Description: Great Courses Classics of Russian Literature 6 DVD & Guidebook Like New! Condition is Like New. Like New, think Brand New minus the shrinkwrap. No faults detected at all. 6 Pristine DVDs and an unread Guidebook. The Great Courses selling price for the instant video streaming course is $339.95!!! They no longer sell the same course on DVD.Buy from us and save over $300 for something else. This will be packed very carefully and shipped US Media Mail with Tracking. We are happy to combine items to save you money on shipping. We can send you three typical DVDs for the price of 1. Or 2 books shipped together might just cost an extra 75 cents for the second book. Just put your selection in your shopping cart and press the Request Total button (top right) and we will get back to you with the lowest combined shipping price. Remember Media Mail starts at $4.13 for the first pound weight (or fraction), but then only 74 cents for each additional pound (or fraction). And visit our sister store on eBay (GutenburgReads) to see the more than 700 interesting items we are selling. Course Overview Russian literature famously probes the depths of the human soul. These 36 half-hour lectures delve into this extraordinary body of work under the guidance of Professor Irwin Weil of Northwestern University, an award-winning teacher at Northwestern University and a legend among educators in the United States and Russia. Professor Weil introduces you to such masterpieces as Tolstoy's War and Peace, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Gogol's Dead Souls, Chekhov's The Seagull, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and many other great novels, stories, plays, and poems by Russian authors. You will study more than 40 works by a dozen writers, from Aleksandr Pushkin in the 19th century to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the 20th. You will also investigate the origin of Russian literature itself, which traces to powerful epic poetry and beautiful renderings of the Bible into Slavic during the Middle Ages. All of these works are treated in translation, but Professor Weil does something very unusual for a literature-in-translation course. For almost every passage that he quotes in English, he reads an extract in the original Russian, with a fluent accent and an actor's sense of drama. You may not understand Russian, but there is no mistaking the expressive intonation, rhythm, and feeling with which Professor Weil performs these passages. At one point, reciting verses from Russia's most famous poet, he advises: "Listen to it once as a piece of music, and you will sense the linguistic genius of Pushkin." Classics of Russian Literature explores Russian masterpieces at all levels—characters, plots, scenes, and sometimes even single sentences, including:Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which has one of the most famous first sentences in all of literature, setting the stage for a novel that probes the tragic dimension of a subject—adultery—that had traditionally been treated as satire.Gogol's Dead Souls, with a concluding passage beloved to all Russians, in which the hero flees the scene of his fiendishly clever swindle in a troika—a fast carriage drawn by three horses—to the author's invocation, "Oh Rus' [Russia], whither art thou hurtling?"Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, whose long chapter "The Grand Inquisitor" is a gripping, haunting, mystifying parable that is often studied on its own, but that is all the more powerful in this great novel, which addresses faith, doubt, redemption, and other timeless themes. The Golden Age and After The central core of the course covers the great golden age of Russian literature, a period in the 19th century when Russia's writers equaled or surpassed the achievements of the much older literary cultures of Western Europe. The age commenced with Pushkin, developed with the fantastic and grotesque tales of Gogol', and grew to full flower with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—who at the time were considered in Europe to be lesser writers than their talented contemporary Turgenev. As the 20th century approached, Chekhov's exquisitely understated plays and stories symbolized the sunset of the golden age. Gorky straddled the next transformation, linking the turmoil preceding the Russian Revolution with the political oppression that affected all artists in the newly established Soviet Union from the 1920s on. You examine the brilliant revolutionary poet Maiakovsky; the novelist Sholokhov, who portrayed the revolution as a tragedy for the Cossack people; the satirist Zoshchenko, who used Soviet society as food for parody; and Pasternak, who produced beautiful poems and a single extraordinary novel. Your survey ends with Solzhenitsyn, who became the most influential literary voice speaking out against the tyranny of the Soviet system. Inside, Outside, and Behind the Scenes Professor Weil uses intriguing details to bring these authors and their works to life. For example, readers of English translations are probably unaware of the symbolic names that Russian writers routinely give their characters, names that are especially evocative in Russian:Roskol'nikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, is named after the term for "schism," signifying a person who is separating himself from society. Dostoevsky gives other characters names that mean "mud puddle" and "intelligence," again, representing the person's inner nature.Iurii Zhivago, the hero of Doctor Zhivago, has a family name that is an older Russian form of the word "alive." Pasternak uses a grammatical case that emphasizes the animate nature of the noun, signifying life as it should be experienced. In addition to such internal details that enrich your understanding of the text, Professor Weil also points you to outside resources, from films and operas to recommended attractions that you may wish to see if you travel to Russia:In order to get a sense of the powerful rhythms of Pushkin's masterpiece Eugene Onegin, readers who don't know Russian can turn to Tchaikovsky's famous operatic adaptation, which magnificently catches the meter and texture of the poem.A trip to Moscow should include a visit to Tolstoy's house, now preserved as a museum. There you will get a vivid sense of the contradictions in this man's life—in the marked contrast between the comfortable Victorian furnishings preferred by his wife and family and the Spartan austerity in which he closeted himself to write, a style that came increasingly to define his life. Professor Weil also recounts behind-the-scenes stories, many of which relate to his own experiences in Russia. These anecdotes add a new dimension to your appreciation of the works covered in this course:One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn's moving novella about life in a Soviet forced labor camp, might never have appeared in print had not the mercurial Soviet premier Khrushchev found the story spellbinding. After reading the manuscript, Khrushchev admitted that it was one of the few literary works that he had managed to finish without sticking himself with pins to stay awake. The resulting publication stunned the Soviet reading public and the world."The History of an Illness," a short story by Zoshchenko, gently lampoons the Soviet health care system, with which Professor Weil has personal experience from his visits to the country. He describes some of the maddening features of Soviet medicine, including a propensity to treat every illness with vodka. By the way: Welcome to the new ebay storefront for The Shepherd's Center of Winston-Salem. The store will be operated by experienced ebay sellers who have been selling some of our best donations for several years now through their own storefronts. Now we are using these same experienced sellers to sell to you directly. For the philanthropists out there, the vast majority of the items sold by us (Gutenburg Reads and others), are for the benefit of The Shepherd's Center of Greater Winston-Salem, whose mission is to help house-bound seniors live full and independent lives in their own homes. The center provides transportation to medical appointments and grocery shopping, assistance with minor repairs around the house, and companionship through visits. The citizens of Winston-Salem generously donate books, music, movies, and more to us to help us achieve our mission. And now, you can buy useful items from us directly, and you will be helping the less fortunate in our city.
Price: 33 USD
Location: Winston-Salem, North Carolina
End Time: 2024-11-21T14:05:45.000Z
Shipping Cost: 6.13 USD
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Item Specifics
All returns accepted: ReturnsNotAccepted
Subject Area: Literature
Publication Name: Classics of Russian Literature
Publisher: The Teaching Company
Item Length: 5.25 in
Subject: Literature
Publication Year: 2006
Series: The Great Courses
Type: Series of 36 University Lectures on 6 DVDs + GB
Format: DVD
Language: English
Item Height: 7.5 in
Educational Level: Adult & Further Education
Author: Professor Irwin Weil
Personalized: No
Level: Intermediate, Advanced
Features: Course Guidebook included, 6 pristine DVDs in 3 tall DVD cases
Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
Item Width: 2.25 in
Item Weight: 1 lb
Number of Pages: 224 pages