Columbia University in the City of New York · Courses
RUSS GU
18 courses with the subject RUSS GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
RUSS GU4006Russian Religious Thought, Praxis, and Literature3
This course examines the interaction of religious thought, praxis, and literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the Russian Empire sought to define it place in the world, many Russian writers and thinkers turned to religious experience as a source of meaning. A varied body of work emerged as they responded to the tradition of Russian Orthodoxy. The goals of this course are to acquaint students with key texts of Russian religious thought and to give students the knowledge and tools required for critical inquiry into the religious dimension of Russian literature and culture.
RUSS GU4013Late Tolstoy (Beyond Anna Karenina): Thinker, Writer, Activist, Pacifist, Humanitarian, and Mortal4
The focus of the course is Tolstoy's work in the last 35 years of his life. On finishing War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy swore off the kind of literature and decided to devote himself to what he believed would be more meaningful work. This work included confessions, letters, tracts, critiques, proclamations, invectives, exposes, meditations, and gospel, and as more fiction, some of which is overly didactic and some which is, like his earlier fiction, more covertly so.
RUSS GU4046The Trickster in the Modern Russian Lit3.00
“Trickster” does not simply mean “deceiver” or “rogue” (the definition of trickster according to the Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary), but rather “creative idiot”, to use Lewis Hyde’s expression. This hero unites the qualities of characters who at first sight have little in common — the “selfish buffoon” and the “culture hero”; someone whose subversions and transgressions paradoxically amplify the culture-constructing effects of his (and most often it is a “he”) tricks. The trickster is a typical comic protagonist – it is enough to recollect Renard the Fox from the medieval Roman de Renard, Panurge from François Rabelais’ The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, Cervantes’ Sanchо Panza, Beaumarchais’s Figaro, Gogol’s Khlestakov, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Yaroslav Hašek’s Švejk, Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’ Producers, Bart Simpson and Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen), as well as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert along with many other comical characters of the same genre – to confirm this self-evident thesis
Thе course examines most representative works of Russian literature and culture since the 1990s and until the present moment. While discussing recent novels, short stories, dramas, poems, and films, we will address the issues of politics, re-assessment of history, gender, family, national identity, violence and terrorism. No knowledge of Russian is expected
RUSS GU4126Remediating Protest: Transgressive Aesthetics in Soviet ＆ Post-Soviet Culture3.00
In the past ten years the authoritarian regime in Russia has rendered political protest exceedingly dangerous but it has not immobilized the cultural forms of dissent shaping contemporary anti-war resistance. From a feminist performance in a church to satirical documentary and whimsical trial speeches, contemporary artists, journalists, and activists have been creating the language of protest essential to understanding post-Soviet space. Why has protest in the post-Soviet region been taking these specific aesthetic forms? Taking our point of departure from Rancière’s idea of resistance – signifying both firm persistence and a practice yielding change – we will explore how contemporary post-Soviet protest genres rely on the communication strategies that return to Soviet parody, poetic form, underground art, and dissident practices of cultural distribution. Looking at laughter as a transgressive communicative device, we will search for the reverberations of Soviet satire in Russian and Belorussian stand-up, as well as in less obvious genres, such as the recent documentary work by Alexey Navalny. We will focus on mimesis as a tool of resistance in Soviet underground art and contemporary performative practices. Exploring the aesthetics of testimony rooted in Soviet show trials, we will examine how Soviet journalistic prose and, later, contemporary theater reclaimed its devices. We will study the persistence of bodily tropes and language of violence in women’s prose, drama, contemporary feminist poetry and feminist performance from Russia and Belarus. Finally, we will discuss how dissident practices of samizdat and tamizdat helped create cultural networks in Soviet Russia and beyond as we reflect on the use of new media platforms and technologies of digital activism in post-Soviet space. Rather than searching for instances of direct influence between cultural producers, we will examine how protest strategies are shaped and remediated while activating multiple layers of cultural memory. Students will learn to annotate images and videos online, write blog posts and carry out an independent research project in consultation with the instructor. At the end of the course they have a choice of presenting the project in the form of a paper or a multimedia digital piece. Enrollment is open to upper level undergraduate and graduate students. All primary and secondary readings are in English or have subtitles
This content-based language course is designed for students who already have an equivalent of five semesters of college-level Russian. The course aims to explore various types of Russian music that have been popular since the 1960s. Popular music expresses widely-shared trends and interests of society and evokes emotions and associations via memories. Sharing these musical associations will enhance students’ knowledge of Russian values and beliefs, and help them understand how and why these values and beliefs have changed since the thaw period, as well as how they continue to change in the 21st century in response to social mood. Students will learn how to interpret popular music and work on the development of the language skills needed to be an engaged listener of Russian music as well as an engaged partner in conversations on related topics. Learners will use language in meaningful interactions and negotiate meaning in real-life contexts. Through engagement with authentic sources, students will solidify and further develop their knowledge of the case and verbal systems as well as cause-and-effect relationships within sentences and paragraphs. They will learn how to interpret music from a cultural perspective that implies the ability to read between the lines. Conducted entirely in Russian
Prerequisites: Three years of college Russian and the instructors permission. The course is devoted to reading shorter works by Nikolai Gogol. The syllabus includes a selection of stories from Evenings at a Farm near Dikanka and Mirgorod, “Nevsky Prospect,” “The Overcoat,” “Nose,” and “Petersburg Tales,” and The Inspector General
Prerequisites: RUSS UN3101 and RUSS UN3102 Prerequisites: RUSS UN3101 and RUSS UN3102 Third-Year Russian I and II, or placement test. Systematic study of problems in Russian syntax; written exercises, translations into Russian, and compositions. Conducted entirely in Russian
FOURTH-YEAR RUSSIAN II Spring 2026: RUSS GU4343 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment RUSS 4343 001/10929 M W F 2:40pm - 3:55pm 709 Hamilton Hall Tatiana Mikhailova 4.00 5/15
Prerequisites: RUSS UN3101 and RUSS UN3102 three years of college Russian or the equivalent. Prerequisites: RUSS UN3101 and RUSS UN3102 Third-Year Russian I and II, or placement test. A language course designed to meet the needs of those foreign learners of Russian as well as heritage speakers who want to develop further their reading, speaking, and writing skills and be introduced to the history of Russia
Prerequisites: three years of Russian. Prerequisites: three years of Russian. This is a language course designed to meet the needs of those foreign learners of Russian as well as heritage speakers who want to further develop their reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills and be introduced to the history of Russia
RUSS GU4351Moving to Advanced-Plus: Language, Culture, Society in Russian Today3
The course is designed to provide advanced and highly-motivated undergraduate and graduate students of various majors with an opportunity to develop professional vocabulary and discourse devices that will help them to discuss their professional fields in Russian with fluency and accuracy. The course targets all four language competencies: speaking, listening, reading and writing, as well as cultural understanding. Conducted in Russian.
Prerequisites: RUSS W4334 or the equivalent or the instructor's permission. Prerequisites: RUSS W4334 or the equivalent or the instructor's permission. Prerequisite: four years of college Russian or instructor's permission. The course will focus on theoretical matters of language and style and on the practical aspect of improving students' writing skills. Theoretical aspects of Russian style and specific Russian stylistic conventions will be combined with the analysis of student papers and translation assignments, as well as exercises focusing on reviewing certain specific difficulties in mastering written Russian
Cultural and political history of women and resistance in Russia, from the Putin era to medieval saints. Explores forms and specificity of female resistance in Russia across history. Addresses questions of historical narrative in light of missing sources. Material includes: prose by Svetlana Alexievich, Lydia Chukovskaya, Lidiya Ginzburg, Alexandra Kollontai, Masha Gessen, Anna Politkovskaia, and Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova; poetry by Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Sophia Parnok; films by Kira Muratova; visual art by Natalia Goncharova and fellow “amazons” of the Russia Avant Garde, together with memoirs, saint’s lives, letters, diaries, and urban legend. Final project: curating a museum exhibit. Prerequisites: Open to undergraduate and graduate students. No Russian required for the undergraduate students. Graduate students are expected to do the readings in Russian. Russian Literature
Prerequisites: four years of college Russian or the equivalent. Prerequisites: four years of college Russian or the equivalent. Workshop in literary translation from Russian into English focusing on the practical problems of the craft. Each student submits a translation of a literary text for group study and criticism. The aim is to produce translations of publishable quality
