Slavic Literatures and Cultures
The Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures studies and teaches the languages, linguistics, literature, film, art, and cultural history of the Slavic world, from the medieval period up through the present. Languages taught include Russian, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Undergraduates may pursue a Slavic Concentration, Joint Concentration, or Secondary Fields in Central European Studies or Russian Studies.
Director of Undegraduate Studies: Professor Stephanie Sandler
Gateway Courses
Spring 2024
Slavic 97: Introduction to Slavic Literatures and Cultures
Aleksandra Kremer
An interdisciplinary introduction to major issues in the field of Slavic Languages and Literatures, including critical theory, modes of interpreting literary texts, the forces structuring national and regional identities, as well as major authors of the Slavic literary traditions, including Russian, Czech, Ukrainian, and Polish works.
Slavic 121: Ballet, Past and Present
Daria Khitrova
This course explores the history of ballet, classical and beyond. We will view and discuss ballets to help us think about what ballet is, and why it has been such an enduring art form in different eras and cultures. Why is it mute and does it have to be? What kind of stories can it tell and how should we read them? How do ballets survive and how do they change in the process? Who makes a ballet: a choreographer or dancers? Or is it, perhaps, a composer, designer, or story writer? Does ballet technique confine the body, as the pioneers of modern dance used to assert, or is it a form of idealist philosophy, the ultimate expression of human freedom, as twentieth-century theorists of ballet have suggested? The works to be studied include Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Rite of Spring, Les Noces, Apollo, and others. The course is classroom-only (no dancing component; only watching, reading, and discussing) but, if pandemics permit, will also include a visit to the theater as well as to a ballet class and, possibly, rehearsals. No pre-requisites.
Class notes: Jointly offered as TDM 121K.
Slavic 147: Russian Fiction in the Soviet Era
Justin Weir
In this course we will read several of the most acclaimed works of Russian fiction in the Soviet era, including Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak’s, Doctor Zhivago, Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, as well as other stories and novels by Osip Mandelshtam, Yuri Olesha, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Evgeny Zamyatin. The main themes of the course will be the role of the author in a totalitarian society, politics, and the form of the novel in the twentieth century. No prerequisites. Conference course.
Slavic 171: The Holocaust in Polish Memory and Culture
Aleksandra Kremer
Hitler’s plan to destroy European Jewry was carried out by the Nazis mostly on the territory of occupied Poland, where three million Jews had lived before World War II. The Poles’ position has often been described as that of bystanders; nevertheless, Polish behavior also encompassed more direct involvement—whether complicity and murder, or attempts at rescuing Jews. How is this time remembered in Poland? How is it represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish literary texts? What is the relation between the Holocaust memory and Polish wartime history? What do we know about German and Soviet occupations of the country? How was the memory of the Holocaust and World War II shaped and used by communist Poland? What happens to this memory today? We will look for answers in different short stories, novels, poems, memoirs, and films created between the 1940s and the present day, and confront them with recent scholarship.
Slavic 196: Making Sense of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Nariman Skakov
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, caused a humanitarian catastrophe, reshaped the geopolitical landscape, and prompted a profound semantic crisis. Fueled by Putin’s manipulative rhetoric and the disinformation of propaganda, this crisis stimulated a rigorous aesthetic response that reclaims art’s right to meaning. This course aims to provide an interdisciplinary examination of the complex array of cultural practices that respond to the war. It explores works of Ukrainian cultural producers and some other dissenting voices from the region that resist the dehumanizing discourse of war by exploring new forms of aesthetic expression. Course materials in English translation will be discussed with their makers via zoom and will include a variety of media – cinema, literature, poetry, music, plastic and visual arts by Serhii Zhadan, Galina Krug, Ostap Slyvynsky, Nikita Kadan, Sergei Loznitsa, Luna, Vladimir Sorokin, Dmitry Glukhovsky among others.
Slavic 164: Literature of Catastrophe: Ukraine 1917-2022
Tamara Hundorova
The course offers an overview of Ukrainian literature through the prism of “catastrophic thinking” – a mode of representation of highly traumatic events of the twentieth century, such as the two World Wars, the October 1917 Revolution, the Holocaust, famines, and nuclear disasters. The aim of the course is to examine how trauma influences literary and cultural imagination and to consider the role of testimony, documentary, and aesthetic sublimation in artistic rendering of catastrophic events. Among the topics to be discussed are fiction and nonfiction as a means of representing catastrophe, the role of apocalyptic imagination, the transgenerational effect of trauma, etc.
Students will study representative texts of Ukrainian literature that cover key 20th-century catastrophic events - the Ukrainian Revolution, the Executed Renaissance, the First and Second World Wars, Euromaidan, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Students will read and discuss texts by various Ukrainian authors from the early 20th century to the early 21st century. The course has an intermedial emphasis: in addition to literary texts, we will also discuss films (Dovzhenko, Loznitsa, Chernobyl documentaries) and examples of Ukrainian art of the 20th century. Course does not require knowledge of the Ukrainian language and the texts will be read in English translation.
GenEd 1057: Poetry Without Borders
Stephanie Sandler
Why do poems and poets today boldly cross the borders of language, geography, form, and how are those border-crossings charged politically, ethically, and aesthetically?
Without borders, can there be poetry? The border of white paper surrounds printed poems; national boundaries keep cultural and linguistic traditions distinct; and aesthetic practice and its conventions create genres and demarcate poetry from music or dance or film. How poetry requires but also perversely challenges these limits will be the subject of this course.
The course studies the cultural practice of poetry, with an emphasis on contemporary poetry. We will examine four kinds of borders – performative, linguistic, geographic, and aesthetic. That yields four large topics: poetry in and about public places (how does poetry speak to public life, including political life? How does poetry address experiences of trauma and harm? What ethical challenges loom large in poetic practice?); poetry and translation (what happens when poems cross languages? how to read mixed-language or macaronic poems?); poetry, confinement, and migration (what happens when poets cross geographic borders? what do they hear in a new language and, as a result, in their own? how do mixed identities and allegiances work? how have the current crises around border crossings and around incarceration affected poetic practices?); and poetry and the other arts (how have the cross-influences of music, film, dance, the visual arts, and photography been felt in poetry? how do poems become visual artifacts, or scripts for performance?).
We will read, listen to, and learn from Laurie Anderson, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, Jorie Graham, Eliza Griswold, Susan Howe, Ilya Kaminsky, Daniil Kharms, Eugene Ostashevsky, Yang Lian, Valzhyna Mort, M. NourbeSe Philip, Tracy K. Smith, C. D. Wright, and others.
The course culminates in a final creative project, and it will also have an engaged learning component. Students will explore poetry outside the classroom and engage with communities beyond Harvard.