Slavic Studies

This is a practical language course for beginner learners of Polish. This course gives students a basic knowledge of Polish language, culture and modern Polish society. Students learn to: 1) use Polish to express information about themselves and others, tell a story, express an opinion; b) use Polish in the classroom; c) correctly use the case system and the verbal system; d) express the following meanings: quantity (how many?), time (when?), location + direction (where?), means (how?), cause (why? how come?), purpose (to what end?); e) comprehend and extract main points from Polish language texts, correctly identify the general idea of a text, locate specifically required information, summarize; f) comprehend contextual information (people, places and events) in Polish-language texts; g) use reference tools (dictionaries and grammars) to obtain grammatical and lexical information; h) formulate questions about structures they do not understand. Students arrive at the lower A1 level of language competence (the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).

This course presents a broad picture of political and cultural situation, including the Russo-Chinese contacts in the 17th-19th centuries. It covers the Kievan Rus, the period of division, culture of the period of Mongol dependency, culture of independent Moscow state; the beginning of secular culture in the 17th century; reforms of Peter I, Westernization of Russian culture in the 18th century; the golden age of aristocratic culture at the end of the 18th century; new trends and schools in Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides students with notions of comparative grammar, which allows them to recognize the main differences between east-Slavic (Russian in particular), west-Slavic (Polish) and south-Slavic (Bulgarian) languages. The course also provides an accurate knowledge of Slavic medieval history, within the broader context of European and Mediterranean culture and civilization. Students will acquire the knowledge and skills to read and comprehend short Slavonic texts.

In Fall 2025, the course concerns the figure of Michael Trivolis, a Greek monk who lived between the end of the 15th and the middle of the 16th century, known in Russia as ‘Maximus the Greek’ (Maksim Grek). Born in Arta, in the Epirus region of Greece, pupil of John Lascaris in Corfù and Florence, collaborator of Aldo Manuzio in Venice, at the service of the court of Mirandola, once again in Florence as Dominican monk, Michael Trivolis trained at the school of Italian humanism. When he was about 35 years old, he returned to his fatherland and entered the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos. After 12 years, in 1518, he was sent to Muscovy with the task of correcting the church-Slavonic translations which were in use there (with particular reference to the Psalter). In the Rus’, the first half of the 16th century was a time characterized by the struggle against heresies on one hand, and by an harsh debate on church properties on the other. Maximus the Greek’s friction with the political and ecclesiastical power earned him imprisonment and ostracism: up until the moment of his death, which took place almost 40 years later, he has never been allowed to leave the Rus’. It’s been written that Maximus “had been prepared for a mission to Muscovy, but Muscovy was not yet ready for him”. Nevertheless, besides being one of the most prolific writers in the entire Slavic Middle Ages, Maximus the Greek has been read and loved by many people, to the point that he became very soon worthy of veneration (but the Russian Church canonized him only in 1988).

This course offers an introduction to the history of modern Eastern Europe, with a focus on the region’s politics, society, and culture, from the late 19th century to the present. It traces the collapse of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires; the rise of nationalism and creation of nation-states; the impact of the world wars; the establishment and evolution of communist regimes; and the region’s transition to democracy after the fall of communism in 1989. Through engagement with primary sources, memoirs, literature, artistic works, and major historiographical debates, the course explores how the countries of the region continue to grapple with the questions of identity, memory, power, and belonging raised during Europe’s tumultuous twentieth century.

This course analyzes developments in Russian literature after Stalinism, covering major literary texts and events in Russian cultural history from 1953 to the present, with a brief look at the period immediately preceding the post-Stalin era. Each week is devoted to a particular text or author, but certain themes recur throughout the course, including: emigration and exile; the boundaries between published and unpublished literature; experimentations in literary form; the effects of ideological and political change on literary production; and writers’ involvement in (or withdrawal from) politics.

History of Russian literature from 20th c. to present.

The course introduces students to three or more works of pre-20th-century literature and culture to be read in Russian, while improving reading and comprehension skills. It includes a combination of canonical and non-canonical texts by women and men, and explores the cultural and institutional contexts in which texts were produced, published, read, or viewed. Students share impressions through class and online discussions, and informal presentations. Students must have passed 1st year Russian, or equivalent for visiting students.

This course explores this question in the context of the languages and peoples of the Danube region, focusing on German, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian and Croatian, and Yiddish. These languages belong to two genealogically different groups (Indo-European and Uralic) and one (Yiddish) bears traces of a third group (Semitic); within Indo-European, three different sub-groups are represented (Germanic, Romance, Slavonic). The course uses data from these languages (texts in the original, idioms, proverbs, jokes, etc.) to explore language and cultural contact from both a purely linguistic perspective (language relatedness v. typological features of languages, script v. sounds, areal connections, borrowing of words, idioms, and figures of speech) and a sociolinguistic point of view (intercultural exchange, multilingualism, standardization, purism, and the relation between language and identity). It explores how Danubian languages both converge and differ, how Danubian culture is both intercultural friction and intercultural flow.

The course demonstrates the reasons for the collapse of the communist system in the Soviet Union and its consequences, with a specific focus on Russia and the Baltic states; the geopolitical consequences of the demise of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent reordering of global economic and geopolitical space; the nature of socio-economic changes in the region in the 1990s, and how different social groups responded to them; cultural change, with a focus on identity politics, gender and ethnicity; the political management of ethno-culturally diverse territories, and the renegotiation of national and ethnic identities; and the importance of the region for Europe as a whole, including a focus on Russia and the Baltic states' relations with the new enlarged Europe.