Author Archives: Miriam Dobson
Death and Redemption
Over the past eighteen months I have come to realise that I’m not an ideal blogger in the sense that I’m not always very good at checking the internet! I’ve been busily writing my first thoughts about Death and Redemption … Continue reading
The Time of Women
Over the weekend I read, and greatly enjoyed, the recent translation of Elena Chizhova’s The Time of Women which won the Russian Booker Prize in 2009. Set in the early 1960s, the short novel tells the story of a “family” struggling … Continue reading
Aleshka the Baptist
This short blog is just to share what was – for me at least! - a fascinating intersection of different research interests. A number of years ago, when I was researching my PhD on the impact of de-Stalinisation, I worked with … Continue reading
A guard’s perspective: Dovlatov’s Zona
After a slightly longer blogging ‘vacation’ than I had intended, I used some of the Christmas break to catch up on the posts I missed. Like many others, I particularly enjoyed the Gulag Boss discussion. It motivated me to start … Continue reading
Forgive me, Natasha and Sergei!
In my first blog I wrote about the film The Way Back and the question of authenticity in memoirs. In the one of the responses which followed, I was directed towards Forgive Me, Natasha by Sergei Kourdakov. At first glance, … Continue reading
Cartier-Bresson in Moscow
Over the Easter weekend, I was reading The Guardian and came across a full-page photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1954. This stunning photograph was used the following year as the front cover … Continue reading
This is just a short blog to point any interested readers to the interview I recorded with Sean Guillory for his recently launched New Books in Russian Studies. I was pleased that my Khrushchev’s Cold Summer could still count as a new book, even … Continue reading
Images of Peace and Nuclear War
In the autumn I attended a conference on “Unthinking the Imaginary War: Intellectual Reflections of the Nuclear Age, 1945-1990” in London. The very same weekend another cohort of academics were attending a conference on “Accidental Armageddons: The Nuclear Crisis and … Continue reading
The Way Back: Cold War Emotions Revived?
Just before Christmas I saw the newly released The Way Back, in many ways a typical escape story. Directed by Peter Weir, the film tells the incredible story of how a young Polish officer, arrested in 1939 and sent … Continue reading
