Algonquin Indian Tales

For thirty years or more we have been gathering up these myths and legends. Sometimes a brief sentence or two of one would be heard in some wigwam--just enough to excite curiosity--then years would elapse ere the whole story could be secured. As the tribes had no written language, and the Indians had to depend entirely upon their memory, it is not to be wondered at that there were, at times, great divergences in the recital of even the most familiar of their stories. We have heard the same legend given by several story-tellers and no two agreed in many particulars. Others, however, were told with very slight differences.

Old Indian Legends

Zitkala-Sa was born on February 22, 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was raised there by her mother, Ellen Simmons, whose Yankton Dakota name was Taté Iyohiwin (Every Wind or Reaches for the Wind). Her father was a European-American man named Felker, about whom little was known. Zitkala-Sa lived a traditional lifestyle until the age of eight, when she left her reservation to attend Whites Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker mission school in Wabash, Indiana. She went on to study for a time at Earlham College in Indiana and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

American Indian Stories

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (1876—1938), better known by her pen name, Zitkala-Sa (Dakota: pronounced zitkala-sa, which translates to "Red Bird"), was a Yankton Dakota writer, editor, musician, teacher and political activist. She published in national magazines. With William F. Hanson, Bonnin co-composed the first American Indian opera, The Sun Dance (composed in romantic style based on Ute and Sioux themes), which premiered in 1913. She founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926, which she served as president until her death.

The Torrents of Spring

The Torrents of Spring  was written when Turgenev was in his fifties and is considered to be partly autobiographical.
Also known as Spring Torrents, The Torrents of Spring focuses on the main protagonist Dimitry Sanin, a young Russian landowner who on his travels to Germany meets and falls in love with Gemma, an Italian living in Frankfurt. After winning her heart Sanin decides to sell off his estate in Russia and move to Frankfurt to be close to her. 

Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories

Referred to by Henry James as ‘the first novelist of his time’ Ivan Turgenev’s works focus on class, love and suffering. Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories with its themes of the supernatural was, therefore, something of a departure for a writer who was well-known for his more humanitarian and liberal views. However, Turgenev uses these supernatural elements as a vehicle for exploring the irrationalities of the human psyche and he leaves the rational explanations for apparently supernatural events ambiguous - as Avrahm Yarmolinsky writes in his biography of Turgenev perhaps ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in positivist philosophy'.