Ruslan Russian 1 Coursebook

This is a communicative Russian course for adults and young people, from beginners to intermediate level.

In September 1984, Lisa Paul, an American college student living in Moscow and working as a nanny, enters Inna Meiman’s house for her first Russian language lesson. And so begins a two year friendship and fight for Inna’s life. Swimming in the Daylight chronicles Inna’s struggle to shed her refusnik status and to be granted a visa to travel to America, seeking medical treatment for the cancer that is slowly killing her. Inna reveals an indomitable spirit as she endures a perverse reality as a citizen of the Soviet Union—she must deny invitations from countries in the West to receive life-saving cancer treatment due to her inability to receive a visa from her own government. This refusal, Inna explains to Lisa, is the Soviet authorities’ way of persecuting her and her husband Naum, a member of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group fighting for human rights in the USSR. Spurred by outrage and the desire to help her friend, Lisa returns to the United States, vowing to do all she can to get Inna out of Moscow. Lisa stages a hunger strike, holds a press conference, and galvanizes American politicians to fight for Inna’s freedom. All these efforts eventually succeed in pursuing Mikhail Gorbachev to issue Inna a visa in December 1986, and she finally steps foot on American soil. At a time when international strife seems insurmountable and worries at home seem to paralyze, this story will teach people everywhere that it is the courage inside that defines a person and can change the future.

Russian: From Intermediate to Advanced is a vibrant and modern course designed to help students achieve advanced proficiency in Russian. Offering a flexible modular approach structured around contemporary themes, the course further develops reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills while also expanding the student’s cultural literacy. Key features include: Structured chapters presenting a wide assortment of readings that include blogs, forums and surveys as well as opinion pieces and commentaries. Each text is accompanied by assignments with increasing levels of difficulty. Authentic and up-to-date readings, video and audio excerpts covering a range of relevant social and cultural topics, including Demography, Youth Culture, Politics and Society, Economics and Globalization. Video clips from news programs that are used not only to develop listening comprehension but also introduce students to contemporary Russian society. Particular attention to helping students acquire advanced vocabulary and the ability to converse, discuss and argue about issues with extended paragraph-length discourse. Special focus on the development of strong listening and reading comprehension skills, ensuring that students understand the ideas and supporting details in narrative and descriptive texts and connected discourse. A free companion website at http://www.russian.ucla.edu/AdvancedRussian/ offering student and instructor video and audio resources, sample syllabi and tests as well as additional materials. Written by a highly experienced author team that has co-authored the first year Russian textbook Beginner’s Russian (2010) and the second-year textbook V Puti (2005). Russian: From Intermediate to Advanced will be an essential resource for undergraduate students in their third and fourth year of Russian language study. It is also suitable for heritage learners of Russian who have mastered literacy and are familiar with the grammatical structure of Russian.

Clarence Brown's marvelous collection introduces readers to the most resonant voices of twentieth-century Russia. It includes stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Babel, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Voinovich; excerpts from Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Sasha Solokov's A School for Fools; the complete text of Yuri Olesha's 1927 masterpiece Envy; and poetry by Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

One of the most widely used texts for 14-16 year old students of Spanish, this course offers solid grounding in the language In print for over 30 years, this classic Spanish course has been an effective and enjoyable tool for thousands of students through its motivating and non-patronising approach. The book contains a great variety of exercises - the content is broken down into 45 well structured lessons each focussing on specific grammar and vocabulary, with follow up exercises to consolidate learning. Key vocabulary and verbs are also covered in the appendices.