Chekhov's Gun

Recently came across a wonderful collection of short stories by Mikhail Zoshchenko, a witty satirist from the 1920s.  The title story is about his experience at a public bathhouse and is a wonderful quick read.  Captures all the humor and pathos of life in the old USSR.  Needless to say, he often ran afoul of authorities.

I didn't know what to expect in Rusalka , the second film by Anna Melikian.  I think she drew more from the mythological creature that has long been part of Slavic mythology  than she did Hans Christian Anderson's classic fairy tale, which Chip Crane notes in his review in Kinokultura .  Alisa embodied many ghost-like qualities, although she found herself having a hard time casting her charms on those around her. It is a fractured fairy tale of a girl born of an incident by the sea where her mother makes love to a sailor on the Crimean shoreline near the end of the Soviet era.  Young Alisa has a hard time reconciling her lowly place in life, her thwarted dreams and the fantasy she holds of her father returning one day to lift her out of the seaside hovel she lives in with her mother and grandmother.  When a sailor does come one day, her spirits are temporarily lifted, only to sadly find out he is looking for room and board.  An eclipse literally leaves ...

It was interesting to read Yuri Slezkine's impressions of Boris Pasternak and the growing number of Soviet Jewish dissidents in the 1950s, as a result of Stalin's purges.  I had seen Zhivago's "nihilism" as anachronistic, referring back to the 19th century nihilists which tended to characterize Russian novels, such as Turgenev's Bazarov.  But, the way Slezkine describes the growing despondency among Soviet Jews in the 1950s as Stalin's purges struck to the heart of a people that had contributed heavily to the Bolshevik Revolution, I get the sense that Zhivago more expressed Pasternak's views at the time of his writing, than they did views in the 1920s, which saw so many Russian Jews embrace the Bolshevik Revolution as expressed in Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry . Slezkine provides a fascinating psychological analysis and history of the Jewish influence on the Bolshevik Revolution in The Jewish Century .  He argues that the generation born of the revo...