Evgenii Bershtein

Russian Symbolism, the semiotics of Soviet culture, gender and sexuality in Russian culture, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Eisenstein.

Naomi Caffee

Minority and transnational writing in Russian, postcolonial studies, Russian literature and environment, Indigenous literatures, Central Asian studies, literary translation.

Marat Grinberg

Russian-Jewish literature and culture, Soviet poetry, poetics and cinema studies, Russian and European modernism.

With over 250 million speakers spread across all seven continents (including Antarctica!), Russian is the eighth most widely spoken language in the world, and the third most widely spoken language in the state of Oregon. The Reed College Russian department offers courses on a range of topics related to the diverse literary, cinematic, and cultural traditions of the Russian-speaking world, as well as Russian language instruction from the introductory through advanced levels. The Russian major and minor provide students with robust training in textual analysis, written and oral communication, critical thinking, and intercultural competence. Our graduates have gone on to enroll in top MA and PhD programs in Russian and Slavic studies, Jewish studies, and comparative literature, and pursue successful careers in the fields of diplomacy, law, translation and interpretation, business, technology, education, and the arts.

The course offerings of the Russian department are designed to meet the twofold objective of providing training in the Russian language and achieving a critical expertise in Russophone literary and cultural traditions from their beginnings to the present. By following the prescribed course of studies, the student majoring in Russian will have acquired the active and passive language skills required for undertaking senior thesis research in the original.

The language courses, from the introductory through the advanced levels, are taught in Russian and offer supplementary drill opportunities through the language laboratory and weekly conversation sections with a native speaker. In the second year, students continue their study of grammar and consolidate their active and passive language skills with reading, discussion, and written commentary on Russian lyrical poetry and texts on Russian cultural history. The third-year level offers extensive reading of the Russian short story, writing, and oral exercises, while continuing formal language training.

The literature offerings, organized by period and genre, survey the development of Russian poetry and prose from the Middle Ages to the present. A three-semester sequence (RUSS 371, 372, 373) covers the most important prose texts produced within the thousand-year history of Russian letters, while our poetry courses examine the main figures and movements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.

In addition to these survey courses, the department offers a number of seminars on specialized topics, the content of which varies from year to year, as well as the opportunity for independent study by special arrangement with the instructor. Seminar topics in the past have included the critical theory and practice of the Russian formalists and structuralists; terror and the sublime in Russian literature; Russian masculinity; art of political discourse; and literature, film, and society since glasnost. A unique dimension of the Reed program in Russian is represented by offerings in the literature, film, and theater of East and Central European Jews.

Independent study topics have ranged from introductory Ukrainian and Old Church Slavonic to Russian comix. With the exception of the poetry courses, which are limited to students with a reading knowledge of Russian, the literature offerings are open to non–Russian majors. Russian majors as well as students who need Russian literature credit for classes taught in English are required to read texts in the original and to attend an additional weekly discussion section.

Majors are expected to broaden their general background and to enhance their critical skills by pursuing work in the humanities, other literatures, philosophy, history, and the fine arts. The junior qualifying examination in Russian is given to majors at the end of their third year or, with prior consultation with the faculty, at the start of the senior year. The written exam tests the student’s preparation in language and seeks to establish the breadth and depth of experience in Russian literature through a series of broadly conceived essay questions.

Of special interest to first- and second-year students who may not wish to major in Russian are the three courses in the survey sequence that are offered in English translation, as well as the one-semester, 200-level course in the Russian short story, which is offered on alternate years.

The Russian House on campus provides a focal point for extracurricular programs in Russian. Besides housing a small community of learners of Russian, the Russian House hosts social gatherings, sponsors visiting lecturers or Russophone guests, and helps organize the Russian film series. Every year a native Russian language scholar is in residence.

The Russian Old Believer community in nearby Woodburn, Oregon, and a growing number of Russian-speaking immigrants in Portland provide opportunities for students to acquaint themselves firsthand with native speakers. Arrangements can be made for Reed students to provide English lessons in exchange for Russian conversation practice.

Study Abroad

Students interested in participating are advised to discuss their plans with the faculty during the semester before application. In addition, students wishing to accelerate their study of the language may enroll in a number of intensive summer programs in the United States. 

Russian
Students must complete all of the following requirements to graduate with a bachelor of arts in this program. Some courses may apply toward multiple requirements.   

College Requirements: 
Students are required to complete all standard college requirements.

Division Requirements: Literature and Languages
Students are required to fulfill the division requirements for their major.
Total divisional units:  3

Major Requirements:
Total major units: 9–13, depending on language proficiency

1. Two units in RUSS 300
2. Five units in Russian literature:
   1. RUSS 371
   2. RUSS 372
   3. RUSS 373 
   4. A minimum of one in Russian poetry 
   5. One at the 300 level or higher (excluding 470)
3. Junior qualifying examination.
4. RUSS 470

1. Two units in HUM 211 and 212, or HUM 220 in the sophomore year
2. Courses in English or other literature, philosophy, or history that may be relevant to the chosen area of concentration of the individual student

1. Four to six units in Russian at the 200 level or higher (excluding 470), depending on language proficiency: 
   1. If starting with first-year Russian:
      1. RUSS 111 and 112
      2. RUSS 220 (yearlong course) 
      3. Two additional units
         1. A minimum of one in Russian literature not in translation taken at Reed 
   2. If starting with second-year Russian:
      1. RUSS 220 (yearlong course)
      2. Two additional units
         1. A minimum of one in Russian literature not in translation taken at Reed 
   3. If starting beyond second-year Russian proficiency:
      1. Four units of Russian courses 
         1. A minimum of one in Russian literature not in translation taken at Reed 
         2. A maximum of one may be in RUSS 300

Russian 111 - First-Year Russian I

One-unit semester course. Intensive treatment of elementary Russian grammar, with special emphasis on pronunciation, basic conversational ability, and thorough coverage of contrastive English-Russian grammar. Grammar instruction is supplemented with Russian-language cultural materials. Classroom activities include poetry readings, working with music videos, film, and internet clips. Conference. 

Russian 112 - First-Year Russian II

One-unit semester course. Intensive treatment of elementary Russian grammar, with special emphasis on pronunciation, basic conversational ability, and thorough coverage of contrastive English­-Russian grammar. Grammar instruction is supplemented with Russian­-language cultural materials. Classroom activities include poetry readings, working with music videos, film, and internet clips. Prerequisite: RUSS 111 or equivalent. Conference.

Russian 220 - Second-Year Russian

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester. Readings, systematic grammar review, verbal drill, and writing of simple prose. The course is conducted in Russian and is intended for students interested in active use of the language. Prerequisite: RUSS 112 or placement exam. Conference.

Russian 266 - Russian Short Fiction

One-unit semester course. Intended for lower-division students, this course is devoted to close readings of short stories and novellas by such nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century writers as Karamzin, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Teffi, Bunin, Babel, Kharms, Nabokov, Kharitonov, Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, and Tolstaya. Our approach is twofold. First, we attempt “open” readings, taking our texts as representatives of a single tradition in which later works are engaged in a dialogue with their predecessors. Second, we use the readings as test cases for a variety of critical approaches. Conducted in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. Meets English departmental requirement for 200-level genre courses. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed RUSS 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Cross-listed as LITR 266. Conference.

Russian 300 - Advanced Russian: Language, Style, and Culture

One-unit semester course. This course is designed to meet the needs of students striving to reach an advanced level of competency in reading, speaking, listening, and writing in Russian. The course expands and deepens the student’s understanding of expressive nuances of Russian through a study of select lexical, morphological, syntactical, and rhetorical features and through an examination of their contextual usage in appropriate target texts—fiction, journalism, and mass media—and corresponding cultural matrices. Case study materials include both classic and contemporary texts as well as classic Soviet films. Course assignments include reading and translation, grammar review, structured composition exercises, and oral presentations. The course is conducted in Russian. Prerequisite: RUSS 220, or by placement examination. Conference. May be repeated for credit.

Russian 362 - Red Sci-Fi: Science Fiction in Soviet Literature and Film

One-unit semester course. Though working behind the Cold War “iron curtain,” post-World War II Soviet writers and filmmakers were preoccupied with the same ideas and questions as their Western and American counterparts, often working in parallel genres. One such genre was science fiction, which became enormously popular in the Soviet Union starting in the mid-1950s. Relying on the rich tradition of the 1920s, the postwar writers and filmmakers used science fiction to reflect on urgent societal and philosophical issues. In the presence of state censorship and official ideology, science fiction became the venue for veiled and subversive critique of the regime. In this course, through reading and watching major works of Russian sci-fi fiction and cinema, we will explore how they imagined artificial intelligence and time travel; space exploration and alien species and transformations of gender and race; the quest for immortality; and the nuclear apocalypse. We will situate these works in their immediate artistic and cultural contexts and the wider, primarily American, comparative context of postwar science fiction. Readings and screenings from the Strugatsky brothers, Alexander Beliaev, Evgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kir Bulychev, Sever Gansovsky, and others. All readings, screenings, and discussion in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed RUSS 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as LITR 362.

Russian 365 - Kiev, Odessa, and the Steppes: Ukrainian Imagination and Russian Literature

One-unit semester course. Russia’s war against Ukraine compels us to examine and revisit the complex and rich history of Ukrainian-Russian coexistence and the prominence of Ukrainian imagination in Russian literature. This course will accomplish this goal by studying how Ukrainian spaces; characters; historical events, including such catastrophes as Holodomor and the Holocaust; and philosophies of identity were constructed and portrayed by eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century writers. We shall begin with the old documents originating from Kievan Rus, the birthplace of Ukrainian and Russian civilizations, and proceed with the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century works of various genres, including short stories, poetry, novels, and philosophical essays. Among the writers we shall study are Grigorii Skovoroda, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Marko Vovchok, Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Alexander Kuprin, Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Eduard Bagritskii, Vasilii Grossman, Boris Slutskii, Konstantin Paustovskii, Anatolii Kuznetsov, Friedrich Gorenstein. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed RUSS 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as LITR 365.

Not offered 2023–24.

Russian 371 - Russian Literature and Culture from Medieval to Romantic

One-unit semester course. How did Russian literature come into being? This course traces the complex, culturally diverse, and perpetually contested history of the Russian literary tradition from the late ninth century to the early nineteenth century. Although our primary focus will be on written texts produced in Kievan Rus’, Muscovy, and the Russian Empire (including chronicles, saints’ lives, autobiographies, travelogs, drama, poetry, and prose), we will also analyze oral tales, religious art and architecture, and a variety of ceremonial and decorative objects. Class discussions, readings, short written assignments, presentations, quizzes, and a multistep research paper are designed to provide students with contextual knowledge and systematic training in close reading and guided critical strategies. Upon successful completion of this course, students will have a working knowledge of the major cultural, historical, and intellectual currents that paved the way to the “Golden Age” of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Conducted in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed RUSS 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as LITR 371.

Not offered 2023–24.

Russian 372 - Russian Literature: Realism

One-unit semester course. This course is an introduction to the major writers, movements, genres, and works of Russian literature from the early nineteenth century to the immediate prerevolutionary era. With a primary focus on the emergence of realism and its associated thematics, this course includes works of fiction by Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Leskov, and Chekhov, as well as letters and essays by their contemporaries. Secondary readings will offer additional contextual information and critical perspectives on these works and their role in the continued development of a national canon. All readings will be in English translation, and class meetings will be conducted in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed RUSS 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as LITR 372.

Not offered 2023–24.

Russian 373 - Twentieth-Century Russian Literature

One-unit semester course. Survey of the twentieth-century Russian and Russophone literature of various genres, exploring the evolution of these genres in relation to key historical and cultural events, such as the Bolshevik revolution, Civil War, Stalin’s terror, World War II, the Holocaust, and reforms of the Thaw, and considering a variety of critical approaches. Readings include the prose of Chekhov, Sologub, Zamyatin, Krzhizhanovsky, Babel, Olesha, Teffi, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Platonov, Ginzburg, Grossman, Berggolts, Gorenstein, Trifonov, and Dovlatov. Conducted in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed RUSS 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as LITR 373.

Russian 385 - Pushkin’s "Eugene Onegin"

One-unit semester course. The essential task of this course is to give students firsthand knowledge of the book which is considered the supreme and untranslatable masterpiece of Russian literature: Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse Evgenii Onegin. To meet this goal, we will undertake a close analytical reading of Pushkin’s novel in the original Russian over the course of the entire semester. Our second goal is to explore the artistic structure of Eugene Onegin, its literary, cultural, and historical contexts, the literary tradition generated by the book, and the attempts to render it in the nonliterary media, such as musical theater. The structure of our classes will reflect the double task of the course: each class will include a) the translation and analysis of a portion of Pushkin’s text, and b) the discussion of a literary and/or scholarly text(s) that elucidate the meaning of Onegin in the context of European and Russian Romanticism. We will read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Constant’s Adolphe, excerpts from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, and Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. We will also read and consult the Pushkin scholarship: Serena Vitale’s Pushkin’s Button and the commentaries on Eugene Onegin written by Vladimir Nabokov and Yuri Lotman. Apart from Eugene Onegin, several Russian Romantic poems, and Lotman’s commentary, all our texts will be in English. The languages of our discussions will be English and Russian. This course meets the poetry requirement for the Russian major. Prerequisite: RUSS 220 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Russian 387 - Jewishness and Cinema

One-unit semester course. This course is devoted to representations of Jewishness, Judaism, and the Holocaust in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cinema. Produced in various countries at various crucial historical points, Jewish film provides a unique window onto the study of intersections between ethnic identity and cinema, trauma and cinema, and religion and cinema. Consisting of different genres, from drama to musical comedy to adaptation, it invites diverse theoretical and comparative formal, cultural, and sociological approaches. We will begin with Yiddish cinema, produced in the United States, Poland, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and move on to the early Holocaust films of the late 1940s and ’50s, produced also in both Europe and the United States. We’ll investigate constructions and representations of Jewishness on Soviet, American, European, and Israeli screens from the 1960s until the present day, paying special attention to the many relevant cinematic, cultural, and historical contexts. Among the topics to be discussed are anti-Semitism, assimilation, Black-Jewish relations, Arab-Israeli conflict, and gender. The directors to be studied include Maurice Schwartz, Edgar Ulmer, Aleksander Ford, Alexei Granovsky, Alexander Askoldov, Elaine May, Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, Chantal Akerman, Amos Gitai, Stanley Kubrick, and Spike Lee, among others. Conducted in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed RUSS 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as LITR 387.

Not offered 2023–24.

Russian 388 - From Lenin to Putin: Soviet Experience and its Aftermath through Film, Literature, and Human Document

One-unit semester course. This course explores Soviet culture and its aftermath in Russia through the prism of human experience. In our interdisciplinary approach to history, we will study films and works of literature, as well as personal documents, such as diaries and memoirs, looking for reflections in them of Soviet and post-Soviet people’s experience and subjectivity. How were the lives and identities of ordinary people affected by the revolutions, utopian ideology, totalitarian government, political terror, and partial modernization? The themes include the reforms of calendar; organization of industrial time; city and house planning; communal living; pedagogical undertakings (the concept of New Men and Women); regulating family, sexuality, and gender; living through terror and forms of resistance to it; the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire as lived experience. We will conclude with surveying main social, cultural, and political developments in post-Soviet Russia. Our primary sources will include both artistic masterpieces (films by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Alexander Dovzhenko, Larisa Shepitko, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Alexander Sokurov; writings by Isaac Babel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Anna Akhmatova, Lydia Ginzburg, and Svetlana Alexievich) as well as testimonial and personal writings. All readings and discussions will be in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed RUSS 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as LITR 388.

Not offered 2023–24.

Russian 390 - Russian Culture under Putin: Resistance and Conformity

One-unit semester course. This course examines major cultural developments in Russia over the last two decades—the developments that took place in a conservative social climate and under the pressure of increasingly repressive government policies. We will discuss heterogeneous materials: works of literature (both fiction and nonfiction), film, poetry, performance art, journalist and scholarly writings, TV, and internet texts. As we explore both Russian “highbrow culture” and “mass culture,” we will pay special attention to both the techniques of conformity and strategies of resistance, as adopted by the Russian creative class. Among the topics which we will address are historical memory and its manipulations, new nationalism, corruption and its impact on society, economic inequality and cultural divisions, Russian versions of artistic and political postmodernism, and the cultural politics of gender and sexuality. All readings and discussions in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. Prerequisite for Russian credit: RUSS 220 or equivalent, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as LITR 390.

Not offered 2023–24.

Russian 394 - Arctic Awakenings

One-unit semester course. Informed by recent scholarship in environmental humanities and critical Indigenous studies, this course explores the histories and varieties of cultural expression of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of Europe, North America, and Eurasia. Our main focus will be works of film and literature by Saami, Nenets, Sakha, Yukagir, Chukchi, Yupik, and Inuit activists, culture workers, and knowledge keepers. By centering Indigenous worldviews and aesthetic systems, we will attempt to move beyond a view of the Arctic as an object of settler imagination and desire, and instead place it at the center of complex systems of human and more-than-human relations. From this perspective, we will analyze how legacies of colonialism and resource extraction have shaped the present realities of climate change and geopolitical conflict affecting us all. Ultimately this course seeks to equip students to contribute to future-oriented strategies of survival, on both local and global levels. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed RUSS 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as LITR 394.

Russian 408 - Decadence and Symbolism in Russia and Europe

One-unit semester course. The course explores Russian Decadent and Symbolist literature and culture comparatively, in a broad Western European context. We will study the philosophical foundations of Decadent culture (Friedrich Nietzsche, Vladimir Solovyov); preoccupation with “degeneration,” common in the European science of the fin de siècle (Max Nordau, Richard von Krafft-Ebing); “aestheticism” (J.-K. Huysmans, Oscar Wilde); new interpretations of gender and sexuality (Otto Weininger, André Gide, Thomas Mann), Decadent mysticism, and other topics. The Russian side of the Decadent and Symbolist movements will be represented by the prosaic works of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Solovyov, Viacheslav Ivanov, Fedor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius, Mikhail Kuzmin, Evdokia Nagrodskaia, and Andrei Bely. A number of classes will be dedicated to the discussion of film (Evgeny Bauer), opera (the phenomenon of Wagnerism), dance (Isadora Duncan; Sergei Diaghilev’s “Ballets Russes”) and visual arts (the group “World of Art”). This course will emphasize a research component, and students will have an option of writing a single 20-page research paper, due at the end of the semester. All reading and discussions are in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. In these sessions, we will focus on the poetry of the Russian Silver Age (Solovyov, Valerii Briusov, Konstantin Bal’mont, Sologub, Gippius, Aleksandr Blok, Bely, Ivanov, Kuzmin, Sofia Parnok, Anna Akhmatova, et al.). Prerequisite for Russian credit: RUSS 220 or equivalent, or consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as LITR 408.

Not offered 2023–24.

Russian 409 - Late Tolstoy: From Anna Karenina to a Religious Teaching

One-unit semester course. The course explores the second period of Leo Tolstoy’s career, from Anna Karenina (1870s) to his late fiction, such as The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886) and Hadzhi Murat (1904), and his aesthetic, ethical, theological, as well as political writings. We will study Tolstoy’s transformation from a fiction writer to a moral theorist and religious activist as we pay special attention to Tolstoy’s doctrine of nonviolence and his antiwar writings. Apart from a study of Tolstoy’s poetics and ideology, we will engage a number of cultural contexts for his works: Russian political and intellectual history, aesthetic and artistic developments in late nineteenth-century Russia, Tolstoy’s role and reputation in Russian society, his impact on anti-racist, anticolonial, and pacifist movements around the world. The workload includes extensive reading, oral presentations, and several writing assignments. All readings and discussions are in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed RUSS 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as LITR 409.

Not offered 2023–24.

Russian 470 - Thesis

Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.

Russian 481 - Independent Study

Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Prerequisite: approval of instructor and division.