Category: writing

When Dragons Show Themselves

I finally managed to formulate my thoughts on translation as a practice in a more coherent and systematic fashion. It only took about eighteen years. The first idea came out in a Poroi essay published in 2005 after a conference at the University of Iowa on empathy. It seems to have been viewed 540 times… Continue reading When Dragons Show Themselves

Dostoevsky as Problem

My “Loving Russia” was published earlier this summer at The Massachusetts Review, with an epigraph from Susan Sontag’s 2000 New Yorker essay “Loving Russia.” Though the essay’s done and out in the world, it’s still something I’m working on, or maybe working through is the better expression. As part of that on-going work, I presented,… Continue reading Dostoevsky as Problem

Fulbright and Sea of Intimacy

I’ve been selected as a Fulbright Scholar to continue — to finish! — my book on the Adriatic. Watching the welcome videos from Donna Brazile and a senior official in the Department of State this morning, I couldn’t help feeling relieved that I did not receive this award during the presidency of the previous person… Continue reading Fulbright and Sea of Intimacy

Racializing Travel Narrative

Continuing my reading “around” the Adriatic, I picked up Jan Morris’s 1980 book The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage and read the parts that focus most on the Adriatic, skimming the other parts. The Venetian Empire in the period she’s interested in exploring included Cyprus, Crete, Constantinople for a brief moment in the 13th century,… Continue reading Racializing Travel Narrative

Two Islands

A colleague in Dalmatia, whom I have written about before here, mentioned a pair of islands in the Kvarner Gulf, the idea of which has fascinated me since last summer. A couple of weeks ago I finally got there. The islands are paired in a distinctive sense: one, which is called Sveti Petar has the… Continue reading Two Islands

Prospero in the Adriatic

I’ve been reading “around” the Adriatic as a way of imagining it, or rather seeing how it has been imagined. In this spirit, I picked up Lawrence Durrell’s 1945 book Prospero’s Cell. Durrell does not refer much to the Adriatic in his account. His Corfu, or rather Corcyra — he begins using the Latin name… Continue reading Prospero in the Adriatic

Olga

The final film in our Slavic series came on the day after we completed the 4th annual Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian Studies Conference, so while I was able to attend and take some notes, I was too wiped out to write anything about it, hence the delay in this final review. It was a wonderful series,… Continue reading Olga

Loving Russia

The Massachusetts Review will publish my essay “Loving Russia” in its summer 2023 issue. The title comes from a 2001 New Yorker essay by Susan Sontag called “Loving Dostoyevsky” and is an attempt to address — this does not feel like the right word — my own conflicted feelings regarding a subject to which I… Continue reading Loving Russia

Petrov’s Flu

I make a point of not reading anything about the films we’re showing as part of our Slavic film series before I watch them. The series has been organized by the Indiana Slavic department in collaboration with the Ryder Magazine and Film Series, in collaboration with the Byrnes Russian and East European Institute. Mostly this… Continue reading Petrov’s Flu