Students generally enroll in one morning seminar and one afternoon seminar as their core classes. The seminars meet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. In addition there are lectures on Russian Literature and Culture as well as other writing-themed lectures each Tuesday and Thursday. These constitute the primary academic portion of the program.

There are also twice-weekly readings, roundtable discussions and tours of the city and its outlying areas. To get an idea what a session at SLS might be like, view the schedule from the 2005 program. The specifics of the upcoming program are as follows:

Program Seminars (All the seminars are held on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week of the program, either from 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ["morning"], or from 2:30 to 5:00p.m. ["afternoon"]. Participants may take a maximum of one seminar from the morning block and one from the afternoon.)

Morning Seminars

	First Session
Fiction	Binnie Kirshenbaum
Fiction	Catherine Texier
Poetry	Paisley Rekdal
Poetry	Christian Bök
Nonfiction	Anthony Swofford

Afternoon Seminars

	First Session
Playwriting & Screenwriting	TBA
Translation	TBA
Travel Writing	Stephanie Griest
Untranslatable Russia	Alexandr Skidan
Arts Criticism	TBA

The Fiction, Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Playwriting seminars will follow the typical creative-writing workshop model: individuals present their original work which is closely scrutinized and critiqued by the group, led by the instructor.

The Translation seminar follows the workshop format as well for those participants actively working on translations, but it also focuses on the theory and practice of translation for those participants not yet translating, with exercises and readings.

The Travel Writing: Literature of Place seminar - At its best, travel writing combines the narrative flow of a short story, the discursiveness of an essay, the substance of a history lesson and the elegance of poetry. This course divides the process into three parts: 1) the preparation before the trip: reading, language study, contact gathering, etc.; 2) the legwork while in the place, including tips on how writers can move from observation to participation; and 3) the writing. Here, working with examples from travel literature, students will learn to use personal voice, point of view, imagination, analysis, humor and other elements essential not only to conveying an accurate sense of place but to making larger observations about the world.

The Untranslatable Russia seminar posits that in every literature, in every culture, there necessarily exist pockets of "untranslate-ability." Something always gets lost in translation; falls through the cracks of verbalized shared meaning, as it were. And it is not so much the ever-inevitable linguistic incompatibility to blame for this, as the simple fact that certain cultural ("neo-anthropological") realities of daily living in one self-sufficient language sometimes cannot be squared away with their rough equivalents in any foreigner's vocabulary, for even the roughest of equivalents just may not be found there. Language is easy; knowing the others' daily living in a different language, amid a very different set of societal norms and cultural notions, can be quite difficult. In this course, the students will be exposed to the "hidden" elements of contemporary Russian culture and literature that even the best and most conscientious of translators knowingly (but more often, unbeknownst to themselves) leave untouched in the original text -- their only rightful place of being. This series of lectures provides an insider's look, if you will, at the Russian world as we do not know it.

All program seminars are limited to 15 participants.

In addition to the program seminars, SLS offers the following (lectures and lecturers are subject to change):

• Literary Walks in St. Petersburg
• A Russian History, Literature, and Culture Series
• Publishing Panels with Editors from The Walrus, Tin House Books, and The New York Review of Books
• Other Lectures and Mini-Workshops
• Faculty Readings
• Participant Open-Mic Nights
• Tours
• The Nuts and Bolts Russian Language Course
• Russian film screenings and commentary

Literary Walks in St. Petersburg include The Mad Monk Walk, The Pushkin Duel, the young St. Petersburg Poet Dmitry Golynko-Volfson's Petersburg in the Literary Imagination walks, and the now infamous Dostoyevsky Tour led by James Boobar, which takes participants along the Raskolnikov trail (Raskolnikov being, of course, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment), to the neighborhood where Dostoyevsky lived, and, in probably the most eerie experience you'll have in Petersburg, to the Pawnbroker's apartment, where tourists and Russians alike have immortalized Raskolnikov's murder of the old lady in multilingual graffiti.

A Russian Literature, History and Culture Series is held on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. It is open to all, and participants do not need to enroll. Lectures and Lecturers for 2007 include (among many others):

MARK HALPERIN:
-Translation as Interpretation, Two Versions of an Isaac Babel Story

-Translating Experimental Russian Poetry—Working with the Poetry of Viktor Sosnora

EUGENE OSTASHEVKSY:
-Mandelstam for the Russianless - The poetry of Osip Mandelstam (1892-1938) should probably be ranked among the most complicated phenomena in the Russian language, and among the least translatable bodies of poetry in world literature. These lectures will attempt to break down several of OM's poems in such a way as to make them evident to English-language readers.

-Russian Absurdism, 1927-1941 - The OBERIU, alternately described as Russia's last avant-garde group or an early manifestation of the European literature of the absurd, was founded in Leningrad in late 1927 and officially dissolved three years later. Although the work of OBERIU poets and writers--Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Nikolai Oleinikov and others--grew out of Russian Futurism, it had an entirely different tenor and level of sophistication than that of their predecessors. Simultaneously funny and tragic, intellectual and anti-rationalist, and, above all, deeply beautiful, absurdist writings tell us what happens when we doubt everything, including the capacity of language to describe the world. This series of talks by the editor and co-translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern University Press, 2006), will include some cultural background as well as readings of OBERIU prose and poetry.

MATVEI YANKELEVICH:
-The OBERIU Writers: The Last Gasp of the Petersburg Avant-Garde

-LETERBURG: Daniil Kharms and his "Comedy of the City of Petersburg" Writing Through the Myth

-Native Poetic Roots of Russian Rock: Viktor Tsoy (KINO) and Egor Letov (GrOb)

-What Happened On The Way To The Theatre: Petersburg/Leningrad as Scene and Stage for Avant-Garde Practice

Publishing Panels with Editors from The Walrus, Tin House Books, and The New York Review of Books - Editors will sit-in on several panels discussing the nature of editing, the state of publishing, and getting your work into publications.

Other Lectures, Mini -Workshops and Guest Writer Readings including Jason Camlot, George Elliott Clarke, Noah Richler, Binyavanga Wainaina, Anne Waldman, and many more TBA:

JASON CAMLOT
-The Voice of the Machine: Speaking Verse as a Non-Human - This lecture considers different theories of verse reading and recitation developed since the invention of sound recording technology (Edison?s phonograph, in 1877). Using actual spoken recordings ranging from the earliest (made at the Victorian fin-de-si'cle ) through T.S. Eliot's recordings of The Waste Land as its focal point, the lecture will explore ideas about the meaning of poetic "voice" in the age of audio reproduction.

-Breathing Verse Into Form - An exploration of conceptions of breath as they relate to poetic imagination, creation, and form, with particular focus on Charles Olson's idea of "Projective Verse", Allen Ginsberg's conception of the poetic line in terms of breath, and Michael McClure's "beast language".

-Talk Poetry as Genre and the Institution of Poetry - A talk about how "talk" (Socratic dialogue, literary table talk, radio and television "talk show" talk) relates to what we call "poetry". Using American artist and performer david antin's "Talk Poetry" as its main example, this lecture will consider the formal and para-formal (i.e. institutional) structures that lead us to define certain works in words as poems.

MARK HALPERIN:
-Meter: What and How We Measure The Pulse of the Poem

-Keeping the Beat Interesting: Metrical Variations.

Readings by teaching faculty, contest winners, and participants, take place several nights each week at The American Corner, a division of the Mayakovsky Library.

Participant Open-Mic Nights - Twice each session SLS organizes an informal open-mic format reading, during which participants sign-up to read their work.

Tours of the city (bus and walking tours; "white night" boat rides; the Hermitage, etc.) and its environs (Pushkin, Pavlovsk, Peterhof, and the ancient cities of Novgorod and Pskov) are offered during the week and on weekends. The cost of some guided tours are in addition to the program fee, a small additional fee will be charged. (For approximate fees per trip see the sample schedules above from previous SLS.) SLS tuition includes a bus tour of St. Petersburg, and tours of the literary museums (dostoyevsky, pushkin, nabokov, akhmatova). Additionally, there will be one or two unusual, unorthodox city tours included in the overall program cost.

The Nuts and Bolts Russian Language Course - In this 1.5-hour course, held after the seminars on your first full day in St. Petersburg, the instructor will introduce students to the Russian alphabet and supply you with needed words, phrases, and linguistic knowledge that will make your stay in the city that much more rewarding.

Russian film screenings and commentary - SLS screens Russian films with subtitles. The films will be introduced and commented on by the leading film critics and culturologists Mikhail Epstein and Mikhail Iampolski.

Academic credit (three credit hours), fully transferable, is available to qualified undergraduate and graduate students through Concordia University. Please note that costs for academic credit are in addition to SLS tuition. Costs are determined by the University. Program participants matriculating from home colleges and universities from which they desire credit for SLS, are responsible for securing approval for course-credit transfer from their respective academic advisors. SLS will assist the participants in every possible way in this matter. Students admitted into the SLS program who plan on seeking credit should contact the SLS adminstrators.

Participants in the writing seminars, as in the past, will include individuals of all ages and all levels of accomplishment -- gifted beginners and writers who have already begun publishing; undergraduate and graduate students of creative writing and people turning (or returning) to writing relatively late in life. All are treated with equal respect by the SLS faculty and writers-in-residence. Please bear in mind: One does not necessarily have to be an accomplished writer to attend Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg: an abiding love of literature, intellectual curiosity, openness to new artistic and cultural experiences, and the sincere desire to deepen one's understanding of the creative process while being immersed in the ethereal atmosphere of one of the world's most aesthetically-charged, mystifying and fascinating cities, are the only prerequisites.