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.
Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition is your chance to survey over 70 literary geniuses and masterpieces of Western literature. In 84 lectures taught by five award-winning professors who are experts in particular literary time periods, you explore the vast collection of Western writers and their respective works. With its broad historical scope and its depth of insight, this course is a veritable encyclopedia of Western literature's greatest writers. It's your chance to get a look at their works, styles, themes, and relationships with one another without having to pour through thousands upon thousands of pages of their writing. And you'll see the role they played both within the context of their own time and within the larger span of literary history.
It can be argued that one simple idea—the concept of freedom—has been the driving force of Western civilization and may be the most influential intellectual force the world has ever known. But what is freedom, exactly? Join historian and classical scholar J. Rufus Fears as he tells freedom's dramatic story from ancient Greece to our own day, exploring a concept so close to us we may never have considered it with the thoroughness it deserves.