Замечательный, интересный и очень познавательный курс. В большей степени рассчитан на читателя, который не знаком с современной литературой (и с историей литературы тоже не вполне дружит), но и мне было полезно его прослушать, хотя это и было моей основной специализацией в университете.

Здравствуйте! Благодарю за такой интересный и познавательный курс!

Очень полезно.

Очень системно

Interesting course in general. Specifically, I registered (1) to get a better idea of which contemporary Russian authors I should read and (2) to get some practice taking a course delivered in Russian. For those goals, the course was beneficial. However, while a good distance learning course, it fell short of being a "real" university course. There are readings connected with the lectures and, in the first few lectures, the instructor exhorts students to do the readings. Indeed some of the books I have previously read in both English and Russian (e.g. Moskva Petushki) but I found that almost without exception, no book content is tested. I recall that two times students are asked to identify to whom a particular book was dedicated -- nothing requiring a detailed reading. Later, these exhortations to read simply disappear and, in effect, students simply have to recall factoids derived solely from lecture (least utile being year of birth of author, year of first publication of book, name of book publisher, etc.). It reminded me of that old boardgame Trivial Pursuit only with focus on the sole topic of Russian lit. Readings in pdf format are accessible but only in Russian. I did buy various books a propos to the course in both English and Russian but they have been relegated to future reading. Quizzes (99%) only test what the instructor says in lecture and I am not sure whether the machine graded fill in the blank called strangely quiz "with a key" ("с ключом") can be taken in other languages except Russian. To take these designated quizzes, by the way, requires paid registration for the course. For deeper questions, like "What does the river Okkervil symbolize?," fill in the blank is not amenable as, arguably, the river can symbolize different things and various synonyms apply yet there is only one "correct" answer. (For that question, by the way, I never did find the answer that the instructor sought although I repeated that quiz perhaps 40 times and reread the lecture transcript several times without avail.) The final exam is just a random selection of various multiple choice quiz questions. There are no compare/contrast questions across books on a thematic level as that would require writing essays, which, not being machine gradeable, are not a test format available for this course. Even if their content are not actually tested, it would be useful for non-Russian speakers to have pdfs in English of the reading excerpts. Content tested may be described as "wikipedia in turbu," although I confess I read wikipedia to prepare for quizzes. Actually, I found some basic info more accessible through wiki than through perusing the lecture transcriptions.