# aplin (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 1 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover aplin. Page: Feed: --- ## [Dostoevsky reading women writers](https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2026/07/25/dostoevsky-reading-women-writers/) _2026-07-25 · Erik McDonald · XIX век_ We’re used to thinking about how Dostoevsky read Pushkin, or Balzac, or Sand. But we hear less about what he made of Gan or Panaeva as writers. You can repeat this pattern for generations of nineteenth-century Russian writers. Russian men read Russian men, Western European men, and a handful of Western European women, but not—the \[…\] ## [Khvoshchinskaya in NLO](https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2026/07/10/khvoshchinskaya-in-nlo/) _2026-07-10 · Erik McDonald · XIX век_ Good news for readers of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya! A cluster of articles about her, compiled by Aleksei Vdovin, is out in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie: I’m excited to read all of these, and especially Vdovin and Verbitskaia’s piece, because I’ve spent the past few weeks alternating between reading a Khvoshchinskaya novel and listening to a Dostoevsky one, \[…\] ## [Words new to me: шарабан](https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2026/07/08/words-new-to-me-%d1%88%d0%b0%d1%80%d0%b0%d0%b1%d0%b0%d0%bd/) _2026-07-08 · Erik McDonald · XIX век_ Sharaban is like abazhur: it makes sense once you separate the French elements to char à bancs or abat-jour. You can find both charabanc and abat-jour in an English dictionary. The name char à bancs means carriage with benches, and it sounds like in France and England, these were a kind of nineteenth-century public transit. \[…\] ## [Pronouns in Dostoevsky](https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2026/06/17/pronouns-in-dostoevsky/) _2026-06-17 · Erik McDonald · XIX век_ Heaven knows my Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья, 1864) translation comparison was long enough without me getting back on this hobbyhorse, but I was keeping an eye on how the translators handled formal and informal pronouns. If you’ve read Notes in English and also speak Russian, what pronouns do you imagine were used between \[…\] ## [Translation comparison: Notes from Underground](https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2026/06/15/translation-comparison-notes-from-underground/) _2026-06-15 · Erik McDonald · XIX век_ “Of all the works of nineteenth-century Russian literature I have translated, without doubt Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground \[Записки из подполья, 1864\] remains the most challenging,” writes Michael R. Katz, rather to my surprise (xi). Shouldn’t a short work dominated by one voice, the voice of a disaffected educated man in a confessional mood, be easier \[…\] ## [Dostoevsky and math](https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2026/04/01/dostoevsky-and-math/) _2026-04-01 · Erik McDonald · XIX век_ Via the North American Dostoevsky Society on Bluesky, I’ve learned of a virtual talk by Michael Marsh-Soloway: “When Earthly Minds Contemplate Infinity,” this Thursday, April 2nd (tomorrow!), 4:30pm Eastern/3:30pm Central. Register here to get the Zoom link. I gather he reconstructs what Dostoevsky would have studied at the Main Engineering School in St. Petersburg in \[…\] ## [Translation comparison: The Comely Cook](https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2026/01/14/translation-comparison-the-comely-cook/) _2026-01-14 · Erik McDonald · XIX век_ Last summer I decided it wasn’t right to let Nikolai Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” (Бедная Лиза, 1792) represent the whole eighteenth century in a survey course. I doubted I’d be able to teach Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched Woman (Пригожая повариха, или Похождение развратной женщины, 1770), because what were the odds it \[…\] ## [Posts past and future](https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2026/01/10/posts-past-and-future/) _2026-01-10 · Erik McDonald · XIX век_ Programming notes: ## [Veltman in English](https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/veltman-in-english/) _2025-12-08 · Erik McDonald · XIX век_ I gripe a lot about how much effort is spent retranslating the same nineteenth-century novels—and I mean person-decades of work by people whose English style and Russian proficiency I envy—instead of translating what was unjustly passed by. But I should do less of that and more celebrating the lesser-known works people do translate and publish, \[…\] ## [CLI-first decentralized compute (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/B0VW97OhnqSX) _2025-12-08 · **Sponsored**_ Run and pay spare GPUs from the CLI — transcode, coinpay (DID+escrow), infernet (AI). ## [Full Stop](https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/full-stop/) _2025-11-21 · Erik McDonald · XIX век_ I recently got to talk to Anna Berman about translating Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s “Behind the Wall” (За стеною, 1862), a story I first learned about from her, and our conversation is at Full Stop.