The war on Russian writers against the war on Ukraine

A blurry Leonid Parfenov at an event in London in 2011

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.

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.

Balmont’s portrait in the book

The book’s original cover

An example of Balmont’s correction

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.

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