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All posts tagged St Petersburg

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 […]

Re-reading Crime and Punishment: Dostoevsky’s spaces

The process of re-reading a novel is simultaneously frustrating and interesting. It’s frustrating because there are too many books out there, and too little time to read them, so returning to ones you’ve already read is always accompanied by a depressing awareness that you’re getting further away from others you’d like to read — I […]

The Crocodile and the Crystal Palace: a whimsy

Some of the best ideas are destined never to make it into print. They’re usually the ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ ideas, that you know probably aren’t true, and even if they are, there’s no way you’re ever going to prove them. At the same time you don’t want to let them go altogether. And […]

Imagining St Petersburg

I’ve finally got round to reading Solomon Volkov’s St Petersburg: A Cultural History (Simon & Schuster, 1995). I’ve felt a bit ashamed that I haven’t managed to read it before, but since I reached the half-way point I’ve changed my mind about how important it is, for me at least. It mainly deals with twentieth-century […]

Two articles

Russian literature is featuring more than usual in The Guardian this week. First, sadly, the obituary of the poet Elena Shvarts, one of the great heirs to the Petersburg tradition of Russian literature. Second, an article about Vasily Grossman to mark the British publication of Robert Chandler’s translation of Everything Flows (read it — it’s extraordinary!). […]

Four short links: the Stalin era

1. Stalinka: Digital Archive of Staliniana. Lots of images (593 to be precise), including photos, posters, paintings, cartoons, and even a few pictures from the Blue Noses Group’s 2007 Naked Truth series (if you’ve never seen them, and aren’t easily offended, do take a look). Those works notwithstanding, I’m somewhat dubious about the concept of […]

Four short links: resources on pre-revolutionary Russia

1. Russian Visual Arts: Art Criticism in Context, 1814-1909. Nice research archive of images and texts from the period, with lots of search options. Good for finding interesting and unexpected things, though occasionally difficult to find the images you’re actually looking for. A lot of the images are in black and white, which seems odd […]

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 […]

Four short links: Dostoevsky

1. The Complete Works of Dostoevsky. A really pioneering website; the concordance and Gospel, with Dostoevsky’s textual markers, are a must for any scholar. It’s been around for years, and used to be very slow (in the late nineties when I was working on my PhD, searches were best conducted after midnight — at other […]

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 […]