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All posts tagged Tolstoy

Russians in London: Introduction

Over the next few weeks, I will be publishing a series of posts entitled ‘Russians in London’. The project came to mind when I was researching Dostoevsky and the Crystal Palace earlier this year. I started thinking about his description of Whitechapel and the Haymarket in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, and imagined him haunting […]

Forest palaces

I recently discovered a great website by a Russian photographer, Andrei Kuzman, or Qzmn. He specializes in travel photography, the Russian wilderness, and its architecture. It’s really worth exploring the site, whether you’ve ever been to Russia and long for the birch forests (I’m a city girl but the Russian countryside definitely speaks to me), […]

Marriage in late imperial Russia

Today I went to a really great seminar given by Barbara Alpern Engel at SSEES on marriage breakdown in the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II. Engel is very well known as a specialist on women’s history who, among other things, has written the brilliant Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia. […]

Russkii vestnik 1859

In terms of Russian literature, the big work of 1859 is Tolstoy’s Family Happiness, though I have to admit I think it’s dreadful, sentimental rubbish, probably the worst thing he ever wrote. On a more positive note, I’m happier to see Adam Bede, which is my favourite work of George Eliot’s (I’m not her biggest […]

Russkii vestnik 1863

Highlights of this year include Tolstoy’s The Cossacks and Polukushka. I have to admit I’ve never come across the latter before — I’m slightly on the fence about Tolstoy, so I never really get beyond the obvious things, although there are quite enough of those. There’s also part of a drama by Maikov called Three […]

Four short links: old Russian photos

I’ve been interested in old photos of Russia since visiting a fabulous exhibition at the Manezh in St Petersburg in late 2004. I still have vivid memories of pictures of the elderly Tolstoy riding his horse with his beard streaming, and a fascinating set of photos of the first trams in Petersburg. My love of […]

Russkii vestnik 1865

These volumes of Russkii vestnik feature a number of literary works, from chapters from War and Peace and poetry by Fet, Tiutchev and Viazemsky, to the continuation of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and, in the supplement, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. There are historical articles on Alexander I after 1812, the Pugachevshchina, and Lomonosov and the Academy […]

Russkii vestnik 1866

It’s hard to get beyond the literary contributions to Russkii vestnik for 1866, as it features both the first of Dostoevsky’s major novels, Crime and Punishment, and parts of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There are also poems by Fet and A. K. Tolstoy, and two works by Boborykin, The World of Success and In a […]

Russkii vestnik 1869

Russkii vestnik was published from 1856 to 1906. Founded by Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, who edited it until his death in 1887, it became one of the most influential literary-philosophical journals of the second half of the nineteenth century, publishing nearly all the great novels of that period: Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and […]

Russian journals on Google books

There are some amazing resources on Google books, which can really transform the way scholars work and particularly the time spent on locating materials. As a postgrad in the late 1990s, when I wanted to find out about the serial publication of The Idiot, I ended up having to consult the journal in a library […]