Department: Slavic Languages and Literatures

Code Name Description
SLAVIC110 The Russian Empire, 1450-1800 (Same as HISTORY 20A. 120A is 5 units, 20A is 3 units.) The rise of Russian state as a Eurasian "empire of difference"; strategies of governance of the many ethnic and religious groups with their varied cultures and political economies; particular at...
SLAVIC111 Russia and Her Conflicts: History, Literature, and Film Winston Churchill famously characterized Russia as a "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." As war rages on in Ukraine, many are left wondering: why is Russia so hostile to her neighbors and the West? This course examines the origins of Russ...
SLAVIC116 Literature and the Dream of Agriculture in Russia and Beyond Why do city people think if they started farming, they could heal themselves and their society? How do writers make agriculture seem exciting, or farms seem beautiful? While agriculture is ancient and world-wide, literature and political movements th...
SLAVIC118N Other People's Words: Folklore and Literature What happens when you collect and use other people's words? This class considers folklore and literature based on it, focusing on the theme of objects that come to life and threaten their makers or owners. We read Russian fairy tales and Nikolai Gogo...
SLAVIC121 Ukraine at a Crossroads Literally meaning "borderland," Ukraine has embodied in-betweenness in all possible ways. What is the mission of Ukraine in Europe and in Eurasia? How can Ukraine become an agent of democracy, stability, and unity? What does Ukraine's case of multipl...
SLAVIC128 Literature of the former Yugoslavia What do Slavoj Zizek, Novak Djokovic, Marina Abramovic, Melania Trump, Emir Kusturica, and the captain of the Croatian national football team have in common? All were born in a country that no longer exists, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugosla...
SLAVIC129 Russian Versification: Poetry as System The study of verse is foundational to literary theory and poetics. The practical goal of the course is to acquaint the students with specific features of Russian prosody and verse in its historical development and to survey such basic concepts as met...
SLAVIC131 Russia in Color This course explores the application, evolution, and perception of color in art, art history, literature, and popular culture - in (Soviet) Russia and emigration. Working closely with the Cantor Arts Center collection at Stanford, this course pairs a...
SLAVIC145 Survey of Russian Literature: The Age of Experiment This course discusses the transition from predominately poetic to predominately prosaic creativity in the Russian literature of the first half of the 19th century Russian literature and the birth of the great Russian novel. It is focused on the pecul...
SLAVIC146 The Great Russian Novel: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: Anna Karenina/ The Brothers Karamazov We will read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky's culminating masterpieces closely, with an eye to the artistic originality and philosophical intensity with which they imbue their complex fictional worlds and passionately reasoning characters. Turgenev and Chekh...
SLAVIC147 Modern Russian Literature and Culture: The Age of War and Revolution What makes Russian modernism special? Or is there anything special about Russian modernism? And how did modernist poets, prose writers, and filmmakers respond to the turbulent events of the first half of the 20th century, when Russia was shaken by re...
SLAVIC148 Slavic Literature and Culture since the Death of Stalin The course offers a survey of Soviet and post-Soviet literary texts and films created by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian artists and marginalized or repressed by the Soviet regime. The first part of the course will focus on the topics of opposition...
SLAVIC155 St. Petersburg: Imagining a City, Building a City St. Petersburg, the world's most beautiful city, was designed to display an 18th-century autocrat's power and to foster ties between Russia and the West - on the tsar's terms. It went through devastating floods and a deadly siege; it birthed the "Pet...
SLAVIC156 Vladimir Nabokov: Displacement and the Liberated Eye How did the triumphant author of "the great American novel" "Lolita" evolve from the young author writing at white heat for the tiny sad Russian emigration in Berlin? We will read his short stories and the novels "The Luzhin Defense, Invitation to a...
SLAVIC15N "My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun": Dostoevsky, Dickinson, and the Question of Freedom. As far apart as Dickinson and Dostoevsky are in terms of national contexts, gendered possibilities of life, and their choice of minimalist or maximalist forms, their experiences of constriction and freedom bore significant similarities. Dostoevsky pe...
SLAVIC160 Cultural Hybridity in Central-Eastern Europe Historically shaped by shifting borders and mixing of various cultures and languages, identities in-between have been in abundance in Central-Eastern Europe. This course offers a comprehensive study of the oeuvre of several major Central-European aut...
SLAVIC171 Chernobyl: from Soviet Utopia to Post-Soviet Apocalypse The course will introduce students to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster through the history of the late Soviet utopian project of the "atomic cities" to the intellectual, aesthetic, and artistic responses that the Chernobyl catastrophe generated in the...
SLAVIC173 Children's Literature: Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond This course traverses the world of Russian and Eastern European literature for children. In our look at a wide variety of children's cultural artifacts (from text to film), we will analyze the ways in which stories for children, and stories about chi...
SLAVIC179 Literature from Medieval Rus' and Early Modern Russia This course traces the history of Russian literature before the eighteenth century. It is divided into two sections. The first section examines literature from Kyivan Rus' (up to the thirteenth century), the medieval conglomerate to which Belarus, Ru...
SLAVIC181 Philosophy and Literature Can novels make us better people? Can movies challenge our assumptions? Can poems help us become who we are? We'll think about these and other questions with the help of writers like Toni Morrison, Marcel Proust, Jordan Peele, Charlie Kaufman, Rachel...
SLAVIC183 Jews in the Contemporary World: Culture, Pop Culture, and Representation (HISTORY 185B is 5 units; HISTORY 85B is 3 units.) From Barbra Streisand to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, from The Dybbuk to Broad City, and from Moscow to LA, this course applies a multicultural perspective on different experiences of Jewishness in the 20th...
SLAVIC187 Classical Russian Poetry A survey of Russian poetry from Lomonosov to Vladinmir Solov'ev. Close reading of lyrical poems. Prerequisite: 3rd Year Russian Language
SLAVIC188 20th century Russian Poetry: From Aleksandr Blok to Joseph Brodsky Developments in and 20th-century Russian poetry including symbolism, acmeism, futurism, and literature of the absurd. Emphasis is on close readings of individual poems. Readings in Russian, taught in English.
SLAVIC195 Russian and East European Theater Evolution of modernist Russian/Eur. dramaturgy, theatrical practices, landmark productions from Chekhov-Meyerhold-Grotowski to present; re-performance of classics; techniques of embodiment. Taught in English.
SLAVIC196 Readings in Yiddish Literature 1 Yiddish literature, at a second-year language level. Readings chosen based on student interest; contact instructor with questions.
SLAVIC198 Writing Between Languages: The Case of Eastern European Jewish Literature Eastern European Jews spoke and read Hebrew, Yiddish, and their co-territorial languages (Russian, Polish, etc.). In the modern period they developed secular literatures in all of them, and their writing reflected their own multilinguality and evolv...
SLAVIC199 Individual Work for Undergraduates Open to Russian majors or students working on special projects. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
SLAVIC203 Russia and Ukraine: Empire, Nation, Myth Explores theories of national myths and nationalism; identifies the founding myths of Russia and Ukraine and the medieval and early modern events they are based on. Extensive primary source readings. Focuses primarily up through eighteenth century, w...
SLAVIC221 Ukraine at a Crossroads Literally meaning "borderland," Ukraine has embodied in-betweenness in all possible ways. What is the mission of Ukraine in Europe and in Eurasia? How can Ukraine become an agent of democracy, stability, and unity? What does Ukraine's case of multipl...
SLAVIC222 Andrei Platonov's "Chevengur": Text and Contexts 'The power of devastation [Platonov's texts] inflict upon their subject matter exceeds by far any demands of social criticism and should be measured in units that have very little to do with literature as such,' wrote Joseph Brodsky. The graduate cou...
SLAVIC223 Russian & East European Literary Theory: Formalism, Bakhtin, & Beyond This course explores the role of Russian and East European thinkers in creating modern literary theory, a discipline which arguably began in this region. Can we speak of "Russian theory" or "East European theory," analogous to labels such as "French...
SLAVIC225 Communist and Capitalist Fantasies: Science Fiction in the Soviet Union and the United States What can science fiction tell us about life and art in the 20th century, in the Soviet Union and the United States? Speculative fiction (including sci-fi, fantasy, utopia, dystopia) combines irony and idealism, belief in science and skepticism about...
SLAVIC226 Bakhtin and his Legacy "Quests for my own word are in fact quests for a word that is not my own, a word that is more than myself," writes Mikhail Bakhtin towards the end of his life. It was this ceaseless pursuit of another word that allowed Bakhtin, one of the most distin...
SLAVIC228 Russian Nationalism: Literature and Ideas Russia is huge and linguistically and religiously diverse. Yet the ideology of nationalism --the idea that culturally unified groups should rule their own territories-- took root in Russia in the early 19th century and is powerful today. What made th...
SLAVIC230 18th Century Russian Literature This course traces major trends in 18th-century Russian literature, from baroque and neoclassical poetry to sentimentalist prose. Although the course introduces students to the major historical and literary contexts of the period, it is primarily con...
SLAVIC231 Tarkovsky The relatively slim body of work produced by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky helped redefine the possibilities of the art of cinema. Older and younger generations of directors continue to be inspired by his trademark long shot, unconventi...
SLAVIC249 Post-Soviet Literature in Ukraine and Russia What is the place of postmodernism in post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia? How do these historically related cultures respond to the post-Soviet transition? The course aims to answer the questions through close reading of the literary masterpieces of Ukra...
SLAVIC251 Dostoevsky: Narrative Performance and Literary Theory In-depth engagement with a range of Dostoevsky's genres: early works (epistolary novella "Poor Folk" and experimental "Double"), major novels ("Crime and Punishment", "The Idiot"), less-read shorter works ("A Faint Heart," "Bobok," and "The Meek One...
SLAVIC256 Language and Identity in Ukraine TBD
SLAVIC267 Film and Theater The course on contemporary Ukrainian film and theater introduces students to the Ukrainian cinematographic tradition of the Soviet period through the present day. During the study of Ukrainian cinema of the Soviet period, we will analyze the work of...
SLAVIC322 Sergei Eisenstein: Theory, Practice, Method The work of Sergei Eisenstein has been central to the study of film since before his death in 1948, but some of his most significant work was first published only in the new millennium and is generating rich interdisciplinary scholarship. This semina...
SLAVIC325 Readings in Russian Realism For graduate students or upper-level undergraduates. What did Realism mean for late imperial Russian writers? What has it meant for twentieth-century literary theory? As we seek to answer these questions, we read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Ch...
SLAVIC327 Boris Pasternak and the Poetry of the Russian Avant-garde An emphasis is made on close reading of the poetry of Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Taught in Russian. Prerequisite: 3rd Year Russian Language
SLAVIC328 Russian Nationalism: Literature and Ideas Russia is huge and linguistically and religiously diverse. Yet the ideology of nationalism --the idea that culturally unified groups should rule their own territories-- took root in Russia in the early 19th century and is powerful today. What made th...
SLAVIC329 Russian Versification: Poetry as System The study of verse is foundational to literary theory and poetics. The practical goal of the course is to acquaint the students with specific features of Russian prosody and verse in its historical development and to survey such basic concepts as met...
SLAVIC331 Russia in Color This course explores the application, evolution, and perception of color in art, art history, literature, and popular culture - in (Soviet) Russia and emigration. Working closely with the Cantor Arts Center collection at Stanford, this course pairs a...
SLAVIC332 The Burden of Memory: Theory, Texts, Politics This course explores the growing field of memory studies and various modes of memory-forgetting in the post-Soviet society and culture. The 'memory boom' in post-1991 Russia has significantly altered the way the post-Soviet subjects remember, forget,...
SLAVIC342 Topics in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine Explores and contrasts Ukraine and Russia ca 1450-1800, when most of Ukraine had not yet been conquered by Russia: governmental structures, religion and culture, ideology, social organization, agrarian economy.
SLAVIC345 Survey of Russian Literature: The Age of Experiment This course discusses the transition from predominately poetic to predominately prosaic creativity in the Russian literature of the first half of the 19th century Russian literature and the birth of the great Russian novel. It is focused on the pecul...
SLAVIC346 The Great Russian Novel: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: Anna Karenina/ The Brothers Karamazov We will read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky's culminating masterpieces closely, with an eye to the artistic originality and philosophical intensity with which they imbue their complex fictional worlds and passionately reasoning characters. Turgenev and Chekh...
SLAVIC347 Modern Russian Literature and Culture: The Age of War and Revolution What makes Russian modernism special? Or is there anything special about Russian modernism? And how did modernist poets, prose writers, and filmmakers respond to the turbulent events of the first half of the 20th century, when Russia was shaken by re...
SLAVIC348 Slavic Literature and Culture since the Death of Stalin The course offers a survey of Soviet and post-Soviet literary texts and films created by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian artists and marginalized or repressed by the Soviet regime. The first part of the course will focus on the topics of opposition...
SLAVIC356 Vladimir Nabokov: Displacement and the Liberated Eye How did the triumphant author of "the great American novel" "Lolita" evolve from the young author writing at white heat for the tiny sad Russian emigration in Berlin? We will read his short stories and the novels "The Luzhin Defense, Invitation to a...
SLAVIC36 Dangerous Ideas Ideas matter. Concepts such as equality, tradition, and Hell have inspired social movements, shaped political systems, and dramatically influenced the lives of individuals. Others, like race and urban renewal, play an important role in contemporary d...
SLAVIC360 Cultural Hybridity in Central-Eastern Europe Historically shaped by shifting borders and mixing of various cultures and languages, identities in-between have been in abundance in Central-Eastern Europe. This course offers a comprehensive study of the oeuvre of several major Central-European aut...
SLAVIC370 Pushkin Pushkin's poems, prose, and drafts in dialogue with contemporaries and cultural milieu. Emphasis on innovation and controversy in genre, lyrical form and personal idiom, shaping a public discourse. Taught in English.
SLAVIC371 Chernobyl: from Soviet Utopia to Post-Soviet Apocalypse The course will introduce students to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster through the history of the late Soviet utopian project of the "atomic cities" to the intellectual, aesthetic, and artistic responses that the Chernobyl catastrophe generated in the...
SLAVIC373 Children's Literature: Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond This course traverses the world of Russian and Eastern European literature for children. In our look at a wide variety of children's cultural artifacts (from text to film), we will analyze the ways in which stories for children, and stories about chi...
SLAVIC379 Literature from Medieval Rus' and Early Modern Russia This course traces the history of Russian literature before the eighteenth century. It is divided into two sections. The first section examines literature from Kyivan Rus' (up to the thirteenth century), the medieval conglomerate to which Belarus, Ru...
SLAVIC387 Classical Russian Poetry A survey of Russian poetry from Lomonosov to Vladinmir Solov'ev. Close reading of lyrical poems. Prerequisite: 3rd Year Russian Language
SLAVIC388 20th century Russian Poetry: From Aleksandr Blok to Joseph Brodsky Developments in and 20th-century Russian poetry including symbolism, acmeism, futurism, and literature of the absurd. Emphasis is on close readings of individual poems. Readings in Russian, taught in English.
SLAVIC395 Russian and East European Theater Evolution of modernist Russian/Eur. dramaturgy, theatrical practices, landmark productions from Chekhov-Meyerhold-Grotowski to present; re-performance of classics; techniques of embodiment. Taught in English.
SLAVIC396 Readings in Yiddish Literature 1 Yiddish literature, at a second-year language level. Readings chosen based on student interest; contact instructor with questions.
SLAVIC398 Writing Between Languages: The Case of Eastern European Jewish Literature Eastern European Jews spoke and read Hebrew, Yiddish, and their co-territorial languages (Russian, Polish, etc.). In the modern period they developed secular literatures in all of them, and their writing reflected their own multilinguality and evolv...
SLAVIC399 INDIVIDUAL WORK Open to Russian majors or students working on special projects. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
SLAVIC61N Literature at War Why have verbal artists since Homer been fascinated with armed conflict and destruction? In the early 1990s, two self-consciously multinational and multicultural socialist states, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, broke apart. Soon, people who had liv...
SLAVIC680 Curricular Practical Training CPT course required for international students completing degree. Prerequisite: Slavic Languages and Literatures Ph.D. candidate.
SLAVIC70N Socialism vs. Capitalism: Russian and American Writers' Responses The turn of the 20th century was marked with turbulent political events and heated discussions about the future of Russian and American societies. Many writers and intellectuals responded to the burning issues of social justice, inequality, egalitari...
SLAVIC77Q Russia's Weird Classic: Nikolai Gogol This seminar investigates the work and life of Nikolai Gogol, the most eccentric of Russian authors, the founder of what was dubbed Fantastic (or Magic) Realism. Our investigation will be based on close reading of the works written in various stages...
SLAVIC801 TGR PROJECT No Description Set
SLAVIC802 TGR Dissertation No Description Set