Sutcliffe, Benjamin
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Recent Submissions
Item Criticism of contemporary women's prose. Bibliographical description
(2011-05-13) Sutcliffe, BenjaminItem Women's literacy in Old Russia: hypotheses and facts
(2011-05-13) Sutcliffe, BenjaminItem Writing The Woman’s Documentary Voice in Perestroika Gulag Narratives
(2011-05-10) Sutcliffe, BenjaminA substantial body of fictional and factual literature discusses labor camps, imprisonment, and exile as aspects of Russian culture both before and after 1917. However, while the Thaw opened public discussion of the Gulag, women’s responses have received far less attention than their male counterparts. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, the nebulous genre of life writing allowed women a framework for more visibly representing their experiences in the lageri.Item Publishing the Russian Soul? Women’s Provincial Literary Anthologies, 1990-1995
(2011-05-10) Sutcliffe, BenjaminFrom 1990 to 1995 four collections of women’s writing appeared in northwestern Russia: Mariia (two volumes: one issued in 1990 and the other in 1995), Zhena, kotoraia umela letat’ (The Wife Who Could Fly, 1993), and Russkaia dusha (Russian Soul, 1995). These volumes, all but ignored by Russian and Western critics, were published at the same time as a series of similar anthologies in Moscow. In the West this lack of attention is somewhat understandable – the prose, poetry, and essays from the provincial anthologies have not been translated.Item Liudmila Ulitskaia’s Literature of Tolerance
(2011-05-04) Sutcliffe, BenjaminWhen Liudmila Ulitskaia published The Funeral Party in 1997 the novella received the critical scrutiny warranted by the latest work of an already prominent figure in postSoviet letters. The plot, set in New York in the humid summer of 1991, revolves around the dying artist Alik and the crowd of friends, former and present lovers, and chance acquaintances gathering in his Chelsea loft. Booker Prize laureate Ol'ga Slavnikova misdiagnoses this narrative as an engaging failure: it attempts to achieve the impossible by trying to fill the void left by the deceased.Item Writing the Urals: Permanence and Ephemerality in Ol'ga Slavnikova’s 2017
(2011-05-04) Sutcliffe, BenjaminOl'ga Slavnikova’s novel 2017 (Vagrius, 2006) made her the second woman to win Russia’s coveted Booker Prize, garnering conflicting critical responses in the process. Many hurried to label the narrative a dystopia: 2017’s last hundred pages depict the centenary of the November ‘revolution’, chronicling how crowds commemorate the event by dressing up as Reds or Whites and slaughtering their enemies (Chantsev 287; Eliseeva 14). Other critics, and Slavnikova herself, see dystopia as only one strand in the work (Slavnikova ‘Mne ne terpitsia’, 18; Basinskii 13).