Chekhov's Gun

Tarkovsky opens Mirror in a very Chekhovian way with a lonely woman waiting for her husband to return to a country house when another man turns off the road and comes to flirt with her.  He is a country doctor and playfully jests with her as one would imagine Astrov with Jelena in Uncle Vanya, but she's having none of it, or so it would seem. The husband never returns, and the focus of the film switches to her son recounting his youth through the many reflections of a mirror.  We don't find out much about the son, or even see him.  He floats in a state of semi-consciousness brought on by some illness or fatigue, drifting back and forth in time.  The event cuts , as Ryland Walker Knight describes them are distilled images held in a form of suspended animation in the narrator's mind.  But, it is not a cold abstract film. It is a very emotional and moving film that speaks volumes for the state many Russians found themselves after WWII, reflecting back on th...

It takes a little while to figure out what is going on in Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit , but about midstream this seemingly dry story takes an unlikely absurdist turn, when he describes how the horses had begun to under collectivism and were now taking their straw and putting it into a communal pile where they all ate together.  Like Tolstoy and Chekhov, Platonov recognizes the value of conveying his themes through animals as well as people, although in the case of this short novel, it seems all life forms and even the dead have been reduced to the same level of abject poverty as collectivism sweeps the Bolshevik nation. The original translation feels a bit dry, but Robert Chandler eventually captures the absurd spirit.of the novel, as Platonov skewers the ambitions of the early Soviet state by showing how a small town tries to come together in a collective spirit after purging the notorious Kulaks.  As is noted in this article by Karen Vanuska, Platonov relies hea...

Bulat Okudzhava was one of the greatest Russian "singing bards" and in 1979 he made a rare trip abroad to America , where he performed to a small audience at the University of California at Irvine and later in concert in New York, which is captured on this CD, presenting a beautiful range of vintage songs with Bulat offering short introductions, in Russian of course.  You can go to grooveshark for a taste of what must have been a wonderful evening.

As the story goes, a fortune teller told young Andrei that he would only make seven good films.  This collection puts together the seven feature films of Tarkovsky in a handsome box set for the first time.  But, alas, Tarkovsky had one film up his sleeve, a student film he made while at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), which was an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Killers . Volkov notes in his book, The Magical Chorus, that Tarkovsky along with Brodsky were part of the "stilyagi" in the mid 50s and Tarkovsky was a big fan of Hemingway, who was being printed for the first time in the Soviet Union.  The film is included in the Criterion collection of The Killers , which features Robert Siodmak's 1946 classic, as well as the later 1964 remake by Don Siegel. It is best to start at the beginning with Tarkovsky.   Ivan's Childhood is his most accessible film and was very popular in the Soviet Union when released in 1962.  War movies were the st...

Volkov mentions Daniil Kharms and other absurdist writers from the 20s and 30s, who found themselves out of favor on the Bolshevik government.  What Volkov doesn't mention is that Kharms turned to children's stories , when he was no longer able to publish his absurdist sketches and short stories .   He was a member of the Association of Writers of Children's Stories from 1928 until 1941, at which time he was imprisoned by the NKVD in Leningrad, and died during the Nazi blockade of 1942, like so many unwanted writers during Stalin's time.  He had founded OBERIU, a branch of the Russian avant-garde which paralleled the Dadaists,  inciting audiences with his absurd  plays , much like Apollinaire in Paris.

Bulgakov and his wife Yelena, 1939 I was beginning to wonder if Volkov would even mention Mikhail Bulgakov, but in his last chapter on the Gorbacev era, he does a little bit of backpedaling in providing some additional history of the Moscow Art Theater (MAT) and Bulgakov's brief reign as stage director, at Stalin's urging. It put him in direct conflict with the great Stanislavsky, who he satirically panned in Black Snow , his unfinished Theatrical Novel .  Stalin had been a big fan of Days of the Turbins , despite the play being sympathetic to White Russians.  Volkov notes that Stalin saw the play 15 times, and felt the ending was just right as it showed that Bolshevism prevailed. Surprisingly, Volkov pretty much dismisses The Master and Margarita , despite it being a runaway best seller when it was finally published between 1966 and 1967.  It remains one of the favorite books among Russians, and not so long was made into a television mini-series by Vladimir Bortko,...

While he didn't quite express it that way, Khrushchev's grand plan to make corn the official grain of the Soviet Union became the brunt of many jokes, and served as one of the many gags in Elem Klimov's debut feature film, Welcome, or No Trespassing (1964) in which he turns a pioneer camp into a satirical parable of the Soviet Union.  Fortunately for Klimov, Khrushchev missed the many ribald references.  As you can see from this clip , Klimov exhibits many of the hallmarks that would make him one of the great film directors behind the iron curtain, although he wouldn't be allowed to let loose until 1985 when he created the haunting Come and See , a surrealistic vision of World War II. Here's the film in its entirety .  Sorry, no subs.

The battle over the Nobel didn't end with Bunin and Gorky.  Volkov describes four subsequent battles, the most famous perhaps that of Pasternak, who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1958 but was forced by Krushchev to decline.  Pasternak died two short years later, but left a rich legacy, which Alexandr Sholzhenitsyn took to heart. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union got its first official winner in Michail Sholokhov, best known for Quiet Flows the Don .  Sholokhov had been a favorite of Stalin but it wasn't until 1965 that he became a Nobel laureate.  Volkov feels that this was more or less a concession to the Soviet Union, after the Soviet premier through over Pasternak, who probably would have never been recognized if it wasn't for all the drama that surrounded the smuggling of Doctor Zhivago out of the Soviet Union in 1957, a book Pasternak couldn't get by the censors.  The Don Flows and Doctor Zhivago are generally recognized as the two best Russi...