Chekhov's Gun

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...