Hello! I’m Elena Vasileva, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto. I am writing a dissertation on the memory of Russian modernism, where I look at how this memory was formed in memoirs and literary fiction that were created after modernism ceased to exist as a cultural institution.

My main interest is exploring how a self, both individual and cultural, is constructed through literary means and performative practices. This comes from my everlasting enthusiasm for the relations of art and life in various contexts, although I look more frequently at the romantic quest to fuse art with life and modernist life-creation (envisioning one’s life as a creative project).

My interest in the digital humanities and in such coding languages as TEI is driven by a similar fascination with the process of how a narrative is built. I am excited to be a part of the Digital Dostoevsky project!