Chekhov's Gun

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 form, laid out in bed as in And

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.  It can be fou

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 part of it, made adamantly clear when

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.