Reading: Dostoevsky, “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (1877) So we come to the end of this lecture series, and a slightly different focus than previously, as theoretical works take a back seat, and we look instead at Russian literature and culture to explore the utopian theme. There are clearly strong utopian aspects to the work [...]
All posts tagged St Petersburg
Russian thought lecture 10: Utopias in Russian culture: of palaces and panopticons
Posted by Sarah Young on March 12, 2013
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2013/03/12/russian-thought-lecture-10-utopias-in-russian-culture-of-palaces-and-panopticons/
Review: St Petersburg city-pick
City-pick St Petersburg, ed. Heather Reyes, Marina Samsonova and James Rann (Oxygen Books, 2012) The city-pick series of anthologies of city writing has turned its attention to St Petersburg, producing a thoroughly enjoyable collection that made me want to revisit old favourites and seek out some very interesting-looking texts (particularly non-Russian ones) that I hadn’t [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on December 2, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/12/02/review-st-petersburg-city-pick/
BASEES 2012 highlights
I was quite busy with committee business during the BASEES conference, but did manage to attend a few panels, and want to pick out a few highlights from what everyone I spoke to agreed was a very stimulating and enjoyable weekend. A Monday morning panel on Gulag literature may not be everybody’s idea of fun, [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 2, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/04/02/basees-2012-highlights/
Mapping Gogol: Methodology
As part of our work to expand Mapping St Petersburg and develop the idea of experimenting with literary cartography, we have produced two maps visualizing the spatial arrangement of Gogol’s Peterburg Tales. The first marks all the place references in the five stories, Nevskii prospekt, The Portrait, The Diary of a Madman, The Nose and The Overcoat, while the second differentiates between the places where the action occurs, [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on January 29, 2012
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/01/29/mapping-gogol-methodology/
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 [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on June 1, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/06/01/mapping-st-petersburg-literature-as-data/
Four short links: photographs of Russia and Eastern Europe
1. Photographs of Old St Petersburg. A great mapping website with a wonderful collection of old photographs. It’s in Russian only, but easy to use even if you don’t speak the language. 2. Henri Cartier-Bresson. Pictures by one of my favourite photographers, mainly taken during his 1954 visit to Moscow. 3. Vintage Photographs of St [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on May 14, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/05/14/four-short-links-photographs-of-russia-and-eastern-europe/
Vera, or The Nihilists
My interest in British views of Russians recently led me to read Oscar Wilde’s first play, Vera, or The Nihilists, apparently inspired by Vera Zasulich’s attempted assassination of the Governor of St Petersburg in 1878. It’s spectacularly bad, and I’m surprised neither that its first productions, in London in 1880 and New York in 1882, [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on May 9, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/05/09/vera-or-the-nihilists/
Top ten beards in Russian literature
I know I said I’d write another post about Mapping Petersburg, but I’m still thinking about that, so in the mean time, another top ten. But this time it is not the works, but the writers themselves, and specifically their facial adornments, that interest me. Beards, as Elif Batuman has affirmed, are hugely important to [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 20, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/04/20/top-ten-beards-in-russian-literature/
Mapping Petersburg
Over the last few months I have been working with John Levin on the pilot for a digital Russian literature project, and last week we launched the website, Mapping Petersburg: Experiments in Literary Cartography. The project aims to explore the role of Petersburg’s topography in shaping the literature for which the city is so famous, [...]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 6, 2011
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/04/06/mapping-petersburg/
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/