A Grim War

Interesting to see that Elem Klimov's Come and See topped the list of Time Out's 50 greatest WWII movies.  It is one of my favorites as well as Klimov gives the viewer a very visceral account of the battle lines in Belarus during the war.  This side of the Soviet-German war was rarely mentioned at the height of the Soviet Union, and I don't think Klimov would have gotten the movie made if not for Perestroika.

Surprisingly, the only other Soviet film to make the Top 50 was Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying.  Notable omissions include Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent.  Shepitko was married to Klimov.

However, I would say that the seeming simplicity of Ivan's Childhood is deceiving.  As I noted before, I'm not convinced the war scenes were real, but that Tarkovsky was using the standard war film conventions to tell a much more compelling story that prefigured such works as The Stalker, which ostensibly was a post-apocalyptic film.

Anyway, it is nice to see Klimov get top billing.  Here's Klimov on the making of the film.  Hit "CC" for subs.

A Matter of Faith

It's been awhile.  I haven't forgotten about this blog, just focused on other topics the past month.  I had started reading Rowan Williams' book on Dostoevsky and the matter of faith in his novels.  It is quite good, as Williams offers his interpretations of how Fyodor addressed the subject, drawing from Dostoevsky's own notes on the books, which are available in print.  Williams also heavily references Bakhtin, who wrote a study on Dostoevsky's poetics, which is also available in print.

From the accounts I've read, Dostoevsky was very faithful to his Orthodox religion.  Perhaps the most explicit of his novels is The Devils where one of his characters categorically states that there is no Pan-Slavism without religion.  This is what unites the Russian people.  Dostoevsky was always quite harsh on the budding socialist movement in the country and the nihilism so often expressed in the youth.  He even poked fun at other author's literary characters like Turgenev's Bazarov, from Fathers and Sons.  I think this is probably the reason Nabokov had so much antipathy toward Dostoevsky.

Williams draws heavily from Brothers Karamazov, perhaps Dostoevsky's most comprehensive novel on the meaning of faith, told from a multiplicity of angels, not just the three brothers.  Some critics have viewed Dostoevsky as a "Doubting Thomas" especially in the way he presents Alyosha in the novel, but Williams points to key moments where Alyosha's faith trumps older brother Ivan's reason.  Williams himself noted that Dostoevsky stated several times in his journals that if he were to choose between faith or reason, he would choose faith.  But, Williams doesn't see faith and reason as mutually exclusive.

Of course, one would expect this from the former Archbishop of Canterbury, but Williams relies heavily on scholarship in presenting his study of Dostoevsky, making his book a most welcome addition to the Dostoevsky library.

Tchaikovsky in Jazz

Sergey Zhilin opts for jazz groups rather than symphony orchestras when it comes to Tchaikovsky, giving the great composer's work more bounce and playfulness, such as this fun interpretation.  Zhilin also likes to go solo like this intimate and warm rendering entitled March.  Of course, Tchaikovsky has long been a favorite of jazz musicians from Shorty Rogers' The Swinging Nutcracker to Kenny Barron's Classical Jazz Quartet Play Tchaikovsky.  But, few do it beer than Zhilin, who will be in Vilnius this weekend, drawing from his latest album, Tchaikovsky in Jazz: The Seasons.

The Lonely Mayanist

Yuri Knorozov was more than just a noted ethnographer with a passion for the Mayan language.  He was also a cat lover.  While a soldier in the Soviet Army in WWII, he had stumbled upon a rare collection of Mayan codices in the Berlin library, which he brought back with him to Moscow.  This apparently life-changing event inspired to devote his energies to "Mayanology" in virtual isolation from all the other work being done by Eric Thompson and others.  Michael Coe in his book, Breaking the Mayan Code, said this gave Knorozov fresh eyes, as up to this point the elaborate Mayan hieroglyphs had been primarily seen as a graphic language, not a written one.  It seemed the Knorozov had largely been forgotten at the time of the writing of this book in 1992.

Knorozov, who had previously focused on Egyptology, wrote a paper, Ancient Writing of Central America, in 1952 in which he made the case for the hieroglyphs being phonetic, not logographic as widely believed.  He used the "alphabet" produced by a 16th century Spanish priest, Diego de Landa, to help unlock the code.  De Landa's "alphabet" had similarly been dismissed by Mayanists.  It took some time before there was acceptance of Knorozov's insights, which in turn inspired a young David Stuart who eventually unlocked much of the language, as shown in the Nova television special, based on Coe's book.

Yuri became a hero not only in the Soviet Union, but was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the Mexican government for his breakthrough studies.  He was the subject of a 2000 documentary, released shortly after his death in 1999.

Portrait of an Unknown Woman

Ivan Kramskoy apparently never said who the woman in this painting was.  The portrait created quite a stir in its day, as critics were appalled by her coquettish look.  Later, many came to take this painting as Kramskoy's impression of Anna Karenina.  After all, he had been commissioned by Pavel Tretyakov in 1873 to paint a portrait of Tolstoy for his gallery.  Pavel had no luck himself getting the count to pose for a portrait, but Kramskoy managed to win Tolstoy over.  It just so happened that Tolstoy was working on Anna Karenina at the time.  However, Kramskoy painted the "unknown woman" several years later.  Maybe he was inspired by Anna, maybe not.

Others have erroneously attributed the unknown woman to a poem by Alexandr Blok.  If anyone was inspired here it was Blok, as the painting predates the poem by several years.

Sympathy for the Devil

As the story goes, Marianne Faithfull gave Mick a copy of The Master and Margarita, inspiring him to pen the lyrics to the classic song, which first appeared on the album, Beggars Banquet.  Pretty amazing when you consider the book only first appeared in print in 1967.  It was translated into English by Michael Glenny the same year (still the best translation). The album came out the following year.  Godard recorded a film of the Stones trying out the song in the studio, which was released in 1970.

The novel has a long history.  Bulgakov wrote it between 1928 and 1940 when he was assistant director at the Moscow Art Theater (MAT).  The story derives its most compelling scenes from the stage, which is probably why it has been so hard to make into film.  There have been several attempts over the years, each more infuriating than the one before.

Bortko's TV mini-series was the last attempt, which met with luke-warm response.  He literally recreated the novel chapter for chapter on the small screen. The only problem was that it had no life.  He was faithful to a fault, more worried about offending the public than he was in recreating the spirit of the novel, as he so wonderfully did in The Heart of the Dog from several years before.

Andrzej Wajda did a version that focused exclusively on the Biblical scenes from the novel in Pilate and Others (1972) which won him an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2006.

Several other directors had been interested in the novel over the years.  Probably the most tantalizing prospect was that of Roman Polanski shooting a film version.  It is often mentioned in articles, but I haven't been able to find any details outside of a quote from Mia Taylor's article on the filming of the novel, in which Polanski claims Warner Brothers was interested at one point.  Polanski apparently had prepared a script, according to Andras Hamori.  But, it still needed work to read Hamori's remarks.  I assume this was in the late 80s.

Elem Klimov was given the green light to make a large budget film after the stunning success of Come and See, but apparently it was too much for him to consider at the time and he took a pass.  Tarkovsky had previously shown interest, but it was Yuri Kara who finally got a shot at it in 1994, completing a film that suffered brutal cuts before getting a very limited release in 1994 and was subsequently shelved.  In 2011, a director's cut surfaced that filled in many of the gaping plot holes, but it didn't fair well at the box office.  It had too much of an old school look.  It seemed that a younger audience was looking for something more along the lines of modern supernatural films like Bekmambetov's Day Watch.

I saw a theatrical production in Vilnius some years ago, which I thought was very good.  Oskar Koršunovas went to the heart of the novel and presented a spectacle that I thought was very much in the spirit of Bulgakov.  There have been many other theatrical productions, including this recent one by Simon McBurney, but can't say whether it is worth watching or not.

So, here we are nearly 50 years after the samizdat copy was released in 1967, and very quickly made the rounds all over the world, as if Woland himself had sent the book on its wild journey.  Yet, there is still no definitive film version of the novel.  Maybe there never will be, but it is hard for me to imagine someone else won't be interested in it in the years to come.

The Stern October Has Deceived Me

We have been watching a 2005 mini-series on Sergei Yesenin.  It seemed to me a rather sloppy production with Sergei Bezrukov emoting all over the place.  He was most maddening in his brief interlude with Isadora Duncan, poorly played by Sean Young.  You feel sorry for the young "translator" caught between them in these tumultuous scenes that took him from Moscow to the beaches of Italy and eventually to New York, where he very quickly grew weary of this relationship and returned to Mother Russia.

As the poem title implies, Yesenin was a reluctant Bolshevik at best, and eventually turned his back on Trotsky, played very well by Konstantin Khabenski, replete with his famous pince-nez.  This pretty much sealed Yesenin's fate in the brave new Soviet Union, which emerged from a bitter four-year civil war.

Yesenin served briefly in WWI, but was able to avoid the worst of the civil war, focusing on his poetry.  He did a number of collaborations which brought him fame.  He was one of many young poets at the time vying for attention.  He co-founded the movement Imaginism, which included Anatoli Marienhof among others.  Most of his poems celebrated his homeland, such as Land I Love.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find a copy of The Stern October Has Deceived Me, which expressed his ultimate disillusionment with the Soviet experiment.

There was no doubt about his impulsive nature.  He married four times between 1917 and his untimely death in 1925, lastly Tolstoy's granddaughter, Sophia Andreyevna.  Igor Zaitsev frames the series in a detective story, with Aleksandr Michailov playing the gumshoe who re-examines the events that led to Yesenin's death some 60 years later during the Perestroika years of the Soviet Union, only to find there are still Soviet officials that don't want the truth to be told.  The belief that Yesenin had committed suicide had long been questioned, and the series makes it clear the NKVD saw him as a threat to the state.

Mayakovsky in America

In 2005, the complete journal of Mayakovsky's Discovery of America was presented for the first time.  It is a thin, colorful paperback that chronicles his round about trip to the United States via Cuba and Mexico in 1925.  He apparently had some trouble getting a visa directly to New York, given his political views, and was advised by his good friend, David Burliuk, to use a "back door," which turned out to be Laredo, Texas.

Mayakovsky, like many Futurists of his era, was fascinated by American industry and technology.  He saw it as a model for Soviet industry and was determined to get a first hand glimpse of these marvels of ingenuity.  He had some problems in Paris, having lost some of his cash to a "highly talented thief," making due the best he could over the next three months.

Cuba and Mexico held much more fascination for him, as it turns out, but New York also proved to be worth his wait when he finally reached the big city on July 30.  There he met up with Burliuk and other Russian emigrees, who provided him contacts and places to stay for his forays into the heartland of America.  He never made it out to San Francisco, as planned, citing loneliness for his beloved Lili as his reason for cutting his trip short.

However, an interesting book, Mayakovsky in Manhattan, came out in 1993 chronicling an affair Mayakovsky had in New York. It was written by his presumed daughter, Patricia Thompson, a.k.a. Yelena Mayakovsky.  It seems he didn't miss Lili that much.

His Poems about America were published during his lifetime, as were excerpts from his travel log, but it took nearly 80 years to collect his American sketches into one volume, bringing this long voyage of discovery to a close, as noted in the introduction to the volume.

The drawings are by David Burliuk for the original publication of his American poems.

All the World's a Stage

There was some confusion when an Italian film company was in Vilnius filming scenes for an upcoming version of Anna Karenina.  I think a lot of folks expected to see Keira Knightley in town, although Vittoria Puccini appears to be quite a beauty herself.  This is the third adaptation of the film in the last four years.  An earlier Russian television version was completed in 2008, which garnered mixed reviews.

The reviews have been mixed on the 2012 British adaptation as well, but after watching it this weekend I was won over by Keira Knightley's performance and the fascinating theatrical interpretation of the novel, using constantly changing theater backdrops to give the story heightened dramatic effect.  This worked especially well in the first half of the movie as Joe Wright literally set the stage for the characters.  Wright moves at a pretty fast pace, unlike the novel, covering a tremendous amount of ground in short order.  He had Tom Stoppard to help him abridge the text into a smooth narrative that still managed to capture many of the subtleties of Tolstoy's text.

The idea of staging the scenes, particularly the haunting horse race, in a hyper-reality theater was really a masterstroke, and Wright and Stoppard deserve a lot of credit for this.  Wright uses a number of theatrical tricks, including Anna's frantic stroking of her fan turning into the hoofs of the horses as they come out of the dark and onto the stage, only for Vronsky to come careening off his beloved Frou-Frou into the lower audience.  Anna gasps so audibly from her box seat that everyone at once knows her interest in the rider.

Knightly really shines in this film.  I had my doubts as most of Anna's emotions were internalized in the novel. Keira has emerged as one of the great leading ladies of our day, able to convey so much in her characters.  She gives Anna the full body of emotions without overdoing it.  Everyone else hovers around her.  Aaron Taylor-Johnson is pretty much eye candy as Vronsky, and Jude Law offers a very subdued version of Alexei Karenin, a bit too sympathetic for my taste.  Levin and Kitty remain on the periphery, but are well played by Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander.  Matthew MacFadyen, as Oblonsky, is the only one to really compete with Keira on stage.  He fills his character with all the aplomb that Tolstoy gave him in the novel.

Wright touches on but doesn't expand on the wonderful asides between Oblonsky and Levin, like the time Oblonsky joined Levin for a hunt on his distant estate.  Still, there are some wonderful rural scenes, captured in rich colors like a Repin painting when Levin thrashes hay with his peasants.  It is clear that Wright and Stoppard read and absorbed the novel.  They didn't treat it lightly.

The movie more or less folds in on itself in the second half, much like the novel, as Anna finds herself isolated from the social world she once inhabited and imagines Vronsky chasing after other women.  The stage sets turn into dark interiors with a brooding Anna trying to find her way between Karenin and Vronsky.  This is a man's world, which Anna made all too painfully clear to Dolly when she first consoled her in regard to her brother Stiva's numerous affairs.  There's a very nice scene where Dolly visits Anna in a cafe toward the end of the movie, supporting her decision to leave Karenin, but alas Anna simply can't bear up under the pressure.

The film rushes a bit too quickly to an end, making for some rather confusing scenes between her and Vronsky and Karenin.  She was clearly a tragic figure in Tolstoy's novel, but you don't have as much empathy for her in the film, largely because Karenin and Vronsky are both made into sympathetic figures.  As a result, Anna comes across as "an awful woman" having brought catastrophe upon herself.

Perhaps this is an attempt to update the novel, since it is hard for viewers today to understand just how claustrophobic 19th century aristocratic life could be for a woman who wanted something more than her much older husband could give, namely love.  In this sense, Anna Karenina mirrors Madame Bovary, but unlike Flaubert's creation, Anna is not able to overcome her situation, in large part because all her actions are made much more visible in society.

Wright ends his story with Levin and Kitty, but alas we don't get enough about them for us to really feel the strength of their love.  It is treated pretty much as a child-like love given both of their naivety in such matters. Their idealistic love was meant to counter that of Anna and Vronsky, with Levin's and Kitty's love more or less taking over the second half of the novel.

Just the same, I wasn't disappointed.  I thought it was an inspired production offering a bold new interpretation of the novel.

Shrove Tuesday

I see things don't change much reading Anton Chekhov's wonderful short story, Shrove Tuesday.  I was helping my daughter with math this morning after making her pancakes.  Pancakes are the traditional fare on the eve of the Lenten fast throughout Russia and Eastern Europe.  Chekhov celebrates the occasion in an amusing way through Pavel Vasilitch.

............

Painting by Elena Shumakova.

Of Life and War

A couple recent acquisitions include an 1887 English translation of Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches and a 1985 translation of Vasily Grossman's Life & Fate.  The first was translated by Frank Millet from a French edition of Tolstoy's frontline stories from the Crimean War.  He was perhaps Russia's first war reporter.  The latter from the man regarded as the Soviet Union's premier war reporter.

Sebastopol is interesting for a number of reasons.  These sketches represent an awakening for Tolstoy as well as laid the groundwork for his triumphant work, War & Peace, as Alan Yentob noted in the History Channel documentary on The Trouble with Tolstoy.

Life & Fate is of course Grossman's most celebrated work.  The novel came to symbolize Russia's role in World War II much the same way Tolstoy's War & Peace symbolizes Russia's battle with Napoleon's grand army.  Grossman has enjoyed a lot of attention as of late, with new collections of his work, but it is fun to go back to the original in this case, at least the first English translation.

The novel was written in the late 50s, but shelved by KGB officials.  A copy was smuggled out of the country in the mid 70s, but it wasn't published until the mid 80s.  It didn't appear in Russian until the Perestroika years, serialized in Oktyabr magazine in 1988.  Grossman had died in 1964.  The Robert Chandler translation is still the one to read in English.

Why Caged Birds Sing

Apparently, I'm not the only one looking up Meryan people after watching Silent Souls.  The film by Alexei Fedorchenko explores the role of Meryan traditional customs in a post-Soviet world, but it seemed to me the odd ceremonies surrounding weddings and funerals had less to do with the ceremonies themselves, but rather how we struggle to cope in a rapidly changing society.  The Merya themselves seem to be related to the Mari, or Volga Finns, but this film doesn't go into such contentious matters, keeping the story more on the level of allegory.

The central character, Aist, sets out to write a journal to break the boredom of working in a paper mill in a remote northern region of Russia.  It is a region apparently heavily populated by Meryans, so that when his boss, Miron, wants to give his dead wife a proper Meryan funeral, taking her to the river where they spent their honeymoon, the police officer doesn't think much of the dead body in the back seat of his SUV.  Along the way, Miron begins "smoking" about his past, relating memories he wouldn't otherwise tell.  Aist seems to accept all this as a matter of course, often falling into narration, as the dialog itself is rather threadbare.  These are after all rather silent souls, although the souls that Fedorchenko refers to are those who came before, drifting in the great river of time, like Aist's father, a Meryan poet whom he tells about in retrospect.

Adding to the cryptic nature of this film are a pair of buntings which Aist insists on bringing, as he lives alone and there would be no one to take care of them.  Miron just shrugs his shoulders, and in the course of the journey takes interest in the birds, noting that his wife Tanya loved birds but couldn't stand to see them in cages. The Buntings, or Ovsyanki, as the film is called in Russian, are constantly chirping throughout the long drive.

Miron slowly comes to the realization that he kept his much younger wife in a cage, having her succumb to his pleasures rather than allowing her to realize hers.  I suppose that is why when he eventually tells Aist he knew about the affair she had with him, he doesn't hold it against him because he enjoyed seeing her happy in the surveillance camera clips he had on his cellphone.  But, their marriage wasn't without happiness, as Miron draws on more of his smokey memories.  It just wasn't realized the way it should, as he tries to come up with an explanation for her untimely death.

The film takes on a droll tone as the two buy birch shovel and axe handles at a hardware store that they eventually use for a funeral pyre on which they lay Tanya.  Miron scatters her ashes on the river.  Aist drifts back to an amusing memory he had following his father as he laid his beloved typewriter to rest on an icy lake,  after deciding that his poetry was over.  These intersecting memories are united by the river itself which Aist likens as the ultimate judge, deciding who to take.  It is not for us to decide our fate, but it seems the buntings work as agents for the river.