Russian commonplace books

[Sergey Karpukhin]

There is the excellent Russian tradition of keeping a notebook, zapisnaya
knizhka, and, as far as Russian literature is concerned, it's at least 200
years old (Prince P.A. Vyazemsky's notebook, for example). Granted, the
genre differs from that of the commonplace book in that it is firmly
embedded in the high-culture literary canon, unlike the commonplace books of
the Elizabethans, for instance. In the 20th C Russian literature we have
remarkable exemplars of such "intermediary" literature, up to and including
M.L. Gasparov's Zapisi i vypiski. 

Samuel Beckett called his multilingual commonplace book (writer's working
notebook, rather) a sottisier. Sounds like a good translation, but not
necessarily the same thing.

Just a couple of thoughts.

Regards,
Sergey Karpukhin
University of Wisconsin-Madison

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