Chekhov's Gun

The other night one of our guests said she was torn over Russian literature and culture these days.  Should she read Dostoyevsky?  Is it OK to listen to Tchaikovsky?  She threw it out more as a question in general.  Over the past year, Ukrainian officials have been urging persons to turn away from Russian culture as it is used as a means of propaganda.  Certainly one can argue as I did in a post  9 years ago at the time of the Euromaiden protests that the notion of a "Greater Russia" has long been promulgated in Russian culture and is still very much alive and well, but does that mean I turn my back on Russian culture? I have lost interest in certain writers like Dostoyevsky who was an ardent Pan-Slavist but I like to think that if Chekhov was alive today he would be very much against this war in Ukraine and critical of the Russian government.   Russia has been exposing its metaphorical and literal gun since it invaded Georgia in 2008, but we look...

If you're like me and wondered what the hell Stalker was all about, I would suggest reading Roadside Picnic , the book on which it was nominally based.  Tarkovsky took his idea from the character, Redrick Schuhart, a laboratory assistant and Harmont Branch of the International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures, leaving the rest up to the imagination.  The names were changed to protect the innocent. While Tarkovsky chose to shroud the story in mystery, the Strugatsky Brothers lay it out pretty clearly in their science fiction classic.  Redrick, the Stalker, has gone into the zone countless times but each time represents a new set of challenges, especially with the Harmont Branch cracking down on the plundering of alien objects left behind by a visitation to a small rural town in Canada. I suppose setting the story in a place outside Russia, allowed the Strugatsky brothers more room to explore new ideas and avoid heavy censhorship, but according to Boris in t...

I found myself having to read Boris Godunov so that I could make any sense out of Eimuntas Nekrosius' latest production .  He was originally going to stage it in Moscow with a Russian cast but when Russia annexed Crimea, Nekrosius chose to cancel the production and reset it in Vilnius with a Lithuanian cast. It came out last May, 2015, but my wife and I only got around to seeing it this past weekend.  Lithuanian theater is very different in that you don't get long running shows, but rather recurring shows.  It must make it tough on actors as one has to hold a whole repertoire in his head, as one could very well be performing one play one week and entirely different play the next week.  Each director has his core actors, but they draw actors from each other quite often.  It is quite impressive seeing these actors take on so many roles during the theater season. Unfortunately, Boris didn't translate very well to the modern era.  In my opinion, this ...

In an effort to kickstart this blog again, I recently received a copy of Roadside Picnic , which inspired Tarkovsky's Stalker .  I saw the movie years ago, and quite frankly couldn't make heads or tails of it, so am hoping that the book will help me put together some of the pieces before doing another viewing.  It was interesting to read that I wasn't the only one interested in the classic Soviet sci-fi novel.  WGN bought the screen rights to it and is planning a television series based on the novel.   A video game has also been designed around the theme. Neither of the Strugatsky Brothers are with us anymore, but for decades they were kind of like the Coen Brothers of Soviet science fiction, turning out a great number of novels in the genre dating back to 1958.  They were mostly collaborative efforts, but there were a few solo novels as well, with Boris penning the last work in 2003. Soviet sci-fi is what propels Victor Pelevin, one of my favorite w...

It is hard to imagine what BBC expected when they signed a young director, Tom Harper, to do War & Peace .  The 35-year-old director did do Demons , but it was based on the fabulous adventures of van Helsing, not Dostoevsky.  There is little in Harper's resume to suggest that he was up to the task, which I suppose is why BBC enlisted veteran screenwriter Andrew Davies to adapt the novel to the television screen. Suffice it to say young Tom is no Sergei Bondarchuk.  I question whether he even read the book, but rather adapted Bondarchuk's enthralling epic film to the television screen.  This new version was more about scenography than acting, with the characters pretty much reduced to stand-ins for the roles.  There were a few big name actors like Paul Dano, Jim Broadbent, Stephen Rea and Gillian Anderson, but for the most part these were newbies or actors you hadn't heard about unless you tune into BBC programming. Lily James was the star of the sh...

I took Sergei Dovlatov's The Suitcase with me on a short holiday to the salt baths in the South of Lithuania.  I got a great kick out of this set of anecdotes based on articles of clothing from the Soviet era.  Dovlatov's books are few but are being reprinted and we should all be thankful for it.  He looks at the Soviet past with a wry sense of humor.  I particularly liked his short piece on a statue of Lenin with his two caps. The New Yorker has a great piece on Dovlatov lifted from the afterward of Pushkin Hills , which is next on my reading list.  He was a journalist for many years, which he recounts in The Suitcase , as well as other brief stints as a sculptor's apprentice.  The Lenin stature fiasco sets up and even more farcical piece on a huge wall relief for a subway station devoted to Mikhail Lomonosov, out of which Sergei managed to nab the mayor's boots. The stories are more or less based on his experiences, set up when his son discover...