Spirituality Subtext: Russ Poe

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Unlike my Orthodoxy as Subtext, a course dedicated to Russian Prose and taught in Eng;ish, this course is taught in Russian and explores poetic texts only. Unlike my other poetry courses in Russian, this one examines exclusively religious—Biblical and liturgical—motifs or/and subtexts in Russian Poetry. Otherwise, different content and concentration aside, the format of the course is very similar to my other poetry courses. We will read, translate, and abanalyze the text with the following important skills and competence required—exploring functions of Russian metrics, grammar, syntax, and other linguistic and structural properties of the Russian Language, for poetic purposes—how the form of the poem is connected to its message. In Poetry, as in Poetics in general, intertextuality is one of such properties. We will address a specific segment of it—the religious one. We start with the Zhivago Poetry Cycle by Pasternak, do a lot of Mandelstam, especially his poems on The Eucharist, Protestantism (including “Bach”), St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Notre Dame, etc. I will introduce some Symbolist poetry, and should the students be interested, they may explore more of it (especially Vladimir Solovyov), on their own, for the final project. I will also use at least one poem by Nikolai Gumilev (“The Descendants of Cain”). We shall also read Pushkin, Tiutchev, and some unexpected sources—like Velimir Khlebnikov’s “Slums,” as well as many much more recent poets, e.g., Timur Kibirov, Olga Rozhanskaia, Henri Volokhonsky, etc. My students from my more general course on Russian Poetry may recognize some authors, as well as the general tools and approaches to poetry I will teach, but the choice of poems and the thematic concentration will be exclusively on religion, especially Christianity, especially when, culturally, the poet would address the topic in an unexpected way. The course entails constant class participation, as we will do the textual analysis in class, every time, of a new poem. So everyone much prepare every assignment, and that is tough—although shorter, poetic texts are usually much more intense than prose, especially in a foreign language. Class participation is therefore worth 40% of the grade. There will be an in-class Midterm, with the analysis of a poem given by the professor (20% of the final grade), and a final project—a paper analyzing a poem of the student’s choice, with specifically religious intertextuality and system of allusions (30% of the final grade). The final project will have a comnponent of an oral presentation in Russian (10% of the final grade). The analysis in the Midterm and the Final written assignments/ papers may be done in English, but the text analyzed must be in the original Russian. A paper written in Russian will receive an additional bonus to the grade but only if its sophistication is the same level as the one on which the student would write in English. The course itself is taught in Russian.