Images of a Lost Empire

Tags

early photography, Prokudin-Gorskii, rusalka, Russian empire, time travel, Tsar Nicholas II, vampire, werewolf

Peasant Girls, 1909

A number of years ago, my husband brought this website to my attention. These are the photographs of a man named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, a photographer who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and whose photographic method allowed him to win the funding of Tsar Nicholas II. He travelled the Russian Empire, documenting in full, vibrant and gorgeous colour, a sampling of the vast and diverse scope of the Russian Tsarist regime short years before war and revolution caused it to disappear forever.

I was absolutely fascinated. Here were villages that had, in many cases, been untouched by electricity and the modernity of industrialization, but were documented in photographs so vivid and intense that they might have been taken yesterday. I kept coming back to them again and again. I couldn’t get over the colours–I always assume that somehow life was duller and less colourful in those old black and white photos (I know otherwise intellectually, but with no information to interpolate colour, my mind tends to infer drab shades). Not so.

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Amazing Analysis

Tags

ereshkigal, Inanna, katabasis, Lorinda J. Taylor, myth retellings, of myth and memory, snow white, Termite Queen, werewolf

Lorinda J. Taylor, author of The Termite Queen books, has written a wonderfully insightful analysis of my short story, “Katabasis” which is in my short story compilation Of Myth and Memory.

Check out her commentary–I’m incredibly flattered that she chose the story for her discussion of retellings of myth and am thrilled that she has undertaken such a close and careful reading. It’s exciting when someone is able to bring out so many of the important threads, carefully woven into the story. So wonderful–thanks for such a thoughtful commentary on the piece, Lorinda!