Russian literary classics set in 2020: updates to Russia’s greatest books

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village

Fiona Bell is a literary translator and scholar of Russian literature, based in Oxford. She won a highly competitive fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 2018, and her translation of Natalia Meshchaninova’s Stories received a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. If you are a fan of the great Russian classics you will enjoy her entertaining article for Points of case where she imagines these set in current – pandemic – times. Think Prince Myshkin disregarding travel restrictions and setting off for Russia from Switzerland (“The idiot”), Anna and Vronsky exasperated with being quarantined together for months (“Anna Karenina”), and Raskolnikov visiting the old pawnbroker woman without wearing a mask (“Crime and punishment”)… Read more

See also our previous articles about Covid-19 and how it has affected our language and life-style:

“The new forms of living, working and socializing during the current pandemic have engendered a crop of neologisms”

“Elephant in the zoom, Le Creuset wrist, and cough-shaming: how Covid lingo is creeping into our every day language”

“In the current health crisis accurately describing what we are asking of people is crucial: why the term “social distancing” should be changed”

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