Reviews by LA2

“Vem är vem i böckernas värld : litterära gestalter från A till Ö” (250 pages, in Swedish language) is a very useful encyclopedic dictionary of 2500 fictional characters, ranging from Gilgamesh to Pippi Longstocking. This title (Who’s who in the world of books) refers to the editions published in 1992-1995, which is an updated version of “Litterära gestalter” published in 1985, which was the first work of this kind in the Swedish language. With an average of ten entries per page, each entry is rather short, but covers the essentials - which book(s) by which author features this character and a very brief summary of their role. The book is beautifully illustrated, both with classic book illustrations (such as Maurice Leloir’s drawing of The Three Musketeers) and with monochrome photos of wellknown (mostly Swedish) actors portraying the characters (such as Khlestakov from Gogol’s The Government Inspector, played by Ernst-Hugo Järegård). You would think nobody needs a printed reference work of this kind in the days of Google searches, but the fact is that many of the 2500 names presented here are not found in Wikipedia (at least not yet, this might change with time) and Google searches present other, real-life carriers of the same name rather than the fictional character. More than twenty years have passed since this book was published (1995-2016); Google was started in 1998, Wikipedia in 2001, but they have still not caught up with its contents.

Intended as an easy reader for beginning students of the Russian language, this abridged and simplified version tries to fit Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1964 science-fiction novel “Hard to be a god” (Трудно быть богом) in only 26 brief text pages using a vocabulary of a mere 650 words. And it does not succeed. This is not a story, it’s a string of glimpses from the story. You need to know the story already (for example by reading an English translation), or you will be completely lost. The 26 illustrations by K.V. Garin are beautiful, but that’s not why the learner needs this book. At the end of the book is a dictionary of 7 pages (only a list of Russian words, no translations) and 2 pages of exercise questions.