And now, to end my ‘After the Ball/Zholkovsky’ rant…

Here are the titles of those books Zholkovsky compares ‘After the Ball’ to
The first is by Mikhail Zoshchenko, published in 1929, and is called “Lady with Flowers”, which I presume is “Dama s tsveti” (or whatever the instrumental case may be) in the original Russian.
The second is a memoir by Eugenia Ginzberg called ‘Paradise Under [...]

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Before and After ‘After the Ball’

Just a brief run through of information on ‘After the Ball’. This may come in useful for studying later on…
BEFORE:
-Provincial Ball, 1840s
-Cultural symbolism (gloves, laws)
-Politics (hostess=Empress Elizabeth, father=Nicholas I)
-Father & Daughter connection in Ivan’s mind (similarity in looks, dance together)
-Ivan’s love for Varenka (excessive, idealistic)
-Hiding the truth (clothing motif, bronze garments, father’s boots)
AFTER:
-Ivan can’t sleep [...]

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Alexander Zholkovsky

Well, earlier this week I did a presentation on Zholkovsky’s critique of ‘After the Ball’, but who was this Zholkovsky guy???
There’s lots of info on him and his various publications at this link-
http://www.usc.edu/dept/las/sll/eng/ess/alik2.htm
as well as an email address if anyone wishes to contact him……
Also, if anyone is interested in reading the book he wrote which [...]

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Pushkin “I loved you”

This is the translation of Pushkin’s “I loved you”.
1)This is one of the versions I found (and it’s nearly how I translated it myself, so I’ll go with it;
( I got this from:  http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/alphabetical.html . There you can read many,many Russian poems in Russian and in English, AND listen to them! )
I loved you [...]

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Presentation on Gogol

Students can also copy sections of their classroom presentations and post them on the blog.This would be helpful for revision, and also to facilitate out-of-classroom discussion.

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