Sarah Lawrence College Russian Department
At Sarah Lawrence, first- and second-year Russian classes are offered every year. Third-year students are strongly encouraged to take their junior year abroad; an advanced reading course is offered for students returning from Russia and/or according to student need. Students of Russian should also be aware that they can pursue their interest in Russia and Eastern Europe more generally in many other areas of the College. Conference work can always be directed toward your field of interest, and courses focusing either entirely or in part on Russia and/or Eastern Europe are regularly offered in a number of disciplines, including literature, history, film history, dance history and philosophy.
The goal of the Russian language classes is to teach students to speak, comprehend, read and write a fascinating language with a logic very different from that of English. Whether you seek fluency in the language, survival skills or something in between, the study of Russian also offers you one of the most fundamental experiences of a liberal arts education: the opportunity to view the world through an entirely new prism. Oral proficiency is the focus of the first-year class, culminating in end-of-semester projects where students draw on textbook dialogues to write and film skits in small groups. In the second-year course, reading is also emphasized, and we include poetry as well as texts paired with films. The advanced course operates as much as possible as a literature class in the original. Topics, texts and authors covered vary widely, and student input is strongly encouraged. Past syllabi have included works by such authors as Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Tsvetaeva and Pelevin.