Friedberg_Nila-2021

here, in some cases, students are asked to imitate a real historical event (to imagine, for example, what a real party official banning Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog might have written in his assessment). Linguistically, assignment 13 is of equal use to multiple proficiency levels; less proficient students can write the speech in advance and then retell it, while more proficient ones can simply look at the “frame” and improvise the speech. Note that in some chapters, assignment 13 is a “frame” for official letters (e.g., an official letter of complaint, or a report of a missing person), in which case it is not intended for oral production. The official letters appear in a simplified form: for authentic official letter samples, see Rozental (2005) or Kolesova and Kharitonov (2011). Assignment 14 is an improvised one-minute speech, a method originally suggested to me by Anna Kudyma. Students can pretend they are a character trying to tell the story from their point of view, or a character trying to prove or disprove a certain point, or justify their actions; or they can pretend they are writers responding to accusations against them. Assignment 15 involves a discussion that typically concludes the class. The questions are of various difficulty levels, the most linguistically complex ones being marked with a star. The assignment gives students an opportunity to discuss issues important to literary theory; this is the section where some questions are based on the work of prominent literary scholars, such as M. Chudakova, K. Clark, M. Gorham, M. Iampolskii, E. Makeenko, M. Mikheev, M. Odesski and D. Feldman, Iu. Shcheglov, and A. Zholkovsky (e.g., what do going to the bathhouse and going to the theater have in common? why is Ostap Bender’s clothing strange, and what does it tell us about his past? etc.). Some questions invite students to envision what a character’s worldview might have been like had they lived in the United States; this provides students with a meaningful opportunity to practice cultural comparing and contrasting. Assignments 16–19 are optional. This is a chance for students to select a presentation topic (e.g., to give a virtual tour of Bulgakov’s Moscow or Babel’s Odessa, or retell the contents of Shcheglov’s research on The Twelve Chairs ) or an essay topic that interests them; to compare the text of a book to its film adaptation; to watch and discuss TV programs about the authors’biographies, or relevant films from the period, or films with plots similar to what they have read. These assignments afford the opportunity to place an issue discussed in the texts into an American context; or even write a parody of a scene from a famous American film about gangsters (e.g., The Godfather ) using stylistic features of Russian writers who treat the same subject (e.g., Isaak Babel). For institutions like Portland State University that operate on a ten-week quarter systemwith three sixty-