The Culture of Kyivan Rus'

The culture of Kyivan Rus’ (10th-13th c.) has been violently contested and rewritten for centuries, and debates about its fundamental texts have shaped the ways we study Ukrainian and Russian literatures, Slavic history, and the politics of Soviet and post-Soviet worlds. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced these disciplines to reexamine their own assumptions. This seminar trains students to read critically both the primary sources of Kyivan Rus’ and the histories of their political and scholarly interpretation.

The course is primarily addressed to graduate students with a research focus on Ukraine, Russia, and the post-Soviet political space. Students will be challenged to develop basic hermeneutic skills for reading medieval texts in their specific cultural and historical contexts. All works will be made available in both Old Slavic original and modern English translation, and students are encouraged to read and discuss them in parallel. Graduate students of Russian and Ukrainian literatures who take the course to meet the medieval requirement are expected to pass a final comprehensive exam.