Bibliography on Tolkien Studies

I’ve finally published my bibliography on Tolkien studies, or, more exactly, a list of the ‘paper’ (not electronic) publications in Russian that appeared in the post-Soviet time and haven’t been posted in the Internet yet, and of the papers in English, French and German that can be found in Russian libraries. I am going to add new references every few months or so. Each update will be posted in the blog at the same time, so that it would be more easy to trace them 🙂

Escape from Besieged Leningrad and Perilous Journeys

This letter has been found in the papers of my Washington housing owner Lisa Ritchie. Its author experienced not only the hell of besieged Leningrad, but also imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, an escape from it and then a journey along Germany in the last months before the collapse of the Third Reich. The original text is a typescript in English, in British spelling. It has five pages, but since the third page, the pagination starts from the beginning. The letter is not signed, but Lisa thinks it was sent to her grandmother Elizavietta Hartmann Artamonoff by one of her friends soon after the Second World War had finished (the Artamonoff family moved from Russia to the USA in the early 1920s, but Lisa’s grandmother could leave the USSR only in 1933).

Below is the text of the letter with Lisa’s introduction and my comments (all of them are put in square brackets or placed in the endnotes). The author’s spelling and punctuation are kept without any change except obvious misprints. I kept also the original paragraphs, although in a newspaper publication of the letter, Lisa divided some of them into more short ones (she mentions this in her introduction).

Continue reading ‘Escape from Besieged Leningrad and Perilous Journeys’ »

The English Version of the Website is Finally Ready

Finally I’ve finished the English version of this website. It’s hardly possible to translate all the texts, but at least I made long annotations to the most interesting of them. I hope I haven’t made any serious mistakes, but I’ll be grateful for any comments, corrections, advice etc. 🙂

Special thanks to my Washington housing owner Lisa Ritchie and to my intern at the Kennan Institute, William La Follette, for their help with translating the texts. Without them, this work would have taken me much more time, and the result would be much worse than it actually is 🙂