Tag Turgenev

A nasty anecdote

Some three weeks ago, Himadri (the Argumentative Old Git) wrote about the change in his perception of Bruckner’s symphonies, which he used to love as a young man: But it struck me recently that it has been a long time…

Subterranean work

In 1877, Nikolai Nekrasov wrote an epigram, To the Author of Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, you have proven with patience and talentThat a woman should not have affairsEither with a sub-chamberlain or with an aide-de-campWhen she’s a wife and a mother.…

More Turgenev trivia

Following up on this, I must admit haven’t read the dramatic trilogy, The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard, and I’m not sure I’m going to, any time soon. The brothers Ostrovsky, who translated the work into Russian, faced difficult…

Ancient Russians abroad

If Henry James was the grand master of the Americans Abroad novel, Turgenev probably deserves the first prize in the pre-1917 Russians Abroad nomination. Other Russian majors used that setting, Gogol in Nights on the Villa, Dostoevsky in The Gambler,…

Turgenev trivia

Going back to Erik McDonald’s latest post with this quote from Dmitry Bykov, But except for the Sochi Olympics, Russia hasn’t made any powerful contributions to international culture recently, I’m not sure the Sochi Olympics was a contribution to anything but…

Turgenev as a household name

“The only thing you never turned you hand to // Was teaching English in a boarding school,” wrote Auden in his 1937 Letter to Lord Byron from Iceland. Dmitry Bykov, an influential and remarkably prolific Russian columnist, novelist and poet,…

Recommended reading

J. Cassian has translated Fear, a story by Guy de Maupassant. P.S. As J.C. points out, Maupassant wrote (at least) two stories entitled La Peur; this one is the lesser known. Knowing that lots of Maupassant have been translated into…

Ace, or the interlinguistic variation of brand names

Ace is a line of non-chlorine whitening detergents manufactured by Procter & Gamble and marketed in Europe (Western and Eastern), Middle East and Africa. It is in the National Health Institute’s household product database, so it might be available in…