Literary references

book background, history, literature

The business of comparing national literatures across languages and time is definitely tricky. Take the English 19th century prose from Jane Austen through Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Trollope, George Eliot, Hardy, to Joseph Conrad. By any yardstick it would be...

Rules for Writers to Help Them Write

literature, writing life

Many writers develop rules to help them write.  Sometimes such rules embody almost inhuman abilities in areas such as discipline.  Anthony Trollope would write several hours every morning, no matter what.  Once he finished a novel while he still had...

Etymology

book background, literature

There is something about etymology, the study of the history of words, which makes it difficult, once one has started to look up the origin of words, to stop. Perhaps it is because there is always another word that just begs to be looked up, and then another, and so...

100 Best Novels (A View from the UK)

Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky, literature, Tolstoy

By chance, I recently came across a list of “100 Novels Everyone Should Read” compiled by the UK publication “The Telegraph.  Putting together such lists and then arguing about them is mostly harmless fun.Looking at the list, my first thought was “What have I...

What’s with all those duels?

history, literature, Russia

The Russian literature of the 19th century is full of duels. Duels figured prominently as subjects in important works by all the major writers of the period: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov. Duels also killed Pushkin at 37 and Lermontov...

Literary References

history, literature, Russia

Tolstoy and ChekhovThe business of comparing national literatures across languages and time is anything but tricky. Take the English 19th century prose from Jane Austen through Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Trollope, George Eliot, Hardy, to Joseph Conrad. By any...