Classes

Translation makes culture possible. Individual writers and thinkers draw sustenance and stimulation from works created outside their own cultures, and artists working in one format get ideas from those working in entirely different media. Translation between languages and...

Studies Russia's rebels, deviants, martyrs, loners, and losers as emblems of national identity. Stories, films and poems that project Russia's distinctive obsessions with history and religion. Includes Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Leskov, Kharms, Platonov, Nabokov...

A course that examines how poems create self-images for poets working in and after Russian modernism, including Khlebnikov, Vvedenskii, Mandel'shtam, Tsvetaeva, Barkova, Brodsky, Sedakova, Shvarts, Dragomoshchenko. Relies on literary and psychoanalytic theories of identity.

A Graduate Seminar in Undergraduate Education, on post-1989 Russian literature, film, and culture, and on the challenges and pleasures of studying contemporary cultural processes. Includes Brodsky, Medvedev, Pelevin, Petrushevskaya, Prigov, Shvarts, Sorokin; German, Muratova...

Poems, films, visual artifacts, and music alongside theories of loss. Focuses on non-narrative forms, with examples from Pushkin, Baratynsky, Fet, Brodsky, Shvarts; Tarkovsky, Shemiakin, Sokurov; Silvestrov, Sebald. Reading knowledge of Russian required. Graduate seminar...

This General Education course studies poetry as a cultural practice that requires and perversely challenges visual, linguistic, geographic, and aesthetic borders. Main topics are translation (poems crossing borders), emigration/exile (poets crossing borders), and poetry and...

I am teaching the second half of our tutorial for junior concentrators. This term, we are reading Evgenii Onegin across the whole semester.