The 1980 book Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov has been compared to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a great but difficult work of fiction.
Associate Professor of Russian José Vergara has led a team, mostly made up of Bryn Mawr students and staff, in a project titled Encyclopedia of the Dog to make the work—which he describes as “notoriously difficult, a complex intertwining of multiple plots, voices, and Russian languages”—more accessible.
“Between Dog and Wolf has been a bit of a writer's novel,” says Vergara. “That is, it's hugely influential among Russian authors but not necessarily widely read, even though it completely transformed the possibilities in fiction and informed many later, more familiar works. This project makes the process of appreciating Sokolov's mastery over the Russian language possible on a new level.”
Encyclopedia of the Dog is an extension of a special issue of a journal devoted to Between Dog and Wolf that Vergara coedited with Martina Napolitano of the University of Trieste.
“I thought we should continue this work and dig into the novel further. From there, we reached out to a few more annotators, received a Digital Bryn Mawr Grant to recruit a local team to support the technological end of the project, and hired a student, Angelina Rogatch ’24, to translate the annotations from English into Russian,” explains Vergara. The English annotations have been done by Vergara, Napolitano, and Noemi Albanese of the University of Rome.
Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows Cameron Boucher ’23, Adrianna Morsey ’23, Arlowe Willingham ’24, and Rafiun Haque ’25 developed a prototype site for the project in the summer of 2022. Senior Digital Scholarship Specialist Alice McGrath and Boucher continued working on the website until it was launched in November 2023. The ongoing translation process for the Russian-language annotations should be completed in the fall of 2024.
"I've taught Between Dog and Wolf (in English translation) two times so far. While students initially struggle with the novel's density and language, they eventually come to appreciate its structure, humor, and the way it breaks all literary conventions," says Vergara. “It was my thought that we needed a resource to make it more accessible to students and anyone interested in it. This open-access tool makes teaching this incredibly significant novel easier for anyone who wants to use it."
Vergara recently talked about this project, his Chornobyl class and corresponding student exhibition called The Reactor Room, and his participation in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program on the podcast The Slavic Connexion. Vergara also talked about the project on The History of Literature podcast.
Learn more about Digital Bryn Mawr Grants!