Now I’ve recovered from the unbearable strain of watching Crystal Palace’s game against Sheffield Wednesday and can breathe a sigh of relief as we’ve avoided relegation, I can get back to the Crystal Palace itself and continue my musings on some of its representations in literature. The Crystal Palace first appeared in fiction in the […]
All posts tagged Dostoevsky
Crystal Palace Literature
Posted by Sarah Young on May 2, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/05/02/crystal-palace-literature/
The Crystal Palace in Russian Literature (2)
I think the general assumption is that Chernyshevsky’s use of the Crystal Palace as the basis for his utopian vision riled Dostoevsky so much that he then included in the polemic against rational egoism in Notes from Underground (Russian text here). But by the time What is to be Done? was published, Dostoevsky had already visited […]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 22, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/04/22/the-crystal-palace-in-russian-literature-2/
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
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/04/20/crystal-palace-russian-literature-1/
Villains and Victims
I’ve just got back from a conference at the University of Nottingham, organized by Sarah Badcock in the History department, entitled ‘Villains and Victims: Justice, violence and retribution in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia.’ It was a small, workshop-style conference with a couple of dozen participants, and like many of the other people there, […]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 8, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/04/08/villains-and-victims/
Blogging from BASEES
The end of term has arrived and with it the BASEES annual conference, so here I am in Cambridge in the slightly unlovely environs and overheated rooms of Fitzwilliam College. To be fair, they have made a lot of improvements to the college since I first visited BASEES as a tender postgrad, and it is […]
Posted by Sarah Young on March 27, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/03/27/blogging-from-basees/
Dostoevsky, the biography
I’m currently reading Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton University Press, 2010), the abridged version of his five-volume biography. So far so good; it preserves a lot of the best features of the original work, in particular the focus on Dostoevsky’s intellectual development and role of the intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Russian life. […]
Posted by Sarah Young on March 10, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/03/10/dostoevsky-the-biography/
Making and using concordances
I’ve been using digital concordances to analyse word frequency in literary texts for quite some time. While I was working on my PhD thesis, on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in the late nineties, I regularly used the Petrozavodsk State University on-line Dostoevsky concordance, as mentioned in a previous post. The site was pretty new at the time, […]
Posted by Sarah Young on February 27, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/02/27/making-and-using-concordances/
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
https://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
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/01/26/crime-and-punishment-sonia-and-prostitution/