Intro

My senior high school English teacher, as English teachers do, assigned a novel to be read over the summer before classes began.  Summer reading is a particularly detested assignment among students for obvious reasons; even I, who greatly enjoy reading, usually dislike such work as it distracts me from books I would like to pursue myself.  

Grumblings aside, my classmates and I spent the summer contemplating (note contemplating, rather than completing) the assigned book, Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic Crime & Punishment.  I wasted most of the summer trying to figure out just why our teacher would have assigned a Russian novel in a course entitled English Literature, but no matter.  I did eventually crack the book open, and became lost in it, lost in the dark tale of ax murders in shadowy alleys in Saint Petersburg, of a wily detective matching wits with the hero (or anti-hero?) of the novel, Raskolnikov.  I raced to the end, desperate to finish it so that I could complete the accompanying written assignment before the start of the academic year.  Once the assignment was safely turned in, I returned to Crime & Punishment so that I might finish it at my own pace.  My love affair with Russian literature has continued ever since.  

I hope to use this blog in the future to express some of my own feelings on the innate qualities and emotions of Russian literature, but for now suffice to say that it was that summer, that assignment, that introduction to Fyodor Dostoevsky and his peers that set me on the path that I am on now.  For although I am a government major at Colby College, I am also a minor in Russian Language & Literature, and about ten days from now, I will be boarding a plane to Saint Petersburg (via Helsinki) for a semester of study on the CIEE Russian Area Studies program.  Over the next several months, I hope to make regular posts about my time in Russia (as well as other topics that come to mind), so that others may share in the experience.  It is entirely possible that I may have ended up studying in Russia anyway, but in my mind, the journey began with that assignment, that damned summer assignment, three years ago.