This is a TBA course. TBA means "time to be arranged" (to accommodate as many students as we can). We hold an organizational meeting for all TBA courses at the beginning of each semester. The time and place of the meeting are posted on our home page, russian.cornell.edu a couple of weeks before the spring semester starts: Click Welcome in the navigation bar and look under Current Announcements.

The course is taught by Slava Paperno (the two required classes) and Raissa Krivitsky and/or Viktoria Tsimberov (the optional reading class for those who enroll for 3 credit hours).

The course is taught somewhat differently each year, depending on the interests and needs of the students.

The two required meetings per week are for discussing documentary films (watched individually as part of homework) and writing one-page essays in Russian, as well as (later in the semester) reading Web sites and writing short texts in a variety of other genres: personal letters, blog entries, news articles, technical descriptions, official documents, short stories, and the like. To watch the documentaries, please visit Lexicon Bridge Publishers and register using your Cornell email address. You will automatically be subscribed to the required films, free of charge.

An optional third weekly meeting (when taken for 3 credit hours) has short reading assignments from contemporary literary and non-literary texts. This optional class may or may not be taught in any given year, depending on the department's resources and the level of interest.

Russian 3306 is a continuation of RUSSA 3305 but may be taken by qualified students who did not take 3305. Issues of style and grammar (in speech and writing) are discussed in every class.

The course is primarily for students who learned to speak Russian at home, but students with other backgrounds may be eligible as well.

Attendance is mandatory and very important. To explain each anticipated absence, send the teacher an email and ask to be excused. Missing more than three classes is likely to affect your grade.

Although spelling and grammar are corrected in your essay, the essays are evaluated on the relevance of their content and clarity of expression--not on spelling or grammatical accuracy. No other written assignments or tests. No final exam.