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In Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella of life in a Soviet labor camp--the 1962 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , ushered into print by none other than Nikita Khrushchev--his protagonist has one particularly treasured possession. His spoon. The reader notices right away that Ivan Denisovich cherishes the spoon, though it may take a while to understand. Early in the text, instructed to wash the floors in the guardroom but not wanting to spend his own precious pre-work time to do the extra task, Ivan Denisovich removes his felt boots and sloshes a full bucket of water on the floor, annoying the guards. "Who washes the floor like that?!" they complain, and eventually agree that he should just sop up the water he has spilled and go back to his bunk. The perspicacious reader (Nabokov's favorite reader -- but that's a different post) noticed something other than the relations between guards and prisoner, than the argument over how best to wash a mud-encrust...

Death is funny. Not "ha-ha" funny, as we used to say when I was a kid, but funny odd, strange. I spend a lot of time thinking about death. That seems like a fairly obvious statement. After all, I teach Russian literature. When my now-sister-in-law heard that her brother was dating a Russian lit specialist, she famously asked: "Is she deep, or just depressed?" The answer is: neither. But even so, death is a big part of my life. Felix Lembersky, "Dusk: Matryona's House" Staraya Ladoga 1960-63 Writing my final exam bonus questions for my intro "Masterpieces of Russian Lit" course this spring -- questions about works we hadn't gotten to in class, but which I'd encouraged students to read anyway -- I began to wonder about my syllabus and the readings I choose. Here are the questions. Extra credit points:     1.      How and why does Mitya die in the story “Mitya’s Love”? (1+2)   2.      How and why does Matryona die in ...

Last night I gave a dorm talk at Ohio State to try to explain the Sochi Olympics. My task was made much easier by NBC.com and the opening ceremony alphabet sequence, which took the Cyrillic alphabet and that sweet little Russian girl and laid out a narrative of Russian history and the achievements of Russian science and culture. But as I went through the presentation, I realized that there were a number of odd choices in how to represent Russian culture through its letters. So I've picked a few alternatives that in my mind fill in some of the gaps that the Russian Olympic organizers left out.   А   The first letter of the Russian alphabet is A, which stands for Азбука, or alphabet. Makes sense -- when people think of the Russian language, one thing they fear is those 33 letters that seem so impenetrable -- like the Russian soul or the vast taiga. The video clip  takes us back to Cyril and Methodius who invented the Cyrillic alphabet, and thus to the roo...