This course explores the different ways that medicine is represented in the fields of literature and the visual arts, using the concept of storytelling to examine themes that are at once medical and existential, and that are part of everybody's lives, such as death and dying, epidemics, caregiving, disability, and public health. Focusing on literary texts and art, we'll analyze how these themes are staged in the different sources. We'll develop a toolbox of concepts and techniques by which to investigate the narrative structures used to convey meanings about medicine, be it as a field of knowledge, a set of practices, or a mode of experience.

This seminar examines Russian and East European sci-fi in its historical trajectory and in dialogue with works from other traditions. Through close examination of foundational texts and films, from interwar dystopias (Zamyatin) to stories of invasion, reproduction, and generation (Bulgakov), to robots (Capek, Asimov, Lem), Cold-War imagery, space exploration (Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Soderbergh), post-apocalyptic scenarios (Strugatsky), and the post-Soviet aesthetics (Pelevin), we will discuss the hopes, fears, values, and worldviews that characterize the time periods and societies in which those works were produced. All readings are in English.

An examination of significant trends in Russian literature from the 2nd half of the 19th century to the Russian Revolution and a bit beyond. The course focuses on many masterpieces of 19th & 20th-century Russian literature. The works (mostly novels) are considered from a stylistic point of view and in the context of Russian historical and cultural developments. The course also focuses on questions of values and on the eternal "big questions" of life that are raised in the literature. Authors read include Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bely, Nabokov, and Kharms.

This interdisciplinary survey explores Soviet literature, art, theater, and film after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We will explore the works of avant-garde authors and artists, official writers and painters, authors who wrote "for the desk drawer", and those whose creative works were circulated in the underground. In our analysis of Soviet artistic production, we will focus on major cultural topics in and around the increasing pressure of shifting political landscapes, ideology, propaganda, the publishing market, and the role of the writer in society.

"Roma (Gypsies) in Eastern Europe" treats Romani history, cultural identity, folklore, music, religion, and representations in literature and film. Roma have been enslaved, targeted for annihilation, and persecuted for centuries. Yet they have repeatedly adapted and adjusted to the circumstances surrounding them, persisting as distinctive ethnic communities while simultaneously contributing to and forming part of the dominant worlds in which they live. This course offers novel perspectives on ethnic minorities and the dynamics of culture in Slavic and East European society.

The main objective of the course is twofold: to develop students' advanced high and above-level Russian language skills such as narrating, comparing, presenting and supporting opinions, and hypothesizing as well as to enhance students' cultural knowledge through a focus on Slavic / Russian visual arts, architecture, music, ballet, opera and drama, thus contributing to their understanding of Slavic culture in general. The highlights of the course are trips to the New York City Ballet and to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. The course will be taught in Russian.

For centuries, Siberia was a transitory space for Eastern nomads and Western adventures. Colonized by the Russian empire in the 16-17th centuries, Siberia became a land of valuable commodities. Traders and hunters were followed by political dissidents, religious radicals, and criminals. Siberia became the ultimate place of exile. And yet it is much more than prison-writ-large. Using diverse sources, the course presents multiple Siberias: from the Siberia of reindeer people, indigenous storytellers, and shamans to the Siberia of the empire's Cossacks and nobility; from the Siberia of labor camps to the Siberia of today's oil and gas giants.

This seminar will examine 20th-century Eastern European history through literary works from a number of countries in the region, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to present-day Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Belarus, and the Balkans. Readings will generally consist of one novel per week, but we will also look at a number of other genres, including the short story, poetry, drama, the journal, and reportage. While discussing the historical and political dimensions of this period, we will consider the limits of what literature can depict, and a range of possible ethical and aesthetic responses to authoritarianism.

We start with Tolstoy's artistic stimuli and narrative strategies, exploring the author's provocative visions of war, gender, sex, art, social institutions, death, and religion. The emphasis is placed here on the role of the written word in Tolstoy's search for truth and power. The main part is a close reading of his masterwork "The War and Peace" (1863-68) - a quintessence of both his artistic method and philosophical insights. Each student will be assigned to keep a "hero's diary" and speak on behalf of one or two major heroes of the epic (including the Spirit of History).The roles will be distributed in accordance with the will of fate.

The course focuses on the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, but attention is given also to other poets (predecessors and contemporaries) with whom he interacted and also with the ways his work intersected with the turbulent first decades of the twentieth century.

Close readings of the writings by various poets belonging to Akhmatova's circle of the 1960s and beyond. We analyze the unique creative phenomenon known as "Akhmatova's Orphans" in the broader context of the Russian and Soviet culture of the second half of the 20th century. Special emphasis is placed on the study of the newly acquired archive of Anatoly Naiman (Special Collections, Princeton). The Naiman Papers offer a plethora of evidence regarding the development of one of the most significant literary circles in modern Russian history. Students learn to handle rare manuscripts and work with the archival resources.

The course has four objectives: (1) an investigation of Dostoevsky's evolution as a writer, (2) an intensive analysis of his fiction and non-fiction, (3) an exploration of his religious, philosophical, political, and aesthetic ideas in the context of 19th, 20th, and now, 21st-century Russian intellectual and cultural history, and (4) an examination of 19th, 20th, and now, 21st-century Russian, Soviet, and Western critical approaches to Dostoevsky's writings.