I’m very pleased with my new banner (the picture’s taken from Dickinsons’ comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851). If you’re wondering why I’ve got a picture of the Crystal Palace up there rather than St Basil’s or an illustration from a Russian fairy tale, you may wish to catch up by reading a couple of […]
Top ten food in Russian literature: part 2
I shall keep you in suspense no longer. 5. Shalamov, ‘Condensed Milk’. As in the case of Solzhenitsyn, hunger is ubiquitous in Shalamov’s stories, so food also plays a significant role. ‘Condensed Milk’ is unusual in depicting a moment of triumph and satiation: the narrator, offered a place on an escape, asks the ringleader Shestaskov […]
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/06/19/top-ten-food-in-russian-literature-part-2/
Top ten food in Russian literature
Food is a tricky subject, as there are a lot of viable candidates for inclusion – so many that I toyed with the idea of doing a top twenty, but that’s a cop out, so I’ve had to whittle it down, and some exceptional works have missed the cut. I’ll say a bit more about […]
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/06/16/top-ten-food-in-russian-literature/
Russian perspectives on the Great Exhibition (2)
The second article on the Great Exhibition in Sovremennik [The Contemporary] appeared in the foreign news round-up of the July-August issue. While the first report was somewhat unclear in its origins, this one was evidently cobbled together from reports in the European press. A further development is apparent regarding the naming of the building; the […]
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/06/09/russian-perspectives-on-the-great-exhibition-2/
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
My article, ‘Recalling the Dead: Repetition, Identity, and the Witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy,’ has been published in the latest issue of Slavic Review (vol. 70. 2, 2011, pp. 353-72). In this article, I examine different types of repetition in Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, from the repeated narration of the same incident in different tales, to […]
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/06/04/repetition-repetition-repetition/
Mapping St Petersburg: Literature as data?
Cross-posted with Mapping St Petersburg. We’ve added a map of Dostoevsky’s addresses to Mapping St Petersburg, and this seems like a good opportunity to discuss the question of data. In comparison with our work on the Crime and Punishment maps, mapping addresses was easy: information on where Dostoevsky lived is well established and available from […]
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/06/01/mapping-st-petersburg-literature-as-data/