Nora Favorov is a freelance, professional translator working in the Russian>English market and is an active member of the American Translator Association. She recently took some time from her piles of manuscripts to talk about how she came to work in her profession and what it’s like to work in a profession that often must bridge art […]
During the 20th century, communist parties assumed state power in Russia and a number of Central and East European countries. The communist leadership of these nations imposed socialist realism as official doctrine governing artistic production. The ruling parties’ ideology emphasized human rationality as the means for creating a well-ordered socialist society, which would be free of […]
Comparative criticism of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is a continuous dialog that has been, and continues to be, a useful means for understanding the work of both authors. The reasons for frequent comparison are numerous, but perhaps the most important factor is that these two authors present the unique condition of offering the perspectives of two […]
In February of 1902 Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter to his editor that if the censor cut or changed even one word of his short story “The Bishop,” Chekhov would not authorize its publication (Brown 12). Such a bold authorial demand suggests that multifaceted significance to every detail underlies a seemingly simple account of […]
In A.D. 1185, as the Kievan Rus Empire was starting to deteriorate, a little known prince on the eastern Russian borders led his outnumbered men into battle against Mongolian invaders, the Polovtsians (Kumans). This battle and its aftermath would become the topic of the Russian literary epic, “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign.” Its conclusion was […]
Book Review: Lazar Fleishman, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics (London, England; 1990) 359 pages In Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics, Lazar Fleishman provides his reader with an in-depth look at the novelist and poet Boris Pasternak, beginning with his origins as a child musician and concluding with his receipt, and rejection of, the Nobel […]
Susanna Weygandt is an acting student at Bryn Mawr College who is studying currently at GITIS. SRAS: Introduce yourself to us, what is your background and what are your future plans? Susanna: I started taking Russian at Bryn Mawr College in fall of 2002. I studied one summer in Vladimir with another program after my […]
Few symbols in literature are more evocative than blood. Its presence can conjure up fear, anger, sadness, confusion, and a host of other emotions in a reader. Blood seems to have a hold on the human psyche that is very nearly universal. Dostoevsky was no stranger to this concept. His novel Crime and Punishment makes frequent and […]
Fyodor Dostoevsky is best known for four novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov. Despite the fourteen-year gap between when he wrote the first, Crime and Punishment, and the last, The Brothers Karamazov, the similar themes in Dostoevsky’s writings remain constant. The themes that exist in both these novels are very alike and […]
