• New Post Alerts By Email

  • Syndication

    RSS
    Atom
  • Tags

  • Archives

All posts for the month April, 2010

Four short links: Russian dictionaries

1. Multitran: an excellent resource, Multitran has  dictionaries for French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Estonian, Latvian, Japanese and, oddly, Afrikaans, Esperanto and Kalmyk. You very occasionally get a duff translation, usually of an idiom, but the only real problem is the absence of stress marks, which my students find a bit annoying. 2. Slovopedia: with links to […]

I love Orlando

For some reason I feel a sudden urge to declare my undying love for Orlando the Marmalade Cat. Okay, so this isn’t the real Orlando, because I can’t find any images that are out of copyright, but I hereby declare Orlando to be the king of fictional felines. Continuing the ‘cat in plant pot’ theme. […]

Anagram

It’s puzzle time, folks, and today I have an anagram for you: I GOOF SLANDER Can you guess what the answer is? If you can’t work it out, here are a few clues: from the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, and, though it pains me to even to write these words, let alone provide […]

The Crystal Palace in Russian Literature (2)

I think the general assumption is that Chernyshevsky’s use of the Crystal Palace as the basis for his utopian vision riled Dostoevsky so much that he then included in the polemic against rational egoism in Notes from Underground (Russian text here). But by the time What is to be Done? was published, Dostoevsky had already visited […]

The Crystal Palace in Russian Literature (1)

At my next conference, the 14th International Dostoevsky Symposium, in Napoli this June (volcanic ash cloud permitting), I’ll be presenting a paper on Dostoevsky and the Crystal Palace. It’s a subject that has obviously been examined before, usually in relation to the narrator’s comments in Notes from Underground, but I’ve decided to tackle it partly because my […]

Gratuitous cat picture (2)

I’ve received complaints that my random musings on Russian literature detracted from enjoyment of the last picture of my cat I posted. So here she is, indulging in one of her favourite activities: watching nature programmes.

Why I blog

I’ve been blogging for a few months now (see my archive — I realized I had enough posts to make it worthwhile), and as I finally decided it was time pay some attention to what my site looks like (this is still a work in progress, so there will be further changes in the coming […]

Villains and Victims

I’ve just got back from a conference at the University of Nottingham, organized by Sarah Badcock in the History department, entitled ‘Villains and Victims: Justice, violence and retribution in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia.’ It was a small, workshop-style conference with a couple of dozen participants, and like many of the other people there, […]

Shalamov’s connections illustrated

And so, back to Shalamov. What I’m going to do is just take one story and show how the connections move out through the collections from there. My intention is more to show just what the connections are than to interpret them. You can start this process at pretty much any point, but I thought […]