Briefly. Dostoyevsky on one page.

I have only just realised that I may have confused the readers with the title of this earlier post, Dostoyevsky on one page. I didn't mean one paper page, which takes 200-500 words, but one internet page, which takes the whole of Crime and Punishment, all 211,591 words of the novel.

Dostoyevsky, 1872.

To compensate, I'd like to recommend an invaluable Russian resource, Брифли. Краткое содержание книг at Briefly.ru. It is in Russian only but these days you can always use machine translation. Briefly offers condensed summaries of world's classic novels. Crime and Punishment, for example, is summarised in 1500 words. Briefly also gives estimated times you'd need to read the summary and the whole book. In the case of Crime and Punishment, it is 5-10 minutes for the summary and 8-9 hours to read the novel in full.

When I first found Briefly I thought it was a collection of students' cribs, but it is based on a printed book, All the Masterpieces of World Literature in Short Summaries, compiled and edited by V.I. Novikov ("Все шедевры мировой литературы в кратком изложении. Сюжеты и характеры", ред. и сост. В.И.Новиков, М., "Олимп"-АСТ, 1996.)

If you are a student too busy to read great novels in full or want to impress a date with your knowledge of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, or if you are an honest reader and just want to refresh in your memory the plot of a book you've read twenty or thirty years ago, Briefly is for you.

Dostoyevsky on One Page.

Dickens and Dostoyevsky.

I was looking for a particular phrase in Crime and Punishment today. (Read A Simple Matter) The full text of Dostoyevsky's novel is on many Russian sites but they usually break it into chapters or parts which makes it impossible to search the full body of text in one place, you have to go from page to page repeating the search.

After having spent some time going from site to site I found one where the whole novel is on one page, here, on Lib.ru/Классика website.

In most word processors, Pages, Word, Open Office, you can do a quick search in text by typing Command+F on a Mac or Control+F on a Windows machine, and then type a key word or phrase in the search window. Not everybody knows that the same trick works in internet browsers. Type the same command and a small search window opens within the browser. In Safari and Chrome it opens at the top, in Firefox it's at the bottom. Type in your key word and the window will show how many times it appears in the text, if any. Click on the arrows in the search window to go straight to the place in the text, no matter how long, where the word is used.

The collage with this post refers to the hoax started by 'Sophie Harvey' in the Dickensian. She claimed to have found a letter by Dostoyevsky describing his meeting with Dickens in London. A number of scholars and critics fell for it. Read Languagehat's post with a link to Eric Naiman's exhaustive investigation into the identity of hoaxer.

In the collage I put Dickens and Dostoyevsky over the photo of a meeting between Lenin and Stalin in 1922, famous for being radically 'photoshopped.' If reposting put in a link to this post.

Seventy Years Since Nazi Invasion of the USSR (a Soviet resource)

Russian version of this post is here

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, a tragic date deeply ingrained in the minds of Russians – 22 June 1941 (it was a Sunday).

The war left a huge legacy of literature, songs, music and graphic art. I have mentioned before (here) an important resource, the web-site Soviet Music (sovmusic.ru), which was recently reorganised to let visitors use it by historical periods (only the Russian language side of the site, the English language side is classified by theme). Its primary purpose is to preserve the original versions of Soviet patriotic songs, but it also contains records of speeches by war-time Soviet leaders and numerous posters. The Great Patriotic War section is here.

All files are free to download (read terms and conditions for limitations) and the full collection is available (for sale) on disc. 

Here is the link to the speech made on 22 June by the commissar for foreign affairs Vyacheslav Molotov. You can hear the nervousness, a shade of distress in his voice. It is also interesting that Molotov separates 'the German people, german workers' from the Nazi rulers. This internationalist motif was later drowned in the drumming up of nationalist, anti-German rhetoric. Molotov also evokes the patriotic theme, mentioning the invasion of Napoleon in 1812.

Stalin did not speak until 3 July. The closing words of Molotov's speech: 'Ours is a just cause. The enemy will be routed. Victory will be ours' are associated with Stalin, but they are in the middle of his speech and not as rhetorically stressed as in Molotov's version. They are in a subordinate clause, inside a bigger sentence. The confident 'Victory will be ours' ("Победа будет за нами") also appears in a slightly less powerful variation 'we will have to/must win' ("мы должны победить").

Molotov's text is here and Stalin's text is here.

This a YouTube video with Molotov's speech:

The Twenty Most Important Russian Reads (a list)

In principle I am against all sorts of rankings and 'top' lists. There is always a degree of subjectivity in them. And anyway, a well-educated reader can always tell good literature from bad, but still have personal preferences based on taste, interests, mood and, not least of all, age and experience.

Still, lists are useful as guides or for comparison or argument. 

The web-site Accredited Online Colleges sent me their recently published list The Twenty Most Important Russian Reads. It has the usual set of Tolstoys and Dostoyevskys. Anna Karenina is number one. For Pushkin they recommend Eugene Onegin, his most renowned work, though probably it is better to start with the great writer's prose, The Captain's Daughter for example (Amazon link, also available for downloading here in a 1914 translation as Marie: A Story of Russian Love).

But I was thrilled to see a few entries there that not always make it onto English language reading lists in Russian literature. In particular I'd endorse the choice of Lermontov's The Hero of Our Time (available for downloading in several digital formats, including Kindle, from Gutenberg, here).

I am not sure whether Nabokov needs several entries (Lolita and Pnin). Lolita, for example, was originally written in English and its Russian version reads a bit rushed and is full of anglicisms. However, in the current climate of 'pervs under beds', the Colleges endorsement is really commendable. 'Unfairly thrown around today as a pervert’s indulgence,' they write, 'Lolita is an absorbing book that truly encompasses the honesty, ego and controversy that can define 20th century literature. Plus, it reads pretty fast compared to other Russian books on this list.'

I loved to see the great innovator Vladimir Mayakovsky's A Cloud in Trousers (English text, Part 1 here) in poetry recommendations. The blurb is slightly confusing, though. It speaks of 'suffering under revolution', while the poem was written in 1915, well before the Russian revolution of 1917, and it is primarily a love poem where Mayakovsky seeks to find balance between the intimate and the social.

I think that translations of English poetry into Russian are worth recommending for students of Russian literature and language, for example, Shakespeare's sonnets (several sonnets in Pasternak's translation are here).

Some of the Russian books well-known in the West did not make it onto Accredited Colleges list:

- Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Heart of a Dog (Amazon link). The Master and Margarita, the novel with parallel stories of Jesus and Pontius and a visit by Satan to the Moscow of 1920s, is full of hilarious satire and moving romance. According to the American literary blog Languagehat it is 'one of the most widely loved novels of the last century'. It circulates in about a dozen different translations.

- Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don (Amazon link) is the Nobel prize-winning epic of cossack life before the revolution and during the first world war and the Russian civil war. Pete Seeger's Where Have All the Flowers Gone is based on an old cossack song quoted in the novel.

- Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (Amazon link) is the first modern antiutopia (or distopia), predating and partly inspiring Orwell and Huxley. 

There are other important works of literature that were created during the Soviet period, but are not as widely known as they deserve in my opinion. Here are a few I'd add:

- Yuri Trifonov's The House on the Embankment (Amazon  link), The Exchange, short stories. Trifonov is the deepest observer of the moral dilemmas of Soviet life;

- Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate (Amazon link). The war epic, described as the Soviet War and Peace.

- Valentin Katayev's The Diamond Crown of Mine is a fictionalised 1977 memoir of Russian literary life, mostly of the 1920s period, with practically all important writers appearing under nicknames. The book has not been translated into English in full as far as I know. It was severely criticised by some, mostly for what it isn't rather than for what it is. Read an analysis in English here and the full Russian text is here.

For lovers of poetry I'd recommend 1960s poets Andrei Voznessensky, Bella Akhmadulina and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Look for brilliant children's authors Kornei Chukovsky and Samuil Marshak, who translated many English nursery rhymes into Russian. I used them in teaching Russian to English speakers.

The Tale of Igor's Campaign is the 12th century poetic epic. Originally written in Old East Slavonic, it has several renditions in modern Russian and a few English translations, notably by Vladimir Nabokov (text here). It contains among other jewels Yaroslavna's Lament, included in Borodin's opera Prince Igor.

The recommendations include, somewhat surprisingly in what is supposed to be a list of Russian books, the American journalist David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, the account of the dying years of the Soviet Union. I've read it, it's a good book, but for a better grasp of Russian national character I'd recommend The Russians and The New Russians by Hedrick Smith (Amazon links).


Thanks to Emma Taylor for sending the link.






 Yaroslavna's Lament scene from the film version of the opera (1969):

Avoiding Cold War Binaries. New Books in Russian Studies.

New Books in Russia and Eurasia is an important, I might say invaluable, resource for analysts, researchers and students of Russia and surrounding regions.  This is how they introduce themselves:

'New Books in Russia and Eurasia, a channel in the New Books Network, interviews authors of new books in any academic field concerning the history, politics, economy, and culture of Russia and Eurasia.'

The website aggregates the multitude of works the flow of which it is often difficult to follow. Along with text reviews it has podcasts (free) of interviews with authors of new books in the field. It is run by Sean Guillory, the American historian at Northern Illinois University, who is known as the author-publisher of Sean’s Russia Blog.

I was excited to see there a review of Thomas de Waal's new book The Caucasus. An Introduction. De Waal and Carlotta Gall covered the Caucasus for the Moscow Times and wrote one of the best books on the war in Chechnya (the first war of 1994-96) published in Europe as Chechnya: A Small Victorious War and internationally as Chechnya: A Calamity in the Caucasus (links to Amazon). De Waal, whose views are not always welcomed in the countries he writes about, is one of the most knowledgeable experts on the region.

Here is an excerpt from the New Books review:

'On August 8, 2008 many Americans learned that Russia had gone to war with a mysterious country called Georgia over an even stranger territory called South Ossetia. Both Georgia and South Ossetia were located not on the southeastern seaboard of the United States, but in a mountainous region south of Russia called the Caucasus.  The war was short, a mere four days, but during that time it became an campaign issue between Barack Obama and John McCain, a moment made memorable when McCain declared “We are all Georgians now.” For the Cold Warriors of yesteryear the world was remade familiar: Russia was enemy #1 again, Mikheil Saakashvili’s was a victim of Russian imperialism, and the Cold War was back as if it had never left.

'Those familiar with the South Caucasus know that the region is allergic to Cold War binaries.  Its ethnic, linguistic, and religious complexity defy even the best social scientific models. Persistent conflicts mark the region.  Azerbaijan and Armenia are at odds over Nagorno-Karabakh.  Georgia has had to contend with seperatist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both Russian protectorates.  Of course, we can’t forget that the region also hosts two important energy pipelines – the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline – making the South Caucasus a geopolitical focus of the United States, the EU, and Russia.'

There is a podcast interview with de Waal.

Militera, an excellent Russian resource

I'd like to recommend a comprehensive Russian resource on military literature – "Военная литература" or Militera. Their home page is here.

The site is in Russian, but if you are a student of Russian history or enjoy reading in Russian, do bookmark, note down or otherwise remember it.

Militera has full texts of practically all Russian books on the second world war, fiction and non-fiction, biographies, memoires, academic studies, novels and poetry. Texts are indexed alphabetically by the author and by the subject (prose, poetry, military history etc.). There is a forum where questions can be posted. Most of the material covers the last war, the Great Patriotic war, as it is known in Russia, which is only natural for the nation that lost 27 million people during 1941-1945.

I found there the full text of Simonov's epic The Living and the Dead and Grossman's Life and Fate. It was a pleasure to see there good Russian translations of my favourite historical books: Antony Beevor's Stalingrad and especially Berlin, which caused some contorversy in Russia; Stephen Ambrose's D-Day and Eisenhower; and Barbara Tuchman's  The Guns of August.

The site is well-maintained and nicely laid out.

Google, but Yandex too: a one-stop language resource

Link to Yandex Dictionary home page

Google has dominated the English part of the internet for such a long time now, that  Western linguists often overlook tools and resources provided by search engines locally.

In Russian, one excellent language tool is on the long established search engine Yandex.ru (Яндекс). Among the many google-type service categories there is one called Словари (dictionaries). The search window there spans around a hundred general and topical on-line dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Students of Russian and linguists would find particularly useful dictionaries of Russian stresses (a source of numerous wailings!), etymology and synonyms. A side panel on the dictionary page gives instant translation of the word you are looking for into five main European languages plus Ukrainian and Latin. And there is an automated translation option too.

Users of online dictionaries, I am told, sometimes test the completeness and modernity of a given dictionary by checking if it includes 'unprintable expletives'. I am a bit old-fashioned myself and never use them, except for linguistic purposes.  But since the 90-s they are allowed on the internet and often in print. So, I made a search on Yandex dictionaries for the three top Russian unprintables - х.. (the male c word), п....(the female c word) and е/ё....(the f word). None is included anywhere in the listed dictionaries! Luckily, for old hats like myself, the dictionary world is still dominated by 'prudes and prejudice'.

Another test of modernity is to check if anglo-barbarisms that sprung off the internet are there. With a sigh of relief I watched the search bringing 'no results' for the four social networking  words widely used by Russian users of LiveJournal (Лижет or ЖЖ,  as it is referred to by "юзеры"), the most popular blog platform in the country.

френд - friend. No results, with verb forms зафрендить, пофрендиться - to include in the list of friends, разфрендить, отфрендить - drop from the list of friends. It is interesting that the Russian word друг (drug as in Clockwork Orange) has managed to resist being adopted for internet usage, perhaps because of its stronger than in English connotation of closeness, or because of its (also strong) masculine gender assignment.

кат - cut (as in the cutout of a long internet text) only brought the archaic meaning of  палач (executioner)

скрин - screen (as in screening of comments etc., also already verbalised as расскринить - unscreen, заскринить - put behind screen) brought back only a regional listing from Dahl's (Даль) dictionary - South Russian/Ukrainian короб, ларец (box, small trunk).

бан - ban (as in blocking someone from seeing or following your blog) only provided a list of Chinese and other Asian historical figures.

It is possible, that some resources are not listed there. I could not find a frequency resource for example, nor a dictionary where words are grouped by their endings. But the convenience of having a one-stop shop for words and reference is very attractive.