Virginia Woolf wrote about Dostoevsky in “The Russian Point of View” (1925): “Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture.” This is true not only for Dostoevsky’s long novels, but for his striking short works, which are considered masterpieces in their ..read more

Please join us for the 2024 Newberry Adult Education Classes – online on Saturday mornings from 10:00 am to noon.     This winter’s course, The North Caucasus through Literature: from Leo Tolstoy to Alisa Ganieva, begins on February 24, 2024 and ends on April 20, 2024. Seven weekly meetings will be held via Zoom ..read more

Stella S. created this animation of «Багаж» (Самуил Маршак). Click here to see it ..read more

19th Century Russian Literature and Film Adaptations This online course will introduce students to the amazing world of Russian fiction of the 19th century. We will read and discuss some of the most celebrated masterpieces by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov. The first semester focuses on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, White Nights, and ..read more

       Natalia Danko (1892-1942). Discussing Stalin’s Constitution at an Uzbek Collective Farm, 1937. Self-portrait. At Work, 1920s. Porcelain. State Porcelain Factory @ The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. This multi-disciplinary course will examine early 20th century Soviet feminism and gender policies, as well as the political, economic, social, and cultural implications of gender stereotypes against ..read more

Designed for teens who love literature and writing, this online course will introduce students to the amazing world of Russian fiction of the 19th century. We will read and discuss some of the most celebrated and overlooked short masterpieces by major Russian writers, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, and Turgenev in the first semester in the ..read more

This summer, we will be reading works by three contemporary Ukrainian authors writing in Russian who testify to the diverse and multicultural identity of Ukraine: Margarita Khemlin’s (1960-2015) The Investigator, with its polyphony of Ukrainian and Jewish voices in the post-war Soviet Ukraine of the 1950s; Andrey Kurkov’s (b. 1961) Grey Bees, focusing on contemporary ..read more

Six months after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, the Ukrainian Education Ministry announced that the Russian language courses had been removed from Ukraine’s school curriculum, along with works by Russian and Belarusian writers. The foreign literature courses have retained books by authors “who wrote in Russian, but whose ..read more

This fall, I invite you to join me as we learn about the oral tradition of Russian folk epics, the written lives of saints, and ancient Slavic pagan and more recent Eastern Orthodox Church worldviews, examining the interaction between them. Culminating in the study of Eugene Vodolazkin’s contemporary novel Laurus (2012), about a 15th century ..read more

This fall, I invite you to join me as we learn about the oral tradition of Russian folk epics, the written lives of saints, and ancient Slavic pagan and more recent Eastern Orthodox Church worldviews, examining the interaction between them. Culminating in the study of Eugene Vodolazkin’s contemporary novel Laurus (2012), about a 15th century ..read more