Russian
visiting students
Russian at St Edmund Hall offers Visiting Students the opportunity to develop their Russian language skills while exploring Russian literature, culture and history through Oxford lectures and small-group tutorials.
Programme Information
During your Russian course here, you will read some of the greatest works of global literary culture in the original, and acquire an in-depth command of one of the world’s most widely spoken and challenging languages.
Russian Visiting Students benefit from a large and lively community in the university and the city of Oxford. A wide range of Russian-related activities and events take place throughout the year in Oxford, from the Sub-faculty’s weekly research seminar, to regular international conferences, Russian film showings, and author visits.
Russian can be studied as either a Primary course / major or a Secondary course / minor, depending on the student’s previous experience and intended programme of study. Students can choose from a range of language, literature and cultural courses.
The Russian courses available to Visiting Students combine language study with the exploration of Russian literature, culture and history. When selecting your courses, please consider your previous level of Russian and the term in which each option is taught and refer to the individual course descriptions.
Students intending to take literature or other subject-specific courses should ensure that they have the appropriate language background to participate fully in the tutorials and associated teaching.
Further topics may also be available depending on the applicant’s specific background and level of Russian. Please contact the Admissions Office for details.
Core Courses
8 tutorials
8 tutorials
Authors and Texts: a selection from Papers X and XI, including Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mandelstam, and others (each author taught in 4 tutorials)
Optional Courses
This option can be taken as a primary course (8 tutorials) or secondary course (4 tutorials).
This course offers a focused study of eight major Soviet films, examining their cinematic form in relation to the cultural, political, and ideological contexts of their production:
- Fragment of an Empire (1929, dir. Fridrikh Ermler)
- Earth (1930, dir. Alexander Dovzhenko)
- Kashchey the Immortal (1944, dir. Aleksandr Rou)
- The Cranes Are Flying (1957, dir. Mikhail Kalatozov)
- Welcome, or No Trespassing (1964, dir. Elem Klimov)
- The Beginning (1970, dir. Gleb Panfilov)
- The Ascent (1976, dir. Larisa Shepitko)
- The Asthenic Syndrome (1989, dir. Kira Muratova)
This option can be taken as a primary course (8 tutorials) or secondary course (4 tutorials).
Spanning from Andrey Rublev to Dmitri Prigov, this course provides a broad introduction to the history of Russian visual art. Topics include:
- Orthodox Art and Architecture (12th-16th centuries)
- Invited Artists and Western Influences (17th-18th centuries)
- The Peredvizhniki: Art, Society, and Reform in Imperial Russia
- Mir Iskusstva and the Russian Silver Age
- The Russian Avantgarde I
- The Russian Avantgarde II
- Socialist Realism
- Moscow Conceptualism
This option can be taken as a primary course (8 tutorials) or secondary course (4 tutorials).
The 1910s–1920s marked a period of intense experimentation in Russian literature, film, and visual arts — and of radical theoretical innovation, centered on questions of form. This course examines the central ideas and foundational texts of Russian formalism, including:
- Boris Eikhenbaum, “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’” (1925)
- Futurist Manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912) and Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism” (1915)
- Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device” (1917)
- Boris Eikhenbaum, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made” (1919)
- Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art” (1921)
- Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions” (1923)
- Yury Tynyanov, “On Literary Evolution” (1927)
- Vladimir Propp, “Morphology of the Folktale” (1928)
Our Tutors
Andrew
Kahn
Professor and Tutorial Fellow of Russian Literature and Modern Languages
Professor Andrew Kahn FBA is Professor and Tutorial Fellow of Russian Literature and Modern Languages at St Edmund Hall, and Professor of Russian Literature in the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Sofya
Dmitrieva
Non-Stipendiary Junior Research Fellow in European Languages
Dr Sofya Dmitrieva is a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellow in European Languages at St Edmund Hall. Sofya is a historian of art and visual culture, specialising in eighteenth-century France. Her research interests span genre theory, perception studies, and the history of collections.
Visiting Students
More information about becoming a Visiting Student at St Edmund Hall – including finance, accommodation and how to apply