Library Resources

MLA International Bibliography

the best place to start if you are researching a topic related to Russian language or literature; this database does include some scholarly works written in Russian, but is much more complete for English-language works

JStor 

a highly selective digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines; includes top peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports from trusted institutes, and primary sources

WorldCat 

this resource allows you to search for any book published in any language anywhere in the world, and it can be a very useful way to find titles the Bowdoin Library does not own that can then be ordered via Interlibrary Loan

OneSearch 

a general search engine for articles, books, audio and video, and primary materials; includes works in both English and Russian

Dissertations and Theses Full Text

the official dissertations archive for the Library of Congress, this database includes millions of searchable citations to dissertations written in English from around the world from 1861 to the present day, together with over a million full-text dissertations in PDF format

Moscow News Digital Archive (1930-2014) 

The Moscow News is the oldest English-language newspaper in Russia; its content reflects the shifting ideological, political, social and economic currents that have swept through the Soviet Union and Russia in the last century – this database will be useful to students with an interest in Russian politics, history, and contemporary culture and society

Books and Periodicals

Bowdoin’s Hawthorne-Longfellow Library houses a comprehensive collection of Russian literature, both in the original Russian and in English translation, as well as reference and scholarly works on Russian literature, history, politics, society, and culture. If you are looking to browse the Russian literature collection in person, then you can find it in the PG call numbers, housed on the first floor of the library annex in Hubbard Hall (reachable through the Media Commons, library lower level). In addition to these collections, titles owned by the Colby or Bates libraries can easily be requested via the CBB Request button in the online library catalogue. Interlibrary Loan is the way to request titles located further afield.

Russian Department Library

Another place to browse or borrow books on Russian language, literature and culture on the Bowdoin campus is the Russian Department Library! Located in Sills Hall and consisting of a large reference section, Russian literature in the original (including the complete works of several major writers and poets), Russian literature in English translation, annotated literary readers, works on Russian folklore and history, biographies and memoirs, albums of Russian painting and photography, and a small collection of otherwise unavailable films (never published on DVD), this modest library is well worth a look. To browse the collection, go to https://bowdoinrussian.libib.com; to check out books, please contact Sandy Kauffman, Russian Department coordinator.

Music

Recordings of the music of many Russian composers can be found in the Beckwith Music Library on the first floor of Gibson Hall, and many more can be borrowed from the collections of Colby and Bates Colleges. In addition, musical performances with a visual component such as ballets, operas, and live orchestral performances can be found on DVD in the regular Hawthorne-Longfellow media collection or via streaming through the Naxos Video Library or Classical Music in Video. All of these works are searchable in the main library catalogue. For more information and music-specific research guides, consult the Beckwith Library website.

Art

Books, journals, exhibition catalogues, and other materials on Russian visual art, artists, and art history can be found both in the regular Hawthorne-Longfellow collection and in the Pierce Art Library, located in the Visual Arts Center. Books in the Pierce Library are non-circulating. The ArtStor database is a great place to start if you want to search for particular images, but many other databases are available as well; for more information and art-specific research guides, consult the Pierce Library website.

Film

The Bowdoin library has an extensive collection of Russian and Soviet films on DVD that are available for checkout or to watch onsite in one of the Media Commons screening rooms, on the lower level of the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, and many additional films are held in the collections of Colby and Bates Colleges. Here are two different ways to generate lists of these films: List 1 and List 2. Many additional films as well as the past StageRussia presentations of live theater from Moscow are available via Kanopy streaming. In addition, many Russian films are available online, and quite a few of these have English subtitles. A few places to start are this list of subtitled YouTube films, another list of Russian and Russian-related feature films from the Internet Archive, and the Mosfilm Studio’s online cinema.

Many invaluable resources can now be found not just in traditional brick-and-mortar libraries, but in electronic libraries as well, and Russian scholars have actually been pioneers in the development of such collections. Here are a few terrific places to start if you are conducting research in the fields of Russian language and literature: the huge repository of Russian dictionaries and encyclopedias on the Akademik website (including dictionaries for a wide range of disciplines); the Russian Virtual Library containing literary texts from the 18th through 20th centuries; the Fundamental Electronic Library of Russian Literature and Folklore containing literary dictionaries and encyclopedias, the complete (searchable) works of many major Russian writers from the last three centuries, and full electronic versions of hard-to-find scholarly works; the National Corpus of the Russian Language which allows one to search the entire corpus of modern Russian literature for particular words and phrases; and the Journal Room, an online full-text collection of many of the foremost Russian journals devoted to literature and literary studies from the early 1990s to the present.

The current practice in the department for scholarly writing in English on Russian topics is to provide quotations in the main text in the original Cyrillic together with a courtesy English translation, but to transliterate all Russian-language bibliographic sources as well as individual Russian words or phrases given in the main text into the Latin (English) alphabet. The Modified Library of Congress transliteration system should be used.

PDF Guide to Russian Transliteration