Chekhov's Gun

There isn't much you can add after such a dramatic trial but Dostoevsky offers an epilogue in which he still manages to turn emotions and leave us to wonder what will be the fate of Dmitri Karamazov. It seems that Katya wasn't so cold-hearted after all, professing her love for Mitya and assuring that she and Ivan will do everything they can to ensure his escape.  Grushenka comes in on this scene and isn't quite sure what to make of it after Katya's performance at the trial, but says she is willing to forgive Katya if indeed they do free Mitya as planned. Rather than go through a long escape scene, the narrator instead ends with Alyosha attending the funeral of little Ilyusha, and having one last tete-a-tete with Kolya, the little boy with an anarchistic spirit, which I guess in some way makes Alyosha think of how Mitya may have been like at that age.  It is a touching scene, made all the poignant with his "Speech at the Stone," but not the way you woul...

The final chapter on the trial of poor Mitya is so compelling that I couldn't believe anyone hadn't done a play or film specifically on this chapter.  Sure enough there was a 1958 Off-Broadway production at the Jan Hus Playhouse.  I imagine other productions have been done in other countries, as it is pretty hard for me to imagine others haven't seen the great theatricality of Dostoevsky's closing chapter. The entire story is pretty well summed up, with a few tantalizing "catastrophes" thrown in for good measure.  Dostoevsky appears to relish the high drama he creates, twisting and turning his characters through the guise of the third person monk who narrates the book.  In fact this is the first chapter where the third person narrator appears plausible, as he like many others have squeezed into the town hall to witness this trial that has captured the imagination of Russians far and wide, and to hear him tell it, the foreign press as well, thanks lar...

Nice two-part special on Leo Tolstoy by the History Channel.  Probably no writer has affected so many people as has Tolstoy.  Alan Yentob takes the viewer on an impressive journey over the expanse of old Russia in search of Tolstoy's vast legacy, starting and ending at his beloved Yasnaya Polyana. I was particularly drawn to Tolstoy's time at Sebastopol, where he experienced the ravages of the Crimean War.  This became the subject of his Sebastopol Sketches , making him one of Russia's first front line writers.    These stories are relatively hard to find, despite having first been translated into English by Frank Millet in 1887.  There is no publication any longer in print but you can find the 1887 available at abebooks for a good price.  These "sketches" would implant in him the seed for his epic work, War and Peace . There is a nice intermixing of past and present in this documentary, as well as interviewers with great grandchildren, bi...

As the story goes, we have Bulgakov's The Days of the Turbins to thank for Stalin reviving the tradition of Christmas trees in the Soviet Union.  Stalin was big fan of Bulgakov, protecting him from critics and making him  the director's assistant at the Moscow Art Theater, which Bulgakov had great fun with in Black Snow .  Bulgakov never got along with Stanislavsky.  Anyway, Stalin sanctioned the first Soviet tree in 1937, a 15-meter tree unveiled at the Hall of Columns in Moscow's Trade Union House, capped by a Soviet red star. Ornaments during Stalin's time tended to be ideological and also marked key events like the signing of the Yalta agreement.  It was only after his death that one saw more festive ornaments to choose from.  We still have a few from this latter period.

The Orthodox New Year is still two weeks away, which makes for a very festive fortnight in Moscow and throughout Russia and other Orthox countries. There have been a few attempts to create a new holiday movie to replace the time honored  Carnival in Moscow  (1956), but only a relative handful have been worth remembering. My favorite is  The Irony of Fate  (1975). There was an attempt to update this film in 2007 but it fell quite a bit short of the original, even with Andrey Myagkov, Barbara Brylska and Yuri Yakovlev reprising their roles. Eldar Riazanov couldn’t leave his Carnival alone either. He chose to reprise it in 2006.  Snegurochka  , or the  Snow Maiden  , has been done several times, but it is the 1969 film that is the gem. Other notable holiday films include  Morozko , aka Jack Frost,  Pokrov Gates , featuring a young Oleg Menshikov,  Charodei  , or the Magicians, and  Come Look at Me  with the late g...

I was surprised this film dated from 2001, as it had the look and feel of a late Soviet film.  It is a wonderful character study set during the holiday season, with a lonely woman bringing home a total stranger as her boyfriend to try to cheer her ailing mother.  The film floats in a kind of "magical realism" without pandering to the audience like the more recent Yolki films.  Oleg Yankovsky is in fine form as the dashing stranger and  Irina Kupchenko is wonderful as the melancholy Tatyana.  Yekaterina Vasilyeva and Natalya Shchukina round out the intimate cast.