The Russian Environmental Imagination, 5 op

There will be five online lectures in Zoom. In Lecture 1, the students will be introduced to the general field of environmental humanities and the significance of nature for the Russian national identity. Lecture 2 gives an historical overview of environmental issues and reactions to them in Russia. Lecture 3 presents the recommended theoretical and methodological base of the course work by giving the students the ecocritical tools needed to conduct a small study on the field of Russian environmental imagination. Lecture 4 focuses on a historical review of cultural representations of the Russian environment. Lecture 5 samples three different possibilities of ecocritical study of Russian culture: water, North and indigenous communities.

The students will be given reading tasks (or similar) before the lectures, and 30–40% of each lecture will be devoted to class discussions on these topics. Each student will have an opportunity to initialize one of the discussions by a small presentation prior the discussion. Ideally, these preparations will be done in groups of 2–4, but if the number of students is small, they will be done individually. The discussions are an important part of the course, and participation in them is mandatory. All the needed material will be distributed on the course Moodle area, including the lecture slides.

After the lectures, students will have time to prepare an individual essay on a topic related to the course theme and agreed on with the teacher. The essay may be an ecocritical reading of a literary, cinematic or other cultural work, or it may be a case study on one of the lecture topics. The essays are returned in Moodle, where the essays are double blind peer-assessed by two other students.