Different approaches to Russia from the point of view of research: History, Culture and Literature, Sociology. Obligatory course for those who intend to make Russian Studies Programme.

The introduction course will address topics such as:

- An overview to the Russian history

- Periodisation of history in Russia and the Soviet Union

- Modernisation emphases of the state Mythmaking and propaganda in history

- Continuum in Soviet and Russian history

- Use of Past in the Soviet Union/Russia

- The legacy of the Soviet Union

- Key concepts of Russian cultural identity

- symbolic world of Russianness

- aspects of cultural history - cultural studies

- "New Man and Woman" - building a new Soviet man: kul'turnost'

- new Russian popular culture

- Russia's transition to a market economy, including the legacy of the Soviet economic system, the shadow economy and new forms of blat;

- Women in Russia, particularly their roles in business and the family

- Russia's transition to democracy, including presidential power, centralization and possibly state-media relations;

- How Russians have coped with the transition in daily life, for example facing changes in the workplace, economic insecurity and the growing gap between rich and poor (e.g. the "new Russians" versus the elderly poor).

Enrollment via NettiOpsu during the period of 20.8.-31.8.2010

IR Master's thesis seminar II KVPOS6B or ERS/CBU Master's Thesis seminar.

Please register by emailing mikko.vaha-sipila (AT) uta.fi by Tue 7.9.2010.

Lectures and essay.

This policy course provides students with an understanding of the EU policy sectors relevant to the Baltic Sea Region as well as insights into the origins, logic and significance of the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, its potential, limitations and broader meaning in the EU macro-regional context.

Compensations:

International Relations
KVPOA3, Telo or KVPOS4, Bicchi

or

Political Science
VALTA7, 2 cr or VALTS2e, 3 cr.

Students of ERS and CBU programmes can include this course in their optional studies in section "Other ERS studies".

No previous knowledge of the Russian language is required. The course is set around studying prepared texts, through which the main areas of the grammar will be covered. Active participation and production are the main goals of the course. The teaching language will be English. Students of any discipline are welcome. Those who already have knowledge of Russian language can participate courses at the Slavonic philology.

This course is for those who have never studied Russian before but think it would be a fun at least to try. The aim is to learn the Russian alphabet, to acquire fundamental vocabulary of 500-800 lexical units, to achieve basic skills in pronunciation and grammar, to study everyday communicative situations. This means that after studying Russian for one semester you will be able not only to read simple texts (names of the streets, signs, ads, short newspaper articles, etc.), but also to understand some spoken language, and even to communicate in everyday life situations.

Of course you heard many times, that Russian is a very difficult language with an alphabet nobody can learn, with lots of grammar forms nobody can understand, and hundreds of rules with thousands of exceptions nobody can remember. You have a chance to see for yourself whether is it true or maybe a slight exaggeration...

PLEASE NOTE:

Course book (available, for example, in the Juvenes book store after 15.08.2009): Karavanova N. B. (2008) Survival Russian: a Course in Conversational Russian. Moscow.

Enrollment via NettiOpsu

FINAL EXAM TAKES PLACE ON MONDAY 27TH OF SEPTEMBER AT 16-18. PLACE: PINNI A, Paavo Koli lecture hall .

SECOND CHANCE TO TAKE THE EXAM (OR RE-TAKE IT) WILL BE ON MONDAY 25TH OF OCTOBER AT 16-18. PLACE PINNIB5069.

Visual culture makes up a significant part of a particular national culture or civilisation and encodes the main values and attitudes of the people and state. For understanding Russia with her dramatic history this is particularly significant. The course aims at providing the students with knowledge of the Russian visual arts and contemporary visual environment with its semiotics and encoded social values.

Content of the course

Starting from the Russian icon and the 19th century painting, the course concentrates on Russian avant-garde art, the Soviet poster and Soviet/Russian art-photography with special attention to the following topics:

• The Russian avant-garde: in literature and in visual arts;
• The history of the Soviet poster;
• Photography and propaganda;
• Gender in Russian painting, poster and photography;
• Censorship in visual arts under Stalin;
• Famous Russian war photographs and photographers;
• Socialist realism in the visual arts (1950s-1980s);
• The re-emergence of fine-art photography in the 1970s;
• Outstanding contemporary Russian photographers.

The final part of the course deals with the Post-modernist 'visual quotation' in Russian pop-culture.

The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.

Syllabus:

Week 1

Mon 6 Sept:

Introduction: the roots of the Russian visual culture.

The icon as an entrance into spiritual world.

Lubok and the "low culture".

Tue 7 Sept:

The Russian art in  the 18-19th centuries.

Critical realism of Fedotov and the Wanderers (Itinerants): Perov, Kramskoi, Repin.

The national idea and the national ideal in the Russian visual arts: Nesterov, Vasnetsov, Kustodiev, Petrov-Vodkin, Glazunov.

Art for the sake of art: Mir iskusstva (the World of Art movement) and the Silver Age of Russian Culture: Levitan and Chekhov, Vrubel and Lermontov,

The idea of the feminine: Petrov-Vodkin and his reference to the spiritual values of the Russian icon, Kustodiev and his idealisation of provincial low-middle class life,

Refined  aesthetism of Zinaida Serebriakova

Mark Shagal's flying lovers  and his representation of the Jewishness.

Wed 8 Sept:

Birth of Futurism.

The futurists manifesto "A slap in the publics face".

David Burliuk as the father of Russian futurism.

Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova.

Futurism in literature and in visual arts.  Book design and experiments in poetry. Kamensii, Kruchonych, Xlebnikov

Mayakovsky and Burliuk.

Malevich an Kruchonych. The first futurist opera The victory over the sun. 1913.

The birth of Malevich's The Black Square.

Malevich and his UNOVIS group.

Suprematism (non-objective art).

Malevich and his heritage today postmodernism.

Fri 10 Sept:

Pavel Filonov and his idea of the ?made? artwork.

Constructivism. Tatlin and his fantastic projects.

El Lissitzky, Bauhaus and Soviet propaganda. Birth of new visual language in photography and cinema. Dziga Vertov and His  Man with a moviecamera.

Alexander Rodchenko  and "The October Group".  

WEEK 2

Mon 13 Sept:

Story of the  Soviet poster. Dmitri Moor.

Arts under Stalin.  The doctrine of the Socialist realism.

Censorship and purges. Gustav Klutsis.

Manipulation with the works of art and photographs.

Tue 14 Sept:

The Socialist realism in the post-war Soviet Russia. The gender aspect of the socialist realism.

Search of the national idea. Ilya Glasgunov.

Depicting a woman: Socialist realists (Samokhvalov, Deineka, Laktionov against their predesessors  Zinaida Serebriakova, Mikhail Nesterov, Kuz'ma Petrov-Vodkin, Boris Kustodiev, 

Dissident and underground arts. The Bulldozer exhibition.

Ernest Neizvestnyi and leader of the state. Nikita Chrushchev.

Mikhail Shemiakin.

Visual arts in the post-modern times.

The Mit'ki group.  Komar and Melamid

Wed 15 Sept:

Photography as propaganda and as visual art.

Famous war photographs.

Photography in Russia in 1980s.

Photography in Russia today.

Documentary and fine-art-photography.

Photogphaphers of St.Petersburg

Fri 17 Sept:

Revision. Workshop and discussion on photography and visual arts.

Selected Literature:

Bowlt, John E and Matich, Olga. Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde And Cultural Experiment. NY, 1999.

Bown, Matthew Cullerne. Art under Stalin. New York : Holmes & Meier, 1991.

Condee,  Nancy.  ed..Soviet Hieroglyphics. Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia. London, 1995

Douglas, Charlotte. Kazimir Malevich. London, 1994

Elliott, David. New Worlds: Russian Art and Society, 1900-37. London, 1989.

Gray, Camille. The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922. Thames and Hudson, Ltd. London: 1962.

Kelly,  Catriona and Shepherd, David eds. Constructing Russian culture in the age of revolution, 1881-1940. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1998.

King, David. The Commissar Vanishes: The falsification of photographs and art in Stalin Russia.-  Edinburgh, 1997.

Lavrentiev, Alexander. Alexander Rodchenko. Photography. 1924-1954. Koln, 1995.

Tarasov, Oleg.   Icon and Devotion. Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia.- London, 2002.

Enrollment via NettiOpsu

Registration begins: 10.8. at 6.00 Registration ends: 1.9. at 24.00.Selection criteria: Priority is given to international degree students, otherwise the selection criterion is the number of credits.Selections on view: The final course lists will be posted on the Language Centre's notice board and website on September 3th.

To develop an advanced interdisciplinary understanding of the main approaches and theories of European integration and an ability to apply them to the enlargemet of the European Union (EU).

Lectures 36 h + exam (3 credit points);
essay seminar 6 h (5 credit points).

Essay seminars are to be held during the III period.

Compensations:

International Relations
KVPOA3, Wiener - Diez (3 credit points) or Wiener - DieZ and Bindi/Vogt - Maier (5 credit points)

Political Science
VALTA7, 3-5 cr.

This course deals with forms and processes of the Russian culture of 2000s. It is focused on analyses of cultural texts belonging to literature, art, music and theatre as well as TV, radio and the Internet. It aims to present and interpret popular novels, films and shows from the point of view of their cultural meanings and relevant cultural languages.

It also studies widespread cultural practices with their specific features, like blogging, mass engagement into social nets, shopping, taking pictures and visiting photo exhibitions, listening to FM radio and reading "ironic crime stories", etc. - in order to come to better understanding of the variety of today's Russian culture.

One of the main goals of this course is to show interconnections between presumably "high" and "low" cultural forms, which are mixed and synthesized into the "nobrow" culture of the global information society.

Methodologically this interdisciplinary course is linked to cultural studies, semiotics and discourse analysis. Therefore keywords for interpretation of cultural forms and practices are: language, cultural meanings, text, narrative, discourse, representation, ideology, media, everyday life, subcultures and audiences.

"Contemporary Russian culture: introduction into cultural studies" is addressed to students of the Russian language and culture as well as to those who study European media, arts and literature of the 2000s.

Prospective themes:

• "Serious media" vs "media entertainment": changing landscape of Russian radio and TV
• Internet: cultural specifics of Russian blogs and social nets
• Internet: users' identity and autobiography in "100 facts about yourself"
• Popular literature: quest for new forms and cultural play with readers
• Popular literature: phenomenon of women's crime stories
• Cinema: blockbusters and experimental forms
• Languages of the contemporary Russian art
• Photography: cultural "boom" of 2000s
• Innovations and traditions in theatre and performance
• Pop- and rock music in today's Russian culture
• Fashion: haut couture and everyday styles.

The course gives an overview of statistics, its importance and use in different fields of science. Basic statistical concepts and descriptive statistics are introduced, as well as an elementary introduction to estimation and hypothesis testing is given. An introduction to a statistical software package is also included.

Only the students of the Bachelor's and Master's programmes of the ISSS (International School of Social Sciences) can participate on this course.

The enrolment has ended.