A cordial invitation to join us for some - famous and extremely tasty - gingerbread and a cup of tea tomorrow, Wed, 27th Jan, 6pm, in 5051.
Gorodetskie Pryaniki are handmade, beautifully decorated gingerbread pieces or loaves. The tradition of making pryaniki goes back as far as the 9th c., when they were sweetened with honey and berries, while spices began to be added in the 12-13th centuries. Festive pryaniki were made on specially carved wooden boards. Lots of traditions and sayings involve pryaniki, and today they are a very popular treat served with tea or coffee. Traditionally produced pryaniki, like those from Gorodets and Tula, are also given as souvernirs.
We have a beautifully decorated pryanik from Gorodets to share - so join us tomorrow.
A new translation of 'Tumbling Biddies' ('Vyvalivaiushiesia Starukhi') by Trinity's own Brigit McCone, followed by a short cartoon in which the biddies tumble chaotically from a stack of Russian classic literature - a nice twist on Kharms' radical demolition of the traditions of Russian prose.
A surrealist and absurdist avant-garde Anglophile (ironic as his own work anticipates later English surrealists such as Monty Python), who took his name 'Kharms' from the Russian pronunciation of 'Holmes' (as in Sherlock), Daniil Kharms (1905 - 1942) is known for his dark and twisted children's literature (resembling a Russian Roald Dahl), but also wrote work for adults that was far ahead of its time: the absurdist play 'Elizaveta Bam', a novella 'The Biddy' ('Starukha' - a disrespectful word for an old woman) and Russian Futurist poetry and sketches with 'The Union of Real Art' (OBERIU) which he himself founded.
In the 1930s, the wild experimentation of the Russian avant-garde and their attempts to reimagine life and ideology from the ground up, began to be persecuted and suppressed as anti-Soviet. A simpler, more obvious style of realistic propaganda, "Socialist Realism", took over and Kharms found himself arrested and exiled to Kursk as an anti-Soviet writer, forced afterwards to write his children's stories anonymously. In 1941, Kharms was arrested on suspicion of treason and confined in a psychiatric ward, where he died in 1942 during the Nazi blockade of Leningrad (St. Petersburg), probably of starvation.
'Tumbling Biddies' combines a taste for the surreal and absurd with what seems a comment on the casual cruelty of the Stalinist period, and on the desensitised apathy of onlookers to the many disappearances and deaths that characterised the time. Perhaps, after all, the meaninglessly repeated casual cruelties of a Kharms story best express the climate of the time:
Tumbling Biddies
An old biddy, out of excessive curiosity, slipped and tumbled from a window, splattering herself.
Another old biddy poked her head out to look at the splattered one and, from excessive curiosity, also took a tumble, splattering herself.
Later, from the window tumbled a third old biddy... then a fourth... and a fifth one.
By the time the sixth came tumbling out, I was sick of looking at them and took a stroll to Maltsevsky Market, where they say some blind cripple was given a knitted shawl.
Lectures focussing on the work of Daniil Kharms are among the topics covered by the department's evening course of lectures in Russian culture. Click on the 'Evening Courses' button to the left to find out more.
A short post celebrating the work of Pushkin's literary contemporaries, who helped to shape and inspire his writings, featuring new translations specially created for Trinity's Russian poetry evenings.
Vasily Zhukovsky (1783 - 1852)
Oh silent sea, oh azure sea,
I'm spellbound by your depths.
You live, you breathe with turbid love,
With thoughts that never rest.
Oh silent sea, oh azure sea,
Reveal to me deep mysteries:
What moves your boundless breast?
How breathes your labouring chest?
Do the far-off shining heavens
Draw you from your earthly strife,
When, filled with sweet and secret life,
You bask in their radiant presence?
Their azure brightness floods your face,
You burn with the rising and setting sun,
The clouds are gold in your embrace,
The glittering stars and you are one.
And when the dark clouds gather round
To steal the heavenly glow,
Your waves rise up, wild howls resound,
To shatter your gloomy foe...
The darkened clouds disperse away,
But filled with past alarm,
You long raise waves of anxiety -
And returning heaven's shining charm
Cannot bring you peace complete,
Your calm appearance is deceit.
Your deep abyss hides turbulent fevers
For love of the heavens, the ocean quivers.
Apart from his influence as a leading poet - shown by his poem 'The Sea' above and his lyrics to the national anthem of tsarist Russia - Zhukovsky was a famously skilled literary translator, bringing the work of West European writers to Russian readers from Homer's epic 'Odyssey' to leading German Romantics, crucially influencing the forms of modern Russian literature in its early development. Mentored by the famous Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin, Vasily Zhukovsky himself became tutor to the future tsar, Alexander II. He may have helped to instill the liberal ideals that inspired Alexander to abolish the institution of serfdom and earn the nickname of 'Liberator', and he certainly used his influence at court to protect and serve as patron to edgier talents like Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov and Alexander Herzen, even helping to buy the Ukrainian nationalist poet and icon Taras Shevchenko out of serfdom. Although the name of Zhukovsky is not very familiar outside of Russia, and his works rarely translated, it is no exaggeration to say that the Golden Age of Russian literature would not have been what it was without him.
Alexander Griboyedov (1795 - 1829)
Into what circles I'm driven by fate?
Circles of hell where my tormentors wait
To victimise me! ostracize me! Storytellers!
Gossiping traitors to love as well as
Ungainly connoisseurs, cunning laymen,
Malicious aged men and women
Grown stale on a diet of schemes and lies.
You brand me a madman with your loud cries!
You're right: he'll come through fire who
When staying just a day with you,
Breathing air with people of your kind
Would not be driven from his mind!
Away from Moscow! Out of these parts!
I seek a place for outraged hearts!
I'll go around the world in search
Get me a coach! Get me a coach!
Poet, composer, officer of a Hussar regiment and diplomatic envoy to Georgia and Persia, Alexander Griboyedov is today remembered as the author of the satirical verse comedy Woe from Wit. A snapshot of the tensions in Russia before the Decembrist Uprising of 1825 (a failed rebellion by mainly aristocratic advocates of democratic reform against the totalitarian tsarist regime), it shows the conservative, anti-reformist Famusov, the social-climbing hypocrite Molchalin and the liberal Anglophile Repetilov as typical types of Russian society at the time. Against all of them, the hero Chatsky is a sarcastic, disaffected cynic who would himself become the model for the 'superfluous man' type of Russian Romanticism. Banned by the censors in 1823, the play circulated freely in unauthorised manuscript copies (like a form of tsarist Samizdat') influencing later works like Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. Griboyedov saw his play staged only once, in an unofficial production by the garrison of Yerevan, Armenia, before he himself was murdered in an uprising against the Russian embassy in Tehran, Persia (now Iran). Mikhail Lermontov's decision to end 'A Hero of Our Time' by reporting his hero Pechorin's death on his way to Persia may be seen as a nod to Griboyedov, creator of Chatsky, the original hero of his time, played above by well-known Russian actor Oleg Menshikov (Burnt by the Sun, The Barber of Siberia). Click here for an article about Pushkin and the musical salon culture of the Golden Age.
Tuesday, 24 June 2014
Jacek
Dehnel in conversation
Join us for a literary meeting with Jacek Dehnel on Wednesday, July 2nd at
7pm in the Centre forCreative Practices (15 Lower Pembroke Street, Dublin 2).
The meeting will be moderated by Cathal McCabe, Chair of the
Polish-Irish Cultural Foundation.
All welcome. Admission free.
Jacek Dehnel (born 1980) is an award-winning poet, novelist, painter and translator.
In 2005 he was one of the youngest-ever winners of Poland's Koscielski Prize for
promising new writers. He studied Polish Literature at Warsaw University, and
wrote his PhD thesis on Philip Larkin in translation. His translations of
Larkin’s Collected
Poems appeared from Biuro Literackie in 2008. He has published
numerous collections of his own poetry which have been translated into English
and several other languages. Among his prize-winning novels novels are:
Lala, Balzakiana
and Saturn (the latter
available in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s acclaimed English translation). A leading translator
of English-language poetry into Polish, he has translated the work of W. H.
Auden, Philip Larkin and, among contemporary poets, George Szirtes and Cathal
McCabe. In 2011, Jacek Dehnel was nominated Young Ambassador for the Polish
Language.
Copies of Saturn in English
translation will be available for purchase on the night.
The event is organized by the Polish Embassy in Dublin in co-operation
with the Ireland-Poland Cultural Foundation.
We will be having a book auction as part of the end-of-year Slavonic Teaon Monday, 10th December, at 6.30 pm, in room
4017 (4th floor, Arts Building). All are welcome. If anyone has any
Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech books they would like to auction,
please bring them along!
Introducing Ирландская литература / Irish Literature in Russian Translation, a new dual-language journal that is published by the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, TCD, and the Gorky Literary Institute, Moscow, with support from Ireland Literature Exchange. It will be published every two years, both online and in print.
For more information, and to read the first issue, see www.irlandskayaliteratura.org
The journal will be launched on Thursday 22nd March at 7.30 pm in the Irish Writers' Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. All are welcome. RSVP to info@irlandskayaliteratura.org
Waterstones is to open a Russian-language "bookshop" within its flagship London Piccadilly store in February. The high street bookseller was bought by Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut’s A&NN Group in June last year, and the businessman was behind the idea to open the new bookshop—which will be called "Slova", Russian for "words".
It will be based on Piccadilly’s ground floor mezzanine level and contain nearly 5,000 titles, taking up 1,200 sq ft of space. Mamut also has a stake in Azbooka-Atticus, a Russian publisher, whose titles Waterstones will stock in Slova along with other Russian-language titles and Russian books in translation, covering areas such as history, art, poetry, fiction, biography and children’s. Slova will also be working closely with Academia Rossica, the Russian culture and arts foundation based in London, in planning author events, book launches and other activities.
The 'Inspiration' Centre of Russian Language and Culture invites you to the Irish launch of Olga Tolmacheva's collection of short stories 'Chudo' (in English 'Wonder' or 'Miracle'), with an exhibition of watercolours by the artist Tatyana Tsarik. The event will be held at 7pm on the 21st January 2012, in 'Inspiration, Muckross Park, Marlborough Road, Donnybrook, Dublin 4.
Olga Tolmacheva is a psychologist, journalist, writer and former television presenter, and this event offers Irish readers a rare opportunity to meet a contemporary Russian author and gain insight into the modern Russian literary world - to read a Russian-language interview with the author click here.
For more information on the event, and the work of the Inspiration Centre, visit their website www.inspirationdublin.com or email inspirationdublin@gmail.com
Blurb: The cultural, political, social and economic interaction between Ireland and Poland has a long and complex history. This volume hopes to contribute to an emerging debate around the issues concerned by looking at alternative frameworks for understanding the relationship between the two countries. While the topic has attracted growing interest among researchers from various disciplines in recent years, this is the first book dedicated to exploring this cultural relationship in the context of Polish migration to Ireland. The essays in this collection tease out significant strands that connect the two countries, including literature, visual media, education, politics and history. Examining Polish-Irish relations in their wider historical and cultural context allows for new definitions of Irish, Polish and European identities in the New Europe.
Contributors:John Belchem • Róisín Healy • Paul McNamara • Jonathan Murphy • John Merchant • Robert Looby • Joanna Rostek • Patrick Nugent • Bartlomiej Walczak • Liliana Kalinowska • Joanna Baumgart/Fiona Farr • Ewelina Debaene/Romana Kopečková • Rozalia Ligus • Tomasz Kamusella • Nanette Schuppers • Kinga Olszewska • Simon Warren
