1102 or the equivalent. Readings in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian literature in the original, with emphasis depending upon the needs of individual students. This course number has been changed to BCRS 2102

• TWF 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Aleksandar Boskovic
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

INTERMEDIATE POLISH II

Prerequisites: POLI UN1102 or the equivalent. Rapid review of grammar; readings in contemporary nonfiction or fiction, depending on the interests of individual students.

• TRF 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Christopher Caes
  Info
• 4 points

SECOND-YEAR RUSSIAN II

Prerequisites: RUSS UN2101 or the equivalent. Drill practice in small groups. Reading, composition, and grammar review.

• MTWR 8:50 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
• Instructor: Marina Tsylina
  Info
• 5 points

INTERMEDIATE UKRAINIAN II

Prerequisites: UKRN UN1102 or the equivalent. Reviews and reinforces the fundamentals of grammar and a core vocabulary from daily life. Principal emphasis is placed on further development of communicative skills (oral and written). Verbal aspect and verbs of motion receive special attention.

• MWR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Yuri Shevchuk
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

THIRD-YEAR RUSSIAN II

Prerequisites: RUSS UN2102 or the equivalent and the instructors permission. Enrollment limited. Recommended for students who wish to improve their active command of Russian. Emphasis on conversation and composition. Reading and discussion of selected texts and videotapes. Lectures. Papers and oral reports required. Conducted entirely in Russian.

• MWF 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Tatiana Mikhailova
  Info
• 4 points

TOLSTOY AND DOSTOEVSKY

Two epic novels, Tolstoys War and Peace and Dostoevskys The Brothers Karamazov, will be read along with selected shorter works. Other works by Tolstoy include his early Sebastopol Sketches, which changed the way war is represented in literature; Confession, which describes his spiritual crisis; the late stories Kreutzer Sonata and Hadji Murad; and essays on capital punishment and a visit to a slaughterhouse. Other works by Dostoevsky include his fictionalized account of life in Siberian prison camp, The House of the Dead; Notes from the Underground, his philosophical novella on free will, determinism, and love; A Gentle Creature, a short story on the same themes; and selected essays from Diary of a Writer. The focus will be on close reading of the texts. Our aim will be to develop strategies for appreciating the structure and form, the powerful ideas, the engaging storylines, and the human interest in the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. No knowledge of Russian is required.

• MW 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Liza Knapp
  CULPA: 28 Info
• 3 points

Persona, Performance, and High Society L

Persona, Performance, 19t

For the nobility of the Russian Empire, daily life for the better part of the 19th century resembled
a carefully choreographed performance. One’s time in public was delicately scripted according
to a stifling web of unspoken expectations, obligatory social ceremony, and mannered
pageantry—all under the watchful, surveilling eyes of the Autocracy (to say nothing of one’s
vicious peers in high society!). The cheap glamours and shameless inauthenticity of high society
life were a common complaint among Russian writers of the 1800s, who bemoaned the falsity
and vanity of their milieu at large. But this pervasive sense of deceit, theatricality, and artifice
was tremendously productive to the Russian literature of the period—as writers developed
devices and vocabulary for interrogating hidden motivations, used new forms and genres to
create and maintain intriguing public personae through their texts, and cleverly deployed their
talents to manipulate the codes that restricted them in order to perform new literary identities
more effectively. An attentive history of Russian literature in the 1800s, then, is in no small part
a history of the ways that Russian writers sought to turn their daily lives into pieces of legible
artistic text, bound by the same constructive principles that their verses and stories often were.

• TR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Zachary J Deming
  Info
• 3 points

RUSSIAN FOR HERITAGE SPKRS II

Prerequisites: RUSS V3430 or the instructors permission. This course is designed to help students who speak Russian at home, but have no or limited reading and writing skills to develop literary skills in Russian. THIS COURSE, TAKEN WITH RUSS V3430, MEET A TWO YEAR FOREIGN LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT. Conducted in Russian.

• MW 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Alla Smyslova
  CULPA: 20 Info
• 3 points

SUPERVISED IND RES-LING THESIS

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Nikita Bezrukov
  Info
• 1-4 points

Folklore Past and Present

This course moves from Serbia and Bosnia, to Ukraine and the Czech lands, through Poland to Russia and Finland and then on to the southern Siberian steppes and finally the Russian Far East. Along the way, the course is divided into three major thematic and theoretical units.

Epics and Ballads: History, Performance, Identity 

Our first focus is on historical songs in the context of Romantic nationalism. We will explore why people (philologists) began to write these down, and how they were they edited and organized into print books. We discuss what these publications meant in the context of Romantic nationalist movements for political autonomy from the Ottoman or Hapsburg Empires. Given the stakes, some scholars were (maybe too) creative with their material. We will ask: What makes an epic text authentic, as opposed to an invented tradition, or even a fake? Throughout, we will pay attention to how traditions of oral performance were learned and transmitted within specific communities of artists, such as Ramadan performers, upper-class Bosnian women, and Ukrainian minstrels.

Words in Context: Poetry, Power, Positioning

Our second unit begins with the theoretical redefinition of folklore in the 20th c. Folklore is no longer defined by
who
performs it (e.g. peasants), but by its characteristics of variation and localization. We begin with a genre that anyone can perform—the proverb. To understand the power of small forms we need place them in their real-world context. We learn about ethnographic interviewing methods aimed at eliciting the local meanings of folklore. We consider relationship between the body and verbal folklore in south Siberian shamanism and in the performance of charms by folk healers in Russia and Finland. In order to bring the study of folklore home, to us at Columbia, we consider campus legends and folklore of the COVID-19 pandemic. This unit provides students with the tools needed to design and carry out their own mini-ethnography, which serves as the final project for the course.

Oral Narrative: Legends, Fairytales, Cross-Cultural Motifs

Our last major unit is dedicated to folk narrative—the memorate (personal narrative), the legend and the fairytale. We begin with Russian memorates about nature and house spirits. Narratives told as true events (memorates, legends) are contrasted with the genre of the fairy tale. We learn about how fairy tales were typically performed

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Jessica E Merrill
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

Advanced Ukrainian Through Literature, M

ADVANCED UKRAINIAN

This course is organized around a number of thematic centers or modules. Each is focused on stylistic peculiarities typical of a given functional style of the Ukrainian language. Each is designed to assist the student in acquiring an active command of lexical, grammatical, discourse, and stylistic traits that distinguish one style from the others and actively using them in real-life communicative settings in contemporary Ukraine. The styles include literary fiction, scholarly prose, and journalism, both printed and broadcast

• MWR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
• Instructor: Yuri Shevchuk
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 3 points

Making the Soviet Body: Health, Gender,

It is widely known that in the Soviet Union, from the first years after the Revolution of 1917, the image of a "New Person," with not only a new morality but also a new physical body, was enthusiastically constructed on both verbal and visual levels and then thoroughly developed and widely propagandized. Literature and visual arts played a significant role in creating and disseminating these images. The same media were also often used to transmit normative ideas about health, illness, hygiene, sexuality, etc. Lived reality, however, frequently contradicted the propaganda and the iconic images it produced, and some works of art registered that tension, sometimes deliberately, sometimes without meaning to. This course will discuss Soviet attitudes and practices towards the body, disciplining the body, and the role of sport and exercise in human life. We will also focus on the work of healthcare institutions, discuss issues of medical ethics, and address models of relationships between patients and doctors that significantly differ from those we know from 20th-century Western Europe and the USA. Throughout, we will look at the normative images, at the practices, and at the ways in which their divergence was reflected upon.

This course is addressed to students interested in Soviet culture and history. It may be of particular interest to those who have not learned a lot about Soviet culture, but who plan to specialize in medicine and healthcare. The literary and visual works suggested for discussion will help us understand the specific traits in Soviet perceptions of health, illness, and death that have carried over into the post-Soviet period.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Maria Mayofis
  Info
• 3 points

The World Made Strange: Grotesque Litera

Grotesque Lit: Eastern Eu

This seminar examines the grotesque as one of Eastern European literature’s most productive formal resources: a way of revealing what happens when incompatibilities are forced into uneasy coexistence in various representational sites – whether that be the same body, image, voice, institution, or world. We will read works from a wide range of Eastern European traditions – Russian, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Albanian, South Slavic/post-Yugoslav, and Hungarian. The course is comparative and does not treat Eastern Europe as a monoculture. Instead, it asks why writers whose lives and works have been informed by a great diversity of forces – empires, border changes, modernization, war, revolution, state socialism, post-socialist transition, folklore, and ecological crisis – converge on the grotesque as a representational strategy.  We will also learn how to read the meanings of various grotesque representational staples – distorted bodies, animate objects, proliferating doubles, impossible bureaucracies, unstable genres, and comic catastrophe.

Across the semester, we will develop a sophisticated working definition of the grotesque by examining its greatest theorists – from Bakhtin and Kayser to Eikhenbaum, Ruskin, Thomson, Harpham, Russo, and Connelly.

The literary readings are assigned as whole works: unexcerpted novels and novellas, plays, and stories or story cycles. Only scholarship and theoretical books will be assigned in excerpts. All readings are available in English

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Ben Hooyman
  Info
• 3 points

Nuclear Narratives in (Post-)Soviet Lite

Soviet Nuclear Lit and Fi

Literature and film provide critical reflections on how nuclear technology and its dangers have shaped Soviet and post-Soviet imaginations and worldviews. This course draws from multiple literary and creative narratives that respond to the region’s nuclear history, tracing how official discourse was first subverted by dissident narratives, and then, over the course of the Perestroika period (1985–1991), subsumed within them. Alongside disasters like Chernobyl, we will investigate nuclear legacies across the former Soviet sphere, including in Kazakhstan, where the Soviet government detonated more than 450 nuclear tests over a forty-year period, and in Lithuania, where inhabitants of a former “nuclear city” still live as if beyond history’s reach. How did artistic narratives shape Soviet nuclear realities, and vice versa? How have nuclear concerns fostered cultural exchange and solidarity in unexpected ways? These questions will guide our inquiry.

While works of literature, film, and art from the (post-)Soviet world take precedence, the course seeks to situate them within their international geopolitical and cultural contexts; as such, some key works from other cultural spaces will be considered as points of comparison or as relevant primary texts. Classes will include both lecture and discussion elements; each class period will be devoted to a broad aspect shared among the assigned readings and will focus on determining what each work sought to achieve within its own cultural-historical context. Assignments will be approximately 100–150 pages or two to three viewing hours per class period. In addition, there will be a weekly film screening, with approximately two (and sometimes more) screen hours of film.

Weekly written responses will be supplemented on occasion with short interactive assignments. Each student is expected to give one 10-to-12-minute presentation during the semester on a major theme from a given week’s assigned materials; the presentation will serve as a genesis for wider discussion. There will be one midterm essay (responses to be four to six pages in length) due at the end of Week 6. One final essay (responses to be eight to ten pages in length) will be due during the exam period at the end of the semester.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Nathan M Goldstone
  Info
• 3 points

Word and Grammar

Many modern theories of grammar are almost entirely based on English, having been developed mainly to describe the structure of English and, to a much lesser extent, other familiar languages of Europe.  But the languages of the world are highly diverse, many of them, in contrast to English, with highly complex word and inflectional structures and relatively simple phrasal structures.  Theories of grammar built on English serve such languages poorly.  This course seeks to address this imbalance by focusing on languages with complex morphological and morphosyntactic structures.  Because the grammars of such languages are built around word structures, we will be exploring current lexicalist theories of grammar such as Lexical Functional Grammar and Construction Grammar to develop formal explicit analyses of these languages.  One learns morphological and morphosyntactic analysis by doing it across languages of various types, so we will regularly be working through problems to analyze in class.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: William Foley
  h-index: 0 Info
• 3 points

Semantics

This course provides an introduction to semantics, the study of meaning in language. We will explore a range of semantic phenomena, and students will learn the tools and techniques of formal semantic analysis as well as core concepts, goals, and findings of the field.

• MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Meredith Landman
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 5 Info
• 3 points

POSTWAR CZECH LITERATURE

A survey of postwar Czech fiction and drama. Knowledge of Czech not necessary. Parallel reading lists available in translation and in the original.

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Christopher W Harwood
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 3 points

Chekhov and Others

We will explore Anton Chekhov’s work on its own terms, in its cultural context, and in relation to the work of others, especially Anglophone writers who responded, directly or indirectly, to Chekhov and his work. Readings by Chekhov include selected stories (short and long), his four major plays, and
Sakhalin Island,
his study of the Russian penal colony.

There are no prerequisites.  Knowledge of Russian is not required; all readings in English.

Students who know Russian are encouraged to read Chekhov’s work in Russian.

The course will be comparative as it addresses Chekhov on his own and in relation to anglophone writers.

The course is open to undergraduates (CC, GS, BC) and graduates in GSAS and other schools. The attention to
how
Chekhov writes may interest students in the School of the Arts.

• MW 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Liza Knapp
  CULPA: 28 Info
• 3 points

CINEMA & THE EMERG OF MOD UKR

This course examines Ukrainian cinema from Yosyp Tymchenko’s invention of the cinematograph in the 1890s to the present as both a transforming mirror and a maker of modern Ukrainian identity. It explores how film shapes collective self-representation, memory, and political imagination, and how Ukrainian filmmakers have negotiated questions of language, history, ethnicity, religion, and political belonging in a society shaped by prolonged colonial domination. The course examines cinema as both an instrument of imperial power and a medium of self-expression and resistance, focusing on the ways Ukrainian filmmakers have reproduced, negotiated, challenged, and sought to overcome inherited colonial legacies. An interdisciplinary course, it draws on history, literary studies, linguistics, theater and art history, and theories of national cinema, colonialism, and postcolonialism to examine the complex interactions among film, language, literature, politics, and historical memory. A comparative dimension situates Ukrainian cinema alongside other national cinemas shaped by imperial and colonial domination.

There are no prerequisites and the course assumes no prior knowledge of Ukrainian language, history, and culture.

• T 6:10 p.m.-10 p.m.
• Instructor: Yuri Shevchuk
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 3 points

LANGUAGE HISTORY

PRIN OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

Prerequisites: LING UN3101 Language, like all components of culture, is structured and conventional, yet can nevertheless change over time. This course examines how language changes, firstly as a self-contained system that changes organically and autonomously, and secondly as contextualized habits that change in time, in space, and in communities. Workload: readings & discussion, weekly problems, and final examination.

• TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
• Instructor: Meredith Landman
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 5 Info
• 3 points

LANGUAGES OF AFRICA

• TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: John H McWhorter
  CULPA: 26 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

FOURTH-YEAR RUSSIAN II

• MWF 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Tatiana Mikhailova
  Info
• 4 points

LITERARY TRANSLATION

This course immerses students in the practice of literary translation from Russian to English. Students will consider their translation work in light of weekly readings drawn from the theory and practice of literary translation more broadly. 

Students will work individually and together for the first three weeks, sharing their translations of a story by Anton Chekhov. They will move on to short prose works by Lev Rubinshtein. We will examine translations of Russian poetry by Pushkin and Mandelstam, as well as self-translations by Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, and students will have a chance to work briefly on verse translation. We will end with classes on translingualism and translation limits, ethics, and current issues in the profession.

Each student will identify a final translation project and spend the last half of the course working on it, submitting approximately 500 words per week, on Fridays. Suggested word count for final projects is 3000-5000 words of prose (students who wish to pursue a poetry project should consult with the instructor). We will workshop translation projects in class (the number of times each project is discussed will depend on enrollment). The goal is to submit a translation of publishable quality by the end of the course.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Thomas J Kitson
  Info
• 4 points

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CULTURE

From Prince Valdimir’s Rus’ to the Post-Soviet Russia of Vladimir Putin, religion has remained a key factor in the making and remaking of Russian polity and culture. This course will explore how Orthodox Christianity—whether privileged or persecuted—came to dominate the Russian religious scene and shape Russian institutions, discourses, and lived experiences. Students will draw from a variety of primary and secondary sources—chronicles, saints’ lives, travel narratives, memoirs, letters, legal documents, icons and other ritual objects, films and fictional texts, as well as a large body of scholarly works and contemporary media materials—to examine how Russia’s Orthodox past and its rewriting into competing “histories” have been used over time as “legacies” shaping the present and the future.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Valentina Izmirlieva
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 4 points

Russian Fiction Beyond the Canon

RUSS FICTION BEYOND THE C

Transformations of a literary canon always reflect historical shifts and upheavals. Today, in the context of Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine and weaponization of culture as a political tool, the Russian literary canon has been problematized and revised. Through our course we want to offer a broadened version of Russian-language literary culture focusing on those texts of 19th  and 20th  cc. that have often remained outside university curricula overshadowed by the pillars of the canon. The goal of the course is to attract students to works and literary experiments that have not been smoothly incorporated into “the Russian canon” – Soviet, Western, or post-Soviet alike. Along with close readings of these texts, we also want to highlight and practice theoretical approaches to textual analysis that typically are sidelined in literary courses and consider how working with a broader canon challenges our conceptions of literary movements, devices, and genres.

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• 4 points