• Home


• Audio & Video Links


• Academic Programs
• Courses
• 1-Year M.A.
• Undergraduate Minor
• SURF
• Stanford in Moscow


• Student Grants
• Graduate Students
  • Academic Year FLAS
  • Summer FLAS
  • Summer Travel/Research
• Undergraduates
• Grant Experiences


• People
• Steering Committee
• Faculty & Affiliates
• Visiting Scholars
• M.A. Students
• Staff


• Outreach
• Events
• Newsletter
• K-12 Teachers
• Alumni


• Contact Us
• Join Our Mailing List
• Support CREEES
• Send a Note
• Directions


• Eurasian Studies @ CREEES


• Ukrainian Studies @ CREEES


• The Alexander Dallin Lecture


• Stanford/Berkeley Joint Conference

Nathan Hayflick

This summer I attended the two month long Bard/Smolny Summer Language Intensive program in St. Petersburg with the help of a CREEES language grant. As an undergraduate majoring in Russian Literature and Language, I found the program to be the perfect way to receive both language and cultural education simultaneously. I lived with a large Russian family in an apartment five minutes from Nevksy Prospect. There was constant activity in the house and I met a former Soviet jazz musician, the family's Belarusian cousins, and even a Russian Orthodox priest who came over for lunch on Sundays. I came to Russia with only one year of language study so at first I was completely overwhelmed by the fast, informal conversations around me. It was my first experience in complete language immersion and for the first couple of weeks I went to bed in a state of total mental exhaustion every night. Of course I eventually began to catch on and have internalized many aspects of the language that I previously knew only on a conceptual level. For someone like me who was not born with the gift of perfect recall, full immersion is truly the only way to overcome the more difficult parts of language acquisition.

In addition to the homestay, our language classes met for four hours a day with an additional hour and a half of phonetics instruction every Wednesday. The Smolny program not only had amazing Russian teachers but also a group of college-aged Russian tutors who helped us with our homework, accompanied us on excursions, and took us to their favorite parks and clubs on the weekends. It was great to have them with us as they made sure we got beyond the tourist’s Petersburg experience and that we spoke a little Russian no matter where we were. As for the city itself, St. Petersburg during the summer is both beautiful and surreal. We arrived at the peak of ‘White Nights’, when the sun doesn’t set until midnight and dusk fades immediately into dawn. The entire city was full of energy and celebration (there was a fireworks show to accompany the opening of the bridges at least twice a week for my entire stay). And no matter how many times you reread Crime and Punishment, it is impossible to fully understand Dostoevsky until you have walked through the labyrinth-like alleyways of Petersburg on a burning summer day.

I am currently studying in Moscow with Stanford’s Bing program and the intensive language training I received this summer has made my second trip to Russia a much easier and more rewarding experience.