Chekhov's Gun

In 2005, the complete journal of Mayakovsky's Discovery of America was presented for the first time.  It is a thin, colorful paperback that chronicles his round about trip to the United States via Cuba and Mexico in 1925.  He apparently had some trouble getting a visa directly to New York, given his political views, and was advised by his good friend, David Burliuk, to use a "back door," which turned out to be Laredo, Texas. Mayakovsky, like many Futurists of his era, was fascinated by American industry and technology.  He saw it as a model for Soviet industry and was determined to get a first hand glimpse of these marvels of ingenuity.  He had some problems in Paris, having lost some of his cash to a "highly talented thief," making due the best he could over the next three months. Cuba and Mexico held much more fascination for him, as it turns out, but New York also proved to be worth his wait when he finally reached the big city on July 30.  There he...

There was some confusion when an Italian film company was in Vilnius filming scenes for an upcoming version of Anna Karenina .  I think a lot of folks expected to see Keira Knightley in town, although Vittoria Puccini appears to be quite a beauty herself.  This is the third adaptation of the film in the last four years.  An earlier Russian television version was completed in 2008, which garnered mixed reviews. The reviews have been mixed on the 2012 British adaptation as well, but after watching it this weekend I was won over by Keira Knightley's performance and the fascinating theatrical interpretation of the novel, using constantly changing theater backdrops to give the story heightened dramatic effect.  This worked especially well in the first half of the movie as Joe Wright literally set the stage for the characters.  Wright moves at a pretty fast pace, unlike the novel, covering a tremendous amount of ground in short order.  He had Tom Stoppa...

I see things don't change much reading Anton Chekhov's wonderful short story, Shrove Tuesday .  I was helping my daughter with math this morning after making her pancakes.  Pancakes are the traditional fare on the eve of the Lenten fast throughout Russia and Eastern Europe.  Chekhov celebrates the occasion in an amusing way through Pavel Vasilitch. ............ Painting by Elena Shumakova.

A couple recent acquisitions include an 1887 English translation of Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches and a 1985 translation of Vasily Grossman's Life & Fate .  The first was translated by Frank Millet from a French edition of Tolstoy's frontline stories from the Crimean War.  He was perhaps Russia's first war reporter.  The latter from the man regarded as the Soviet Union's premier war reporter. Sebastopol is interesting for a number of reasons.  These sketches represent an awakening for Tolstoy as well as laid the groundwork for his triumphant work, War & Peace , as Alan Yentob noted in the History Channel documentary on The Trouble with Tolstoy . Life & Fate is of course Grossman's most celebrated work.  The novel came to symbolize Russia's role in World War II much the same way Tolstoy's War & Peace symbolizes Russia's battle with Napoleon's grand army.  Grossman has enjoyed a lot of attention as of late, with new co...

Apparently, I'm not the only one looking up Meryan people after watching Silent Souls .  The film by Alexei Fedorchenko explores the role of Meryan traditional customs in a post-Soviet world, but it seemed to me the odd ceremonies surrounding weddings and funerals had less to do with the ceremonies themselves, but rather how we struggle to cope in a rapidly changing society.  The Merya themselves seem to be related to the Mari, or Volga Finns, but this film doesn't go into such contentious matters, keeping the story more on the level of allegory. The central character, Aist, sets out to write a journal to break the boredom of working in a paper mill in a remote northern region of Russia.  It is a region apparently heavily populated by Meryans, so that when his boss, Miron, wants to give his dead wife a proper Meryan funeral, taking her to the river where they spent their honeymoon, the police officer doesn't think much of the dead body in the back seat of his SUV. ...