Alexander "Sasha" Volokh
Arts & Literature

Some pieces of mine.
- Literature (1997)
- Orpheus (1995)
- To come: "The Twisted Path of Destiny"
- Together (1990)
- The Scent of Tea and Sherry (1989)

My translations of poems by Aleksandr S. Pushkin (1799-1837), Russia's greatest poet. Warning: do not attempt unless you have a fast connection! See the L.A. Times article about our Pushkin bicentennial event in Los Angeles in November 1999. Ron Rosenbaum of The New York Observer found one of my translations helpful for understanding the music of Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies. Also check out articles about the event in the L.A. Russian newspaper Panorama and the L.A. Russian magazine Afisha (before and after). My translations also appeared in the San Francisco Pushkin bicentennial event; see the write-up in 24 chasa (24 hours). Russia Online has the Russian text of several poems by Pushkin. Stephany Gould of James Madison University's Language Learning Center maintains an amusing Pushkin Page -- check out the Pushkin humor.

My translations of poems by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), my mother's favorite poet. This description won't at all do her justice, but she's kind of like the Russian Emily Dickinson, only without the slant rhymes. Here are my translations of "Lot's Wife" and "Thirteen lines". Also check out the Anna Akhmatova Museum at Fountain House (with wonderful pictures of Akhmatova!), the Akhmatova page, and the 20th-century Russian poets site. Also take a look at Akhmatova postcards at the Just So Postcards site.

My translations of articles about Feodor Chaliapine (1873-1938) (Shaliapin in more proper spelling), the famous Russian bass (that's opera, not jazz or fish). Warning: do not attempt unless you have a fast connection! These articles, which I translated from Russian into French, were presented at the 10th international music festival in Colmar, France, in summer 1998. Two of the articles are by Vlas M. Doroshevich (1864-1922), a Russian journalist and contemporary of Chaliapine's, and the third article, about the relationship between Chaliapine and opera director Vsevolod E. Meyerhold, is by (our) contemporary Russian scholar Solomon Volkov.

Some minor pieces.
- My refrigerator poetry
- Romeo and Juliet; or, The Veronese Washerwoman -- a five-minute capsule summary of the play. Inspired by Adam McNaughton's "Oor Hamlet" and "Macbeth."
- The Countries of the World, inspired by the similar song from the Animaniacs.
- There is a condiment called Hope, a poem I recently "discovered," attributed to Emily Dickinson
- Rootin' Tootin' Rasputin, to the tune of "YMCA."
- The epic of Pismo Beach
- My Favorite Things, or the Song of the Young Paleontologist, published in Science magazine -- check out a version on someone's web site. The original version of the song, with funny and informative links!, written for my UCLA paleontology class in Fall 1989 (now preserved on the ESS 116 web site at UCLA)
- To come: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Buber, and Barth

To come: Westwind, UCLA's journal of the arts (1993), which I was senior editor of. Meanwhile, see a text version of the 1995 issue and a PDF version of the 1999 issue, which I didn't work on. Westwind is now subtitled "A UCLA Journal of Undergraduate Research and Writing" and has a snazzy home page!

Economics songs
- Concavity, the Mystery Property (1998)
- Two songs about Friedrich A. Hayek (1996)
- A song about Ludwig von Mises (1996)

In capsule form
- Islamic history in capsule form (1990)
- Greek philosophy in capsule form (1990)
- English poetry in capsule form (1990)

My "obsequious poetry."
- Sonnet written to Prof. Pearsall (1991)
- Sestina written to Prof. Dickey (1991)
- Poem written to Prof. Tennyson (1992)
- Ulysses; for Prof. Kolb (1992)

My poetry for the Hewlett-Packard/3000.
- The Song of Hiawatha's Spectrum (1988)
- New Wave -- A Ballad (1988)
- The Unbundling of IMAGE (1990)

100 best books, etc.
- The Modern Library has a "board's list" and "readers' list" of 100 best novels of the century. Note that 7 of the top 10 on the readers' list are by Ayn Rand or L. Ron Hubbard. Also with a link to board's and readers' lists of 100 best non-fiction books of the century. Note that on the readers' list, the top book is by L. Ron Hubbard and 9 of the top 15 are libertarian/objectivist.
- National Review Online offers a list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century, from a conservative perspective, of course.
- The Best English-Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century: A Composite List and Ranking

Ch-ch-ch-chaucer! Find out about Geoffrey Chaucer's dark-horse 1992 bid for the presidency of the UCLA undergraduate student council. Here's a picture of the opening page of the Landsdowne manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, which I saw at the "1000 Years of English Literature" exhibit at the British Library in March 2000. For e-texts by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) and other good Chaucer-studying resources, take a look at the Chaucer Metapage. With a name like that, how can you go wrong? Also check out the Middle English Compendium.

Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994), the French absurdist playwright. Here's a list of all performances of La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano) known by one Soren Olsen, who maintains an Ionesco site in Brussels. Toward the bottom of the list -- the 27-29 April 2001 performances by the Harvard French Club, in which I played the Fire Captain. Here are pictures from that show.

The Georgetown Gilbert & Sullivan Society, America's only theater group with its own law school. I played the Major in Gilbert & Sullivan's Patience in my theatrical debut in March 1994.