Alexander "Sasha" Volokh
Arts & Literature


  • 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 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.
  • 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!
  • 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.
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