Very interesting.
Filed under: anarchism, culture, people, people I'd like to meet, philosophy, politics, russia
July 19, 2008 • 6:21 pm 0
kropotkin
Filed under: anarchism, culture, literature, people I'd like to meet, philosophy, russia, science, trivia
April 27, 2008 • 6:59 pm 0
Church of Old Bewick
January 31, 2008 • 1:16 pm 2
burns, lermontov and nabokov
On Tuesday the very nice Russian woman at work came over to speak to me. Somehow we got talking about Burns and Russia. She didn’t seem to realise that (at least at one time) Burns was very big in Russia (she’s only 25 and I’m talking the 1950s and 1960s). It came back to me as we spoke that my former employer John Aitkenhead had told me that one year he and some others travelled by car from Scotland to Moscow to attend a Burns supper there.
Anyway I wanted to substantiate some of this and did a search on robert burns and russia. The number one link returned was From Rabbie with love.
“Pushkin, the great Russian poet, had an edition of Burns in his library,” says Fedosov, “and Lermontov, a man who is as big as Pushkin in our literature and whose forebears came from Fife, even translated small bits from Ae Fond Kiss. Unfortunately Lermontov was killed in a duel so he couldn’t follow it up.”
I knew that Lermontov had Scottish family connections (on his mother’s side I thought) but not that they had come from Fife. Over to the Wikipedia to discover that the family name had been Learmonth. So that’s interesting fact number one—learmonth becomes lermontov.
Lermontov was killed in a duel in 1841 in a part of the Caucasus called Little Scotland, an area where Scottish missionaries had settled. So that was also interesting to learn from the Scotsman article.
What really interested me though was that Nabokov’s Pnin (a book of which I am somewhat fond) took Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time as its model.
I don’t know about you but I just love learning things like this.
Filed under: culture, literature, russia
