St. Petersburg is one of the most beautiful and cultured cities in the world, but to Russians it is more than that. Tsar Peter the Great created the city in Italian Baroque style around 1700 as part of his drive to westernize Russia. Ever since then, St. Petersburg, as the most European metropolis of a Eurasian country, has proved a focus of debates about Russian identity. The capital of tsarist Russia for two centuries, St. Petersburg has maintained the great cultural institutions of that era — the Hermitage Museum and the Kirov Ballet and Opera — in completely changed circumstances. In this century it has been at the center of momentous struggles: the Russian Revolution that overthrew the tsarist empire and established communist rule, and the invasion by the German army that besieged the city in World War II. Today, as Russia remakes itself in the aftermath of communism, St. Petersburg is reasserting its cosmopolitan and outward-looking role in the life of its nation.

The Bates Fall Semester in St. Petersburg offers entering and continuing students an opportunity to live for a semester among St. Petersburg's people and to explore their city, its history and its cultural life, while studying the Russian language. No prior study or knowledge of Russian is needed.

In mid-August, the students and Bates faculty of the program travel together to St. Petersburg, where the students take a three-week intensive Russian language course (with classes at different levels for beginning and more advanced students) taught at the Nevsky Institute. During this time they will live as a group in a university dormitory. From early September to the beginning of December, they continue their language study, though on a more restricted schedule, and begin their two courses on St. Petersburg culture and history with Bates faculty members. During this period they will live with Russian families in St. Petersburg apartments.

Both of the Bates courses in the program are taught jointly by Jane Costlow, professor of Russian language and literature, and James Parakilas, professor of music.

St. Petersburg, Past and Present
This course explores the unique vision that formed St. Petersburg and the special role that the city has continued to play in Russian history ever since, the contrasts that St. Petersburg has offered to Moscow and other older centers of Russian culture and the themes of heroism and resistance in the city's history. The study of these issues will involve reading works of history and fiction in English, watching films by classic Soviet and contemporary Russian film makers and visiting historic sites, including the palaces of the Romanovs, prison cells of political prisoners under the tsars and the Soviet state, and ancient monasteries in the nearby region.

St. Petersburg as an Artistic Center
This course deals with the city as a place where politics and art have merged and sometimes clashed, as a funnel for Western artistic ideas and as a site for artistic experimentation - from the time of Pushkin to the "Silver Age" (the period of the Ballets russes) to perestroika. We will explore the history of the city's cultural institutions and the current roles of those institutions in the lives of the city's people. We will study classic and contemporary literature, music, dance, art and film; attend concerts, operas, ballet and drama at the Kirov and other famous theaters; visit the Hermitage Museum, the Russian Museum and other galleries; and explore the latest in the St. Petersburg artistic scene. At a cultural center in the city (see photo above), students will take classes in one or more Russian folk arts, such as woodworking, pottery or folk dancing, and will be asked to consider what values these traditional, originally rural arts hold for the people of this modern city.

Jane Costlow, a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature, has taught Russian at Bates since 1986. She lived in St. Petersburg as a graduate student and has frequently taken classes of Bates students to St. Petersburg as well as to other Russian cities in recent years.

James Parakilas, a scholar of 19th-century European (including Russian) musical culture, has taught music at Bates since 1979.

The Bates faculty will lead many expeditions to sites and cultural events in and around St. Petersburg, including royal palaces and artists' retreats on the outskirts of the city, and a few day and weekend trips to more distant places, including the sites of Russian folk culture at Kizhi, the medieval city of Novgorod and Moscow.

All students in the program will study the Russian language; instruction will be offered at different levels, according to whether each student has studied the language before and to what extent. Classes will be given at the Nevsky Institute by instructors who have considerable experience teaching Russian to American students.

All expenses, including travel to and from St. Petersburg and program-related field trips, are covered by regular Bates comprehensive fees. Students bring money for personal expenses, entertainment, gifts and independent travel.

This program is part of the Bates curriculum. Completion of the Fall Semester in St. Petersburg provides students with four Bates credits and satisfies the College's cluster component for the General Education requirements for graduation. Students at Bowdoin and Colby colleges are encouraged to apply for admission to the program; they are responsible for arranging transfer of program credits from Bates to their home institution.

Administrative questions
Georgette Dumais, Area Coordinator
200 Hathorn Hall
Bates College
Lewiston, ME 04240
Phone: (207) 786-8293
e-mail: dumais@bates.edu

Curricular questions
Professor Jane Costlow
Department of German, Russian and East Asian Languages and Literatures
102 Hathorn Hall
Bates College
Lewiston, ME 04240
Phone: (207) 786-6289
e-mail: jcostlow@bates.edu

Professor James Parakilas
Department of Music
260 Olin Arts Center
Bates College
Lewiston, ME 04240
Phone: (207) 786-6138
e-mail: jparakil@bates.edu