Chekhov's Gun

It's back to Alyosha after two very compelling long chapters on Mitya, which formed the core of previous movies made of the novel.  Dostoevsky returns to the rock throwing incident which Alyosha interceded upon.  Little Ilyusha  is on his death bed.  His father had finally accepted the money Alyosha had given from Katarina to assuage the sense of guilt she felt for Mitya beating him in the streets, greatly embarrassing his son, who was never the same after that.  But, the focus of the chapter is more on a boy named Kolya, who had been a friend of Ilyusha. We are introduced to Kolya tending to small charges as he anxiously awaits for their mother to return.  Kolya seems the responsible sort but also has a strong rebellious nature.  He's small for his age and is quite bitter about it, because he expects to be treated as an adult.  He has schooled himself on books left by his father and now considers himself a socialist and free thinker, with a...

I have no idea why Timur Bekmambetov wanted to associate himself with Yolki , or Six Degrees of Celebration as it was called in wide release.  It seems Russian producers were hoping to recreate the magic of The Irony of Fate , by inviting Timur and other Russian directors to paste together a set of vignettes loosely held together by a little girl's lie that the President is her long lost father, which can be made true if Medvedev (the President at the time) utters the code words, Na Deda Moroza nadeisia, a sam ne ploshai! , at the fateful hour.  In order to achieve this "miracle," a boy sets in motion a chain of events which he hopes will break the six degrees of separation between these lowly orphans and the President. As Beach Gray writes in this review , Bekmambetov has a weakness for Hollywood-style movies.  At his best, he can deliver in grand style, but here he serves up a sticky sweet pastry loaded with familiar faces (to Russian viewers anyway) that pretty m...

Mitya didn't have very long to enjoy his moment with Grushenko before the police, magistrate and other town officials arrived to interrogate him on the death of his father.  Dostoevsky backtracks a little to fill in some of the details before picking up with the action at the Mokroye inn. Perkhotin starts to have second thoughts and goes to Madame Khokhlahov to see if she really gave Mitya 3000 rubles.  After getting the straight story he goes to investigate Mitya's father's house to find that all hell had broken lose and reports his findings to the police.  The policeman, the magistrate and the town clerk already know of the crime and Perkhotin's story of how a blood-soaked Mitya came to him with a wad of rainbow-colored notes in his pocket seems to pretty much seal the deal.  But, in true Dostoevskian fashion we hear from Mitya first, and what an admission it is. He admits to almost everything except killing his father.  Honor and pride lead him to omit...

It is a bit like Chichikov's wild ride and there is even a reference to Gogol's Dead Souls in Dostoevsky's marvelous chapter on Mitya.  At 80 pages it reads like a novella, beautifully crafted from beginning to end.  Of course, it helps having the preceding chapters to capture the full impact of Mitya's wild night where he finally connects with his beloved Grushenka. At first you get the sense of Don Quixote chasing after his Dulcinea.  You figure there isn't much chance for the impetuous Mitya who stakes everything on a carriage full of champagne and foodstuffs to recreate a previous wild night at the inn in Mokroye.  When he arrives at the inn and sizes up the situation, his hopes at first seem dashed, but over a game of cards his luck turns and the two Poles are revealed to be little more than hucksters, and the officer that Grushenka had harbored her love for a total dud.  Mitya dismisses with them both, but not in the way you would imagine.  The ...

The opera world lost a great diva in Galina Vishnevskaja .  She reigned supreme in the Soviet Union until the mid 70s when she and her husband, Dmitri Rostropovich were deemed "unpersons" for having harbored the Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhinitsyn.  She was removed from the official history of the Bolshoi, if you can imagine that.  However, Galina got the last laugh when in 1990 she returned to a country on the cusp of independence and was reinstated in the Bolshoi in 1992.  She set up an Opera Center , which has nurtured a new generation of voices.  She starred in Sokurov's 2007 film, Alexandra , a very different role for her.

Around page 420, depending on which edition you are reading, we finally get to the heart of the story, as Mitya finds he has been duped in more ways than one and begins lashing out at everyone.  Dostoevsky gives us an interesting chapter on jealousy, comparing Mitya to Othello, but Mitya knew in his dark heart that everything wasn't as he imagined.  So, the events which follow aren't so much tragic as they are farcical. By page 450, I'm still not sure whether Mitya killed anyone.  Poor Grigori apparently stumbled and fell on a rock, not as a result of the brass pestle Mitya tossed away.  When Mitya turned to help out the poor servant, he covered himself in blood.  I'm sure it will be atleast a hundred more pages before we find out what actually happened.  In the meantime, Mitya is a fugitive with a wad of 100 ruble notes in his coat pocket.  You figure it won't last him long, just as he had squandered Katya's 3000 rubles befor...

It seems Dostoevsky got paid by the word for The Brothers Karamazov as he stretches just about every situation to its breaking point, such as the unruly smell of Father Zossima which leads fellow monks and laypersons who gather for the viewing to question his legacy.  There wasn't much in the way of embalming back then but still a saintly corpse wasn't expected to smell the next day.  Zossima apparently stuck up the place, leading Father Ferapont and others to speculate on his faith, which greatly upset the young Alyosha, who had literally taken Zossima as his father figure given how unfortunate he was to have a miser like Fyodor Pavlovich as his biological father. Alyosha, like his brothers, was raised by surrogate parents, as Fedya didn't appear to have much time for his offspring.  Instead, he preferred bars and brothels, chasing after young trollops like Grushenka.  Alyosha appeared perfectly content to devote himself to the monastic order, but Fat...

There was an interesting passage in Laimonas Briedas' City of Strangers in which he described Dostoevsky's brief visit to Vilnius on his way to Baden-Baden.  The passage was drawn from Anna Dostoevsky's diary , in which she describes her husband refusing to go out that night for fear his baggage might be stolen.  It seemed  Fedya lived in a very agitated state, especially when confrontied with a strange place. I was curious to find out more and did a search for her diary.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find any previews, but stumbled across Leonid Tsypkin's novel, Summer in Baden-Baden , which is drawn from Anna's diary.  He mentioned the Dostoevskys' layover in Vilnius, but described only their morbid fear of Jews, who dominated Vilna at the time. Poking around some more, I found that Alexandra Popoff has written a new book on The Wives of Russia's Literary Giants , which looks very tempting.  We often take these wives for granted, but in recent...

I'm well into The Brothers Karamazov .  It is easy to see that this novel was serialized in its day.  Each chapter is like a little charge of dynamite, designed to string the reader's attention along from one installment to the next in this very melodramatic story.  For a murder mystery it takes an awfully long time to get to the murder.  I'm a quarter of the way through the book an old Fyodor is still very much alive and well, although Dostoevsky maintains a strong tension between the brothers. The novel is essentially a study of predestination vs. free will with the main characters introduced in a meeting with the Father Superior at the youngest brother's monastery on the outskirts of a remote Russian town. Dostoevsky's characters are for the most part "Sensualists" struggling with their own inner demons.  Even within the monastery Dostoevsky reveals schisms and tensions, notably between the Father Superior and  the ascetic Father Ferapont, who is n...

Andrei Zviagintsev's The Return is apparently meant to be read allegorically, but I think the film works better on a simpler level of human emotions.  Granted, there are some easily recognizable allusions and the father figure is a rather stark one, but the boys are the stars of the film, particularly young Ivan on whom much of the emotional weight is carried. Ivan Dobronravov is excellent as the younger brother.  He reminded me a lot of young Ivan in Tarkovsky's great Ivan's Childhood.  The film opens with the boy unable to make the leap from a tall light station on a remote lake shore, which his brother and several other boys had done.  His mother comes to retrieve because he is too ashamed to climb down, forced to face the ugly jeers the following day in this chronology of events. The story is told through the pages of a diary the two boys keep when confronted with their father after 12 years.  The father is presented in Christ...

I read Gorky's The Lower Depths to prep me for a Lithuanian production this past week.  I couldn't help being reminded of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh , especially in Luka's role in the play.  Made me wonder if O'Neill stole a page from Gorky.  Both of these playwrights drew on their own experiences in creating a view from the bottom of urban society.  Gorky's play had more resonance in 1902 with theater viewers used to plays that dealth with either a fading or debauched aristocracy.  The reaction was visceral according to Solomon Volkov who wrote extensively  in his book, Magical Chorus, about the play and Gorky's relation to Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theater.  Gorky quickly found himself the hottest property in Moscow and soon St. Petersburg.  The play, which focuses on a group of lost souls in a squalid tenement building in Moscow, was picked up by the London Theater in 1911 and made into a movie by Jean Renoir in 1936....

We found ourselves watching  Край ,or the Edge, last night.  It dates to 2010 and features one of my favorite actors, Vladimir Mashkov.  It seems made largely for foreign consumption as noted in this review in  kinokultura .  The film is set in the aftermath of WWII with a fallen war hero finding himself a very reluctant champion of German survivors in a gulag on the edge of Siberia.  The film is played more for action than it is meaning, but nonetheless offers some pithy theatrical moments. It is a muscular movie, in some ways similar to Konchalovsky's Runaway Train , as much of the action swirls around two rival locomotive drivers, but seems to come down to uprooted nationalities.  There was a surprise appearance from one of my favorite Lithuanian actors, Vladas Bagdonas, as an exile in this penal colony, although most of the detainees were German.  This of course leads to much tension with the local Russians, which Ignat no longer feels pa...

On this day in 1957 Laika was launched into space.  The perky young female, only 3 years old, was originally named Kudryavka , on account of her curly hair, but I suppose Laika was easier to wrap your tongue around.  Laika underwent rigorous training for her flight aboard Sputnik 2.  For decades the Soviets held up Laika as a symbol of their space program, which Viktor Pelevin poked fun at in Omon Ra .  But, even he didn't know at the time of his writing that Laika hadn't survived her space odyssey.  Information wasn't released until 2002 that Laika died of asphyxiation, when her oxygen ran out on board.  Laika has been honored on postage stamps around the world.

It certainly looks lavish, but I have to wonder about Joe Wright and Tom Stoppard taking on Count Leo in this new adaptation of Anna Karenina.  The last foreign attempt was an American adaptation fifteen years ago with French actress Sophie Marceau cast in the lead role and Sean Bean as Count Vronsky.  Now we get a British version with Keira Knightley and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the lead roles and Jude Law as Anna's jilted husband. There really hasn't been a successful version of the novel.  The Soviet version from 1967 featured Tatyana Samojlova, best known for her role in The Cranes Are Flying .  There were earlier American attempts with Vivien Leigh in 1948 and Greta Garbo in 1935, but somehow Tolstoy's signature character has eluded actresses. I like Keira.  I thought she was great as Sabina Spielrein in A Dangerous Method , but she is a very intense actress, and the role of Anna requires someone with a more quiet passion.  Her attempt at Lar...

One of the most beautiful tellings of the Little Mermaid is this 1968 Soviet feature, русалочка , told from a contemporary point of view and in two different styles of animation.  My wife has long loved this version, although it doesn't make as much impact on our little one, who prefers the Disney version from a few years back.  Here is Rusalochka with English subtitles.

Nikolai Nikogosyan appeared to have many stories to tell when I saw him interviewed on the History Channel the other night.   Well into his 90s, Nikolai still looks spry and alert.  It was just too bad the host didn't see fit to translate what he had to say.  Instead, he showed a few of his more famous bronze castings. Fortunately, there is this piece from Passport magazine , noting his 90th birthday in 2008.  Nikogosyan's work can be found all through the former Imperium.  Perhaps his most famous work is that associated with the New Building of the Moscow University, which he started back in the 50s.  I like his beautiful stone sculpture of Maya Plisetskaya pictured above.  He also has a wonderful hand for painting. Much of his Soviet era work remains in place.  His contemporary pieces break free from the bonds set at the time.  Here is the artist at work .

"I'm a Karamazov... when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful." I had been looking for a nice copy of The Brothers Karamazov , the only one of Dostoevsky's "Big Four" I haven't read.  The first English translation was by Constance Garnett, published in 1912, and served as the standard for decades.  I was tempted to track down a first edition of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from 1990, which received glowing reviews like this one from the New York Times.  But, this Folio Society edition, translated by David Magarshak, is a real beauty, replete with its own slipcase. The volume dates from 1964.  Magarshak may not make the words "sing," as the reviewer raved of the P/V translation, but his translation is generally regarded as the most accurate.   The Folio Society updated this edition in 2008 ...

We found ourselves watching  Полёты во сне и наяву  the other night, featuring Oleg Yankovsky and Lyudmila Gurchenko.  The film dates to 1983 with Yankovsky's character, Sergei, having a hard time coming to terms with his 40th birthday.  The architecture studio where Gurchenko's character, Larisa, worked reminded me a lot like the one my wife shared with colleagues when I first came to Vilnius in 1994.  

I was watching a History channel special on Socialist Realism art of the Soviet Union and this was one of the grand canvases that is now stuffed away in the Tretyakov State Gallery .  The painter was Fyodor Shurpin and he had a wonderful eye for detail, right down to the secret service black car on the road to Stalin's right.  To the left, one sees a row of combines turning over the field of golden wheat, which became symbolic of Stalin's Soviet Union.  Утро нашей Родины is from 1949, with Stalin radiating a post-war confidence.  It is also known as  Dawn of our Fatherland and other titles. Shurpin was one of the better artists to carry over from the pre-war years.  The narrator pointed out how socialist realist art changed dramatically as a result of the war, becoming much more static and propagandist in appearance.  He pointed to two stops along the Moscow subway as an example of this divide.  Here, Shurpin essentially transposes Stalin fo...

Here are a few tantalizing clips from the title story in this early collection, A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia .  Wolves have figured heavily into the Russian imagination, but Pelevin twists this metamorphosis into an existential experience not much unlike those encountered in his book, The Life of Insects .  It is less a parable, as say Bulgakov's classic Heart of a Dog , than it is an invocation of a return to a natural order.  Ultimately, Pelevin through his first person, Sasha, finds himself having to encounter another werewolf in a battle for his life.

What a treat it was to see  Опасные гастроли   the other night on  Дом Кино  television.  Vladimir Vysotsky stars as George Bengalsky, the leader of a traveling cabaret group, which also serves as a cover for early Bolsheviks in Tsarist Russia.  The action swirls mostly around Odessa, but travels to St. Petersburg for its climactic scene.  The film features a great number song and dance routines, with the great Bard singing a few signature songs.  The story is exploited mostly for comic effect, with Vysotsky donning a number of disguises to keep one step ahead of the police.  It was released in 1969.  Here is the film in its entirety on kinopod .   Unfortunately, no subtitles.

My wife and I found ourselves watching this Soviet classic the other night.  Reminded me a little of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court .  Yuri Yakovlev is one of my favorite actors.  He was great in The Irony of Fate .

I'd be most remiss if I didn't note the birthday of Leo Tolstoy.  It was Sunday, September 9.  The Count left a rich legacy that is still being widely disseminated today.  A legacy that influenced Gandhi  and many others

The wine quickly turns to vinegar in this story, as Irene Nemirovsky fashions a novel around her early life in Kiev, Petersburg, a remote region in Finland and ultimately Paris.  As a set of memoirs it is interesting to read, as Nemirovsky provides her fans with a number of salient details, but as a novel it is rather banal, told in third person although we see the story exclusively through the eyes of the protagonist, Helene Karol, from age 11 to 21. Obviously, Irene hated her mother.  She paints her in the most harsh terms, while doting over her father who manages to rise from a bookkeeper in Kiev to a rich investment banker in Petersburg thanks to a gold deal he struck in Siberia after he was fired, due to his wife flaunting herself in public.  As his business deals keep him largely away from home, a still young mother takes on a younger lover, much to her daughter's chagrin, planting the seeds of hatred that would ultimately fuel Helene's "revenge." But, t...

The Paper Soldier offers a very unique view of the "space race," in taking the point of view of a doctor responsible for the health and well being of the cosmonauts, Gagarin and Titov, in the weeks leading up to the historic launch.  This is no rose-tinted perspective, but rather how Chekhov or Pasternak might have imagined the space program, as all the action takes place in the distance, while the doctors deal with abject life in Baikonur, the remote cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It is a very well-crafted film, theatrical in its approach, with Aleksei German stripping away the heroic aspects of the epoch-making flight by treating Gagarin as a periphery figure.  German invents a doctor who struggles with the enormity of the situation, torn not only by the importance of the moment, but between a wife and a mistress.  One in Moscow, the other in Baikonur.  Here we see shades of Dr. Zhivago, as Nina represents his cosmopolitan world view and Vera the more pragma...

You won't find this one on IMDb,  Ты ,  да я ,  да мы с тобой , a fun short film featuring Sergei Makovetsky ( Сергей Маковецкий)  and Vladimir Steklov ( Владимир Стеклов) as brothers maintaining an isolated train depot.  When one of them gets a tattoo of the girl he loves, Katya, it threatens this uneasy relationship.  The film dates back to 2001.  It is broken up over three parts on Youtube.  Part one above, and here are links to part two and part three .  Sorry, no English subtitles.

You get the feeling Viktor Pelevin read quite a bit of Kurt Vonnegut, as he had great fun with the decaying Soviet space program in his first novel, Omon Ra .  The introductory chapters are pretty much background for the story, which sees two boyhood friends dreaming of flying to the moon while at pioneer camp.  You don't really get the full impact of the story until the two find themselves in a flight training camp named after the famed fighter ace, Alexei Mariesiev.  Eventually, they are shipped out to the cosmonaut program where they undergo a rigorous set of exams including a reincarnation test. It's a brisk read, as Pelevin leads you on a journey of discovery quite unlike any other.  The Soviet Union finds itself in a battle with the USA in keeping up the appearances of a space program during the Brezhnev era.  Even a great bear hunt for the visiting Henry Kissinger was staged, with disastrous consequences, as related in a story to "Ommy" by a blin...

I see there is a paperback version of The Slynx now available through New York Review of Books.  I ordered an earlier hardback published by Houghton Mifflin with a much more evocative cover.  The NYR copy is the same translation by Jamey Gambrell, so you can take your pick.  I'm not sure when Tatyana Tolstaya originally penned the book, but it was sometime in the 1990s at the height of the corruption that plagued Russia, and in particular Moscow, no doubt lending to the dystopic futuristic world she imagines in this novel.   Tolstaya is best known for her unvarnished criticism and trenchant essays of post-Soviet Russia.   Pushkin's Children is well worth reading.  She has no soft spot for Putin, even if a certain amount of stability has emerged in the wake of the wild and woolly 90s.  Since then, she has taken her acerbic wit to the airwaves, co-hosting a popular television show, The School for Scandal.  Here's a clip from an episode feat...

My wife has been reading  Marina's Thirtieth Love , one of Vladimir Sorokin's early novels, which she says is crazy mix of sex and mayhem.  Sorokin was part of the came of age in the mid 70s, defying authorities and publishing his books in undeground magazines like  Spring and Mitya's Journal .  This book comes from that period.   It doesn't seem as though it has been translated into English, but another book from that period is The Queue .  I recently ordered the Ice Trilogy , which has received rave reviews.  Sorokin takes in a grand sweep in these three novels, covering the Soviet experiment and its collapse in a "band of brothers" who, seek out their kin and re-unite them. Perfect impersonators of meat-machine ways, they employ a sort of magic-ice hammer. When pounded on the chest of a fellow-angel, it releases blissful feelings of content and so awakens the victim to their special status. For the initiates, once enlightened, "the absol...

Viktor Pelevin has long liked to combine elements of the ancient past, present and future in his stories.  My favorite is Life of Insects , in which insects literally morph into humans, although they retain their entomological instincts.  In Generenation π , the story revolves around a young independent Russia, being weaned on Pepsi and trying to come to terms with the American lifestyle invading their country.  The book was published in 1999, before Putin rose to power, giving it a first hand feel of the situation.  The English translation is called Babylon .  Pelevin sets a black market atmosphere, which characterized much of Eastern Europe at the time, but told with wit and irony. Russians have long saw themselves as Eurasians.  One of the favorite quotes I hear is "scratch the surface of a Russian and you will find an Asian," so Pelevin plays heavily on Mesopotamian themes, in which a young advertising copy writer tries to unlock the se...

Sokurov's elegy  didn't make as deep an impression on me as it did on Nick Cave , but I was moved.  A mother and son appear to be in a self-imposed exile.  There are sounds from beyond Sokurov's distorted close-ups, but you don't see the children playing or the seagulls that lend a seaside appearance to the film.  Sokurov only chooses to show a train and a ship at sea to imply a distant connection. Gary Morris  describes the painterly quality to the film, Sokurov's sense of German Romanticism, with dream-like landscapes that evoke Caspar David Friedrich.  The long narrow shots, especially of the mother in bed made me think of Egon Schiele.  Whatever your impression, the film draws you into its claustrophobic world, eliciting deep emotions. The house appears as it may have served as the mother's school house before.  It is bare and institutional looking, and she and her son allude to her earlier days in gentle conversation.   She lies i...

Vysotsky was many things to many people, so it is not surprising to see a wide range of opinions on Thank You for Living , a recent biopic by Petr Buslov that captures 4 tumultuous days of Vysotsky's life when he was touring Uzbekistan in 1979.   The story comes from the pen of Nikita Vysotsky, paying the supreme tribute to his late father.  Apparently Marina Vladi was not impressed, calling the film a terrible sin .  More like a sin of omission, since she figured very little into the movie.  What few flashbacks we get are to Vystosky's first wife and children, notably in an out-of-body experience when he suffered a heart attack. I thought Buslov did a great job in capturing the era, especially the remoteness and desolate beauty of Bukhara, a desert city far from Tashkent.  Vystosky was apparently drug to Uzbekistan against his wishes to stage a concert that would receive close KGB scrutiny.  By this point, he was strung out on drugs and was sufferin...

It is very nice to see the work of Victor Serge being reprinted by New York Review Book Classics .  They have a literal treasure of trove of obscure titles, including those of Platonov  and Yuri Olesha , among many others, and not just from Russia.  But, Serge's work stands out, as noted by Christopher Hitchens in this article he wrote for The Atlantic in 2003.  In Hitch's words, After Dostoyevsky and slightly before Arthur Koestler, but contemporary with Orwell and Kafka and somewhat anticipating Solzhenitsyn, there was Victor Serge. His novels and poems and memoirs, most of them directed at the exposure of Stalinism, were mainly composed in jail or on the run. Some of the manuscripts were confiscated or destroyed by the Soviet secret police; in the matter of poetry Serge was able to outwit them by rewriting from memory the verses he had composed in the Orenburg camp, deep in the Ural Mountain section of the Gulag Archipelago. A great place to start is wi...