Twentieth-century links

It’s been a good month for this reader of Anglophone blogs about Russian culture. Sarah J. Young’s highlights from the BASEES conference include some interesting thoughts about form and content in Shalamov, as well as a discussion of Iurii Dombrovskii that complements this post at the Faculty of Useless Knowledge. I’ve finally worked my way through an interview with Jan Plamper and “blog conversation” about his book The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power. I’m impressed with what Russian History Blog can do. It feels a bit like traditional academic writing done faster, which is nice; if I could effortlessly compare a book review in, say, Slavic Review to all other reviews of the same book, and then hear the author’s response, and then the reviewers’ responses to the response, I would.

I didn’t know it until I read it, but if you put together everything I want in one blog post, it looks like this.