Last week I participated in a workshop titled ‘Punishment as a Crime? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Prison Experience in Russian Culture’, at Uppsala University’s Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies. The programme, which is available here, was notable for its wide range of papers and approaches. The imperial, soviet and post-soviet periods were all covered, and [...]
All posts tagged Siberia
Russian prison experience
Posted by Sarah Young on August 22, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/08/22/russian-prison-experience/
Four short links: Gulag
A number of Gulag sites have come or returned to my attention recently, so this is a quick round-up of the best (for reasons I won’t go into, I’m rather short of time at the moment and the longer posts I’m trying to write are somewhat behind schedule). I’ve not included the virtual museums I [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on July 13, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/07/13/four-short-links-gulag/
Dostoevsky and the Gulag
I’ve started work on a paper on the depiction of criminals in labour camp writing for a workshop later this summer, and as Dostoevsky is one of my starting points, this has led me to revisit the broader question of the role of recurrent references to him in Gulag literature. This post is not intended [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on May 6, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/05/06/dostoevsky-and-the-gulag/
Gulag Voices: two books
This year has seen the publication of two books titled Gulag Voices: an anthology of memoirs edited by Anne Applebaum, and a collection of oral histories by Jehanne Gheith and Katherine Jolluck, so this seems like a good opportunity to look at both of them. I had previously read all but one of the extracts [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on September 5, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/09/05/gulag-voices-two-books/
Doroshevich on Sakhalin
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 [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on August 10, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/08/10/doroshevich-on-sakhalin/
Translating Shalamov
My translation of Shalamov’s story Resurrection of the Larch has been published in the literary journal Cardinal Points. I’ve also written a short piece on Shalamov for the journal. I don’t intend to repeat what I said there, but I would like to make a couple of additional observations. Although this is the first translation [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on May 4, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/05/04/translating-shalamov/
Atamansha
According to one of my mailing lists, a poll to identify the women who best symbolize modern-day Russia has seen the top two places given to ageing lite entertainment diva and staple of celebrity gossip magazines, Alla Pugacheva (I could never see the point, even ironically – perhaps because I like music), and the arch-Putinite [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on March 8, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/03/08/atamansha/
Russians in London: the anarchist threat
For my final post in the series (for now), I want to discuss events rather than individuals. As a couple of my recent posts have suggested, by the end of the nineteenth century, the nature and number of Russian visitors to, and settlers in, London had changed considerably. It was no longer the preserve of [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on January 31, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/01/31/russians-in-london-the-anarchist-threat/
Russians in London: Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin, anarchist and revolutionary, already had a reputation in England before his arrival in London in 1861. The story of his alleged links with the Russian state reached the press in the form of an article in the Morning Advertiser, ‘Was Bakunin a Russian Agent or Not?’ (23 August, 1853), written by the conservative [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on December 12, 2010
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/12/12/russians-in-london-mikhail-bakunin/