Chekhov's Gun

This book just gets curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say.  Volkov devotes much of Chapter 6 to the battle for the Nobel prize in liiterature between Bunin (the White expatriate) and Gorky (the Red socialist).  Bunin had fled to Paris during the civil war and was part of a large emigre community in the City of Light. He was considered the leading light among the Russian expats.  Nabokov provided a wonderful vignette of his meeting with Bunin in Speak, Memory . Volkov sets up the story by telling how the Nobel prize committee had repeatedly overlooked Tolstoy, which was a major sore point among Russian emigres.  Tolstoy was expected to receive the first Nobel prize for literature in 1901, as he was at the height of his international popularity.  When the prize went to Sully Prudhomme, a relatively obscure French poet, Volkov noted that upset Swedish writers wrote an apology to Tolstoy.  It didn't seem he much cared one way or the other.  By thi...

Hard to imagine Stalin as a theater-goer, but to read Volkov's account in The Magical Chorus , Stalin had a very active interest in the theater.  He was especially drawn to the work of Gorky and Chekhov.  He also liked Bulgakov and a number of other playwrights of the era.  His closet relationship was with Gorky, who interceded any number of times on the behalf of writers and artists who had run afoul of authorities, with Stalin sometimes giving them a reprieve.  However, Stalin's sympathies didn't extend to Futurists and Absurdists, whose works he openly despised.  Such was the case with Nikolai Zabolotsky, whose absurdist pieces resulted in him being labeled a peasant poet, despite his strong socialist leanings.  Zabolotsky managed to survive the purges but not without scars. Stalin preferred the socialist realism of Gorky, whose plays were very popular at the time.  Stalin and Gorky shared a deep mistrust for peasant writers. Gorky suffered the s...

One thinks of Tom Sawyer as the quintessential American story, which makes it all the more surprising to see this 1936 Soviet interpretation of the adventure tale with Kolya Katsovitch as young Tom.  Seems Stalin appreciated the boyhood anarchist spirit of young Tom.   Vera Nabokov apparently wasn't so charmed, and refused to let her son Dmitri read the book in any language, citing Tom's adolescent love for Becky Thatcher, among other things, a bad influence on her young son.

How easy it is to view Russian-Soviet culture and politics as a zero-sum game and how the Magical Chorus lost, as Keith Gessen suggests in his review, Reading Volkov’s chatty, well-informed and in many ways enlightened book, you wonder whether he even suspects just how badly, how devastatingly, how possibly lastingly, he and his friends have lost.   Gessen couches his review of the 2008 book by Solomon Volkov in the election engineering that was going on in Moscow the same year, and what he describes as Volkov's loathing for Orlando Figes.  The only problem is that it is pretty hard to read any of this in the book itself, as Volkov takes the reader on a magic carpet ride over the cultural history of Russia and the Soviet Union the past 100 years.  Volkov takes the title from a term Anna Akhmatova used to describe the young poets of the late 50s and early 60s, which included Joseph Brodsky. Unlike Figes, Volkov is a native son, albeit a self-exiled one, who shared...

Day Watch proved much more entertaining than Night Watch with Timur Bekmambetov having much more fun with the premise.  It was like he had brought The Master and Margarita up to the present replete with a final ball scene, with a veritable who's who of Russian entertainment stars, that would have made Bulgakov proud.  It was certainly a much more spirited supernatural thriller than that which Bortko made of the Bulgakov classic the same year (2006). I liked the idea of the magic chalk from Samarkand and the ability to rewrite the present, resulting in a fitting end to this wild and crazy ride through modern-day Moscow.  Timur has a great sense of timing, knowing when to bring the chalk into the action and how to use it to great effect.  We all would like to have a chalk like this to break down the walls of our "reality" and recast them as they were before everything went south, which is very much the case in this movie. Anton is much more compelling this ti...

First we get Last Station and now we have Chekhov and Maria , a film treatment of an earlier play by  Jovanka Bach.  We all know that writers were not saints, but it seems that in recent biopics it has become all to tempting to identify with the thwarted woman, in this case Chekhov's sister. The film, like the play, focuses on the waning days of Chekhov's life at his White Dacha in Yalta, where his sister and mother looked after him.    The seaside house served as a magnet for visiting writers, composers and other celebrities, including close friends Bunin and Gorky.   Chekhov had married the well known actress, Olga Knipper, but he was unable to spend much time in Moscow or on the road with her, given his tuberculosis.    Letters indicate this was a mutually agreed to situation.  However, Jovanka draws on Maria's letters as well, which paint a much less flattering portrait of events.  What follows is a story not much unlike that of Un...