My most recent publication is an article on Dostoevsky’s early works, ‘Hesitation, projection and desire: the fictionalizing ‘as if…’ in Dostoevskii’s early works‘, in Modern Languages Open which, as the name suggests, is an open access journal, so the article is available freely to download. MLO is a terrific journal published by Liverpool University Press, […]
Unexpected turns in my Dostoevsky studies
Posted by Sarah Young on November 14, 2019
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2019/11/14/unexpected-turns-in-my-dostoevsky-studies/
Revolutionary Dostoevsky
How might we think of Dostoevsky as a radical writer? In his later years he certainly seemed anything but. From his searing critique of nihilist ideas in Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, and his scathing portrayal of revolutionaries in Demons, to his increasingly virulent Orthodox nationalism and support for the authoritarian Tsarist regime […]
Posted by Sarah Young on October 2, 2017
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2017/10/02/revolutionary-dostoevsky/
Assessing sources: Russian criminal tattoos
I’m currently working on a book chapter about the body in labour camp narratives. This was actually pretty much the starting point for my current research, so I’m in part revisiting an article published in Gulag Studies in 2008 on the Gulag body and self-mutilation. More recently, I’ve been thinking about the representation of different […]
Posted by Sarah Young on March 6, 2017
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2017/03/06/assessing-sources-russian-criminal-tattoos/
Raskolnikov on Twitter
For the last few days on Twitter @RodionTweets has been tweeting Crime and Punishment in real time from Raskolnikov’s perspective. A collaborative project developed by a group of North-American and British colleagues, we have each been responsible for turning one part of the novel into tweets. As my contribution for Part II begins, I repost here […]
Posted by Sarah Young on July 11, 2016
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2016/07/11/raskolnikov-on-twitter/
Reading Gulag propaganda
As regular readers will know, I am currently working on a book manuscript on the Russian tradition of prison and exile writing, from the tsarist era to the present day. This is a subject that generally focuses, with good reason, on the victims’ perspective, and many people will disagree with the idea of including Stalinist […]
Posted by Sarah Young on November 9, 2015
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2015/11/09/reading-gulag-propaganda/
Historical memory of the Gulag (3): Contested memory
The failure to establish a central memorial to the victims of the Gulag mentioned in my previous post is part of a problem of contested memory that has been apparent since the demise of the Soviet Union but has escalated in the last decade or so. As Arseny Roginsky’s eloquent essay The Embrace of Stalinism shows, […]
Posted by Sarah Young on September 17, 2015
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2015/09/17/historical-memory-of-the-gulag-3-contested-memory/
Historical memory of the Gulag (2): Memorials, maps and other memory projects
Since the final years of the Soviet Union, memorializing the victims of the political repressions – in itself a curious formulation that indicates some of the problems associated with this subject – has remained a significant and, to a large extent, unresolved question. Historical memory projects can obviously have all sorts of different aims: the […]
Posted by Sarah Young on June 23, 2015
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2015/06/23/historical-memory-of-the-gulag-2-memorials-maps-and-other-memory-projects/
Historical memory of the Gulag (1): Memory books
I’ve been thinking about historical memory of the Gulag and the Stalinist repressions recently whilst working on my book, and have decided to put together a few posts of links relating to the subject. This is partly from my own need to organize the material coherently, and partly because an up-to-date list would, I hope, […]
Posted by Sarah Young on May 1, 2015
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2015/05/01/historical-memory-of-the-gulag-1-memory-books/