Over Wintersession, while most of Wellesley’s campus is snowy and quiet, the fourth floor of Founders has been humming with activity. In room 423, eight students sound out Cyrillic letters and memorize nouns in an attempt to learn all of RUSS 101: Elementary Russian I in 12 days under the guidance of Adam Weiner, professor of Russian, and Katerina “Katya” Rudykh, language assistant in Russian. This Wintersession tradition, which began in January 1995, and other popular courses and programs the Russian Department offers result in a powerful bonding experience that connects generations of alumnae and prepares them for a variety of careers after Wellesley.
Malina Dumas ’10 took Elementary Russian I during Wintersession in January 2007 because she liked learning languages and was looking for an excuse to stay on campus. “I lived and breathed Russian for three weeks,” says Dumas, now an attorney specializing in Indigenous nation and tribal law. “After that, I pretty much never left Founders.” Dumas became a Russian major and traveled to St. Petersburg and Moscow through programs at Yale and Wellesley. Her interest in Russia led her to study Arctic law and the Inuktitut language at the University of Washington School of Law.
“I still have all my Russian books! They were the only books I kept after college,” says Pamela Gimbel Lehman ’66, the first Wellesley student to graduate as a history major with a concentration in Russian. She says there weren’t many Russian majors in those days, and though the CIA “kept calling me,” she took a job with the United Nations in New York City as the secretary for a Russian diplomat. (He turned out to be a spy: “I got in a little bit of trouble with the FBI,” she says, laughing.)
The Russian Department, which has been launching careers such as Dumas’s and Gimbel Lehman’s for over 80 years, was started by famed author and literary critic Vladimir Nabokov. He came to campus as a comparative literature lecturer in 1941, and from 1942 to 1944 he taught unofficial, noncredit courses in elementary Russian to Wellesley students, who paid $10 each. During the 1944–45 academic year, Wellesley offered an introductory Russian language course for credit, with Nabokov as the instructor, and the next year added an intermediate class. Eventually Russian poetry in translation and prose in translation courses were added, and in 1969 the College allowed Russian as an official major.
Since then, Wellesley alums who majored in Russian have pursued all kinds of professions. Some have gone the foreign service route, like Kiana Nedele ’16, or become professors of Russian language and literature themselves, like Carlotta Chenoweth ’09, who teaches at West Point. Others focus on international politics or Russia-USA relations: Zhanna Malekos-Smith Shank ’13 is an expert on Russia-related security issues, and Sarah Bidgood ’09 researches nuclear nonproliferation.
But there are also Russian major alums who are deans, nonprofit directors, surgeons, professors, editors, and writers. Becky Warren ’00, a history major who took many Russian classes, is a country music star.
Students say they are attracted to the department’s close-knit, family atmosphere. Rose Paine ’28, for example, thought she would be a linguistics major, but pivoted to Russian area studies because the department offers “such a supportive environment.”
Wellesley’s senior lecturer and director of theatre and theatre studies, Marta Rainer ’98, had a similar experience. She double majored in theater and Russian, and when she told her Polish mother she was going to study Russian, her mom said, “Oh good, it’s good to know all about your enemies.” But Rainer says she came to Russian through her love of poetry and theater—reading Konstantin Stanislavski and Anton Chekhov in the original Russian was transformative. “My heart was just opened up,” she says.
She recalls that Thomas Hodge, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and professor of Russian, let her do an independent study on Eastern European cinema. “I wrote these papers that were really bizarre and uniquely mine, pulling in unexpected threads and trying [to make all these connections] but not always succeeding,” says Rainer. “But through his support I remember just feeling really free to fail and to try weird approaches to arguments.” The department, she says, provided “a really good atmosphere for me to do that. It was small, [the faculty] knew me. They knew how weird I was.”
If a student is terrified of learning a language like Russian, I want them to know that we will walk with them. It is difficult but not impossible.
The faculty leave an impression even on students who don’t formally declare a Russian major. After English major Marty Martinage ’24 took Russian 101 over Wintersession their junior year, they told the faculty, “You’re never getting rid of me.” They worked in the department as a student assistant and took Russian literature classes, including an independent project about Nabokov’s legacy at the College. Martinage says they “figured out a lot of what [they] believe about the world from writing papers in the Russian department,” including that they felt called to ministry. Hodge encouraged them to apply to the master’s program at Harvard Divinity School. “I got into that program because of what Tom Hodge thought of me not as a scholar, but as a person,” Martinage says. “I am definitely on a ministry path because of the Wellesley College Russian Department.”
The current department faculty consists of Hodge, Weiner, and Alla Epsteyn, associate teaching professor in Russian, who were all hired in the 1990s, and Rudykh, who arrived at Wellesley in 2018. She describes the Russian department as having “a family-like atmosphere”; Epsteyn says once when the faculty took the graduating Russian majors out to dinner, a restaurant patron mistook the group for a big happy family.
The Russian faculty has made a concerted effort to “open the doors wide to the whole Wellesley community,” as Weiner says, by offering Russian language classes as well as Russian literature in translation courses. They have also hosted field trips to see The Nutcracker in Boston, visit the Icon Museum and Study Center in Clinton, Mass., and hear the New York Philharmonic perform the works of a Russian composer. In the past, the department sponsored travel to the motherland, such as the Wintersession in Moscow program, which ran from 2009 to 2021, and the Lake Baikal program, a 20-year collaboration with the biology department. (Due to current Russian-USA relations, such trips are on hiatus, though the department finds opportunities for students to study in other Russian-speaking countries, like Georgia and Kazakhstan.)
“There is a special kind of student attracted to Russian,” Weiner says, adding that what he loves the most about the department are the students and his colleagues. “It has been very special to build up the department alongside them,” he says.
“There is nothing like the experience students can have in a small, intimate department like ours,” says Hodge. “If a student is terrified of learning a language like Russian, I want them to know that we will walk with them. It is difficult but not impossible.”
When students start RUSS 201: Intermediate Russian I, they “are often very shy, very afraid,” says Epsteyn. She loves to watch them blossom as they take on roles in Three from Prostokvashino, a play based on a popular Russian cartoon that students traditionally perform at the end of the course: “They memorize lines, create a script, speak Russian while moving through space.” When students start the next course in the series, RUSS 202: Intermediate Russian II, in the spring, they have jokes from the play and “can build on that experience of fun,” says Epsteyn. “We create a family.”
In the same vein, Rudykh, with the support of the department, hosts a weekly “Friday Feast” in the lounge on the fourth floor of Founders, open to all, to chat in Russian and in English and to sample Eastern European snacks. Hodge says he loves “the laughter I hear every day when students are hanging out in the lounge, bonding and loving one another and chatting … the sense that the department is a place where they are with their family.”