Tag "literature"

On February 7, Professor Marcus Levitt (Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California, USA) visited the Faculty of Humanities to give a lecture about Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook. In his lecture, Professor Levitt examined the novel within the context of eighteenth-century Russian culture and, in particular, the tradition of ‘lubok’ literature.

Sometimes, minor errors take on major importance and actuallyinfluence how we perceive literaryclassics. A new collection of verse by Marina Tsvetaeva from Azbuka publishers provides a perfect example of this. The cover bears a photo of another woman that was taken from the Internet. Svetlana Saltanova, IQ.HSE portal editor and author of a book on Tsvetaeva, explains how the ‘fake’ came to be, and why readers no longer recognize or understand the real poet.

At the turn of the 20th century in Russia, public attitudes towards the creator of Sherlock Holmes went through changes even more dramatic than readers’ perceptions of the famous fictional detective. While initially op-ed writers and literary critics portrayed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a British militarist, colonialist and 'tabloid novelist', later, reviewers lauded his 'versatile and powerful talent' and welcomed his interest in Russia, according to Maria Krivosheina , lecturer at the HSE School of Philology.

Ivan Delazari, Associate Professor at HSE Department of Comparative Literature and Linguistics, gave a seminar on Shostakovich in Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction on October 16, 2018 at HSE St. Petersburg.

In 1937, an editorial team set up by the Pravdanewspaper produced the Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR [Works of the People of the USSR] poetry anthology, of which more than half were Russian translations of poems written in Armenian, Ukrainian, Kazakh and other languages spoken in different parts of the USSR. Designed to showcase cultural diversity, the anthology was in fact an example of colonial homogenisation. Translators and literary workers had tweaked the originals to suit metropolitan standards and their own ideals of good poetry, according to the Soviet Folklore as Translation Project by Elena Zemskova, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Philology.

The National Pushkin Museum at its famous home on on Moyka Embankment was the platform for the first Polish-Russian interdisciplinary seminar ‘Methods of Textual Criticism and Models of Poetics’. The seminar was co-organized by the museum, HSE in St. Petersburg, Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Vinogradov Institute of Russian Language, Russian Academy of Sciences.

HSE’s School of Linguistics, along with Samsung and the Leo Tolstoy State Museum, has developed a mobile application called ‘Living Pages,’ which offers users a new way of reading Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. The programme’s launch coincides with the Russia’s Year of Literature.

Associate Professor at the Department of Social History Oleg Voskoboynikov has won the Humanities Prize 2014 for his translation into Russian of French art historian Roland Recht’s Le croire et le voir: L'art des cathédrales, XIIe-XVe siècle (Believing and Seeing, The Art of Gothic Cathedrals) in a volume published by the HSE Publishing House. The prize was awarded by the French Ambassador to Russia, Jean-Maurice Ripert who signed a certificate at the ceremony for the winner to travel to France.