Chekhov's Gun

I must say I knew nothing about Clarice until I read this article.  Now I am very interested, That unexpected encounter brought me friends I never would have met and took me to places I never would have seen. Yes, the same would have been true with Russian or Arabic or Greek: every new culture brings its food, its music, its beaches. But what Portuguese gave me that nothing else could have was Brazil’s great mystic writer, Clarice Lispector, a person so dazzling that she was reputed to be that rare woman who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf. She came to Brazil by way of Ukraine, and adopted Portuguese as her literary language. Read more For those curious, here is The Passion According to G.H.

This is certainly an odd little book.  The story seems to come more from the pages of Balzac than Dostoevsky as the cynical old Jewish banker tries desperately to reconcile his life but finds himself unable to do so without scoring one last deal in Soviet Russia.  Throughout the short account he is plagued by his wife and daughter who seem to have no other interest in him except his money.  At least that is the way he sees it, and Nemirovsky gives us little reason to think otherwise.  A few pages reveal a lighter tone when the author follows young Joy and her boyfriend in the Pyrennes as they escape into a romantic idyll.  But, alas, it is all too brief as they soon find themselves short of cash and have to return.  By this point, Gloria, her nasty mother, has assumed control of much of the Golder estate, while her embattled husband, having suffered a heart attack, retreats inside himself, unwilling to extend anymore credit to anyone, and letting the once ...

One of the things I find most interesting about Russian culture is the way literature, music and theatre have become intertwined.  Operas have been made of Eugene Onegin , War and Peace , and The Idiot .  Imagine an opera of Moby Dick or Whitman's Song to Myself !  The crowning operatic achievement remains Boris Godunov , based on a drama by Pushkin. The drama had been censored until 1866.  Mussorgsky first staged his complete operatic production in 1874.  It is a towering achievement, and finally garnered the attention he deserved.  Unfortunately, he wasn't able to come close to this peak again.  It has been remade countless times, versions by Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich among them.  In 1986, Bondarchuk made a movie based on the story. 

Also worth noting for those who get Mezzo , this television channel is celebrating Russian music this month with many wonderful productions, including Prokofiev's L'Amour des trois oranges , which is visually stunning and a joy to watch and listen to.

Another nice find on YouTube was Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog , broken up into 8 segments.  Known as Dama s sobachkoj in Russian, it was made in 1960 by Iosif Kheifits .  The story became central to Hanna's character in The Reader .  Here's a review of the movie.

I finally managed to get a hold of a copy of Bortko's Idiot with Yevgeni Mironov in the title role.  It was a 10-part television series done in 2003, and is available with English subtitles for those who have poor comprehension of Russian like myself. I had hoped to see Nekrosius's play earlier this month, but it was canceled due to illnesses among the actors.  It is scheduled to come around again in February. In the meantime I had bought an Everyman's Library edition of the novel, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, who appear to have become the foremost authorities on Russian literary translations in recent years.  I have to say I enjoy their translations.  While Volokhonsky does the grunt work of making a word-for-word translation of the original text, Pevear seeks to give it a narrative flow in keeping with the author's original intent, without losing the meaning. Anyway, here is a YouTube link , with English subtitles.  Seems you can follow the ...

Jonathan Weiss wrote a very intimate biography of Némirovsky a few years back.  There are also various websites dedicated to her, including this one .  She seems to enjoy more fame now than she ever did when she was alive.  For many Jews she was very controversial in her day, as she not only converted to Catholicism, but many regarded her early books and articles as antisemitic, in particular David Golder , which was made into a film in 1930.  Weiss appears to feel that her conversion to Catholicism was genuine, and not simply a means of dodging the antisemitic laws of the time.  Either way, she was not able to escape the Holocaust. She was born in Kiev, and raised in St. Petersburg, but French became her first language, especially after her family moved to Paris to escape the Bolshevik Revolution.  She enjoyed a certain amount of success in her day, but it was the printing of the unfinished Suite Francaise in 2004 that appears to have immortalized he...

I feel lucky to have found an inexpensive copy of Nemirovsky's A Life of Chekhov , as it seems pretty hard to find these days.  Suite Francaise really did a number on me, as I found myself fascinated by Nemirovsky, reading her biography and purchasing other books by her.  It was fascinating to read she took such great interest in Chekhov.  It is also interesting to see BBC did a radio production of Nemirovsky's biography of Chekhov .

I find myself reading The Village of Stepanchikovo , a book Dostoevsky wrote while in Siberian exile.  Ignat Avsey gives a very interesting introduction to the povest , noting that it was originally intended as a play, but given no takers Dostoevsky made it into a narrative.  As it was, it took several publishers, before having the book serialized in 1859, and was mostly panned by critics. Avsey also notes that Dostoevsky drew a lot from Gogol, and that Foma Fomich may have been a caricature of Gogol himself, which Dostoevsky had lost respect for.  He also notes other influences like Dickens, whom Dostoevsky read while in exile, and Moliere's Tartuffe . The story revolves around a dysfunctional gentry family in a remote village in which a man of dubious nature has managed to gain sway.  Rostanev's young nephew comes to visit and is soon caught up in a maelstrom of events largely the result of Foma Fomich, who isn't formally introduced until the middle of the nar...

On a lighter note, Russian television has been showing episodes of the Sherlock Holmes series that was made back in the early 80s. Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin starred as the intrepid duo.  The program was one of the most successful in Soviet television.  It pretty much covered all the short stories, which have been handsomely bound into a new annotative 2-volume set .  Here's a clip from the series , with subtitles.  

In perusing online texts of Chekhov , I came across The Black Monk .  My wife and I saw a stage adaptation of this short story years ago with Sergei Makovetsky as the black monk.  It was excellent.  I usually have to read translations before seeing these plays as my comprehension of Russian is very weak, but when you have excellent actors like Makovetsky, their actions pretty much carry the story.

Great picture of Chekhov with Tolstoy in the Crimea in 1897.  

Getting back to books, Sakhalin Island by a relatively young Chekhov is a must read.  The book provides so many insights into Chekhov, and as Robert Peckham noted in his review altered the author's writing style leading to the great literary works that followed.  Peckham further notes, Sakhalin Island focuses as much on a moral and conceptual geography as it does on a physical location. Throughout the book Chekhov demonstrates that for most of his contemporaries Sakhalin was less a place than an imaginary topos; because it had acquired mythical status, its existence had become fictitious. Significantly, Chekhov observes that the official charts of the Tatar and Sakhalin coasts are notoriously unreliable and that the captain of his boat 'follows his own, which he draws up and corrects while sailing.'

Vladimir Bortko's adaptation of Gogol's  controversial novel (now available on DVD) created a big stir when it was released last year.  Bortko has built a fine reputation as one of Russia's premier directors, having brought Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog and Master and Margarita to the screen.  He also did a fine adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot .  This led persons to wonder why such a blatantly pro-Russian version of this novel, which shows the Wild Cossack plowing through fields of Polish noblemen, slicing them down to size. The main thrust of this movie, which Ellen Barry notes in her review , appears to be an attempt to show that there is no separate Ukraine, bringing back the Pan-Slavism that has long dominated Russian thought.  Of course the odd thing is relying on Gogol for any historical picture, given his sardonic view of early 19th century Russia, not to mention the dementia he eventually developed.  However, being a Ukrainian, with Polish a...

Recently watched this wonderful film that seems as fresh today as it was 50-plus years ago when it was made.  It captures the sense of coping with WWII from the domestic side, as lovely Veronika is forced to live life without her boyfriend, Boris, who volunteered for the front.  After a fateful explosion, she comes to live with Boris' family and is soon seduced by the brother, an inspiring concert pianist, who she is never able to fully warm up to. At the heart of the story is a stuffed squirrel with a little basket of nuts, which Boris gave to his dear "Belka" before leaving for the train.  In the basket, Boris had stuffed a note which isn't revealed until much later when Veronika and Mark have relocated to Siberia, with Moscow under siege by the Germans.  Veronika has not be able to forgive herself for giving up on Boris, and it is during a tough scene at a hospital, where she works as a nurse for Boris' father, that the point of her unfaithfulness is dri...