This week saw the death following a road accident of the poet and activist Lev Rubinshteĭn (Rubinstein). Rubinshteĭn is most closely associated with Russia and especially Moscow, where he lived and died and and whose son he was most famous as through his status as one of the founders of Moscow conceptualism. Yet while Russia’s dissident and artistic scenes have lost a shining light through his death, Ukraine has also lost a friend (he consistently spoke out against Russian aggression again Ukraine) and a son too: Rubinshteĭn was born in Moscow to Jewish parents who both came from Ukraine. Continue reading “Lev Rubinshteĭn (1947-2024) : an anti-war Moscow poet with Ukrainian Jewish roots”
Tag: Russian literature
The war on Russian writers against the war on Ukraine
Next week will see the launch of collaborative work to bring some of the UL’s Ukrainian material together into a pop-up exhibition. This week, we will focus briefly again on the effect Russia’s war on Ukraine is having on its own country, this time through the prism of the leaked list of authors that the Moscow Dom Knigi bookshop network have apparently banned their staff from putting on display (a full ban is thankfully not in place); an article in Russian about this can be found here. The ban largely relates to the authors’ appearance on the list of ‘foreign agents’ (inoagenty) this blog has mentioned before, which ultimately boils down to their stance against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Continue reading “The war on Russian writers against the war on Ukraine”
Finding Balmont’s hand in a UL copy : the November 2021 Slavonic item of the month
This guest blog post is written by one of our UL Reading Room colleagues. David, also a learner of Russian, came across a hidden treasure in our older collections – a book of poetry by the poet Bal’mont (normally Balmont in English, as below) with inscriptions by the author.
Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont was a well known poet of the Silver age of Russian Literature. The last book he completed, Свѣтослуженіе (Svi︠e︡tosluzhenīe; Liturgy of light), was published in Harbin, Manchuria in June 1937 to coincide with Balmont’s 70th anniversary. Continue reading “Finding Balmont’s hand in a UL copy : the November 2021 Slavonic item of the month”
Extra Russian eresources now available
East View have opened up access to their Rossiĭskaia gazeta Digital Archive, Novaia gazeta Digital Archive, and Essential Russian Classics e-book collection to Cambridge staff and students until the 31st of July.
Out of the shadows : a talk on the UL’s Bunin book dedications (5pm, 28 May : all welcome)
Last autumn, the University Library exhibited several books signed by major Russian authors such as Ivan Bunin. Vera Tsareva-Brauner, of the University’s Slavonic Section, who found the autographs, will talk about her extraordinary discoveries on 28 May at 5pm in the Library. The talk is open to all.
Russian émigrés on paper : a new exhibition online and in the Library’s Entrance Hall
A new exhibition of Russian literary publications featuring handwritten dedications has opened today in the Library’s entrance hall and online. Out of the shadows : post-1917 Russian emigration rediscovered has been curated by Vera Tsareva-Brauner of the University’s Slavonic Studies Section. Vera found the first of the dedications while researching Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin, an unearthing which led to the five other inscriptions being brought to light again. It is wonderful to be able to celebrate these re-discovered treasures.
The six dedications (three by Bunin, one by Teffi, two by Tolstoi)
The exhibition marks the centenary of the start of the Russian Exodus. Following the revolutions of 1917, as many as three million people fled their native land, among them many of the best representatives of early 20th-century Russian culture. Most of the émigrés, including the writers Ivan Bunin, Aleksei Tolstoi and Nadezhda Teffi fled to Western Europe, where their determination to preserve their cultural heritage saw the effective creation of a Russia Abroad. The books which feature in the physical and online exhibition and which have never been shown before have original autographs by Bunin, Teffi, and Tolstoi.
The books will be on display in the Entrance Hall until 30 November 2018. The permanent online exhibition can be accessed here: https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/outoftheshadows/
Vera Tsareva-Brauner and Mel Bach
Lost and found : two September 2018 Slavonic items of the month
Last week, two 19th-century Russian books were brought to me by a Rare Books colleague who had found by chance that they had no record in the online catalogue. An invisible title is a librarian’s (and reader’s) nightmare – without catalogue records, we may as well be without books. Now that these two volumes, lost to readers (except those still dipping into the old physical guard book catalogues) for decades, have been found, I thought it would be appropriate to celebrate them in a blog post.
Continue reading “Lost and found : two September 2018 Slavonic items of the month”
Forms of modernism and samizdat : bibliographical notes on recent CamCREES seminars
The CamCREES bibliographical notes have lapsed of late, with many of the 2016 seminars missed due to trips away, but it is a pleasure to resurrect them to discuss the three seminars which the Lent Term provided – a talk on early Russian modernism and two on Soviet underground literature.
Trial access to Russian and Ukrainian e-resources : ‘Niva’, ‘Vestnik Evropy’, ‘Za vozvrashchenie na Rodinu’, and the Donetsk/Luhansk newspaper collection
The University Library has arranged trial access to four new electronic resources on offer from East View. Please send feedback to slavonic@lib.cam.ac.uk by the end of Tuesday 7 February to meet Accessions Committee deadlines. Resources with clear academic and student support will then be recommended to the Committee for purchase.
Access (available through Raven or within the cam domain) will last until 21 February. Details about each backfile/database follow, with individual links. All resources on trial can also be accessed through the general East View entry on this page. Continue reading “Trial access to Russian and Ukrainian e-resources : ‘Niva’, ‘Vestnik Evropy’, ‘Za vozvrashchenie na Rodinu’, and the Donetsk/Luhansk newspaper collection”
Three Soviet anthologies : the July 2016 Slavonic item(s) of the month
This month, we look at three old and new books. Old to the Cambridge system but new to the University Library, the three anthologies offer interesting glimpses into the publishing world of the post-WW2 Stalinist period.
Hundreds of Slavonic books have recently started to be transferred to the University Library from the Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty Library (MML) as the MML makes space for new books coming in to support courses taught by the Department of Slavonic Studies. The history of the MML and UL’s Slavonic collections – a subject for a separate blog post – means that the former holds many early and Soviet literary editions which the latter lacks. As a result, we are taking close to 100% of the books they have withdrawn which are not already in the UL, and it is a pleasure to be able to add these books to our collections. Listed below are three examples from the Soviet period. In all three, the parental guiding hand of the state is very clearly seen, and a paternalistic Stalin features in many of the anthologised works. Continue reading “Three Soviet anthologies : the July 2016 Slavonic item(s) of the month”
Languages across Borders 