Today is the first anniversary of my blog, and I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve done so far and what I’m planning to do in the coming months. I’ve made a couple of discoveries over the last year. I’ve realized that cats, the Crystal Palace, and Merthyr Tydfil all attract a more readers than Russian […]
All posts tagged women
Re-reading Crime and Punishment: mis-naming
My recent posts collating contents pages of Russian journals do not, I will admit, make for very exciting reading. They do have a purpose, though, and are going to be appearing for some time. But I do want to continue writing on other subjects, partly so as not to alienate all my readers, and partly […]
Posted by Sarah Young on August 12, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/08/12/re-reading-crime-and-punishment-mis-naming/
Re-reading Crime and Punishment: characters
Re-reading Crime and Punishment hasn’t entirely resolved the perennial problem of Sonia, which I’ve mentioned previously, but I do finally seem to have found a way of accepting her as a character, which makes the novel’s denouement less contentious. Or maybe it’s just that I was focusing on the fine details rather than the big […]
Posted by Sarah Young on July 9, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/07/09/re-reading-crime-and-punishment-characters/
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
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/06/18/women-beauty-and-other-things/
The Crystal Palace in Russian Literature (1)
At my next conference, the 14th International Dostoevsky Symposium, in Napoli this June (volcanic ash cloud permitting), I’ll be presenting a paper on Dostoevsky and the Crystal Palace. It’s a subject that has obviously been examined before, usually in relation to the narrator’s comments in Notes from Underground, but I’ve decided to tackle it partly because my […]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 20, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/04/20/crystal-palace-russian-literature-1/
Krupskaya: an apology
I’ve been criticized by my boyfriend for my unsisterly (although true — even he admits it) comment about Nadezhda Krupskaya in a recent post. So, I apologise, and instead will enumerate some of the many valid reasons there are to dislike the woman. There is, of course, her dreadful hagiography, Reminiscences of Lenin. And the fact […]
Posted by Sarah Young on February 16, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/02/16/krupskaya-an-apology/
Sonia: another thought
William Burnham’s article, ‘The Legal Context and Contributions of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment,’ Michigan Law Review, 100.6 (2002), 1227-1248, suggests another dimension to Sonia’s role as a registered prostitute. Burnham states that while confession and eye-witness testimony were considered the most reliable forms of proof in Russia at the time, ‘the law disqualified several classes of […]
Posted by Sarah Young on February 2, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/02/02/sonia-another-thought/
Crime and Punishment: Sonia and prostitution
I’ve been thinking a lot about Crime and Punishment recently, partly because I’m teaching it on our MA course on the nineteenth-century Russian novel, partly because of the recent adaptation I saw, and partly because I’m starting to plan a new digital project on the novel (more on that anon). What has really piqued my […]
Posted by Sarah Young on January 26, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/01/26/crime-and-punishment-sonia-and-prostitution/
Gulag art
While I am usually pleased by events which raise the public profile of the Gulag, I am distinctly less comfortable with its use for anti-Russian/anti-Soviet propaganda by neoconservative American think-tanks who have failed to notice that the Cold War ended twenty years ago, as in the case of the Heritage Foundation’s current exhibition of Nikolai […]
Posted by Sarah Young on October 3, 2009
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/10/03/gulag-art/