Russian

Related Student Organizations and University Programs

Study Abroad

Most Russian majors study for a semester or a year in Russia.
Programs are available that offer home-stays and work internships in addition to classroom instruction.
Approved programs include the ACTR-ACCELS at Moscow International University in Moscow and the Council of International Education Exchange program in St. Petersburg.
Students may accelerate their language learning through intensive summer language study, either at other American universities or in Russia.

Career Paths

As the achievements of the Russian program’s graduates demonstrate, knowledge of the Russian language and culture can favorably distinguish them when they are entering law and business schools, government service, education or humanitarian organizations. Since 1991, most graduates of the Russian program have begun their post-graduate careers with a job in Russia. Alumni of the program have also secured the following positions:

AdWords Coordinator, Google
Development Assistant, New York Philharmonic
Writer, Self-employed
Business Manager, Intervet International Bv, Akzo Nobel Inc.
Consultant, PricewaterhouseCoopers
Assistant district counsel, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Assistant district attorney, Suffolk County, New York
Program administrator, Center of Russian Language and Culture, Saint Petersburg State University
Chair and associate professor of Russian, Syracuse University
Executive director, Coalition on Adoption Institute
Legal assistant in U.S. law offices in Moscow and representative of Merck, Sharp and Dohme in corporate affairs for Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia

Graduate and Professional School

Russian majors are prepared for advanced graduate and professional work in a range of disciplines, including Russian language, Russian studies, international relations, law, business or medicine. Recently, students have gone on to:

Indiana University
Yale University
Charles University
Fordham University
Florida Coastal School of Law

Quick Facts

Number of program faculty: 3

Average number of majors per class year: 4

Program Details

The New Russia, which emerged from ruins of the Soviet Union, once again has become an important player in the political, economic and cultural arenas.
Knowledge of the Russian language and culture will help students to take full advantage of opportunities which the New Russia offers.
Bucknell’s Russian program offers four levels of Russian language study, providing courses in Russian culture and literature, business Russian and Russian of the media, as well as colloquial standard Russian.
Russian studies, while founded on language study, include all aspects of Russia — the history, literature, culture, folklore, music, film, news media and women’s studies. This allows students to become familiar with Russian culture and society and the life experiences of the Russian people.
TStudents can focus on any aspect of Russian culture and society they choose.
Many Russian students combine their major in Russian with one in international relations.
The program offers two minors— one in Russian language, the other in Russian studies.
Students work closely with Russian faculty, who serve as their mentors.
A graduate student from Russia serves as a Russian teaching assistant.
Russian students collaborate with their professors on a variety of research topics.
Selected students may choose to participate in the Honors Program in Russian, completing an honors thesis in their senior year.

Faculty

Ludmila Lavine
Ph.D. Princeton
Teaches Russian language, 19th- and 20th-century Russian prose and poetry. Research focuses on the Silver Age of Russian literature, specifically on the works of Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak. Teaching interests include Russian language at all levels, Russian culture, poetry and the poetic song.

Slava Yastremskio
B.A. State Institute of Theater Arts, Moscow; M.A., Ph.D. Kansas
Teaches business Russian, Russian culture and civilization, and a wide range of courses on special topics, from the history of Russian cinema and the history of Russian theater to the literary philosophies of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov’s poetics of theater to contemporary Russian literature, many representatives of which he has known personally, and whose works he has translated into English. Research interests include works of Nikolai Gumilev and Velimir Khlebnikov, the question of literary landscape and contemporary Russian cinema.

Affiliated Faculty

James Lavine, linguistics
B.A. Tufts; M.A. Harvard; Ph.D. Princeton
Teaches Russian language and general linguistics. His research focuses on the syntax and morphology of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Czech.

Selected Faculty Publications

Ludmila Lavine, “Alksandr Blok’s The Twelve: Transformation of Commedia dell’arte into an Epic,” Slavic and East European Journal, 2005.

Ludmila Lavine, “Prose, Poetry, and Aleksandr Pushkin’s ‘Egyptian Nights,’” Slavic and East European Journal, 1998.

Ludmila Lavine, “The Lyric, the Epic, the Dramatic, and Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Poem of the End,’” Die Welt der Slaven, 2004.

Slava Yastremski, Surplussed Barrelware, a translation of a collection of Vasily Aksyonov’s stories, 1985.

Slava Yastremski, After Russia, a translation of a collection of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry, 1992.

Slava Yastremski, translation of Andrei Sinyavsky/Abram Terz’s book Strolls with Pushkin (Yale University Press), 1993.

Slava Yastremski, five articles on Nikolai Gumilev and Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetry, including the question of verbal landscape in their poetry, in various scholarly publications in Russia, 1996-1997.

Slava Yastremski, translation of Olga Sedakova’s book of poetry, Poems and Elegies (Bucknell University Press), 2003.

Slava Yastremski, translation of the Ukrainian Russian writer Igor Klekh’s book of stories, A Land the Size of the Binoculars (Northwestern University Press), 2004.

James Lavine has published in the Journal of Slavic Linguistics, the Generative Linguistics in Poland series, the Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society, Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, and the Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics. He is a guest editor for the Journal of Slavic Linguistics.

Courses Offered

The major in Russian consists of eight courses – five courses in Russian language starting with Russian 104 and three courses on Russian literature and culture in English. The broad spectrum of courses offered, along with the study of the language, gives students a solid background in Russian studies.

19th-century Russian Culture and Civilization
19th-century Russian Literature in Translation
20th-century Russian Culture and Civilization
20th-century Russian Literature in Translation
Advanced Russian
Advanced Topics in Russian
Chekhov: Drama in Prose
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy: Literary Philosophy
Elementary Conversation and Composition
Elementary Russian I and II
Global Manager in Russia
Honors in Russian
Independent Study
Intermediate Russian I and II
Readings in Russian Literature
Russian Cinema
Russian Complementary Reading
Russian Conversation
Russian Folklore and Ritual
Russian for Business
Russian Guitar Poetry
Russian Theatre of the 19th and 20th Centuries
Russian Through Theatre
Topics in Russian Studies

Facilities & Resources

Multimedia classrooms with computer and video/DVD projection are available.
Bertrand Library is home to an excellent collection of foreign language films.
The Russian Table gives students an opportunity to learn more about Russian language and culture at a weekly luncheon.