EEER 38.09 Creative Writing in Russian: Russian and Ukrainian Short Story
This class is conducted in the format of a workshop and provides learners and speakers of Russian with an opportunity to engage in creative writing in Russian. We will read selected Russian, Ukrainian (and other) literary texts and examine them from the perspective of a writer rather than a reader or a critic. We will also explore semantic, stylistic, and poetic resources of language through a variety of experimental assignments. Finally, each student will undertake their own creative writing project, which will center on a specific literary genre and a specific topic chosen as the cultural-historical focus for the course. For the Fall of 2017, this topic will be the 1960s-70s in Ukraine, which, at that time, was part of the Soviet Union. Each student will write one short story, set in 1960-70s Ukraine, and written from the perspective of an imaginary, yet historically grounded, narrator. The reading list for the course will include some of the best short stories written in the Russian and the Ukrainian languages as well as collateral texts and films of various genres devoted primarily to the 1960s-70s in Ukraine and the Soviet Union. These readings and viewings will serve as a reservoir of characters, situations, plots etc. which could inspire, or even serve as prototypes for the students’ own short stories.