Tag "literature"

Marking Mikhail Sholokhov's 115th anniversary (1905-1984), linguists Boris Orekhov of the HSE and Natalya Velikanova of the Moscow State University confirmed his authorship of the epic novel about the Don Cossacks. The researchers were able to attribute the novel using the text distance measure proposed by John Burrows. Termed Burrows' Delta, it provides a simple and reliable method of attributing or confirming the authorship of various texts. 

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.