I had other plans yesterday, but was feeling far too tired and depressed to concentrate on the writing I was supposed to be doing. So, to take my mind off present-day violent criminality at home, I started thinking about violent criminality more than a hundred years ago on the other side of the world… I recently […]
All posts tagged Gulag
Doroshevich on Sakhalin
Posted by Sarah Young on August 10, 2011
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/08/10/doroshevich-on-sakhalin/
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 […]
Posted by Sarah Young on June 4, 2011
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/06/04/repetition-repetition-repetition/
Translating Shalamov
My translation of Shalamov’s story Resurrection of the Larch has been published in the literary journal Cardinal Points. I’ve also written a short piece on Shalamov for the journal. I don’t intend to repeat what I said there, but I would like to make a couple of additional observations. Although this is the first translation […]
Posted by Sarah Young on May 4, 2011
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/05/04/translating-shalamov/
BASEES highlights
I was only able to visit a small number of panels at BASEES last weekend, and the ones I chose were a bit of a departure from my usual interests, but there were some very good papers. I was sorry to miss the first half of Hubert Bergmann’s paper on Russophilia in the German youth […]
Posted by Sarah Young on April 5, 2011
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/04/05/basees-highlights/
Hughesovka revisited
Finding the concept of Welsh Noir rather appealing, I’ve been meaning to get round to reading Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth novels, featuring gumshoe Louie Knight, for some time. But it was only when I picked up a copy of the latest addition to the series, From Aberystwyth With Love, that I realized its true significance. I had anticipated […]
Posted by Sarah Young on March 18, 2011
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/03/18/hughesovka-revisited/
Blogs and academic publishing
This week has seen the launch of the Russian History Blog, a collaborative project that has already featured, among other things, a review of the Gulag escape film The Way Back, addressing questions surrounding the authenticity of the book it is based on, Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, and a discussion of a very significant […]
Posted by Sarah Young on February 20, 2011
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/02/20/blogs-academic-publishing/
Top Ten Murders in Russian Literature
This is the first in a new occasional series in which I’ll look at different aspects of Russian literature through a ‘Top Ten’, and hopefully give people a few reading ideas. My main rule is that writers may only have one entry in any given list. Which makes my first subject slightly trickier than it […]
Posted by Sarah Young on February 11, 2011
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/02/11/top-ten-murders-in-russian-literature/
Vavilov and the Pavlovsk Experimental Station
My knowledge of science in Russia is pretty limited. Like most students of Russian literature, I know that Dmitry Mendeleev, of periodic table fame, was the father-in-law of the poet Alexander Blok. Shalamov, in his story Courses, tells the tale of having to pass an oral exam in Chemistry, his weakest subject, in order to […]
Posted by Sarah Young on September 20, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/09/20/vavilov-and-the-pavlovsk-experimental-station/
Siberian prison and exile: two studies
I’m currently working on revisions to an article on nineteenth-century narratives of prison and exile (see my previous posts on an earlier stage of work on this and on the conference where I presented it), and in the process of completing my reading, two works have stood out in different ways: Sergei Maksimov’s Sibir’ i […]
Posted by Sarah Young on July 26, 2010
https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/07/26/siberian-prison-and-exile-two-studies/
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/