Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
From Erik McDonald’s translation of It Didn’t Come Off (1867) by Ol’ga N. (Sophie Engelhardt, 1828-1894): Once I started a sentence this way: “I think…” Madame Petitpierre, my governess, interrupted me: “You think? In that case you will have dinner in…
Erik McDonald provides more detail on the share of serfs in the Russian population before the great peasant reform of 1861. From a slightly different angle, one can claim with some justification that in 1678, two years after the death of…
By default, the Russia word slivki means “cream” (only in the sense of the dairy product) but can also mean “little plums.” It has been claimed that Constance Garnett, the industrious translator of Russian classics into English, more than once…
Sozont I. Potugin, the character from Turgenev’s The Smoke quoted by Dmitry Bykov and Erik McDonald and discussed here and here on this blog, had much more sensible views than his grumbling remarks had initially suggested. Consider this exchange from…
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…