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All posts tagged Shalamov

Russian Literature and the Big Society

It comes as something of a relief to learn that the Observer’s story about the government linking research council funding to the study of the Big Society turns out to be exaggerated, but given that our funding is at the mercy of the AHRC’s decisions about research themes, which in turn are dictated by their need […]

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 […]

Top Ten Animals in Russian Literature

As I have suggested previously, animals have a significant place in Russian literature, and I think this is quite unusual, probably reflecting the greater proximity of Russia literature to its folklore roots than is the case with other literary cultures. Although obviously children’s stories in English (as in other languages), are full of animal characters, […]

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 […]

An Interview with Robert Chandler

The Road, Robert Chandler’s new collection of translations of Vasily Grossman’s short stories and essays, will be published by MacLehose Press on 14th October 2010. On Monday 4th October at 6.30pm, he will be giving a talk about Grossman at Pushkin House, 5a Bloomsbury Square, to mark the publication. Here I talk to Robert about Grossman’s writing […]

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 […]

Russkii vestnik 1868

The highlight of Russkii vestnik for 1868 was the publication of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, but other notable features are articles by N. A. Liubimov on advances in Physics, Hermann Laroche on Glinka, A. D. Gradovsky on Russian historical literature, and Gustave de Molinari (a regular contributor on European affairs) on the 1867 World Exhibition […]

Women, beauty and other things

The ambiguous treatment of some of Dostoevsky’s major themes was high on the menu in the first session on Thursday. Joe Andrew gave a very interesting paper on the ‘woman question’ in The Brothers Karamazov, discussing how marginalized the female characters are – in the central family grouping there are no mothers, daughters or sisters […]

Shalamov’s connections illustrated

And so, back to Shalamov. What I’m going to do is just take one story and show how the connections move out through the collections from there. My intention is more to show just what the connections are than to interpret them. You can start this process at pretty much any point, but I thought […]

Ephemerality and versionality

I know I said my next post would explore some aspects of the connections in Shalamov, and that will be coming up soon, but for now… At the inaugural UCL Centre for Digital Humanities Decoding Digital Humanities event, a wide-ranging discussion initiated by our reading of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age […]