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 [...]
All posts tagged women
Re-reading Crime and Punishment: characters
Posted by Sarah Young on July 9, 2010
http://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
http://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
http://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
http://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
http://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
http://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
http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/10/03/gulag-art/
@russianist
- #FF @saveUNlibrary for fighting the good fight. Closing libraries impoverishes us all
(about 4 hours ago) - RT @phoebetaplin: Is poetry always Lost in Translation? | Russia Beyond The Headlines http://t.co/1XKb1Mrx
(about 1 day ago) - RT @UCLSSEESLibrary: Online exhibition 'Bodies In Formation: Mass Gymnastics Under Communism' http://t.co/grRMXjoK via @osaarchivum #CE
(about 2 days ago) - RT @PlashingVole: My rough guide to what I'm looking for when I'm marking: http://t.co/1ksP3p5D
(about 2 days ago) - No sooner have I dispatched one set of exam scripts to the second examiner than another enormous pile lands on my desk #gradinghell
(about 2 days ago)