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, [...]
Mapping Gogol: Methodology
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/03/08/atamansha/
Four short links: Russian oddments
1. Hermitage cats. For over 250 years – with a break during the siege when they sadly all perished – the Hermitage has been home to an army of 50 or so cats, and every year the museum holds a Cat Day in March with lots of cat-related events to celebrate the Winter Palace’s most [...]
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/02/05/four-short-links-russian-oddments/
Russians in London: Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky left St Petersburg for his first trip to Europe on 7th June 1862. He spent most of his time in France and Italy, but also visited London for 8 days – his only trip to Britain – arriving on 9th July (Dryzhakov, p. 328). Like many other writers, one of his chief aims was [...]
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/12/19/russians-in-london-dostoevsky/
