On 8 April, a Zoom conference was held where VSU students who study translation had a chance to meet Charlotte Hobson, an English writer and the author of the book about Voronezh titled “Black Earth City: when Russia ran wild”. Charlotte Hobson is a laureate of the Somerset Maugham Award (British literary prize) and the Duff Cooper Prize (literary prize for the best work of history or biography). The event was held as part of the International Scientific and Practical Conference “Language, thought, digitisation: on the 160th anniversary of the journal “Filologicheskie Zapiski” (“Philological Notes”) and was supported by the Khovansky Historical and Philological Foundation.
The conference was dedicated to the 160th anniversary of the release of the first issue of the journal “Filologicheskie Zapiski” (31 December 1860), one of the oldest Russian scientific journals dedicated to comparative and historical linguistics, teaching Russian language, as well as to Slavic philology and mythology, literature studies, and translation.
Charlotte Hobson studied Russian language and literature during her internship at VSU in 1990s. Charlotte remembered those times: together with other interns she had arrived in the Soviet Union but when she was leaving it was already Russia. Charlotte warmly remembers the years of her study at VSU, her lecturers, and all the people she met. She told about these and many other things during her talk with the students from the Department of Translation and Professional Communication.
They read the first chapters of her book “Black Earth City: when Russia ran wild” and asked Charlotte some questions. The author told them about the basis of the story and about the notional structure of some chapters and said that she hoped that in the future Russian readers would have a chance to get this book.
The students thanked Charlotte for telling an interesting story about her stay in Voronezh, her works, and future literary plans.
