Newsweek recently published a fantastic slide show of pre-revolutionary photos from the Russian countryside.  Colour photography was still in its infancy at the time, and the colours have a slightly washed-out, ethereal feel to them.   The photographer’s name is Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, and you can read more about him and his photographic method at his wikipedia page.

[photo of Lev Tolstoy]

If you’d like to see even more, the Denver Post published a large number of them at this blog post.

As promised in class today, the source of several

useful and interesting essays on Gogol’ and ‘Shinel”

is Robert Maguire, Gogol from the twentieth century

 1 copy in the Ussher Library, this has the studies

of Eikhenbaum and Chizhevskii, as well as the study by

A. Slonimsky, ‘The Technique of the Comic in Gogol’

I wanted to pass on a few links following our discussion in today’s class.

The first is to a blog post from last year regarding Pushkin’s mythic status in the Russian cannon.  Specifically, Pushkin’s more sexually-charged poetry was suppressed in the Soviet Union in order to maintain his saint-like status.  The link can be found here.

There’s a Harvard scholar, Stephanie Sandler, who writes extensively on the myth of Pushkin in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.  The abstract from her book Commemorating Pushkin reads:

Two hundred years after his birth, Alexander Pushkin still issues a dynamic, liberating challenge to Russia’s cultural identity. His story has promised national coherence and meant artistic integrity in its seemingly purest form. Irreverent and polemical responses to Pushkin abound, but Russians retain a deep investment in Pushkin’s image.

Commemorating Pushkin argues that the emotional complexity of Russia’s relationship with Pushkin has informed both large-scale cultural institutions and the writings of talented individuals. It assesses twentieth-century museums, anniversary rituals, and films that keep the poet alive. It shows how Pushkin’s self-fashioning was exemplary for Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bitov, and Andrei Sinyavsky. And it goes beyond well-known figures to give names and histories to poets, novelists, actors, filmmakers, scholars, and museum workers who have sustained Russia’s myth of a national poet.

You can also find a great article by Sandler entitled “Sex, Death and Nation in the Strolls with Pushkin Controversy” at JSTOR here (you can log in no problem from an on-campus connection, and if you’re on campus you can log in with you college id through the library site).

cartoon Irishman ca 1920

We also only got to gloss over the school of literary study known as Imagology or Image Studies.  If you’re interested in going a little deeper in the issue of literary stereotypes, here is a great site run by Joep Leerssen, who did his PhD at UCD.

For the specific bit on the literary stereotypes of the Irish that I glossed in class today, you can click into the page on “Images – Compendium.”  At the bottom of that page there is a link for the survey article on the Irish, taken form the recently-published Imagology Compendium.

In today’s 19th century class, we discussed a possible reading of Lermontov’s HoT according the Chatman’s diagram of narrative elements (ie author, implied author, narrator, etc.).

The book that this comes from is Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1980), by Seymour Benjamin Chatman.  Here’s a passage from page 150 dealing with the concept of the “implied reader”:

[click on the image to see a larger version]

If this tickles your curiosity, you can read more of a preview version of the book here at Google Books.

In one of last week’s classes, we discussed the 19th-century psuedo science known as physiognomy, where one attempts to divine personality traits of a subject given their physical attributes.  This “science” was extremely popular in the 1830s in Russia, and certainly did seem to have influence upon Lermontov.

Most sources that treat physiognomy refer to it as a movements in the 18th and 19th centuries that was eventually roundly discredited.  But it is not as though it died out by the 20th century.

I recently stumbled across a bizarre extension of physiognomy into the 1960s – much farther on than one would have thought possible.  It involves the so-called “Ivy League Nude Posture Photos.”

Here’s the New York Times summary of these Photos, from 1995:

“The Smithsonian Institution has cut off all public access to a collection of nude photographs taken of generations of college students, some of whom went on to become leaders in American culture and government. The pictures at first were taken to study posture. Later they were made by a researcher examining what he believed to be a relationship between body shape and intelligence.”

If you’re interested in going any deeper into the issue, there is a summary article on the Harvard’s site (which was one of the schools involved) here.

If anyone is interested in going deeper into the topic of Lermontov and the Caucusus, there are a few old posts on this blog that you can check out.

There’s a map of Vladikavkaz up here, and a post on Lermontov’s Romantic Caucusus-themed paintings here.

If you like Chekhov, I have great news for you.  At this site here, you can listen to and download free podcasts of Chekhov short stories, read by Alan David Drake.  All in all, Drake records about 14 hours worth of Chekhov – great for the bus, the car, Christmas dinner, and your next house party.

Lady with a Dog (“Дама с собачкой”) can be found here.

The translations that Drake reads are in the public domain, meaning most of them are quite old – so you get ca 1885 Russian peasants who sound like either Dickensian chimney sweeps or London drawing room aesthetes. Such is the mixed legacy of the prolific Constance Garnett.

If you’re in the mood for some Russian-language Chekhov (and you probably will be after listening to Drake [otherwise a fantastic reader] miss every single stress in the Russian names), check out this podcast here of “Silly Frenchman” from UCLA. They even have the Russian-language version of the story up on the site in .pdf format, so you can follow along.

Comparing the way the two readers (one American, one Russian) approach their texts, I think we can argue that their tone has been influenced by the different histories of Chekhov’s reception in the West and in Russia.  In the West, he is known more for his psychological penetration as well as his influence upon Beckett-style drama.  As such, many presentations of the Cherry Orchard focus on a kind of restrained intensity of feeling.

In Russia, by contrast, his reception was much more bound up in the comedy of his shorter fiction (especially during his own day), as well as for advancing the cause of the peasant (during the Soviet Union).  The two Cherry Orchard productions I saw in Moscow both featured a lot more laughter than the two I have seen in the States.

Any other differences between the two reading styles?

Today in class we were discussing Lord Byron and the impact of his work upon Lermontov’s HoT.  If you have twenty minutes, check out this podcast on Lord Byron’s life.

It’s from the “Stuff you Missed in History Class” programme at HowStuffWorks.com.  They broadcast free, entertaining, and informative bits on history, and their site is well worth a look.  They’re very convenient to toss onto the mp3 player for the commute into town.

The programme is even rather popular: it’s currently ranked #13 in podcasts at the iTunes store.

I’d be interested to know if this helps shed any light upon Lermontov’s novel. I’d be even more interested to hear any critical responses to the podcast itself.

Also, I’ll be compiling a list of Russian-lit related podcasts soon, so let me know if you come across any interesting ones around the Web.

http://news.kremlin.ru/video/256?page=2

Check out this video, it’s very interesting and caused huge publicity in Russia.

You can also check out the text which you can translate into English. Let me know what you thought

http://blog.kremlin.ru/post/35/transcript

Match this saturday 14th November at 4pm and is palyed in Moscow. Go Russia! Victuary is important for Russia to make it to World Cup 2010.