The present work aims to investigate the academic life-span of courses in Eastern and South-Eastern European languages and literatures at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, currently taught in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Comparative Studies. It presents a historical reconstruction of the teaching of Albanian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian languages and literatures from their emergence as academic disciplines to the present day when they continue to be taught at the undergraduate and the graduate level (except for Bulgarian). The section on Russian language and literature is further enriched with a biography of Evel Gasparini. As the article shows, each language has followed a different path, but, with the important exception of Russian language and literature, what they have in common is the long-term attempt and the strong will to maintain their presence in the academic curricula in spite of the continuous fluctuation of conditions that has shaped their history at Ca’ Foscari
