Who are the Russians? How have Russians imagined their world and themselves? What makes Russia’s one of the world’s great cultures? Welcome to the enchanting world of Russian culture and civilization. This semester we will experience Russian culture through the lenses of space and place. We will investigate how Russia’s great thinkers, writers, artists, and composers have visualized their country and thought about homeland and foreign land, and imagined sacred and profane space—sometimes as the best of all possible worlds and sometimes as one inviting new inventions of ideal community.

The goals of RUTR 2460 are to:

•  Understand the basic political, social, and cultural events in Russian history.

•  Know the geographies of Russia, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Russian regions; and what Russians see and think when they consider these places on their “mental map.”

•  Probe the connection between spatial and utopian thinking.

•  Summarize the varieties of Russian social/spatial imagination.

•  Map and “decode” the spaces and various “imagined communities” in art and literature.

•  Think critically about identity, ways of imagining space and ideal community and examine your own identity from this perspective.

There are additional UVa-only syllabus items for this course. Click here to view all the public and UVa-only syllabus items. This link is restricted to UVa-members with Netbadge authentication.