Spring 2017 Courses
RUSS432 Fate and Chance in Literature and Film
Vera Zubarev, Ph.D., is a scholar, a bilingual writer, an author of 19 books, including literary theory, poetry and prose. Some of her works in English appear under her penname, V. Ulea. She has won many prestigious international awards for her works, including the Honorary Diploma in the nomination of Monograph for her book, A Systems Approach to Literature: Mythopoetics of Chekhov's Four Major Plays (Taganrog, 2010), the Honorary Diploma in the nomination of the best article dedicated to Anton Chekhov’s work (Taganrog, 2016), Bella Akhmadulina’ International Award (2012), Municipal Prize of Konstantin Paustovsky (Ukraine, 2011), and many others.
She teaches classes on Chekhov’s comedy and decision making in literature and film.
Her articles and reviews have appeared in major Russian and American collections and journals. Her works have been translated into Czech, German and other languages. Her English cycle of poems, Letters from Another Planet, was nominated for the Push Cart Prize. Her book, About Angels: A Treatise (Pano Verlog, Zürich, 2003) received the top Book Award at the International Book Fair, Green Wave.
Caryl Emerson (Princeton University), wrote the following about her book, A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New Type: Chess, Literature, and Film, “ V. Ulea attempts here a very ambitious thing, nothing less than a poetics of dramatic character as an alternative to the familiar, Aristotelian plot-based approach. She brings to her task a sophisticated understanding of human systems—organic, intelligent, capable of learning—and of their ability to interact creatively as psychological mechanisms in the best sense of the word: that is, as mechanisms for generating potentials. Chekhov, especially, will never quite sound the same.”
University of Pennsylvania
School of Arts and Science
Department of Slavic Languages
745 Williams Hall
255 South 36th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305