‘Complete rubbish but a real page-turner’ Chukovsky and detective stories

K. Chukovsky was one of Russia’s first scholars of detective fiction. Yet his literary criticism on this particular topic has never been researched. Nor has it come to light that his attitude to the genre was ambivalent. On the one hand, he knew it very well, was a regular reader of detective stories and made a number of valuable observations about the works of Conan Doyle (whose writing he contrasted with the cheap sensationalist books about Nat Pinkerton, stressing the quality of logic in Conan Doyle’s stories) and Wilkie Collins. On the other hand, he often made very critical and ironic remarks about the genre, confessing that he failed to comprehend the reason for its popularity. The article suggests the grounds for Chukovsky’s attitude: he argued that literature was linked to ‘the most important personal experience’ (in the words of the writer N. Oleynikov), with entertaining literature automatically dismissed as an outsider to real art.

Constellations of Stains: The Matter of Experiencing and the Measure of Writing in the Essays by Józef Czapski and Marta Piwińska

This text is an attempt at repaying the author’s debt (both as an academic intellectual and as a regular reader) towards two inspiring essayists: Marta Piwińska and Józef Czapski. From the latter, the author of the article gained a lesson in establishing an intimate relationship with a work of literature he reads or a painting he views. From Piwińska he learnt the poetics of a mentally disciplined essay and gained the ability to associate the readings of the literature of the Polish Romanticism with contemporary sensitivity and the grand works of high modernism of the 20th century. In this article, the author analysed the records of fragments of the life and artistic struggles included in eight essays by Czapski (from the Patrząc and Czytając collections) as well as extensive essays with a literary studies’ focus by Piwińska (from books: Złe wychowanie and Juliusz Słowacki od duchów). The author focussed on the essayistic studies of the experiences of lostness and tiredness, the work of the mind, eyes and other senses, of spiritual and intellectual surprises, and even of moments of clairvoyance. He esteems the discussed essays particularly highly due to their exploratory value, which often takes the form of micro-stories, and elliptical and condensed biographical outlines. In these, readers are offered specific figures of artists and people engaged in everyday hustle and bustle. Both these groups encounter experiences which could be referred to as cornerstone lessons in existence.

Is Google Scholar use declining?

I'm a regular reader of TechCrunch, a popular blog about internet products and companies. But somehow I missed the article just before christmas that talks about the popularity of different Google products. In this analysis, ...

On: “Imaging discontinuities on seismic sections by E. R. Kanasewich and S. M. Phadke (GEOPHYSICS, 53, 334–345, March 1988)

As a regular reader of Geophysics, I often find articles directly applicable to practicing petroleum geophysicists, and the above article is one of them. I would like to make the following comments. Attributing geologic meaning to a recorded seismic diffraction pattern has always been a great challenge to geophysicists. The above paper is certainly an appreciable and serious effort to find a useful meaning. Any new idea needs two ladders to climb—technical acceptability and economic sense.