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All posts for the month June, 2011

Housekeeping

I’m very pleased with my new banner (the picture’s taken from Dickinsons’ comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851). If you’re wondering why I’ve got a picture of the Crystal Palace up there rather than St Basil’s or an illustration from a Russian fairy tale, you may wish to catch up by reading a couple of […]

Top ten food in Russian literature: part 2

I shall keep you in suspense no longer. 5. Shalamov, ‘Condensed Milk’. As in the case of Solzhenitsyn, hunger is ubiquitous in Shalamov’s stories, so food also plays a significant role. ‘Condensed Milk’ is unusual in depicting a moment of triumph and satiation: the narrator, offered a place on an escape, asks the ringleader Shestaskov […]

Top ten food in Russian literature

Food is a tricky subject, as there are a lot of viable candidates for inclusion – so many that I toyed with the idea of doing a top twenty, but that’s a cop out, so I’ve had to whittle it down, and some exceptional works have missed the cut. I’ll say a bit more about […]

Russian perspectives on the Great Exhibition (2)

The second article on the Great Exhibition in Sovremennik [The Contemporary] appeared in the foreign news round-up of the July-August issue. While the first report was somewhat unclear in its origins, this one was evidently cobbled together from reports in the European press. A further development is apparent regarding the naming of the building; the […]

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

My article, ‘Recalling the Dead: Repetition, Identity, and the Witness in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolymskie rasskazy,’ has been published in the latest issue of Slavic Review (vol. 70. 2, 2011, pp. 353-72). In this article, I examine different types of repetition in Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, from the repeated narration of the same incident in different tales, to […]

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 […]