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 ҵstudents and staff, in a project titled 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