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Reading lists

I’ve started compiling reading lists on the two main areas of my current research: Gulag narratives and Dostoevsky. There are a couple of reasons for doing this. They will eventually, I hope, be decent resources for other people, but it’s also about keeping track of things for myself. They’re both very much in the initial  stages, and are likely to grow quite slowly, particularly at the moment when I don’t seem to have time to do anything.

The Dostoevsky list is of critical works, and I’m going to write a brief description/review for each entry. One of the things that will be enjoyable about doing this, I think, is that it won’t be as restrictive as writing formal reviews. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be rude about things, though, because I want it to be a list of what is best in Dostoevsky studies today, so if there’s good reason to be rude about something, it’s probably not going to make it on to the list in the first place. I’m sticking to books initially, but will probably expand it at some point to include articles.

The other list is called ‘Gulag narratives’, but this is very loosely conceived and includes not only narratives of exile, imprisonment and hard labour (to borrow the title of my MA course), from the pre-revolutionary as well as the Soviet era, but also works about the terror. So far I’m concentrating mainly on memoirs and fiction by witnesses (also broadly defined), but such genre distinctions are often questionable. Given that The Gulag Archipelago — which is as much history and polemic as personal or collective memoir — is already there, I may well start including other types of work, such as histories, and maybe critical works as well, while fiction written by writers who were not witnesses also has a place. I’m just writing short comments on each entry, giving a bit of background, and/or saying something about the text itself. Where I’ve found on-line versions of the Russian text (and the English, in a couple of places), I’ve put in links.

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by on December 13, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Sarah Young on December 13, 2009

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/12/13/reading-lists/

Varlam Shalamov on Literary Encyclopedia

Just a quick note to say that my article on Shalamov is now available on the Literary Encyclopedia, a rather good and steadily growing on-line resource. It’s subscription only, which is a real pity, because I think there are plenty of people outside universities who would find the site useful and interesting. Academics, particularly in the arts and humanities in Britain, spend a lot of time these days hand-wringing about the pressure to engage with a wider audience (and a lot of that pressure is indeed misplaced, as in the case of the current plans for ‘Impact’ in the Research Excellence Framework — I’m not going to put up links for that because it’s far too depressing, and if you don’t know about it already, your life won’t be improved by the knowledge), but there seems to be reluctance in a few quarters to embrace the possibilities that are available to us.

Anyway, this very much delayed article on Shalamov is the first thing I’ve written for the Literary Encyclopedia, but now I’ve got into the swing of things, more will follow — next up is Kolyma Tales, which should be there by mid-January.

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by on November 28, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Sarah Young on November 28, 2009

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/11/28/varlam-shalamov-on-literary-encyclopedia/

Not thrilled

Although I’m probably an intellectual snob in some ways, I’m quite happy to admit I enjoy a good thriller, particularly during term time when I get so exhausted that my bedtime reading has to be fairly undemanding. And given my fascination with all things Russian, I like reading about Russia in my spare time as well — intelligent books during the summer (this year, mostly art history), but usually by about week 3 of term such things are beyond me. So I’ve been keeping a copy of Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 (Simon & Schuster, 2008) for this very moment: what could be better than a novel about a serial killer in the Soviet Union? I know something about the case the novel is based on, having seen Citizen X, which is actually a rather good film. The reviews of Child 44 have been pretty good, and it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2008, so I had high hopes.

And yes, you’ve guessed it, they were dashed. It is in many ways an engaging read (though hardly Booker material, you would have thought), the gradual revelation of the central mystery is done well, and it does have an overall Russian flavour which makes it quite fun. But…

It started with the usual gripes, such as the use of the word ‘Gulags’ (see my post Gulag: Note to Writers and Editors (1)), and an occasional and annoying habit of throwing in Russian words and titles without any explanation for the non-Russian readers who will presumably make up the vast majority of the audience.

Then there are a few factual inaccuracies, one of the worst being the scene when the hero Leo Demidov and his wife are being sent off to the ‘Gulags’, where we read of ‘converted cattle carts’ and ‘several thousand prisoners on the platform’ of the railway station (p. 376). But this supposedly takes place on 11 July 1953, and there were no mass transportations at that time — it is well known that the Gulag began to be dismantled within days of Stalin’s death (in March of that year, about a third of the way through the novel), and never again operated on the same scale.

The original case took place between 1978 and 1990, and moving the novel back to the end of the Stalin era just seems to make it less plausible. Take the moral journey of Demidov, a dashing and idealistic MGB officer (yeah, right) who sees the light when he realizes innocent people are being arrested. What took him so long, we wonder? Can it really be that this is the first time he’s been involved in the interrogation of innocent citizens? Were there any idealists left by 1953? Surely, such as they were, they all perished in 1937? And another problem: even in the late Stalin era, an officer in Demidov’s position would hardly have been handled with such caution or given a chance to prove his innocence. The problem seems to be that the author wants the absolutist (although regularly changing) ideology of the Stalin period to coexist with the moral and political uncertainty of the immediate post-Stalin years, but the result is just a mishmash which doesn’t make much sense.

However, what really ruins the novel is the denouement, when the killer’s motivation is revealed (I won’t spoil it, in case you still want to read it). There is a logic to his crimes, but it’s insufficient; clearly he’s insane, and the origins of that are explained, but there’s still a gaping hole between that and the question of why he starts to commit these murders. And unlike in Crime and Punishment, say, where the gap between the motivation and the crime is the starting point for the psychological exploration of Raskol’nikov, in Child 44 it’s the end of reflection. Perhaps this is an unfair comparison. I don’t expect my bedtime crime novels to be Dostoevskian masterpieces (indeed, that would entirely defeat their function in my life), but I don’t like negligent writing whatever time of night it is.

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by on November 12, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Sarah Young on November 12, 2009

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/11/12/not-thrilled/

My work (3)

The articles and papers section (see list on the right), has a new addition, Shalamov’s symbolism, which I presented at a conference a couple of years ago. This is an on-going piece of work and ultimately it will form the basis of one of the chapters of my book on Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. Anyway, it finally gives me chance to talk a bit about my current work.

I’ve been studying Gulag narratives for several years and I’m interested in the works of various survivors and others who wrote about the Gulag — in particular, the experimental and generically peculiar writings associated with labour camp memoirs/experiences, from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead and Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island to, in the Soviet period, Grossman’s Everything Flows (look out for the wonderful new translation of this by Robert Chandler, soon to be published by NYRB), Abram Terts’s Voice from the Chorus and Sergei Dovlatov’s The Zone. One might also include Solzehnitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in this list. While I’m intermittently working on and teaching all these texts (in my MA course on labour camp prose), the six collections of short stories that form Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales fascinate me more than anything else, and as I realized that all my ideas were revolving around his work, I thought I’d better write a book on it. The others will have to wait.

For such an important writer, Shalamov has attracted very little critical attention, which is one very good reason for writing a book on him. Another is that the work that has been done on him so far never seems to get to the real point. A lot of it focuses narrowly on individual stories, and while there is material for analysis, the results are frequently one-dimensional and lack substance. At the other end of the scale, there are studies that analyse the structure of the tales as collections, but they tend to be so broad that the extraordinary nature of the stories — the combination of violence, terseness, and lyricism that borders on beauty in spite of the subject matter — tends to get lost altogether. There are other problems too, but I’ll leave those for another day.

It took me several years to learn how to read Shalamov and to understand that it’s all about the connections, the repetitions and the gaps between the stories, but now it seems to me quite obvious that it’s necessary to examine the parts in relation to the whole. I’m interrogating the texts in various ways in order to work out the significance of such features, focusing, for example, on recurring characters and themes. Most recently I’ve been word-crunching with concordances (my thanks to John Levin for setting these up for me) and am starting to think about other digital tools which will help me to both find, visualize and interpret the points of connection. The paper I’ve posted represents an earlier stage in the development of my analysis — as the title suggests, it’s about the significance of recurring symbolism, on both a structural and a thematic level.

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by on November 1, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Sarah Young on November 1, 2009

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/11/01/my-work-3/

Teaching Russian literature

One of the big dilemmas in teaching Russian literature at undergraduate level is the translation vs. original question. Clearly, most of us would like to see our students reading texts in the original, because there are always losses in translation, and because reading in the original helps develop language skills, but it presents various problems. Chief among these is the simple fact that even for final year undergraduates, reading texts in the original is difficult and time-consuming (not least because of the length of many of the great works of Russian literature — see my previous post on The Brothers Karamazov for the effect of this).  Often translations are used because courses are open to non-Russian department or non-Russian language students, and while one makes efforts to persuade the students who are learning Russian that they should read the original, it’s easy to see it from their point of view: why should they make that extra effort when they’re not going to get any extra credit for it? The result seems to be two sorts of compromise: either a shared pretence that the students are reading the works in Russian, when in fact we all know they’re using translations, or abandoning the great works altogether in favour of short and/or obscure works which we can expect them to read in Russian, or which don’t have translations at all, and thereby forcing the issue.

Which route you take largely depends on what you think a degree in Russian language and literature is for. Personally I believe that there are certain works of Russian literature which all students should read, and without which their education is incomplete. Some of these are really short (Pushkin’s and Gogol’s short stories, for instance, although they both present their own brand of linguistic difficulty), but some of them are pretty long (Tolstoi is relatively easy to read, but that doesn’t make tackling War and Peace any less daunting, but then that’s probably true of translations as well). So I tend to go for a halfway house: a mixture of short things the students are expected to read in Russian, and longer things where they will generally use translations, but we usually work with extracts in the original in class, so that they at least get a flavour. It’s still a compromise, and maybe I’m deluding myself and the students still in fact read everything in translation, but it’s the best solution I’ve got at the moment.

It is important, however, to do what one can to encourage reading in the original. Parallel text reading is a tried and tested method, and even forcing students to quote in Russian in essays can help, as they will have to do some reading in order to locate the quotations they’ve found in translations. Another good resource is Conradish.org, a website of Russian literature with reading aids: you click on words you don’t know in the text, and translations appear at the bottom (and there’s a new interface where you just hover your cursor over words and the translation pops up). The contents of the site are slightly patchy — there’s not a great deal of Pushkin or Lermontov, for example — but most of the ‘big’ works one would expect are there, and there’s an interesting section on collaborative translation, using Babel and Chekhov texts. I have a few minor gripes, such as the absence of any of Dostoevsky’s short stories (I would still maintain that a site like this is likelier to get students reading, say, ‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ or ‘A Meek Girl’ than The Idiot), but on the whole the selection available so far is pretty good. And it’s all downloadable and in the public domain, which is great. I hope it is still a work in progress and that it develops further. I’ll certainly be encouraging my students to use for my Russian Literature in Revolution course this year — Babel’s Red Cavalry, Olesha’s Envy, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and Platonov’s The Foundation Pit are all on there — and I’ll see how useful they find it.

Update (19/06/2013): some time ago, Conradish.net disappeared, and the link now leads to something else entirely. As far as I know, the website has ceased to existed altogether, although if anybody knows differently, I’d really appreciate it if you let me know. It was a great site into which a great deal of work had gone, and it’s a real loss.

Update (13/09/2015): Conradish.org is now back up on a new site. Many thanks to Johannes for alerting me to this.

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by on October 25, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Sarah Young on October 25, 2009

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/10/25/teaching-russian-literature/

Russian history under threat, again

I was planning to write about something entirely different today, but the arrest of Mikhail Suprun, a historian from Arkhangelsk who is researching Germans sent to the  Gulag in the Stalin era, is worrying news which deserves comment. This is the most recent in a series of attacks on academic freedom and integrity relating to the study of the Soviet era, following last year’s raid on the St Petersburg offices of Memorial, which I mentioned in a previous post, the establishment by Medvedev of a commission to prevent the so-called ‘falsification of history’ (here it is — sadly, most the interesting bits haven’t been translated), and the related closure of a major Russian history website, hrono.info (now fortunately back up and running).

We’ve got so used to the control of the media that when we read that that Russia’s last independent TV channels are being taken under state control, the only surprise is that they had lasted so long. The media is one thing, but scholarship is another, and this sort of political interference represents a return to the practices of the past, which is particularly alarming because it’s trying to suppress the memory and retelling of those very events.

In this light, even the odd apparently liberalizing step, such as in the recent news that Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is going to be taught as part of the Russian high school curriculum, looks so contrary to the general trend that one has to be suspicious; I wonder how it will be taught, and whether this is actually a move to control and neutralize its influence, a return to something akin to Stalinist reading circles, perhaps? The irony would certainly be in the Stalinist spirit.

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by on October 18, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Sarah Young on October 18, 2009

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/10/18/russian-history-under-threat-again/

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 Getman’s Gulag art.

The whole of Getman’s Gulag Collection can be found on the website of the Jamestown Foundation, which was founded in 1984 to support the activities of Soviet dissidents and has been accused of being anti-Russian. This may have been Getman’s choice, but for me this sort of presentation, which places the art in the service of a dubious and outdated policy agenda, undermines its relevance and diminishes its impact. Unfortunately, the same sort of approach has hindered the development of a sensible critical discourse on the literature of the Gulag, much of which appeared in translation in the sixties and seventies and was subject to vague, journalistic reporting that focused on fulminating against the evils of the Soviet empire and celebrating the triumph of the human spirit represented by the survivors’ writings, rather than actually interrogating the texts in an intelligent way. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag works suffered particularly from this tendency, and their reputation, sadly, has never really recovered, while Shalamov, who didn’t fit into the dissident mould, was largely ignored as a result, and again, this had a long standing impact on his reception.

Refuting the Jamestown Foundation’s claim that Getman’s art is the only visual record of the Gulag, the website of Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya’s extraordinary and evocative illustrations of her twelve years in the Gulag allows the pictures to speak for themselves. Only the introductory section of the website so far been translated into English (one hopes that ultimately the whole site will be translated), but the Kersnovskaya Foundation has made a number of images available under a Creative Commons License via Wikipedia, including this one of women huddled together in a bathhouse, ‘Banya on cold stone floor: even the guard in the fur coat didn’t look too warm’:

Kersnovskaya, Banya on cold stone floor

Kersnovskaya, Banya on cold stone floor

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by on October 3, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Sarah Young on October 3, 2009

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/10/03/gulag-art/

Gulag Museums

Although my own work focuses on textual and genre analysis and of Russian narratives of imprisonment and exile, that field obviously doesn’t exist in a vacuum. From the point of view of understanding both the workings of the system and some of the experiences of those caught up in it, in addition to all the memoirs and stories that have been published, on-line Gulag Museums offer some interesting perspectives.

Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives is a collaboration between George Mason University, Memorial Society Moscow, and the Gulag Museum in Perm. The main exhibit takes you through different aspects and stages of the Gulag as experienced by prisoners, featuring some famous memoirists and some less well known former prisoners. Here and in the archive, there are written texts, videos (unfortunately, last time I visited the site, none of the videos were visible), and audio interviews, as well as photos and pictures drawn and painted by some of the survivors. There is also an exhibit relating more specifically to the museum at Perm, with documents, photos and narrative concerning various aspects of the Gulag. Overall, the site offers a good introduction to the subject. The package of resources for teachers, created by the David Center at Harvard University and aimed at high school pupils, indicates that this is largely an educational rather than a specialist site, although features such as the podcasts on aspects of the Gulag by scholars will be welcome, when more materialize — there does not seem to have been much activity on that front in the last year.

The Virtual Gulag Museum is a project run by the Saint Petersburg Research and Information Centre Memorial, most recently famous for the police raid in which their enormous and hugely important archive was seized (fortunately the story ended happily with the return of the archive and the raid being declared illegal). The Virtual Gulag Museum is a registry of 29 Gulag museums in Russia and the former Soviet republics, and consists largely of images of items in the museums’ collections. The images vary considerably, with recent photos of former camps and equipment retrieved from them alongside archive images, items — both practical and decorative — made by prisoners during their sentences, which I found particularly moving, pictures of and by prisoners, and documents relating to the Gulag and dissidence. While it’s a fascinating collection, the documents do present a problem, because they are frequently unreadable. One wonders what response we can have to items we can see we should read, but are unable to. It’s as though we are only allowed only see it from a distance. As access that would otherwise be unavailable to many people is one of the great advantages of such on-line resources, this seems like an opportunity missed.

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by on September 22, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Sarah Young on September 22, 2009

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/09/22/gulag-museums/

My work (2)

I’ve added another piece of my research, this time a paper I delivered earlier this year as part a Gogol’ bicentenary panel at the BASEES annual conference. The paper was a bit of a departure from my current preoccupations, but the idea arose while I was teaching my final-year undergraduate course on Modern Russian Prose Fiction (1917-1941), when I noticed a strange recurrence of images of dismemberment and decapitation in a number of the texts we were studying: stories by Daniil Kharms and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, and Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. As soon as I started digging deeper, I realized that these were far from being the only such references in Russian literary works from around the 1920s and 1930s. It seems obvious that all these works lead back to Gogol’s short story The Nose, and the paper explores some of the themes suggested by this connection.

Although I think I’m reasonably well adjusted (for an academic), this is not the first time I’ve written about dismemberment. My article ‘The Convict Unbound: The Body of Identity in Gulag Narratives’, Gulag Studies, 1 (2008), 57-75 (sadly not available online) examines the significance of acts and fantasies of self-mutilation in Shalamov’s stories.

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by on September 13, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Sarah Young on September 13, 2009

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/09/13/my-work-2/

Gulag: Note to writers and editors (2)

The incorrect use of ‘Gulag’ pales into insignificance when compared to the remarkable inappropriateness with which it is employed at times. When I recently received a Google News Alert directing me to an article titled What you need to know to survive the airlines’ gulag, I innocently imagined I had reached the nadir of Gulag references. And then the other day this popped up in my inbox: Escape from the Girl Group Gulag. I’m not even sure what the author is trying to say here, because ‘Gulag’ doesn’t appear in the body of the article. Perhaps she mean ‘ghetto’, but that doesn’t really fit either.

And it struck me that since Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago popularized the term outside Russia, the meaning of ‘Gulag’ has in fact changed. Once upon a time, it signified an arbitrary and brutal system of incarceration, but now it seems to mean ‘something mildly unpleasant in which I’d rather not be involved’, and the more outlandish the application the better.  How did this happen? It’s not just that it’s trivializing, as a comment to my previous post says. It suggests a total loss of perspective on our largely very comfortable lives, a belief that every minor inconvenience entitles one to a place on the Tragic Life Stories shelf in the local bookshop.

Ruth Derksen Siemens also suggests that ‘Holocaust’ would not be used in the same way, but that is far from being the case, as Hillary Clinton proved last year.  The problem of comparing the Gulag to the Holocaust is another can of worms altogether. More on that anon.

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by on September 9, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by Sarah Young on September 9, 2009

https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2009/09/09/gulag-note-to-writers-and-editors-2/

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