Alex Rawlings, a second-year student reading German and Russian at St Catherine's College, has won a national competition to find the UK's most multilingual student. To hear him speak all eleven languages, go to:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17107435

Six first year FHS students in the Russian sub-faculty have been awarded a prize by the Washington DC Russkii Mir foundation for their joint translation of a Vysotsky poem, 'She was in Paris'. You can read the original, plus their translation and the names of the six students here:

http://vvysotskyinenglish.blogspot.co.uk/p/she-was-in-paris.html

A new bursary has been established to provide financial assistance for undergraduates to attend a course in a South Slavonic language in the relevant country before taking it as a final-year option. The bursary is in memory of Anne Pennington who made invaluable contributions to Russian and Slavonic Studies at Oxford. More information about the bursary can be found here:

http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/pennington

The Faculty regrets to announce the death of Paul Foote on 1 March 2011 in the John Radcliffe Hospital. Mr Foote was University Lecturer in Russian from 1954 until his retirement in 1993, and Fellow and Praelector in Russian at Queen's from 1964 until his retirement (and latterly an Emeritus Fellow).

More information regarding arrangements will follow. Our condolences go to his family, friends, and former colleagues.

The committee's citation for the honorable mention reads:

"Andrew Kahn has produced an extremely erudite study of Pushkin's lyrics, in which he explores and elucidates the intellectual context for these works. Very well read in the contemporary scholarship on English and continental Romanticism, he reveals the extent of Pushkin's profound engagement with the literary and cultural movements of his day. The volume is imaginatively organized around a set of themes that shed light on how Russia's greatest poet formed and developed his ideas about such matters as the role of inspiration in creativity, the classical and the Romantic, the question of commercial success for the artist, concepts of the hero, and the confrontation with mortality."

Andrew Kahn is university reader in Russian at the University of Oxford, fellow at Saint Edmund Hall, and lecturer at Queen's College. He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Pushkin and translator of Nicolai Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveler. His articles have appeared in journals such as Stanford Slavic Studies, Révue des Études Slaves, and EMF and books such as Remapping the Rise...