Freshman and Sophomore seminars offer lower-division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.

While the expansive Russian novel looms large in the history of Russian prose, this course offers an introduction to Russian and Russophone literature through the rich tradition of the short story. We will read a number of major 19th-century writers, including Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov, as well as 20th-century and contemporary writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Isaac Babel, Andrei Platonov, Lyudmilla Petrushevskaya, and Yevgenia Belorusets. With care, nuance, and attention, we will examine the inner workings and meaning of each story, as well as its place within a wider tradition. How does the short story work? How does one story respond to others that came before it? How does the short story form develop from the 19th century to today? We will consider a range of topics, including war and revolution, love and death, the everyday and the supernatural, as well as the comic and absurd. This course should be of interest to anyone who likes to read, and also for students interested in creative writing.

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