We had a talk Tuesday evening on women writers and translators, and the speaker mentioned a problem with biography in his research — some of these women wrote under pseudonyms, or anonymously, and even the ones whose names we know don’t necessarily have biographies. Our speaker’s project is to “recover” some of the names, but without knowing anything about the women themselves, it is difficult to make judgments about their work, their motivations, their influences, etc. In other words, to become known, someone must already know that they want to know you. In order to ascend to the rank of Writer, someone must write your Biography. Something the speaker said reminded me of Evgeny Bolkhovitinov and his project: a dictionary of Russian writers. Evgenii when he became Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia Son of a Voronezh priest, Evgeny had studied in Moscow at the Slavic Greek Latin Academy and at Moscow University. Interestingly for my purposes — and perhaps for Tuesday’s speak...
A blog about travel and staying put, reading and writing, food and food for thought.