I had other plans yesterday, but was feeling far too tired and depressed to concentrate on the writing I was supposed to be doing. So, to take my mind off present-day violent criminality at home, I started thinking about violent criminality more than a hundred years ago on the other side of the world… I recently [...]
All posts tagged Chekhov
Doroshevich on Sakhalin
Posted by Sarah Young on August 10, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/08/10/doroshevich-on-sakhalin/
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 [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on June 16, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/06/16/top-ten-food-in-russian-literature/
Hughesovka revisited
Finding the concept of Welsh Noir rather appealing, I’ve been meaning to get round to reading Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth novels, featuring gumshoe Louie Knight, for some time. But it was only when I picked up a copy of the latest addition to the series, From Aberystwyth With Love, that I realized its true significance. I had anticipated [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on March 18, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/03/18/hughesovka-revisited/
Top Ten Murders in Russian Literature
This is the first in a new occasional series in which I’ll look at different aspects of Russian literature through a ‘Top Ten’, and hopefully give people a few reading ideas. My main rule is that writers may only have one entry in any given list. Which makes my first subject slightly trickier than it [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on February 11, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/02/11/top-ten-murders-in-russian-literature/
Forest palaces
I recently discovered a great website by a Russian photographer, Andrei Kuzman, or Qzmn. He specializes in travel photography, the Russian wilderness, and its architecture. It’s really worth exploring the site, whether you’ve ever been to Russia and long for the birch forests (I’m a city girl but the Russian countryside definitely speaks to me), [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on November 2, 2010
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/11/02/forest-palaces/
Marriage in late imperial Russia
Today I went to a really great seminar given by Barbara Alpern Engel at SSEES on marriage breakdown in the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II. Engel is very well known as a specialist on women’s history who, among other things, has written the brilliant Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia. [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on October 27, 2010
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/10/27/marriage-in-late-imperial-russia/
Siberian prison and exile: two studies
I’m currently working on revisions to an article on nineteenth-century narratives of prison and exile (see my previous posts on an earlier stage of work on this and on the conference where I presented it), and in the process of completing my reading, two works have stood out in different ways: Sergei Maksimov’s Sibir’ i [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on July 26, 2010
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/07/26/siberian-prison-and-exile-two-studies/
Women, beauty and other things
The ambiguous treatment of some of Dostoevsky’s major themes was high on the menu in the first session on Thursday. Joe Andrew gave a very interesting paper on the ‘woman question’ in The Brothers Karamazov, discussing how marginalized the female characters are – in the central family grouping there are no mothers, daughters or sisters [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on June 18, 2010
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/06/18/women-beauty-and-other-things/
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, [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 8, 2010
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/04/08/villains-and-victims/
Blogging from BASEES
The end of term has arrived and with it the BASEES annual conference, so here I am in Cambridge in the slightly unlovely environs and overheated rooms of Fitzwilliam College. To be fair, they have made a lot of improvements to the college since I first visited BASEES as a tender postgrad, and it is [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on March 27, 2010
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/03/27/blogging-from-basees/