Not entirely in the festive spirit, I’ve been reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Invisible Allies (trans. Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson; London: Harvill, 1997) with my usual set of mixed feelings. He’s not the greatest writer the world has ever seen, but he is very readable. Last time I read The Gulag Archipelago in full, I couldn’t […]
All posts for the month December, 2009
The problem with Solzhenitsyn
Posted by Sarah Young on December 31, 2009
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/12/31/the-problem-with-solzhenitsyn/
Four short links: Dostoevsky
1. The Complete Works of Dostoevsky. A really pioneering website; the concordance and Gospel, with Dostoevsky’s textual markers, are a must for any scholar. It’s been around for years, and used to be very slow (in the late nineties when I was working on my PhD, searches were best conducted after midnight — at other […]
Posted by Sarah Young on December 27, 2009
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/12/27/four-short-links-dostoevsky/
Fairytale and reality in Gulag narratives
The fairytale metaphor is a recurring feature a large number of Gulag narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, and it stands out because most of these texts are otherwise determinedly unmetaphoric. Amid the stark language habitually used to narrate the experience of the Gulag, aimed at depicting the harshness of reality, there are recurring images of […]
Posted by Sarah Young on December 21, 2009
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/12/21/fairytale-and-reality-in-gulag-narratives/