Russian/Scottish Literature

Russian and Scottish literature is a combination that brings two of the world's most distinctive and powerful literary traditions into dialogue. Russian literature, which gave the world Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, and Akhmatova, is one of the most celebrated bodies of writing in any language, preoccupied with questions of moral seriousness, social responsibility, and the Russian soul in a way that has shaped literary culture far beyond Russia. Scottish literature, which the University of Glasgow is uniquely positioned to teach, is a tradition of remarkable depth and variety, from the medieval makars and the poetry of Robert Burns through the Scottish Renaissance of the twentieth century to contemporary fiction and drama.

At the University of Glasgow, home to the only academic unit in the UK exclusively dedicated to Scottish literature, you will study both traditions over five years full-time, developing your Russian language skills to a high level alongside deep literary and cultural engagement with both traditions. The Russian strand gives you access to texts in the original, developing genuine linguistic competence as well as literary understanding. The Scottish literature strand engages you with a body of work that most English literature programmes never reach, and that offers a distinctive and often challenging perspective on questions of identity, nation, class, and land.

The programme includes a sandwich year and work placement provision. The typical entry tariff is 200 UCAS points.

Graduates are well placed for careers in education, translation, publishing, journalism, cultural organisations, heritage bodies, broadcasting, and the civil service. The combination of Russian language and deep knowledge of Scottish literary culture is unusual and genuinely distinctive. Many graduates also go on to postgraduate study in Russian or Scottish studies, comparative literature, translation, or creative writing.