Classics of Russian Literature

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.
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 on teach12


1. Origins of Russian Literature
2. The Church and the Folk in Old Kiev
3. Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, 1799–1837
4. Exile, Rustic Seclusion, and Onegin
5. December’s Uprising and Two Poets Meet
6. A Poet Contrasts Talent versus Mediocrity
7. St. Petersburg Glorified and Death Embraced
8. Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol’, 1809–1852
9. Russian Grotesque—Overcoats to Dead Souls
10. Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 1821–1881
11. Near Mortality, Prison, and an Underground
12. Second Wife and a Great Crime Novel Begins
13. Inside the Troubled Mind of a Criminal
14. The Generation of the Karamazovs
15. The Novelistic Presence of Christ and Satan
16. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828–1910
17. Tale of Two Cities and a Country Home
18. Family Life Meets Military Life
19. Vengeance Is Mine, Saith the Lord
20. Family Life Makes a Comeback
21. Tolstoy the Preacher
22. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, 1818–1883
23. The Stresses between Two Generations
24. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, 1860–1904
25. M. Gorky (Aleksei M. Peshkov), 1868–1936
26. Literature and Revolution
27. The Tribune—Vladimir Maiakovsky, 1893–1930
28. The Revolution Makes a U-Turn
29. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, 1905–1984
30. Revolutions and Civil War
31. Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko, 1895–1958
32. Among the Godless—Religion and Family Life
33. Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, 1890–1960
34. The Poet In and Beyond Society
35. Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Born 1918
36. The Many Colors of Russian Literature
+ .pdf with annotations and abstracts of lectures.