Links

• Lots of good stuff in Elizabeth Banks’s “Those crazy Americans, of course Pushkin’s not black!” I didn’t know there was a Soviet Afro-Asian writers’ organization or a mulatto section in Cuban bookstores. Also, she discusses Anne Lounsbery on the African-American press exploring Pushkin as “a black man owning white bonded labourers.”
• Ask Baron Brambeus: Swedish is a fake.
• An excellent site from Gesine Argent, Derek Offord, and Vladislav Rjéoutski at the University of Bristol on the History of the French Language in Russia (also via Languagehat).
• Russian Tumble, a fairly new blog from John Dougherty whose name comes from a mnemonic for metrical feet (“trochees rush and tumble”). Among other things he touches on Pushkin and talks about translation. He also led me to this video of the Smolny Cathedral Choir performing “Aluminum Cucumbers” by Kino.