Chekhov's Gun

Maskaradas has become a staple of the Fall season, and one we've watched several times.  Lermontov had a hard time getting this play staged in his day.  Vladimir Golstein notes that the poet made drastic revisions to please censors, but it wasn't until 11 years after Lermontov's death that the play was first seen. Rimas Tuminas first staged the play in Vilnius in 1997.  He is currently directing Moscow's Vakhtangov Theatre.

  My wife and I had been looking forward to the premiere of Ana Karenina , a modern dance production by Anželika Cholina .  We weren't disappointed.  Cholina appeared to take the story from the point of view of Ana, creating a dream-like atmosphere in which Ana wrestles (at times quite literally) with the tempest of emotions inside her.  The Kitty-Levin story serves more as counterpoint, with Levin portrayed as an oafish man, dogging Kitty through the first act before bringing her to his estate and marrying her in the second act. Beata Molytė shines as Ana, overwhelming the rather sober looking Vronsky, as portrayed by Gintaras Visockis.  Torn by her passion for Vronsky, her place in society and her love for her son, Ana plays out these emotions on stage, at times bordering on the hallucinatory, in keeping with the emotions she for the most part kept suppressed in the novel, until her tragic end, which Cholina handled beautifully.  She portrays Ana as d...

I was bemused by this article by Dara Horn on Teaching Tevye .  I'm not sure where Dara is coming from, but I think she should take a closer look at the stories in question, because Tevye is no "ignoramus," and the quotes he takes from the Bible and Talmud may seem broad and sometimes out of context, but as Hillel Halkin noted in his introduction, were in most cases  a propos , as we must remember that Sholem Aleichem is speaking through Tevye as he relates the changing face of Yiddish life in Ukraine. These stories, ostensibly about the marriages and misfortunes of Tevye and his daughters, serve to tell us about various forces shaping Yiddish life.  One daughter marries a revolutionary, and moves to Siberia to be with him after he serves his jail term.  Another marries an Orthodox boy, with Tevye finding it very difficult to reconcile himself with the loss of his daughter to the local priest, who appears to gloat over this conversion.  Another...

I found myself asking if Petersburg constituted the first "Post-Modern" novel?  So many of the elements we now regard as "Post-Modern" are right here in Bely's "Astral Novel" from 1913.  Seems that the Post-Modernists stole from the pages of Symbolist literature. Bely shifts back and forth in time effortlessly, with the events in the novel all taking place within a span of two days.  The ticking clock inside the homemade bomb, hidden in a sardine can, comes to dominate the second half of the novel.  The tension is wonderfully wrought, as Bely moves back and forth between a handful of characters in those fateful hours of the strikes that would bring about the first Russian revolution of 1905.  Nikolai  Apollonovich finds himself breaking these hours down into seconds, with each one ticking away slowly on a collision course with "zero." Meanwhile, his father contemplates the distance that has grown between his son and him, and in snooping ...

I find myself reading Sholem Aleichem's stories of Tevye the Dairyman , after finishing Petersburg (more on Petersburg later).  I have a translation by Hillel Halkin, who also writes a lengthy forward describing the Jewish condition in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the time in which these stories are set.  Aleichem eventually immigrated to America, as many Eastern European Jews did during this time, escaping the harsh tsarist rule that had consigned them to the Pale of Settlement .  Still, some Jews prospered as Aleichem noted in his amusing introductory chapter, as Tevye meets a wealthy family from Yehupetz (Kiev) in an odd and round about way. The stories are filled with religious anecdotes as Tevye tries to come to terms with his lowly place in the world.  These amusing reveries are passed along to Aleichem, who sets himself as the narrator of these stories.  Halkin noted that Aleichem used a number of pen names, this being th...

Here is a wonderful adaptation of Gogol's classic short story, The Nose , by Alexander Alexeieff from 1963.

Bely draws on Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman as his inspiration for Petersburg , prefacing each part with pieces from the immortal poem.  In this poem we find a young man, who the narrator has chosen to call Yevgeny, driven mad by the destruction wrought from the flood of 1824 , which destroyed his his love's home and cast about its inhabitants if after a battle.  Yevgeny wanders around for a year in a state of delirium eventually coming upon the bronze sculpture of Peter, at which he hurls his abuses, only for the menacing statue to come to life and chase him through the streets of Petershburg and to his doom.  With the popularity of the poem, Falconet's statue of Peter the Great became known as The Bronze Horseman . The Neva figures heavily into the poem, like an untamed beast, whose waves plunge the city into chaos.  It took decades for the city to bring the waters under control with a series of locks and canals...

Pasternak to Isaiah Berlin, ".. of course Andrey Bely was a genius – Petersburg, Kotik Letaev are full of wonderful things – I know that, you need not tell me – but his influence was fatal." and what did Berlin think of Andrei Bely? "... a man of strange and unheard-of insights – magical and a holy fool in the tradition of Russian Orthodoxy." here's more .  ____________________________________________ Andrei Bely (1905) as seen by Leon Bakst .

Sergei Eisenstein goes back two years before the first Russian Revolution to the strikes of 1903 and the subsequent suppression that followed in his feature length debut, Стачка .  The film was made in 1925 and was steeped in revolutionary references, including the famous scene near the end of the film where he compares the suppression to cows being slaughtered at the abbotoirs.  He would go onto make Броненосец Потёмкин (Battleship Potemkin) that same year, which dealt with the mutiny that occurred in 1905.  His strong visual style would become the hallmark of early Soviet film.

As I read Petersburg , first published in 1916, I probably could use a few more annotations, as there are so many references that if you aren't fully knowledgeable of the events that surrounded the 1905 uprising , you will find yourself missing a lot of them.  My overall sense of the novel is that Andrei Bely was channeling Gogol while setting his characters against each other like chess pieces.  Each chapter seems to represent a "move," or series of moves, leading toward a fateful ending.  I can see why this is one of Nabokov's favorite books from the 20th century, as it has much of the sardonic wit and clever juxtaposition of characters that you read in Nabokov's books. A new translation by John Elsworth apparently breathes more life into the novel.  I have been reading the Cournos translation, which I haven't found that stilted, as Katya Galitzine notes in her review of the book, but am curious to read the Elsworth translation as he goes back to the ...

On a lighter note, one of my favorite Soviet animated features is Hedgehog in the Fog , made by Yuriy Norshteyn in 1975, and winner of numerous international awards in the years that followed.  Norshteyn has done a number of other wonderful animated features, but has yet to finish his long overdue adaptation of The Overcoat .

Don't know quite what to make of this early short novel by Chekhov.  He seems to be presenting young Egor as the future of Russia as the boy finds himself thrust into a journey across the limitless Steppe with his uncle and a bishop in a mad race to catch up with the mysterious Varlamov.  While this action propels the first half of the story, it seems little more than a way to hold the reader's attention as Chekhov seems more interested in describing the vast prairie land of his mother country and Egorushka's impressions, as he is being taken to a boarding school in a distant town. Along the way we are treated to some rather odd characters sketches such as two Jewish brothers where the  shabby covered chaise stops briefly as the boy's uncle, Ivan Kuzmitchov, tries to gauge how distant Varlamov remains on the road.  The description of the Jewish brothers would make many readers today cringe, as they are cast as gross caricatures.  Forced to sit for a cup of ...

While technically a war movie, Tarkovsky chooses to take a more abstract approach to the ravages of war in My Name is Ivan .  We find a young Ivan moving between blissful reveries with his mother and sister by a minimalist lake shore to those where he is seen penetrating behind German lines during WWII, bringing back reconnaissance to numbered Soviet commanders. The war scenes are presented realistically while the idyllic beach scenes are far more dream like, but in watching it again I'm not convinced the war scenes are real.  Rather, a product of his imagination, especially the use of code in the beginning and the counting he does with the twigs, berries and seeds in the young lieutenant's office.  I think Tarkovsky purposefully tried to keep the relationship between the conflicting images ambiguous, using marvelous camera work such as the scene where young Ivan drifts off to sleep and moves up a well in his dream to the image of he and his mother looking down a well....

The Golden Calf sounds a lot like a modern update of Dead Souls .  In this case Ostap Bender rides through the Hinterlands in a yellow jalopy in search of an elusive millionaire.  Sounds like a good translation.  As Mark Twain once wrote in The Awful German Language , it is very hard to translate humor. Ilf and Petrov love the idea of searching out millions, probably best characterized in The 12 Chairs , which Mel Brooks made into a movie back in 1970.  Here's the classic Soviet version directed by Mark Zakharov and featuring Andrei Mironov as Bender, but alas no subtitles.  Well worth the look just the same. Also great fun is the adventures of Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip .