Russian Language & Literature

Overview

The Russian program at New College offers courses as well as individual and group tutorials in language and literature. Regularly-offered courses focus on literary developments from the era of Sentimentalism at the end of the 18th century until the present. Tutorials are normally devoted to important areas of interest, which are not included in more formalized course work. Students are also encouraged to follow contemporary literary and cultural developments, particularly as they fit into the continuum of literary production in Russia, and to pursue work in pertinent cognate areas such as history, political science, and anthropology. Students are encouraged to pursue off-campus study at another institution or participate in one of the many available programs of language and cultural study in the United States or in Eastern Europe. New College students have participated in both summer and semester programs of study at Lomonosov Moscow State University, St. Petersburg State University, the Linguistics University, Nizhny-Novgorod, and the summer program at Middlebury College, Vermont. Without exception, travel-study experience has proved to be an invaluable component of the student’s AOC.

Courses and seminars offered on a regular basis at New College include language instruction from the elementary to the advanced level and a wide range of topics in  nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, among them: Russian Realism; Dostoevsky: The Major Novels; Women in Russian Literature: 1780s-1990s; The Russian Short Story; and Nabokov’s Early Novels: Resident and Stranger. Literature will normally be the major academic component of the AOC.

Faculty in Russian Language and Literature

Alina Wyman, Professor of Russian Language and Literature

Requirements for the AOC in Russian Language and Literature

A minimum of eleven (11) academic units. Students must demonstrate proficiency in the Russian language sufficient to read and analyze texts of moderate difficulty and to discuss with relative ease topics of everyday life and experience as well as relevant areas of the student’s academic focus. Students must also demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of at least three areas of Russian literature and literary history, normally two periods and one figure. Some familiarity with other periods, such as developments from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries and/or the twenty-first century Russian and, more broadly, East-European literature is also encouraged. Normally, attaining this level of expertise will require at least five semesters of language instruction and six or more courses and tutorials devoted to the study of literature, literary history, and culture.

Requirements for the Joint AOC in Russian Language and Literature

A minimum of seven (7) academic units, to be completed in one of three possible combinations of courses.

Combination 1

Combination 2

 Combination 3

Representative Senior Theses in Russian Language and Literature

• Automated Text Extraction of Anna Karenina and The Kreutzer Sonata: Quantifying the Lexical Representation of Women in Tolstoy
• Tolstoy’s Literary Pedagogy: The Morality of Death in His Writings
• Dostoevsky and the Problem of Microcosm: Bakhtin, ‘Bobok,’ and ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man'
• Behind Blue Eyes: Psychological Profiles of Dostoevsky’s Criminals
• If They Cut Off both of my Hands, I will Compose Music Anyway’: Dmitri Shostakovich’s Interpretation of the Poetic Voice in 'Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva' and ‘Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin’
• Dehumanization in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales
• Authority and Authorship: The Plight of the Artist in Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair and Invitation to a Beheading
• Gogol’s ‘Shinel’ in English: A Commentary and Translation
• Reading and Writing in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading
• ‘You always see something, but you never see all’: Narrative Devices and the Reader’s Role in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Andrey Bely’s Kotik Letaev