LITTRANS 204: Survey of 19th and 20th Century Russian Literature in Translation II (Spring 2025) : Home

LITTRANS 204 students: welcome to your library course guide! This guide will support you in finding, evaluating, and citing quality sources for your research essay assignment.

Use the menu on the left to navigate through a variety of resource suggestions. For more assistance, please contact your course librarian or use the Ask a Librarian chat service.

There are a couple of special challenges related to doing research in this field.

1. Gaps in scholarship. Depending on your chosen text, it may be difficult to find relevant secondary sources on that work specifically - especially in English. If you run up against this issue, try to break down your research topic and identify the broader scholarly conversations you might tap into. For instance, you could seek scholarship on:

• A literary movement the text fits into
• Other works by the same author or trends in that author's work
• The historical context of the text's setting or authorship

2. Different Romanization schema. Most American and Western European library catalogs, scholarly databases, and academic journals represent Russian authors' names in Romanized (i.e., Zamyatin) rather than Cyrillic (i.e., Замятин) form. However, there are several different Romanization schema - meaning that the same author's name may appear slightly differently across sources. To mitigate this complication, keep an eye out for alternate spellings of an author's name. Then, when searching databases, use the Boolean "OR" operator to encompass all spellings. For example:

• (Zamyatin OR Zamiatin)
• (Alexievich OR Aleksievich)
• ("Tatyana Tolstaya" OR "Tat'iana Tolstaia")

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