Russian

Russian at Oxford is a degree of exceptional depth and ambition, offering the chance to develop genuine mastery of one of the world's great literary and linguistic traditions within one of the world's finest academic environments. Russian carries within it a cultural inheritance of extraordinary power, from the medieval chronicles through Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov to the revolutionary modernism of Akhmatova, Bulgakov, and Mandelstam, and into the contemporary. To read these writers in the original is to encounter the language at its most revelatory and most demanding.

Oxford's four-year full-time degree in Russian develops your linguistic competence from your entry level, taking you to advanced reading, writing, listening, and speaking in modern Russian. Alongside language study, you will engage with Russian literature from its earliest period to the present, with Russian history, and with the cultural and intellectual traditions that have shaped Russia and its relationship with Europe and the world. The tutorial system ensures that your intellectual development is intensive and personalised, with regular small-group or one-to-one teaching from leading scholars in the field.

Oxford's Slavonic studies community is one of the largest and most distinguished in the UK, and the resources available, from manuscript collections to research expertise, are unmatched.

Graduates in Russian from Oxford go on to careers in diplomacy, intelligence, journalism, academia, international law, business, publishing, and the civil service. The depth of linguistic, literary, and cultural knowledge the degree develops makes graduates highly effective in any context requiring engagement with Russia or Russian-speaking communities, and the analytical and communicative skills Oxford's tutorial teaching develops are valued in demanding careers of every kind. Many graduates continue to doctoral research in Russian literature, history, or cultural studies.