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Course Overview

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Russian literature famously probes the depths of the human soul. These 36 half-hour lectures delve into this extraordinary body of work under the guidance of Professor Irwin Weil of Northwestern University, an award-winning teacher at Northwestern University and a legend among educators in the United States and Russia.

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Professor Weil introduces you to such masterpieces as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Chekhov’s The Seagull, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and many other great novels, stories, plays, and poems by Russian authors.

You will study more than 40 works by a dozen writers, from Aleksandr Pushkin in the 19th century to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the 20th. You will also investigate the origin of Russian literature itself, which traces to powerful epic poetry and beautiful renderings of the Bible into Slavic during the Middle Ages.

All of these works are treated in translation, but Professor Weil does something very unusual for a literature-in-translation course. For almost every passage that he quotes in English, he reads an extract in the original Russian, with a fluent accent and an actor’s sense of drama.

You may not understand Russian, but there is no mistaking the expressive intonation, rhythm, and feeling with which Professor Weil performs these passages. At one point, reciting verses from Russia’s most famous poet, he advises: ‘Listen to it once as a piece of music, and you will sense the linguistic genius of Pushkin.’

Classics of Russian Literature explores Russian masterpieces at all levels — characters, plots, scenes, and sometimes even single sentences, including:

• Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which has one of the most famous first sentences in all of literature, setting the stage for a novel that probes the tragic dimension of a subject — adultery — that had traditionally been treated as satire.
• Gogol’s Dead Souls, with a concluding passage beloved to all Russians, in which the hero flees the scene of his fiendishly clever swindle in a troika — a fast carriage drawn by three horses — to the author’s invocation, ‘Oh Rus’ [Russia], whither art thou hurtling?’
• Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, whose long chapter ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is a gripping, haunting, mystifying parable that is often studied on its own, but that is all the more powerful in this great novel, which addresses faith, doubt, redemption, and other timeless themes.

The Golden Age and After

The central core of the course covers the great golden age of Russian literature, a period in the 19th century when Russia’s writers equaled or surpassed the achievements of the much older literary cultures of Western Europe. The age commenced with Pushkin, developed with the fantastic and grotesque tales of Gogol’, and grew to full flower with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy — who at the time were considered in Europe to be lesser writers than their talented contemporary Turgenev. As the 20th century approached, Chekhov’s exquisitely understated plays and stories symbolized the sunset of the golden age.

Gorky straddled the next transformation, linking the turmoil preceding the Russian Revolution with the political oppression that affected all artists in the newly established Soviet Union from the 1920s on. You examine the brilliant revolutionary poet Maiakovsky; the novelist Sholokhov, who portrayed the revolution as a tragedy for the Cossack people; the satirist Zoshchenko, who used Soviet society as food for parody; and Pasternak, who produced beautiful poems and a single extraordinary novel. Your survey ends with Solzhenitsyn, who became the most influential literary voice speaking out against the tyranny of the Soviet system.

Inside, Outside, and Behind the Scenes

Professor Weil uses intriguing details to bring these authors and their works to life. For example, readers of English translations are probably unaware of the symbolic names that Russian writers routinely give their characters, names that are especially evocative in Russian:

• Roskol’nikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, is named after the term for ‘schism,’ signifying a person who is separating himself from society. Dostoevsky gives other characters names that mean ‘mud puddle’ and ‘intelligence,’ again, representing the person’s inner nature.
• Iurii Zhivago, the hero of Doctor Zhivago, has a family name that is an older Russian form of the word ‘alive.’ Pasternak uses a grammatical case that emphasizes the animate nature of the noun, signifying life as it should be experienced.

In addition to such internal details that enrich your understanding of the text, Professor Weil also points you to outside resources, from films and operas to recommended attractions that you may wish to see if you travel to Russia:

• In order to get a sense of the powerful rhythms of Pushkin’s masterpiece Eugene Onegin, readers who don’t know Russian can turn to Tchaikovsky’s famous operatic adaptation, which magnificently catches the meter and texture of the poem.
• A trip to Moscow should include a visit to Tolstoy’s house, now preserved as a museum. There you will get a vivid sense of the contradictions in this man’s life — in the marked contrast between the comfortable Victorian furnishings preferred by his wife and family and the Spartan austerity in which he closeted himself to write, a style that came increasingly to define his life.

Professor Weil also recounts behind-the-scenes stories, many of which relate to his own experiences in Russia. These anecdotes add a new dimension to your appreciation of the works covered in this course:

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn’s moving novella about life in a Soviet forced labor camp, might never have appeared in print had not the mercurial Soviet premier Khrushchev found the story spellbinding. After reading the manuscript, Khrushchev admitted that it was one of the few literary works that he had managed to finish without sticking himself with pins to stay awake. The resulting publication stunned the Soviet reading public and the world.
• ‘The History of an Illness,’ a short story by Zoshchenko, gently lampoons the Soviet health care system, with which Professor Weil has personal experience from his visits to the country. He describes some of the maddening features of Soviet medicine, including a propensity to treat every illness with vodka.

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| Average 29 minutes each

• Origins of Russian Literature
• Russian literature has its national and spiritual origins in the territory around the ancient city of Kiev, which adopted Christianity in the 10th century with a 100-year-old, magnificent translation of the Bible into Slavic. x
• The Church and the Folk in Old Kiev
• One of Russia’s most precious literary productions is The Tale of Prince Igor, a 12th-century epic recounting the daring, doomed raid of a Kievan prince against the neighboring Polovetsians, precursors of the Tatars. x
• Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, 1799–1837
• The first of five lectures on Russia’s greatest poet discusses Pushkin’s upbringing and the influences that molded his character and literary style, making him, in his own words, ‘the Mozart of the 19th century.’ x
• Exile, Rustic Seclusion, and Onegin
• In the 1820s, Pushkin began work on a long poem, a ‘novel in verse,’ called Eugene Onegin. Inspired partly by Byron’s Don Juan, it became an endless source of inspiration for later writers and composers. x
• December’s Uprising and Two Poets Meet
• After reading Shakespeare in French translation, Pushkin wrote the historical tragedy Boris Godunov, based on the life of a Russian tsar whom many people accused of rising to the throne by using murder. x
• A Poet Contrasts Talent versus Mediocrity
• Pushkin’s drama Mozart and Salieri probed the psychological dimensions of the supposed murder of Mozart by his rival Salieri and inspired the 1980s play and film Amadeus. In Egyptian Nights, one can see elements of Pushkin in the character of Charsky. x
• St. Petersburg Glorified and Death Embraced
• The concluding lecture on Pushkin explores his narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, about a poor man pursued by an equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Somewhat later, Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel provoked by a man flirting with his wife. x
• Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol’, 1809–1852
• The first great master of Russian prose, Gogol’ gloried in extensive, often bizarre imagery. In delightfully different ways, The Nose, The Inspector General, and The Overcoat each deal ironically with absurd situations. x
• Russian Grotesque — Overcoats to Dead Souls
• Gogol’s most famous novel, Dead Souls, concerns the confidence scheme of Chichikov, who buys ownership of dead serfs to use as collateral for a large loan, in the course of which Gogol’ creates a gallery of grotesque characters. x
• Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 1821–1881
• The first of six lectures on Dostoevsky probes the early life of this celebrated chronicler of eternal themes and extreme states of mind. Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk, is a heartrending, sometimes cruel, account of life among the lower classes in St. Petersburg. x
• Near Mortality, Prison, and an Underground
• Arrested for his political views, Dostoevsky was condemned to death and put in front of a firing squad, only to be reprieved at the last second. The experience had a searing effect on the author. Some years later, after many difficult experiences, he produced his most consistently cruel work, Notes from the Underground. x
• Second Wife and a Great Crime Novel Begins
• Under a draconian deadline, Dostoevsky dictated his novella The Gambler in a month, and then married his stenographer. Around this time, he began work on a story that would grow into the novel Crime and Punishment. x
• Inside the Troubled Mind of a Criminal
• Continuing the analysis of psychological portraits in Crime and Punishment, this lecture focuses on the double murder at the heart of the novel and the gradual unraveling of what had appeared to be the perfect crime. x
• The Generation of the Karamazovs
• Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, tells a story of family conflict and moral struggle. The book’s most celebrated chapter, ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ is as mystifying as it is unforgettable. x
• The Novelistic Presence of Christ and Satan
• The Brothers Karamazov includes a celebrated interview with the Devil, and the conviction of the wrong brother for patricide. Dostoevsky died shortly after finishing the novel. x
• Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828–1910
• The first of six lectures on Tolstoy explores his early life and works, including a remarkable account of childhood, adolescence, and youth, and a series of realistic stories based on his experiences in the Crimean War. x
• Tale of Two Cities and a Country Home
• Tolstoy’s most famous novel, War and Peace, was inspired at least partly by his reaction to the return to European Russia of some of the Decembrists previously exiled to prison in Siberia, and evolved into a sprawling saga centered on the great Napoleonic invasion of 1812. This lecture introduces some of its major characters. x
• Family Life Meets Military Life
• What happens when decent family people meet the hideous bloodshed of the most massive war that Europe had yet seen? In War and Peace, Tolstoy paints a huge canvas in which even the smallest detail is astonishingly lifelike. x
• Vengeance Is Mine, Saith the Lord
• After War and Peace, Tolstoy turned to an entirely different theme: adultery. Anna Karenina tells the story of a respectable married woman who goes through tortuous confusion and enters into a passionate affair that has tragic consequences. x
• Family Life Makes a Comeback
• A parallel plot in Anna Karenina involves a character named Levin, whose name clearly links him to the author, Lev Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy, Levin is preoccupied with the search for happiness and spiritual fulfillment. x
• Tolstoy the Preacher
• The final lecture on Tolstoy probes two late novellas, The Death of Ivan Il’ich and The Kreuzer Sonata. The aging Tolstoy grew increasingly obsessed with moral and religious problems. He died in 1910 after fleeing his wife and home. x
• Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, 1818–1883
• In his day, Turgenev’s reputation surpassed that of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, especially in Western Europe. This lecture examines his Notes of a Hunter and First Love. The latter is a tender and beautiful evocation of adolescent passion. x
• The Stresses between Two Generations
• In Turgenev’s best known novel, Fathers and Sons, he addresses many of the most hotly debated issues of the day, including anarchism, socialism, feminism, and science. Turgenev experienced painful ambivalence in determining his own position on these issues. x
• Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, 1860–1904
• Chekhov is renowned for capturing the subtleties of deep human feelings in his plays and short stories. This lecture examines one of each: The Seagull, a formative drama of 20th-century theater, and the poignant story The Darling. x
• M. Gorky (Aleksei M. Peshkov), 1868–1936
• As a popular writer and public figure, Gorky came to symbolize the transition between two different political and social systems, separated by the Russian Revolution. His autobiographical sketches are a moving account of the 19th-century Russia that he knew. x
• Literature and Revolution
• In the 1920s, Russian writers came under control of the Soviet system. Gorky, despite some misgivings, stayed loyal to the revolution. Many times he tried to protect writers and intellectuals from the murderous fanaticism of officials. x
• The Tribune — Vladimir Maiakovsky, 1893–1930
• The brilliant poet Maiakovsky stoked the fires of passionate socialism with his evocation of the sun to visit the proletarian poet, his cry for a creative surge from ‘the army of the arts,’ and even, with some ambivalence, in his paean to the Brooklyn Bridge. x
• The Revolution Makes a U-Turn
• In 1929 Maiakovsky completed a very ambivalent and moving play, The Bedbug. Woody Allen’s film Sleeper is, in part, inspired by this work. One year later, Maiakovsky played Russian roulette with a loaded pistol and lost. x
• Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, 1905–1984
• The novelist Sholokhov saw the revolution as a tragic force that wiped out a whole community, the Cossacks. In the first part of And Quiet Flows the Don, he gives a vivid picture of pre-World War I Cossack life. x
• Revolutions and Civil War
• The second part of And Quiet Flows the Don gives a remarkable picture of what it’s like to experience war and revolution. In later life, Sholokhov won a Nobel Prize and shockingly called for the execution of some dissidents. x
• Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko, 1895–1958
• Arguably the most popular writer during the Soviet era was the satirist Zoshchenko, who crafted stories that shed a ridiculing light on the many hypocritical and often downright crazy aspects of Soviet propaganda and life. x
• Among the Godless — Religion and Family Life
• Zoshchenko’s stories capture the religious piety that survived amid state-promoted atheism. He was also a master at portraying the comforts and vexations of family life amid housing shortages and other external pressures. x
• Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, 1890–1960
• Principally a poet, Pasternak partly coped with the dangers of the Stalinist era by translating Shakespeare. In the thaw after Stalin’s death, he wrote a politically charged novel on the revolution, Doctor Zhivago. x
• The Poet In and Beyond Society
• Doctor Zhivago focuses on its hero’s growing isolation in a country torn by war, revolution, and ideology. The novel has breathtakingly beautiful natural descriptions of Russia. x
• Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Born 1918
• In 1962 an unknown high school math teacher electrified the world with a novella called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which told the truth about the Soviet Union’s slave labor camps. Solzhenitsyn went on to recount other horrors of the Stalinist era. x
• The Many Colors of Russian Literature
• Reviewing the territory covered in the course, this lecture points out that Russian literature opens a wide window into the ways of the world and the human condition, enlightened by the writing of Russia’s greatest authors. x

Lecture Titles

What’s Included

What Does Each Format Include?

Instant Video Includes:

• Download 36 video lectures to your computer or mobile app
• Downloadable PDF of the course guidebook
• FREE video streaming of the course from our website and mobile apps

Instant Audio Includes:

• Download 36 audio lectures to your computer or mobile app
• Downloadable PDF of the course guidebook
• FREE audio streaming of the course from our website and mobile apps

DVD Includes:

• 36 lectures on 6 DVDs
• 232-page printed course guidebook
• Downloadable PDF of the course guidebook
• FREE video streaming of the course from our website and mobile apps

What Does The Course Guidebook Include?

Course Guidebook Details:

• 232-page printed course guidebook
• Suggested readings
• Questions to consider
• Timeline

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Reviews

Rated 4 out of 5 by Dukey from Good but repetitiveThis course has content of great interest to me. Dr. Weil’s presentation is good, but I have a few criticisms. He reads a lot of Russian during the lectures. I like this to a point, but there is far too much of it. He is at times repetitive. He is an engaging person with extensive knowledge of the subject. I think it could easily have been 24 lectures instead of 36. All that being said, I still think it was worth it because the subject interests me so much. Also, it helped that I took Professor Hartnett’s excellent Understanding Russia: A Cultural History first.

Rated 5 out of 5 by richibi from warm and wonderfulProfessor Weil with his personal warmth, and evident passion for his subject, made this course into something resembling a fireside chat, wonderful episodes of listening to a man who knows his stuff weave enchantment out of all of it, complete with some readings in the original Russian for their euphonic aspects, duly translated of course, plus even delightful renderings of relevant music sung, thankfully, in tune

Rated 4 out of 5 by jgruetz from Have gotten thru 6 sessions so far. The professor tries to pack too much in to one session. He is so familiar with the subject matter that he leaves me behind from time to time. No doubt, however, I am enjoying the course and it certainly keeps me looking forward to the next lecture. I signed up for the streaming video rather than the audio because I thought that there would be more imagery to accompany the lecture. So far that has not been true.

Rated 5 out of 5 by Gloster from Lessons from a master readerThe course I took just before this one was on modern Russian and Soviet history, and its presenter was a dynamic speaker who interwove political events with cultural developments. Professor Weil is a very different type of lecturer: soft-spoken, casual, and his lectures are much more like symposium sessions with less than a dozen students and their professor sitting around a large table, perhaps sharing tea together. While it took me a couple of lectures to adjust to the difference between the two professors’ manner of delivery, I then found myself ‘settling in’ to another visit with someone who was becoming something of an old friend, a ready smile on his face and read to yield up more treasures from the rich field of Russian literature. Of necessity, as is the case in any course, he had to choose representative works from among the greatest writers and poets, leaving some — as he readily admits and laments — out. Nonetheless, this is a rich survey and, because he knows and loves the Russian language so much, one that gives listeners and viewers a chance to hear extensive quotations — even songs — in the Russian language. (I confess my ear was not good enough to really ‘hear’ the magic of poetry in Russian for which he professed such love.) Even those who are quite familiar with the works of the masters such as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov will likely learn something new from Professor Weil’s course, as well as gain a new appreciation for the vastness of Russia’s geography and rich historical experience. If one is looking for a ‘quick summary’ course on major works of Russian literature, this is not the course for you. But if you are willing to set aside the hectic pace of modern life, pull up a favorite chair, and brew yourself some tea (or seize another liquid), I think you will be greatly enriched by the wisdom, knowledge, and humor of this good man.

Rated 5 out of 5 by MC68 from Classics of Russian LiteratureI love this Great Course. I’m not through with it yet, but I’ve absorbed so much because Great Courses has made it SO MUCH more interesting than similar courses I had of Russian Literature, in college. I’ve bought around six other courses from Great Courses this year & will continue to do so. I’m now getting a MUCH BETTER education than I had as a young person. Know you will, too.

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Rated 4 out of 5 by MarleysGhost from Best if You Speak RussianLike many TGC students I suspect, I have read (and reread) the well-known classics like “The Brothers Karamazov”, “War and Peace”, “Anna Karenina” , “Crime and Punishment” and some miscellaneous Pushkin poetry. It was only through the cinema that I became familiar with Gorky (The Lower Depths by both Renoir and Kurosawa), the stage (Chekov) and opera that I became familiar with the prose of Pushkin (Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin). Of course as a member of the West I felt obliged to read Solzhenitsyn. As impressed as I was (and am) with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I remained ignorant of much of the rest of Russian literature. Thanks to Professor Weil some of that ignorance has been modified. His 36 lectures seemed to cover the scope of the subject, although having read the other reviewers, I accept that much was left out (as admitted by the Professor). And herein lies the rub. I thought that the lectures on the novels and writers with whom I was already familiar lacked come degree of depth. I would have preferred more analysis and less plot description. To be sure Dr. Weil did bring out some points of which I was unaware or had given no thought, even on works that I had read more than once. But for works that I had not read (e.g. “And Quietly Flows the Don”), I liked that I got a lot of plot summary. Plus the historical and cultural background that he provided that gave me quite a bit of background necessary for proper understanding of the work (e.g. the Cossacks in the aforementioned novel). A dilemma for the course: what level of prior knowledge should the instructor assume? In the end I think that Professor Weil hits about the right mark. Even on works that I had read (but had not enjoyed so much) such as those by Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak, Professor Weil added quite a bit to my understanding of the author and the background that caused the books to written. There is quite a bit of history (much unnecessary I thought) and cultural (almost all necessary) information provided as the course goes along. In the end these positives are enough to give the course high marks. There are of course a few elements that don’t quite hit the expected standard. For example, beginning at lecture three (Pushkin) Professor Weil does a lot of recitation of the poetry in Russian. Now this is fine if the prereqs for the course are Russian 101 and 102, but not helpful for the rest of us. To be fair a bit of the rhythm and sonority of the language is helpful in understanding why Pushkin should be considered a great poet, but for me at least, the recitations in Russian went on long after I had heard as much as was going to helpful to a non-Russian speaker. (note that I understand this may not be a fair criticism and I might not have the same view were this a course on Garcia Lorca and the recitation were in Spanish). And while I think it charming that Professor Weil felt that he could sign a bit of Boris Godunov (again to give us a bit of the feel of the language) and his singing was reasonably good, there was a bit too much of this as well. Finally, a criticism of omission. I am not competent to know which greats have been left out, but at least two reviewers have mentioned the grievous omission of Bulgakov. I looked him up and think that MtLogan’s comment on this must necessarily be correct. I will now put “The Master and Margarita” on my reading list. All in all get this course, but I’d say that having watched the video, the audio would be fine.

Rated 5 out of 5 by jab1960 from Phenomenal ProfessorNeeded a bit of a refresher course — the last time I took a course with Dr. Weil wa 1982!

Rated 2 out of 5 by crosby from Um, um…and ramblingI have several courses and this is my least favorite. Although the individuals and works covered are very interesting on their own, this professor is one of the worst. The lectures lack organizational structure, the professor stutters repeatedly to the point of distraction and fails to identify or emphasize main ideas. I also find some of his treatment of female characters and relationships to be sexist.

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