Russian Academics

The title of this post will probably scare away all but the most academic and loyal readers, but since the content of these blogs haven't been quite focused on the experience of late, I thought I would respond to a question I received by email about the apparent abscence of any references to the classes we are taking in these blogs.

I thought that in response I'd write a brief description of each class that we're taking:

RUSSIAN HISTORY

Taught by the American missionary who is also the coordinator of our group, this class largely revolves around readings from our textbook. The class reminds me somewhat of Alan Guenther's History of Christianity courses in that the lectures often focus on the specific time in history that we've read about prior. We've also just recently received our topics for major papers--I get the opportunity to write about Lenin, while others are writing about Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra (the last Russian royal family), and Stalin. Source materials are a lot more difficult to find in Russia so these papers will likely have bibliographies slimmer than most Russian models--and that's slim.

-Tsar Nicholas



RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Our Russian literature class is taught by a younger lady who was just recently married. We had an enjoyable break during her wedding and honeymoon but she has now returned in her newlywed fury. This is the class that I got to read Dr. Zhivago for, and I'd say it's one of the more difficult classes in terms of sheer reading volume. I was fortunate that my book was only 550 pages, John gets to read Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and though a great book, it is definately a 1000 page tome. Russian literature is definately unique, their history is as interesting as the wildest fiction, and suffering and faith are two themes that are explored much more vividly than I have ever seen in English.




RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

Our language class is taught by the extremely patient and kind Lyouba. She has helped us learn the Cyrillic alphabet and a few of the many Russian grammatic constructions. Here is a picture of the alphabet, it is quite cool.




The bl letter that says "(like you've been jabbed in the stomach)" is pretty accurate. It can't really be reproduced using the English alphabet. I would also describe it as the sound a person makes when they see something really gross, "eeuih, sick man." Learning a new language has been great though, I hope to continue practicing when I return to Canada.

RUSSIAN ART

I've mentioned this in previous posts so I'll just re-state that this class is the best. We get to visit museums and historical locations and see the orginals of great art. I've tried to explain how amazing this class is but I still think it's something that needs to be experienced to be fully explained. A 15 page essay could probably give a good idea, but I'd probably need either money, furs, or semi-precious stones for that to happen.

It's good though to say the least.



Until next time--probably three days...