Friedberg_Nila-2021

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S In 2003, as a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, I audited a third-year Russian language class taught by Susan Kresin. The textbook used in this course was Olga Kagan and Mara Kashper’s Lidiya Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna . This was my first exposure to teaching language through literature, the first exposure to the methodology developed by my postdoctoral mentor Olga Kagan and her colleagues. Sofia Petrovna and other books by Olga had a profound and long-lasting effect on how I teach content-based courses today. Thus, the format of the exercises presented in this book echoes the assignments appearing in the works of Olga and her coauthors: these exercises are inspired by Cinema for Russian Conversation (e.g., “polyphony” and multi-level assignments), Sofia Petrovna (e.g., paraphrase and vocabulary assignments), Russian without Borders 1 and 2 (e.g., stylistics assignments), and Russian: From Intermediate to Advanced (e.g., “rhetorical frames” assignments). I would like to dedicate this book to Olga Kagan. I am also tremendously grateful to Sandra Freels. Not only does this book use some of the techniques I learned from her (e.g., creating visual images from verbal descriptions, as in The Golden Age: Readings in Russian Literature of the Nineteenth Century ; isolating similar-sounding grammatical structures and explaining them from an English speaker’s perspective, as in her Russian in Use ). Sandra created the Russian Flagship program at Portland State University, which made it possible for materials of this difficulty level to be taught. I owe many thanks to my colleague William Comer. His profound expertise both in language pedagogy and literature, his wisdom and advice, were crucial in helping me conceptualize the linguistic goals of a textbook on the 1920s and selecting the stylistic features central to the period. I am grateful to Bill and my colleague Anya Alsufieva for not letting me forget about language accuracy in a literature class, and for showing me, in their own outstanding work, how grammar can be incorporated into literary studies. I am indebted to Anna Kudyma for generously sharing her innovative thoughts on language teaching for many years; in particular, one of the exercises in this textbook was based on her idea of a “one-minute speech.” Many thanks to Karen Evans-Romaine, Luba Golburt, and Hanna Shipman for reviewing the manuscript and offering insightful suggestions on every aspect of the book, from the content of exercises to the scope of footnotes. Karen and Luba’s appraisal