Names of the Game

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:28:51 +0000

For the past six to seven months I have been leading the way for developing what we hope will be the first full blooded Foreign Literatures in America (FLA) archive based on receptions of Russian authors. While Peter Mallios has given Foreign Literatures in America its initial intellectual impetus, during the day to day research and archiving I have encountered innumerable small points of inquiry, seemingly mundane at first but then suddenly realized as potent obstacles to our research goals. Thus far and into the foreseeable future, no one hiccup in my process has crippled my efforts, but these moments raise questions the will ultimately enrich our archive and computational analysis in unexpected ways. For example, as the title of this entry suggests, the issue of names has raised a number of red flags. As one should expect, the transliteration of names from one alphabet into another is asking for trouble.

Let me provide a concrete case: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский, or perhaps better known to most readers here as Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. That particular transliteration is, for the moment, only my personal convention that I have imposed on the project until we turn to the question of our own choice of spellings, which will likely undo all of my personal preferences. Even Wikipedia disagrees with me, spelling the author’s name as Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky. Ultimately the difference here seems inconsequential; I believe those two spellings are currently the most widely accepted. As a result, one might think that to find reception documents I would only need to enter into an archival database a text string like “Dostoevsky” OR “Dostoyevsky”. If only it were so!

From the eighty-three reception documents about Dostoevsky that I have so far acquired, we have seen a huge variance in the historical transliteration of the author’s name. I will let some examples speak for themselves:

Dostoievksy
Dostojevski (from a review of an article in a Scandinavian periodical)
Dosteovsky (a misspelling?)
Dostoieffsky
Dostoevsky
Dostoyevsky
Dostoyefsky
Dostoievski
Dostoevskii

These are only a few of the variations that I have noted in passing during my research; as part of the digital analysis with which FLA is experimenting, we are painstakingly cataloguing spellings so that we may reflexively expand our research and analysis parameters. But from my own initial efforts, based on the examples that I have found and permutations that I have hypothesized, I have constructed an initial list of forty-five potential English spellings of the Russian writer’s last name:

Dosteoffski
Dosteoffskii
Dosteoffsky
Dosteofski
Dosteofskii
Dosteofsky
Dosteovski
Dosteovskii
Dosteovsky
Dostoeffski
Dostoeffskii
Dostoeffsky
Dostoefski
Dostoefskii
Dostoefsky
Dostoevski
Dostoevskii
Dostoevsky
Dostoieffski
Dostoieffskii
Dostoieffsky
Dostoiefski
Dostoiefskii
Dostoiefsky
Dostoievski
Dostoievskii
Dostoievsky
Dostojeffski
Dostojeffskii
Dostojeffsky
Dostojefski
Dostojefskii
Dostojefsky
Dostojevski
Dostojevskii
Dostojevsky
Dostoyeffski
Dostoyeffskii
Dostoyeffsky
Dostoyefski
Dostoyefskii
Dostoyefsky
Dostoyevski
Dostoyevskii
Dostoyevsky

This ad hoc list is likely to grow, and the spellings of first names and patronymics will geometrically complicate it. Антон Павлович Че́хов, or Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, poses a similar though less diverse problem: the Cyrilic character “Ч” (like the Greek “chi”) can be translitered as either “Ch” or “Tch”. Thus, I have seen both Chekhov and Tchekhov. The name of another famous author, Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й or “Leo” Tolstoy, presents a contrast to Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Whereas in English we almost always see only either “Tolstoy” or “Tolstoi,” the awkward sounding “Lev” in Russian has been transformed in a number of ways into the English alphabet. To date, I have seen “Lev,” “Leo,” “Lyof,” and even a few “Leons” in a single issue of Craftsman in which both the names “Leo Tolstoy” and “Leon Tolstoy” appear. While the names “Dostoevsky” and “Chekhov” are more singular signifiers, many figures with the name “Tolstoy” have circulated in the American cultural sphere: for example, Tolstoy’s children and relatives on the one hand, and the Russian science fiction writer Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy on the other.

Eventually, with a full catalog at our disposal, we will be able to conduct the most expansive searches for and analyses of reception articles based on our Russian authors functions. But, in addition, we now have to ask ourselves how might spelling variations inflect such reception? I imagine that this question and its kin will require both sophisticated digital analysis and humanist attention as we continue onward.

Nick Slaughter is a first year PhD student in English at the University of Maryland. He is an Executive Editor at the Foreign Literatures in America project.

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Reinventing the Boundaries of American Literature

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:34:58 +0000

I began my career as a graduate student in literature knowing that, with how literary studies stand now, I would have to choose for my focus between my two great fascinations: 19th-century Russian and 20th-century American literature. The former seemed pre-destined to remain a hobby or a neglected interest. But thanks to the inventiveness of Foreign Literatures in America as well as to the slippery categories of “foreign,” “literatures,” and “America(n)” that the project seeks to explore, I have found an exciting professional opportunity to open up scholarly avenues between these two disciplinary fields. No one, of course, could argue that so-called American literature exists outside a world genealogy of writing that looks to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky et al. as masters of their arts. Were an undergraduate or graduate student to pursue and argue for the importance of a Russian text’s influence on an American one, professors and the scholarly community could not deny the validity of such an argument. In such a transnational project, however, the sense remains that not only are geographic, political, and temporal boundaries crossed but also violated are the sometimes seemingly more strictly policed border of disciplinary fields. Although, beyond Foreign Literatures in America, American literary studies are moving in different ways toward boundary-troubling methodologies, the field retains a strong residual definition as constitutively, for example, “not-Russian,” not that which is foreign. The FLA project works to liberate us from that sensibility. Rather than passively accepting the borders of American literature as a line marking zones of inclusion and exclusion to be crossed, FLA makes the move of being all inclusive, recognizing the historicity of borders and disciplinary categories while illuminating and giving primacy of inquiry to the networks of cultural influence that underlie and overlay those categories. Thus, as Executive Editor of the FLA’s Russian Authors digital archive, I am given scholarly legitimacy as an (aspiring) Americanist to explore the impact of text authored outside the United States upon text authored within, all under the newly inclusive umbrella of American literary studies.

Of course, as one person in a large, ambitious but new and still growing project, I am still in the first stages of this Russian Authors archive. So far I’ve put together a foundational collection of reception materials about Dostoevsky from a variety of periodicals from 1900-1945. Tolstoy is my next subject, and already reception of his works have proved much more widespread, so I’ve extended my time frame from 1890-1960. Neither of these collections is intended to be complete; both are meant to be starting points with much work still waiting to be done by current and future FLA participants.

This endeavor has occasioned two main obstacles, but both have hopefully been effectively conquered. First, developing a methodology for collecting and curating digital materials was a challenge; although I am quite computer literate, this has been my first archival and digital project. Along with the rest of the Executive Board, I had to discover by trial and error the most effective way to store our data and meta-data for documents. At this time we have decided upon standards for collecting and cataloging documents, but I suspect that we will have to continue adapting as we encounter new issues as FLA grows. The second obstacle was transforming analogue documents into digital items. Microfilm has been my primary source for reception materials, and a large portion of the reproductions are not good enough quality for optical character recognition (OCR). Still, the Executive Board has generally agreed that it is still worthwhile to collect imperfect copies of documents even if they are not computer-legible. As a result, in the future others can contribute to the archival aspect of FLA by locating better quality copies; rather than viewing this imperfection as a problem, we can treat it as an open invitation for people to participate in small or large ways.

In closing, I can only emphasize the professional opportunities the FLA embodies to re-imagine literary discourse.

Nicholas Slaughter is in the Department of English at the University of Maryland.

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Nicholas Slaughter – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Names of the Game

Reinventing the Boundaries of American Literature