Reading this article made me immediately think about Russian literature, particularly from the 19th century. Mostly because of my background and how I am still working on adopting to English in my speaking and writing. Russian authors of that time are famous for their elaborate, intricate, and syntactically rich sentences. This isn't unique just to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and even Bulgakov later on. The Russian literary tradition is about constructing entire emotional and philosophical worlds within a single sentence where thoughts cascade into one another with modifiers piling up like layers of nested parentheses. Punctuation in Russian has its special role and many school children will describe feeling utterly tormented trying to... (read more)
Reading this article made me immediately think about Russian literature, particularly from the 19th century. Mostly because of my background and how I am still working on adopting to English in my speaking and writing. Russian authors of that time are famous for their elaborate, intricate, and syntactically rich sentences. This isn't unique just to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and even Bulgakov later on. The Russian literary tradition is about constructing entire emotional and philosophical worlds within a single sentence where thoughts cascade into one another with modifiers piling up like layers of nested parentheses. Punctuation in Russian has its special role and many school children will describe feeling utterly tormented trying to... (read more)