War and Peace

Story of the Bass Cello

2012-02-14T05:18:00.000-08:00

I was putting together a list of movies, The More Refined One Is, the More Unhappy, based on Chekhov stories and plays, and came across a couple of fun shorties drawn from his story, Romance with a Double Bass. The first stars John Cleese and Connie Booth, a year before they teamed up on Fawlty Towers . The second is a wonderful Czech animated feature by Jiri Trnka, which dates from 1949. Oddly enough, I'm not able to find a copy of the story online.

Revizor, or the Inspector-General

2012-02-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

I find myself prepping for an upcoming production of the Revizor. Rimas Tuminas is reviving the production in Lithuania. He has been directing Moscow's Vakhtangov Theater the past several years, but returns to his home theater from time to time. Here is a clip from his first production in 2001. Previews show Sergei Makovetsky cast as the mayor, but will have to wait until the 29th to see!

The Revizor is considered the epitome of satire, and perhaps Gogol's greatest work. It seems just about everyone has tried his hand at this play at one time or another, including Danny Kaye in the 1949 Hollywood production. There is also a little known Egyptian version, which dates from Nasser's time, 1956. Here is the 1996 Russian screen production, featuring Nikita Mikhalkov as the mayor and Oleg Yankovsky as the judge. Unfortunately, no subtitles.

What to make of Chekov?

2012-02-07T23:50:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Chek(h)ov, there has been a cyber legend that Pravda questioned the lack of a "Russian" member on the international crew of Star Trek, and so Gene Roddenberry felt compelled to create the character Ensign Chekov. Snopes questions the story on several counts. Nothing has apparently been found in the Pravda archives to verify this claim, and young Pavel looks suspiciously like Davy Jones (mop heads were quite popular at the time). But, if you look at young Anton Chekhov and young Pavel Chekov there is some resemblance ; ) It seems Roddenberry was already cultivating myths back in the 60s that would keep Trekkies going for decades afterward.

It struck me that Roddenberry was more drawn to the voyages of Captain Cook than he was the space race in creating the original series. For whatever reason, he felt compelled to introduce a Russian character, probably in an effort to show that the Cold War really would come to an end some day and the space race would evolve into a joint effort. Turned out to be quite prescient in this regard, as the famous Apollo-Soyuz joint mission proved in 1975. A number of collaborative efforts have been carried out in the years since.

Antosha Chekhonte

2012-02-06T02:11:00.000-08:00

It was interesting to read that Chekhov initially published his short stories under the pseudonym Antosha Chekhonte, since he viewed his humorous sketches as little more than a means of making money to help feed himself and his extended family. Nemirovsky noted that the young author didn't think much of these stories until Dmitri Grigorovich, an elder Petersburg novelist, wrote to tell him how much he enjoyed his stories that were being published in a Petersburg journal, Fragments, over the period 1883-85. Grigorovich singled out The Hunstman as his favorite. In response, young Anton (then 26) thanked his admirer profusely but admitted that he wrote that particular story while taking a bath and could see nothing special in it. Nevertheless, he would take his fan's words of advice and devote more time to his writing, as Grigorovich noted it would be a waste to squander such talent. The old novelist also urged Chekhov to publish under his own name.

Here are more of Chekhov's early short stories.

The Elusive Mr. Chekhov

2012-02-02T08:43:00.000-08:00

It seems Anton Chekhov is a hard man to pin down. No one has yet to write a definitive account in the English language. I've been reading Irene Nemirovsky's A Life of Chekhov, published after her death in 1950. It is a personal story about Chekhov, rather than a study of his work. The narrative has been made into a BBC radio play.

A book that does receive much praise is Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought, edited and annotated by Simon Karlinsky and translated by Michael Henry Heim. It is a collection of Chekhov's letters spread throughout his literary career with a lengthy introduction by Karlinsky putting his work into perspective. Here is a copy of the 1997 reprint by Northwestern University. It appears to be an expanded copy of the original 1975 edition. Nemirovsky drew on Chekhov's letters to a large degree in writing her personal account.

Henri Troyat has also written a biography of Chekhov that is generally well regarded. He is most famous for his magisterial biography of Tolstoy. Heim also translated this book to English.

The portrait is by Issac Levitan, painted in 1886. Here's a nice essay, Crossed Destinies: Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan

Time waits for no one

2012-01-30T23:32:00.000-08:00

It was funny to read Ivan Bunin's comments on The Cherry Orchard. He criticized Chekhov for making so much of an orchard when it was impossible to grow much of anything in the region he described, and that the land would have been of little value to a speculator like Lopakhin. It seems Bunin, like many others, had a tendency to take Chekhov literally, when the play was intended as a comedy.

Stanislavsky once again staged the play as a historic drama, taking the role of Gaev himself and casting Lopakhin as an unsympathetic local businessman intent on wresting the estate from poor Madame Ranevskaya. Chekhov apparently didn't see Lopakhin as good or bad, but rather someone who was sympathetic to the woman and was trying to work out the best deal for her, but she and her brother simply couldn't see past their rose-tinted glasses, imagining the estate in its former glory rather than sad state of affairs that now existed.

Not surprisingly, later Soviet versions played up Lopakhin and cast Lyubov Adreievna and Leonid Anreieveitch as anachronistic beings forever trapped in their own world. Varya is the sensible daughter and Anya the hopelessly naive one. Vladimir Vysotsky even took a theatrical turn in The Cherry Orchard in 1974, lending his charismatic presence to Lopakhin.

Foreign versions, like this 1962 adaptation by Michel Saint-Denis with a young Judy Dench as Anya, favored the nobility. John Gielgud offers a very dashing version of Gaev, and poor Lopakhin is reduced to the periphery. The most interesting thing is that Dame Judy Dench returned to play Madame Ranevskaya in this 1981 production.

There is this Russian version, directed by Anna Chernakova in 1993. After some interesting archival logging footage, the story starts with Lopakhin tending a fire and reminiscing of a time the Madame came to his aid, as in the play. She did a follow-up to this film in 2010, entitled Death in Pince-Nez, which is reviewed in KinoKultura. There is also this adaptation by Sergei Ovcharov, simply entitled The Garden, which he produced in 2008.

Another recent cinematic version is one directed by Mihalis Kakogiannis in 1999, starring Charlotte Rampling and Alan Bates as Madame Ranevskaya and Gaev.

Tom Stoppard also takes a turn with The Cherry Orchard, teaming up with Sam Mendes for this modern British theatrical production at the BAM in 2009. Stoppard and Mendes apparently try to tie Chekhov to Beckett.

The lead photo is from a production at the Dundee Rep, directed by Vladimir Bouchler in 2009. Take your pick.

What is Art?

2012-01-18T02:30:00.000-08:00

The problem with Chekhov is that once you get started it is hard to stop. I turned to The Seagull the other night in this wonderful collection, translated by Laurence Senelick. It is perhaps his most engaging play with characters that leap off the page, such as the eternally young stage actress, Irina Arkadina, who constantly terrorizes her son, Konstantin Treplev. He is vainly trying to break standard conventions when it comes to play writing, but finds himself unable to elicit the emotions most persons, especially his mother, look for in theater.

Senelick noted that Tolstoy didn't think much of the play, content only with a single passage in which Treplev castigated the state of the theater at the time. But, Chekhov struck a wonderful balance between comedy and drama, not letting his speeches dominate the play. Treplev finds he is no match for his mother, who diminishes him at every turn. The play opens with Konstantin staging one of his plays at a summer house, only for his mother to crush his spirits with her sharp sarcasm. Not only that, but Nina (Konstantain's love interest) is intrigued by Arkadina's "boy toy," Trigorin, a successful novelist, further devastating the would-be playwright.

The final act takes place two years later, with all the characters coming back together again pretty much in the same state of mind although much has happened in the time in between. Seems Chekhov wanted to show that time doesn't change the situation except to show Masha's strong interest in Treplev, despite having married Medvedev and having a child. Treplev still maintains his unrequited love for Nina. Arkadina remains indifferent to everyone but herself and Trigorin is content to play his part in this melodrama, oblivious to anyone's feelings.

Chekhov intended it as a comedy, but Stanislavsky treated the play they way he did historic dramas, casting the characters as polar opposites. This was before he would modernize the theater. Chekhov was very dissatisfied with Stanislavsky's production, but it was a success and for years remained the definitive version.

Savelyeva (Nina)

The classic film version is this 1970 Russian production, Chayka, directed by Yuri Karasik, with some of Russia's finest stage actors of the era, including a young Lyudmila Savelyeva as Nina. Pictured above is Alla Demidova as Arkadina. There was also a ballet version with Maya Plisetskaya and music by Rodion Shchedrin, from 1980. But, probably the best known version is Sidney Lumet's 1968 adaptation, thanks to its all-star cast that included Simone Signoret (Arkadina), James Mason (Trigorin), Vanessa Redgrave (Nina), and David Warner (Treplev). Here's a clip of the opening scene.

Exporting Vanya

2012-01-15T09:33:00.000-08:00

It was a return to Chekhov over the weekend as I watched Vanya of 42nd Street, an interesting adaptation of the play by David Mamet filtered through the lens of Louis Malle. I had seen it years ago and had remembered it fondly. It was nice not to be disappointed the second time around.

The production has its flaws. I think it was a little too melodramatic at times but Wallace Shawn is good as Vanya. Larry Pines is excellent as Astrov and Julianne Moore simply divine as Yelena. The supporting cast is filled out nicely with George Gaynes providing the necessary aplomb to the role of Serybryakov.

There is a certain amount of overlap in Chekhov's plays but it was interesting to see that Uncle Vanya is an adaptation of an earlier play, The Wood Demon, with several of the same characters and much of the same dialog. Chekhov was never satisfied with his earlier play and chose to rework it. He had fallen under the spell of Tolstoyism during the writing of The Wood Demon and by 1897 had second thoughts about the idealism Tolstoy inspired.

Astrov is a carry over of Krushchov, the good doctor who has such a great interest in maintaining the nation's forests for the sake of posterity. But, in Uncle Vanya, Astrov questions whether it is all worth it. He makes a speech very similar to Krushchov in the first act, extolling the virtues of forest management, but by the third act he makes it clear to Yelena in a set of maps that it is a losing proposition. He notes that if progress had resulted in better roads, schools and the general welfare of the people, he could justify the despoiling that had taken place in their region, but all he sees is more poverty. Perhaps Chekhov's own disillusionment is reflected through the once starry-eyed Astrov.

Eventually, Astrov, like Vanya and Sofiya, returns to his work after the professor and his lovely wife leave for a remote city where he hopes to settle into retirement. As with The Cherry Orchard, the important thing is to accept your condition in life.

Chekhov's plays are more a vehicle to vent anxieties than a search for some great dramatic victory or great truth. In many cases, his plays were intended as social comedies, poking fun at all the frustrated ambitions of living on country estates, detached from the cultural and intellectual hubs of Moscow and Petersburg. Whatever talents his characters have are minimal, yet they aspire for something more than their work-a-day lives, which is why audiences were drawn to his plays, as they voiced many of the same anxieties they felt. This is especially the case with Uncle Vanya, one of his most enduring plays.

Not Everyone Loves Raymond

2012-01-13T03:42:00.000-08:00

This documentary caught my eye, which chronicles the attempt by Sony to bring Everyone Loves Raymond to Moscow, recasting the situation television comedy with Russian actors. Unlike previous efforts with The Nanny and Married with Children, Raymond proved to be quite cumbersome. Maybe that's because it wasn't a very good sitcom to begin with, but one that filled a void on American television after the long run by Seinfeld. But, you can't argue with success and Rosenthal chooses to lash out at Russian producers and costume designers who tried to jazz up the show, thinking it might play better to a Russian audience. Here's the trailer.

From what I've seen Russians tend to prefer variety shows, with comic sketches, such as the highly popular Наша Russia, rather than the uniquely American situation comedy. While some sitcoms do travel well, others fall flat. Friends has a big international audience, thanks largely to the star power of its actors, who all went onto successful Hollywood careers. By contrast, Seinfeld is too specific in its humor to gain much of an international audience.

Where Russia truly excels is in slapstick comedy, for which there have been no shortage of movies over the years. Maybe adapting one of these movies into a "sitcom" might prove more successful than Raymond?

From Russia with Love

2012-01-11T09:07:00.000-08:00

When it comes to "Cold War" movies, I prefer mine stirred, not shaken. Always had a soft spot for Bond's second escapade, From Russia with Love, which featured the lovely Daniela Bianchi as agent 007's muse, Tatiana Romanova. Robert Shaw provides the nasty villian, and Lotte Lenya makes a surprise appearance as KGB agent, Rosa Klebb.

The Soviet Union was a dark, mysterious place seen mostly through the lens of the Cold War. Apparently, Putin and his KGB comrades used to enjoy Michael Caine's Harry Palmer movies, such as Funeral in Berlin, or so the story goes. Even in films like North by Northwest you could see it in the subtext. But, perhaps the most memorable film from that era is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton as British agent Alec Leamas near the end of his rope. The film focuses mostly on the East-West divide in Germany, and was adapted from a John Le Carre novel.

The theme has its earlier precedents, such as the whimsical Ninotchka, starring Melvyn Douglass and Greta Garbo. The 1939 film is set in Paris at the time of the Russian Revolution, with Garbo as a stern Russian agent sent to see what the problem is with a jewel transaction. She doesn't count on a charming count foiling her plans. Bela Lugosi even pops up in the film as Commissar Razinin.

By contrast, the Soviet Union didn't seem as obsessed with the spy genre, although the Dead Season (Мертвый сезон) stands out from 1968, starring Donatas Banionis (Solaris) as Ladeynikov.

My Favorite Clown

2012-01-09T08:50:00.000-08:00

It was fun watching Oleg Menshikov in Moy lyubimyy kloun the other night. The movie dates back to 1986, the year of Chernobyl, and offers an interesting look at life under the big top. The film revolves around Sergei, the clown, and a 6-year-old boy, Vanka, whom he has adopted. The film has the added bonus of Vladimir Ilin as Menshikov's sidekick. Worth checking out in full.

Déjà vu

2012-01-03T03:32:00.000-08:00

Call it a continuation, if you want, but extending The Irony of Fate into present day Russia simply doesn't work. Much of the irony was in response to life in the old USSR, but here we get an all too contemporary view of Russia (2007) with a young couple repeating virtually the same situation as in the original movie. It doesn’t help that the young actors fumble with their roles, unable to achieve the same spark that existed a generation before. The only real twist is the relationship the young couple has with the main characters, Nadya, Ippolit and Zhenya, from Ryazanov's 1975 classic. All three actors reprise their roles. Better to see the original again.

Dersu and the Captain

2011-12-22T22:42:00.000-08:00

As the temperature plunges down into the red, I find myself thinking about movies like Dersu Uzala, which Akira Kurosawa adapted from Vladimir Arseniev’s account of charting the Russian-Manchurian border in the earlier part of this century. Dersu is one of those rare movies that transcends time and place with its universal theme of humanity. Filmed at the height of the Cold War, it reached far beyond the movies of that time that tended to play up the East-West tensions and looked for common bonds.

Here's the scene with them staring into the face of winter.

Vysotsky: the movie

2011-12-18T22:39:00.001-08:00

We were watching a segment the other night on the making of the movie, which was released a couple weeks ago. The mystery is over. Sergey Bezrukov had the honors of playing the great screen bard. Of course, you are taking a big gamble casting anyone for the role, as Vysotsky is still very fresh on many Russians' minds. His music, movies, and television appearances live on, and he is a tough act to emulate. But, it seems Bezrukov satisfied viewers.

The film apparently covers the last four days of his life, turning it into a very dramatic chain of events, judging from the trailer. It has been a huge hit, easily surpassing all other movies this year. Here's a second trailer.

Remembering Evgeny Leonov

2011-12-09T05:33:00.000-08:00

We found ourselves watching Gentlemen of Fortune the other night. This video comes with subtitles. Evgeny Leonov is one of the great Russian comic actors, and perhaps the most loved actor. You might call him the Russian Danny De Vito. His filmography is a mile long and he has done voices for famous cartoon characters like Vinny Pukh. He even had a stamp minted in his honor.

Gruppirovka Leningrad goes Lithuania

2011-11-23T05:07:00.000-08:00

It is too bad I missed this concert at the Forum Palace recently. Leningrad reformed last year and has revived its raucous rhythms from the late 90s, which bespoke the turbulent nature of Russia during that time. They hooked up with the Tiger Lilies at one point, collaborating on an album in 2005, but it pretty much flew under the radar screen. Not everyone's cup of tea, but these guys and gal (Yuliya Kogan) sure can jam,

Pas de deux

2011-11-22T01:12:00.000-08:00

It's a black day in Moscow when the Bolshoi loses two of its premier dancers, Ivan Vasilev and Natalia Osipova, to the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.

Okno v Parizh

2011-10-21T07:40:00.000-07:00

.... which brings to mind this fun movie from 1993, Okno v Parizh, that captured the sense of longing for the West during the waning days of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, for poor Nicole all these new house guests prove overwhelming and she soon finds herself on the wrong side of the window, hidden by an old wardrobe. What makes this film special is how Yuri Mamin plays both sides of the "window."

Mamin found himself on the outside looking in when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and had a hard time financing this film, but his French backers stuck by him and the movie was a big hit in France and at the Berlin Film Festival that year, and was subsequently picked up by Sony Pictures.

My Paris

2011-10-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

Nice to see this classic book in print again, Moi Parizh, a highly impressionistic photo journey through Paris by Ilya Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky. It was originally published in 1933 and would cost you a small fortune for a first edition. I love these books as they capture a side of the Russian avant-garde not often seen.

The Shooting Party

2011-10-14T06:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a classic movie based on a classic novel. Oleg Yankovsky and Galina Belyayeva in Chekhov's The Shooting Party. Sorry, you will have to search for subtitles.

Remembering Oleg Yankovsky

2011-09-29T23:39:00.000-07:00

Oleg Yankovsky passed away in 2009, but his legacy lives on in film. We were watching Khrani menya, moy talisman (Keep me, my talisman) the other night, in which a young Yankovsky is part of a love triangle with Tatyana Dubrich and Alexandr Abdulov, as they document the Pushkin Poetry Festival in Boldino,

Some marvelous cameos by Bulat Okudzhava and others in the film, which dates from 1986 Yankovsky was one of Russia's favorite actors. His filmography is mostly known within the country, but he also played in Tarkovsky's Mirror (1974) and Nostalghia (1983).

Scenes from Paris

2011-09-27T03:15:00.000-07:00

Judging by the price Ilya Repin's 1875 masterpiece fetched at a Christie's auction this past summer, Russian art is finally getting its due. Repin is widely regarded as the master of Russian realism in the late 19th century. He briefly broke with the Peredvizhinki artistic school to paint scenes of Paris, where he studied from 1873-76. You can certainly see the influence of Manet in this painting. Here's another example of his Paris Years.

Much of the Russian realism carried with it a strong sense of nationalism. Repin would return to Russia and nationalist subject matter in such works as Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV, a work that consumed 10 years of his life and was completed in 1891.

One Night in Tallinn

2011-09-14T04:47:00.000-07:00

It is hard to say when modern jazz began in the Soviet Union, but in 1967 Charles Lloyd toured the Soviet Union and recorded a concert in Tallinn. The original album contained four cuts and was released on Atlantic. It showcased Lloyd, along with Keith Jarrett, Ron McClure and Jack DeJohnette, at he peak of his popularity following the highly successful Forest Flower album. The highlight of the concert was an extended version of "Sweet Georgia Bright." Soviet "jazz bands" tended to be state produced with music by the Composers' Union, so this was quite a departure from the standard fare.

Slava Ganelin formed the Ganelin Trio with Vladimir Tarasov and Vladimir Chekasin in Vilnius in 1970, which is generally regarded as the first free jazz band in the Soviet Union. They would achieve international success with the studio album Ancora da Capo and their live recording in East Germany.

What little cross pollination that occurred during this time was at events like the Tallinn Jazz Festival.

Stalin's Wife

2011-08-25T01:50:00.000-07:00

Zhena Stalina is an ambitious four-part television series that attempts to convey the agonizing position Nadezhda Allilueva found herself in when she married Josef Stalin. The writers took their cue from a 2004 documentary by Slava Tsukerman, drawing on even more archival material to piece together a very intimate account of this marriage. The series does lack emotional intensity, which Jamie Miller notes in his review for Kinokultura, with Duta Skhirtladze giving a rather subdued performance as Stalin. But, then this film is principally about Nadezhda, and Olga Budina turns in a powerful performance as Stalin's wife.

I don't know that much about Allilueva, so I can't say how accurate the telling is. It appears to be more an emotional "truth" that the director is aiming for in justifying the fateful decision she would ultimately make. We see her provide understanding and love for Stalin's son from a previous marriage, shown in this film clip, and try to guard their two children from his tyrannical outbursts, only to feel the full weight of his anger. One senses the same love-hate relationship one finds in most abusive marriages but with far more profound consequences, as Nadezhda has her broader family to think about in the wake of her husband's reign of terror.

The filmmakers decide to treat Stalin's terror on the periphery, with pointed references rather than any attempt to explain his actions. Instead, the series focuses on Nadezhda's reactions to the growing list of crimes against humanity her husband is perpetrating, and her attempts to reconcile this with the image she stills holds of "Soso" as the idealistic revolutionary she first met in 1917. As a result, this film becomes very domestic and probably won't appeal to viewers looking for pithy insights into Stalin's character. It is Olga Budina's strong performance that holds the viewer.

Budina had previously played Aglaya Yepachina in the television series, The Idiot.

Portraits of an Artist as a Young Man

2011-08-20T03:36:00.000-07:00

I've really been enjoying Speak, Memory, a fascinating collection of Vladimir Nabokov's remembrances of his youth (1899-1919) in Imperial Russia. As he notes in his penultimate chapter, it is the first arc of the spiral that made up his life, in which he delves into the some of the formative moments that shaped him. One can find echoes of Lolita in his "first love" for Collette on a French seashore, where his family vacationed one summer. And, his first real love for Tamara which ended when his family had to flee Petersburg for Crimea, as the Bolshevik revolution thrust the country into turmoil, and eventually set sail for Greece with Tamara's letters left to drift like butterflies as no forward address was left. There is even a pause for silence in the death of Tolstoy, which Nabokov notes in his parents one morning.

Brian Boyd wrote the introduction to this Everyman's Library edition, 1999, and here he is on the Centennial of Nabokov's birth that year. Boyd notes that Nabokov was startling accurate in his accounts, having written and rewritten pieces for magazines before finally publishing the final edition of his autobiography in 1966.

Nabokov briefly touches on the second arc of his life, a "voluntary exile" in Europe, which included Germany, France and England. He notes the sickly green passports which were issued by the League of Nations to Russian emigres, who no longer found themselves citizens of the Soviet Union. He writes about his three years at Cambridge trying to set his classmates straight on Bolshevism, eventually to give up and turn to poetry. He also tells of his time in Paris among the Russian emigres, including a wonderful sketch of Ivan Bunin one night at a restaurant to which Bunin had invited him.

A sixteenth chapter has been added, in which Nabokov writes an amusing appraisal of his autobiography from the point of view of a third person critic. Nabokov chose not to include it in his earlier edition of the book.

Thief

2011-08-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

Vladimir Mashkov was featured recently on a segment of "Stop Frame," a Russian film and actor review program on TV 1000. His film career goes back to the late 1980s, but my introduction was Thief, where he plays a conniving father looking for the easy score in Stalinist Russia. He has since become one of my favorite Russian actors. He was excellent as Rogozhin in the Russian television mini-series The Idiot. He is currently working on a French-Russian production of Rasputin, in which he will play Tsar Nicholas II, with Gerard Depardieu as Rasputin.

Nice to see a full transfer of Thief available on Youtube with English subtitles. Mashkov has done quite a number of films over the years, including the popular Oligarch, which included an international cast. I guess you could call it a Russian Scarface. He seems to play dubious characters for the most part.

Vysotsky in New York

2011-08-08T05:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a wonderful interview with Vysotsky and Dan Rather for 60 Minutes in 1976. It was an "unauthorized" visit, as Vysotsky had only been granted a visa to France to spend time with his wife, Marina Vladi. The two then flew to Montreal, Canada, and onto New York, where he met up with Brodsky and other expatriated Soviet dissidents. But, as Vysotsky states in this interview, he didn't consider himself a dissident, and had no intention of seeking asylum. He soon returned to the Soviet Union.

The Meeting Place Cannot be Changed

2011-08-05T01:48:00.001-07:00

We found ourselves watching part of this television series from the late 1970s, which featured Vladimir Vysotsky and Natalya Fateyeva among many others. It was one of Vysotsky's last films before his tragic death. He was in very good form as a tough-minded homicide detective following a complicated trail of leads to a vicious gang known as "Black Cat" in 1930s Moscow. Along the way, he and his young idealistic partner come across Fateyeva on a riverboat restaurant.

It was a very popular five-part series, which you can see in its entirety with English subs on youtube, or order a copy through amazon. It was distributed as The Age of Mercy, which was the title of the novel by Arkadiy Vayner and Georgiy Vayner, outside the Soviet Union. So good to see Vystotsky in fine form. One doesn't have any sense of his own private demons. Unfortunately, the book is not so easily available.

The Twelfth Chair

2011-07-13T22:51:00.000-07:00

I was watching the 1971 version of 12 Chairs the other night, with Archil Gomiashvili as Ostap Bender. Great visual and comic feast. This is a very nice transfer , unfortunately no English subs. You can say Russians reclaimed Ilf and Petrov's classic novel after numerous foreign adaptations, including Mel Brooks' 1970 version. There was also a 1976 Soviet version with Andrei Mironov in the lead.

It is often thought comedy gets lost in translation. Mark Twain commented on this in his essay, The Awful German Language. While it is hard to find fault with Twain, I think comedy is visually specific as well. Ilf and Petrov relied on a number of "word images" that simply don't carry the same resonance in any other language than Russian. The films help restore some of that humor.

The 1971 film was wonderfully inventive with amusing cartoon sketches mixed in, similar to the Monty Python Circus. Of course, the great Andrei Mironov was fantastic to watch in the 1976 television mini-series.

The monument is located at Deribassovskaya Street, Odessa. You have to love Bender's hat and suitcase in the picture.

Waiting for the Sun

2011-07-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

I watched part of Dom Solntsa the other night on Russian TV 1000. The theme and production values are very similar to Valeri Todorovski's Stilyagi, but the time frame is the 1970s and the rise of the Soviet hippie culture. The director, Garik Sukachev, is steeped in this era. He published a book in 2007, which served as the script for the movie. He pays tribute to pioneer rock band, Mashina Vremeni, in a very amusing scene where the band takes over a Soviet concert with a stature of Lenin behind them.

As in Hipsters, we see a young person turn her back on the party line and join a counter culture group. In this case, Sasha chooses to turn her back on her parents and join this band of misfits, led by Solntsa, a golden haired version of Jim Morrison. They flee the confines of Moscow for the coastline of Crimea. This seaside resort area has been featured in a number of Russian movies as of late. Unfortunately, it is hard to track down a copy of The House of Sun (2010), so I hope to catch it next time around on TV1000.

Here is a film clip.

The Bathhouse and Other Stories

2011-06-28T04:58:00.000-07:00

Recently came across a wonderful collection of short stories by Mikhail Zoshchenko, a witty satirist from the 1920s. The title story is about his experience at a public bathhouse and is a wonderful quick read. Captures all the humor and pathos of life in the old USSR. Needless to say, he often ran afoul of authorities.

From Mermaid to Moon Girl

2011-06-15T01:04:00.000-07:00

I didn't know what to expect in Rusalka, the second film by Anna Melikian. I think she drew more from the mythological creature that has long been part of Slavic mythology than she did Hans Christian Anderson's classic fairy tale, which Chip Crane notes in his review in Kinokultura . Alisa embodied many ghost-like qualities, although she found herself having a hard time casting her charms on those around her.

It is a fractured fairy tale of a girl born of an incident by the sea where her mother makes love to a sailor on the Crimean shoreline near the end of the Soviet era. Young Alisa has a hard time reconciling her lowly place in life, her thwarted dreams and the fantasy she holds of her father returning one day to lift her out of the seaside hovel she lives in with her mother and grandmother. When a sailor does come one day, her spirits are temporarily lifted, only to sadly find out he is looking for room and board. An eclipse literally leaves her speechless, after which she is placed in a school for disabled children, here she learns to tap into her hidden powers thanks to an autistic boy who chalks up the apples he makes fall from trees. Summoning up all her newly discovered powers, she calls on the sea to lay waste to the village, and the family is forced to move to Moscow.

This doesn't initially impact her lowly station in life. Still mute, she picks up odd jobs around the city while her mother works in a large supermarket. She finds herself drawn up in the glamour of Moscow life when a large canvas advertisement is hoisted over the facade of their building. She cuts an opening out of the eye of the cosmetic beauty on her eighteenth birthday. Steeped in symbolism, the "mermaid" becomes urban myth, as she still finds herself able to alter events if she puts her mind to it. But, ultimately she finds herself thwarted from her ambitions, which she takes from the billboards around town, and is ready to leap off one of the bridges when a young man appears out of the blue and plunges into the Moskva River. She dives in, rescuing him from the river and wakes up the next morning in his lavish apartment.

But, Melikian is not content to make this a happy story. Sasha doesn't show much interested in Alisa, mistaking her for the cleaning lady. Sasha is a purveyor of fantasies, selling land plots on the moon to Moscovites who need an escape from the rough and tumble city. Sadly, this doesn't seem to give Sasha much satisfaction beyond the lavish lifestyle he is able to afford, making him prone to bouts of depression which lead him to attempt suicide. He has an attractive girlfriend in Rita but becomes increasingly curious in Alisa, who has dyed her green in an effort to change her life. Not much of a "love triangle," but it provides the necessary tension for the powerful closing scene.

The film offers a bittersweet view of contemporary Moscow, where the cost of living is so far out of reach to the majority of its denizens, that it might as well be the city in Luc Besson's The Fifth Element. It was Leeloo that gave Alisa the inspiration to transform her life. All of it comes crashing to an end like a fairy tale tragically cut short.

Deconstructing Yuri Zhivago

2011-06-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

It was interesting to read Yuri Slezkine's impressions of Boris Pasternak and the growing number of Soviet Jewish dissidents in the 1950s, as a result of Stalin's purges. I had seen Zhivago's "nihilism" as anachronistic, referring back to the 19th century nihilists which tended to characterize Russian novels, such as Turgenev's Bazarov. But, the way Slezkine describes the growing despondency among Soviet Jews in the 1950s as Stalin's purges struck to the heart of a people that had contributed heavily to the Bolshevik Revolution, I get the sense that Zhivago more expressed Pasternak's views at the time of his writing, than they did views in the 1920s, which saw so many Russian Jews embrace the Bolshevik Revolution as expressed in Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry.

Slezkine provides a fascinating psychological analysis and history of the Jewish influence on the Bolshevik Revolution in The Jewish Century. He argues that the generation born of the revolution turned its backs on its Jewish fathers and embraced the new Soviet society that emerged after the Russian Civil War. Of course, I imagine there were a few dissidents, which could have served as a model for Yuri Zhivago, but the overwhelming amount of Russian literature at the time praised the Red Army, with many Jews taking their service as a right of passage into the Soviet Union. Many young Jews completely renounced their heritage, assuming Russian hybrids and acronyms of Soviet leaders, and wanting nothing to do with their Yiddish past.

Pasternak's dissidence seems to have greatly affected the way he chose to characterize Zhivago's "profound ambivalence." Pasternak had not been the most agreeable Soviet citizen, often coming up against the literary censors, but from what I've read Pasternak embraced the modernism that suffused the early Soviet Union. It wasn't until Stalin imposed his sense of neo-realism that writers like Pasternak, Mandelstam and Akhmatova found themnselves on the outside looking in. Stalin and his successors wanted the Soviet Union described, painted, sculpted and built in heroic terms, and it was obvious that Yuri Zhivago didn't fit the definition of a "model citizen" anymore than Pasternak did himself, which is why Doctor Zhivago was first published in Italy, and became an international sensation, having been rebuffed by Soviet censors.

This kind of reflectivity came to characterize the Russian dissident of the 50s and 60s. Writers like Pasternak and Achmatova were a major influence on Joseph Brodsky and "the magic chorus" that arose at this time, which no longer saw the Soviet Union as a socialist paradise. Still, Slezkine notes, Soviet Jews couldn't dispel their love for Russian culture, particularly their love for Pushkin, and found it difficult to fully embrace the new State of Israel or the capitalist panacea that the United States represented. Those who did emigrate to America and Israel had a very hard time reconciling their feelings, as Khrzhanovsky depicted Brodsky in Room and a Half.

Stiliagi

2011-05-29T22:27:00.000-07:00

A friend tuned me into Stiliagi, or Hipsters, as it was called in its all too brief American release. The movie would have seemed to have great cross-over appeal with its rousing 1950s musical theme, portraying a "gang" of hipsters bucking the repressive conformity of Soviet Moscow by staging underground Swing bars, while evading Komsomol kids. But, it seems the movie got very limited play beyond Russia.

The film is loosely based on a real movement at the time, as noted in Volha Isakava's review. These stylish kids mostly came from the elite ranks of the Communist Party, and were therefor immune from overt censorship, which would help explain why they flaunted their American style so openly. Still, they found themselves coming up against the Komsomol, receiving harsh reprimands and sometimes being expelled from university, as was depicted in this riveting scene. Isakava also notes the interesting juxtaposition of 50s theme with 80s Russian rock, showing that this defiance spanned post-war generations.

However, the director, Valeriy Todorovskiy, maintains a breezy style, choosing to not delve too deeply into harsh realities, even turning life in communal housing into an engaging musical number, as the young Mels (an acronym of Marx Engels Lenin Stalin) wrestles with his new found attraction to this subculture. Mels becomes the star of the movie. A former Komsomol kid smitten by the engaging "Polly." He drops the "S" to become more "American," which leads to his expulsion from school and his full embrace of swing music, looking like a young Chet Baker.

Eventually, the kids need to make some tough choices and the movie veers toward reality, while avoiding any head on collision. Mel and Polly are forced to grapple with parenthood, with an interesting twist; and the leader of the group, Fred, follows in his father's footsteps and becomes a diplomat. Fred's father is played by the great Oleg Yankovskiy.

I suppose it may have seemed a bit too much like Swing Kids for some audiences, but it is a fun movie that deserves more international exposure.

The Magical Chorus

2011-05-18T02:14:00.000-07:00

Very nice essay on Joseph Brodsky, by Keith Gessen, in this month's New Yorker, which recaps his life both in his own words and those of others like his great friend, Lev Loseff, whose biography has recently been published in English. Loved Brodsky's description of his first meeting with Auden, which he wrote to Loseff,

W. H. Auden drinks his first martini dry at 7:30 in the morning, after which he sorts his mail and reads the paper, marking the occasion with a mix of sherry and scotch. After this he has breakfast, which can consist of anything so long as it’s accompanied by the local dry pink and white, I don’t remember in which order. At this point he sets to work. Probably because he uses a ballpoint pen, he keeps on the desk next to him, instead of an inkwell, a bottle or can of Guinness, which is a black Irish beer that disappears in the course of the creative process. At around 1 o’clock he has lunch. Depending on the menu, this lunch is decorated by this or that rooster’s tail, or cocktail. After lunch, a nap, which is, I think, the only dry point of the day.

Of Love and War

2011-05-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

Maybe it is just me, but I found an intriguing resonance between Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Doesn't seem much has been written on this possible connection, but the "love stories" are very similar and they are both set during World War I.

Hemingway's book preceded Pasternak's book by more than two decades, but no doubt Pasternak had long envisioned Zhivago. Yury, like Hemingway's Frederic Henry, was a very strong part of himself. You can read alot about the authors in both works. Both opt for a very visceral style of writing, as they bring the reader into the war and force him to gain an understanding of the consequences. Both were expatriates in their own ways. Zhivago saw the Russia he knew reduced to ruin with the never-ending scramble for firewood to keep the stove going.

Frederic Henry, or Tenente, is an American expatriate who finds himself enveloped in WWI on the Western Front. Although he comes from much more simple means, Henry has adopted a similar cynical view of war, no longer capable of understanding the reasons, and ever more appalled by the death toll. At first he seeks comfort and then love in Catherine Barkley, a British volunteer nurse, with a much fuller realization of their romance in the second half of the novel.

The big difference between the two novels is the scope of the respective works. Pasternak is much more complex. He takes on the full width and breadth of Russia during the tumultuous civil war that followed, where Hemingway increasingly turns inward, treating Europe more as "battle fronts," with the romance between Frederic and Catherine taking center stage. Yet, both end on very similar notes, leaving both characters with an abject emptiness. Frederic's is made more poignant by the death of Catherine, whereas Zhivago consciously gives Lara up.

Hard to say whether Hemingway would have had any influence on Pasternak. He was probably more drawn to the stories of Isaac Babel and other Russian writers who chronicled World War I. But, it is fascinating how two well known writers could come up with similar stories of "The Great War."

1 мая

2011-05-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

May Day actually dates back to the labor movement in America and began being celebrated in the late 19th century in memory of the "anarchists" who were hung for organizing the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago, 1886. These figures were lauded by Marxists around the world and May Day was appropriated by the Second International, eventually to become one of the major celebrations of the Soviet Union, starting in 1918. Not as much resonance these days, but the holiday is still marked on the Russian calendar.

A Room and a Half

2011-04-30T00:10:00.000-07:00

“Of course, we all shared one toilet, one bathroom, and one kitchen. But the kitchen was fairly spacious, the toilet very decent and cozy. As for the bathroom, Russian hygienic habits are such that eleven people would seldom overlap when either taking a bath or doing their basic laundry. The latter hung in the two corridors that connected the rooms to the kitchen, and one knew the underwear of one's neighbors by heart…”

You don't hear much about Joseph Brodsky these days, which is why it is nice to see Andrei Khrzhanovski's A Room and a Half garnering so much attention. In the movie, Khrzhanovski re-imagines the great poet's youth in the form of a heartfelt retrospective. Best known as an animator, the director fuses a number of images together into a series of 45 "photographs" in which Brodsky attempts to rebuild his "nest."

It really is marvelous to watch as Khrzhanovski moves seamlessly between sepia tones, B&W, nostalgic color and animation in piecing together these "memories." He draws as much on Proust as he does Brodsky in this cinematic telling, as if it is all seen through the "magic lamp" of time. I didn't recognize Alisa Frejndlikh at first, but my wife reminded me she played Kalugina in Office Romance (1977). Great to see her again, playing Brodsky's mother.

Here's the trailer.

Duska

2011-04-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

My wife and I watched Duska the other night, followed by a Russian round table discussion from 2010, which featured the late Lyudmila Gurchenko. The title is the mistaken namesake of the Russian character in this Dutch film, implying little soul or heart. As Sergei Makovetski noted, the name referred to the malformed baby in a scene he and the movie critic (Gene Bervoets) were watching.

The movie critic meets Duska at a film festival in Russia, played to great comic effect, and finds he can't shake his new friend no matter how hard he tries. When Duska shows up on Bob's doorstep back in Holland, this crimps Bob's designs on a cashier at the local cinema, resulting in a number of amusing situations. Jos Stelling forces the humor at times, but Bervoets and Makovetski play off each other extremely well.

Bob has essentially become bored with life, unable to even be fully stimulated by the nubile Sylvia Hoeks, when she literally falls into his arms following a dispute with her motorcycle suited boyfriend in front of the theater. You aren't quite sure whether Bob is imagining these relationships or if they are real, given the ever growing surrealistic tone of the movie.

The comments from the Russian critics was as amusing as the movie, as they found themselves deeply at odds over Duska. Makovetski offered numerous defenses, while Jos Stelling felt he had undergone an inquisition afterward. It was a rather harsh tone that developed, with a lot of discussion of the meaning of the "Russian Soul" with Gurchenko pleading for Ukranians to have a greater accord with Russia. Other critics saw the movie as a Western longing for the depth of the Russian soul, pointing out the movie critic's emptiness. One critic felt they were making too much out of the movie, as it was pretty simple and offered no profound statement on the Russian soul. He found the references to Pushkin empty and the music insufferable.

You can read into the movie pretty much what you like. Stelling leaves it open ended. There is a Gogolian quality to the story, like an "overcoat" that takes on a life of its own, but it isn't the type of movie that is going to stay with you.

The Red Cavalry Stories

2011-04-15T02:42:00.000-07:00

Here's another view of The Red Cavalry, as seen by Isaac Babel. He was assigned to Field Marshal Semyon Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army in 1920, witnessing the Polish-Soviet War, from which these stories spring. This cycle of short stories was first translated into English by John Harland in 1929, providing one of the first accounts of the civil war. This translation is by Peter Constantine.

Boris Pasternak offers searing portraits of life in the Red Army camps in Doctor Zhivago, but the book was published much later.

Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed

2011-04-08T02:09:00.000-07:00

Nice twist on CCCP. Taschen seems to have outdone themselves again with this photographic tour of some of the more Brutalist examples of Soviet architecture over the years. The heydey of these monumental structures was in the 1960s, as Stalin was no fan of modern architecture. He preferred neo-classical buildings encrusted with Soviet symbolism, as exemplified in his choice for the Palace of the Soviets. Fortunately, it never was built, but he left a gaping hole in Moscow after tearing down the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour to make room for it. Nevertheless, he massively reshaped Moscow in the 1930s as shown in this film clip from Novaya Moskva.

Eventually, new ideas would come. The pioneering ideas of El Lissitzky and other modern designers from the 1920s didn't go to waste. But, by the 1950s these ideas had been massively reformed, as it was no longer so much about the proletariat as it was about making a monument to Socialism. Krushchev even imagined building a new Palace for the Soviets but settled for a huge swimming pool instead. Ryszard Kapuściński has a wonderful chapter in Imperium on the fate of the Palace.

Ironically, a replica of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was built after the fall of the Soviet Union. The new cathedral was finished in 2000 and towers to the former height of that commissioned by Tsar Alexander I in 1812, after the defeat of Napoleon.

Carnival in Moscow

2011-04-01T05:14:00.000-07:00

For Lyudmila Gurchenko, her big break came with Карнавальная ночь, or Carnival Night, in 1956. Very high quality transfer available on youtube, although no subtitles. You don't really need them to enjoy this movie. Such a positive spirit. It was also Eldar Ryazanov's first film. She would appear in his films time and again, including the wonderful A Railway Station for Two. This one comes with English subtitles. Enjoy!

Goodbye Lyudmila

2011-03-31T00:22:00.000-07:00

It is very sad to hear Lyudmila Gurchenko passed away yesterday. She leaves a great cinematic legacy behind her. Truly one of the great screen actresses. Her list of films is long and varied. Equally at home in comedy as well as drama. My favorites were Siberiade (1979), A Railway Station for Two (1983) and Starye klyachi (2000) Here's a wonderful video of her, from 2004, as the object of Moiseev's affections.

Ballerina

2011-03-30T02:07:00.000-07:00

A few year ago, Bertrand Normand made a lavish documentary, Ballerina, which focused on five dancers from the famed Mariinsky Theatre. Unlike Black Swan, this film truly goes behind the scenes to reveal what it takes to become a prima ballerina in one of Russia's most revered theaters.

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You can purchase the documentary individually or part of this fabulous box set.

My Perestroika

2011-03-22T23:28:00.000-07:00

Interesting to see an American making a documentary entitled My Perestroika, but according to the production notes Robin Hessman spent 8 years in Moscow and earned a graduate degree in film directing from the prestigious VGIK, with a "red diploma" of honors. So, she would have been quite aware with the events swirling around the capitol during that time.

Hessman follows five persons who came of age during the Perestroika era, interspersing their recollections and thoughts with archival footage and home movies. It is sure to strike a soft spot in most viewers, judging from this teaser. Hard to get much sense of the film from the homepage, but it seems to capture a feeling of "Paradise Lost," as events since the second social revolution haven't exactly lived up to many Russians' expectations.

Re-imagining the Black Swan

2011-03-22T01:29:00.000-07:00

Watching Black Swan the other night made me wonder what really were the roots of Tchaikovsky's most famous ballet, Swan Lake, and if it really did carry with it some of the dark roots Aronofsky attempted to uncover in his recent movie.

Seems like much of the early controversy surrounded the prima ballerina, Anna Sobeshchanskaya, who was not satisfied with the production, bringing in Marius Petipa and Ludwig Minkus to redo the choreography and the music. Needless to say, this incensed Tchaikovsky who felt he alone had the right to revise the music. After some fighting back and forth a compromise was reached and the prima ballerina seemed pleased with rewrite and first performed the ballet in 1877.

As for sources to the libretto, numerous theories abound. Apparently, Tchaikovsky left few notes in regard to his inspiration, other than he had initially fantasized a "Lake of Swans." Some of the possible sources are explored in BalletNotes. The ballet we have come to know was largely composed after his death. Of course what we do remember most is the music, which was quite a departure from the traditional ballets of the day and why Sobeshchanskaya probably had such a difficult time coming to terms with it, and called on Petipa and Minkus to clean it up a bit.

The idea of the white and black swans is principally about dualities, and allowed the prima ballerina to explore two sides of her character. Some directors have actually split the role into two parts with two dancers. In the recent movie, Aronofsky chooses to internalize this conflict, turning the classic ballet into an effective psychological thriller. However, this film doesn't capture much of the dance aspect of the role. In fact, we see very little dance in the movie, rather a splitting of the soul in Nina, as she becomes torn by conflicting emotions. Natalie Portman flaps her arms uselessly as Nina, conveying little of her character in the dance sequences. Of course Portman is not a ballerina, but still it would have been nice to see a little more care given to this aspect of the story. Here is the lovely Zenaida Yanowsky, well known for her daring roles, demonstrating how to convey the rival swans in this video clip. You can see her in a reprise of Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House through April 8.

Remembering Alexandra Kollontai

2011-03-08T04:41:00.000-08:00

It was interesting to learn that Alexandra Kollontai urged Lenin to make International Women's Day a national holiday in the Soviet Union. A fully committed Marxist, her involvement in the socialist movement dated back to the late 19th century. She helped to organize women workers in Russia following the 1905 Strike, before being forced into exile in Germany. She became a major catalyst in recognizing International Women's Day throughout the Socialist world. She later wrote Love of Worker Bees and other stories depicting modern women in Soviet Russia.

Molotov's Magic Lantern

2011-03-03T03:07:00.000-08:00

Always on the lookout for a new book on Russian history and culture, I was surprised to come across this article, in which Orlando Figes apologizes for having anonymously savaged Rachel Polonsky's new book, Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History, in an effort to steer readers toward his books at amazon.com. Sad, because I have always liked Figes, particularly Natasha's Dance, which provides an engaging and very insightful review of Russia's vast cultural legacy. Doesn't seem to me that he needs to resort to such tactics to attract readers. Now, it appears he will lose many readers.

As for Polonsky, it looks as though she too has written a very engaging book, judging by Alexander Nazaryan's review in The New Republic,

But still this is an audacious effort, one that tries to capture an entire literary legacy, and the collective tragedy of a beleaguered people, in fewer than four hundred pages. And it is, at least to my limited knowledge, the only history of Russia to use a Bob Dylan lyric as its epigraph: “I can’t feel you anymore, I can’t even touch the books you’ve read.” I imagine that Figes was, at bottom, stung by the thought that Polonsky had written a book more clever and current than his: there she was, drinking Jack Daniels at 3 Romanov while he poured over Stalin’s archives. And so he went online, and at a time when people are reading less, tried to turn away a potential audience away from a book that is worth their attention. Molotov would have been proud.

The Other Woman

2011-02-23T03:42:00.000-08:00

As is so often the case, fact is more interesting than fiction. The other woman during Stravinsky's years in Paris was Vera de Bosset, not Coco Channel. The two engaged in an illicit affair while he produced short compositions for the French piano manufacturer Pleyel. Eventually, Vera would become a major part of Igor's life, traveling with him throughout the 20s and 30s, with the two eventually getting married after Stravinsky's first wife, Katerina, died in 1939. They settled in the United States.

Of course, one can still speculate that Igor and Coco may have been more than casual acquaintances in Paris, but Vera was a woman closer to Igor's heart and soul. One who did understand his music, and wasn't just a "shopkeeper" ; )

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The portrait is by Sergei Soudeikin, depicting Vera as she would have appeared in 1920. You can view the painting at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

Rite of Spring

2011-02-18T02:18:00.000-08:00

In many ways Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is the gift that keeps on giving, even if Parisians in 1913 had no way of knowing this when the audience broke out into riot over the premiere of what would become Stravinsky's signature work. I thought Jan Kounen captured the riotous atmosphere quite well in the opening sequence of his movie. Here is a link to the production by the Joffrey Ballet in 1987, which presented the ballet as it was seen in 1913. And, here is a copy of the musical score.

Coco After Chanel

2011-02-13T04:53:00.000-08:00

It seems that Coco & Igor is more a beautifully imagined story than it is a biography. The movie is based on a novel that presumed a relationship between them during his time in Paris in 1920. The only problem is that Igor Stravinsky seems like little more than a "boy toy" played between Coco and his deeply jealous wife, Katerina. The women in this movie are by far the most captivating to watch, while Mads Mikkelsen pretty much plays Stravinsky like a rube, at least when it comes to affairs of the heart.

I won't hold this against Mads, because I have enjoyed him in other movies, but he seems clearly miscast as Stravinsky, right down to his heavy Russian accent. If you are going to invite Yelena Morozova to play Katerina, why not invite Oleg Menshikov or Vladimir Mashkov to play Stravinsky. Much better for a Russian actor to speak with a heavy French accent than it is to have a Danish actor struggle with two languages.

As a film, Coco & Igor is beautiful to watch. It plays out like a sonata, with sparse dialog, conveying much less than do the impeccable sets, lighting and clothing that take you back to 1920. This is after Coco became Chanel and had established her House and was scrutinizing what would become her famous perfume. The camera soaks up every detail right down to the art deco etchings on Stravinsky's brandy snifter as he works out the final revisions to his Rite of Spring, which had been so badly received before the war. That he owed any debt of gratitude to Coco Chanel for this is highly unlikely, but it would be nice to think so.

La Bayadère

2011-02-10T01:09:00.000-08:00

My wife and I went to a production of La Bayadère last night at the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre. The LNOBT director has come under fire for the major investment made into the stage and backdrops, but it seems like money well spent judging by the lavish production we saw last night. No live elephants or tigers, as in the original 1877 Moscow production, but the luscious palms and ancient temple of the first scene transported you back in time.

It was a very traditional interpretation of the classical 3-act ballet by Altynai Asylmuratova and Liudmila Kovaliova. The scenes were presented more as showcases for the dancers than creating an emotional resonance between dancers. The little idol, glazed in sparkling gold paint, is the star of the wedding scene, even with Solor brought in on a huge brightly painted elephant. You get very little feeling for the love between Solor and the temple dancer Nikiya until her solo dance in the second act before the Rajah, the warrior and his prized bride, Gamzatti. Little does lovely Nikiya know that Gamzatti planted a deadly cobra in the bowl of roses that were offered her in the name of Solor.

Similarly, one doesn't really sense the love the High Brahmin harbors for Nikiya when he offers to restore her life with an antidote for the poison. She tosses the vial away refusing to accept his offer, choosing to die in the arms of Solor. The poor warrior falls into a deep sorrow that only a snake charmer can rescue him from by transporting Solor into a kingdom of shadows where he is reunited with his true love. While this "dream sequence" starts off on an excellent note with a hypnotizing troupe of dancers streaming down from the Himalayas, the love between Solor and Nikiya is barely felt. Instead, we are treated to a lovely array of dances, much like the wedding scene in the second act. One very much wants to see Solor and Nikiya come together emotionally, not just physically.

No doubt the play was a big hit in its day. There are some wonderfully choreographed scenes that faithfully retain the original sequences of Marius Petipa. He staged a number of classic productions in the 19th century, including Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. The music doesn't fair so well. The composition by Ludwig Minkus is rather repetitive and clunky. There have been a number of revivals over the years. Perhaps the most famous being that of the great Nureyev, when he restored the full length ballet at the Paris Opera in 1991.

La Bayadère, or Bajaderė as it is called in Lithuanian, was first shown in 2007 with Nerijus Juška and Miki Hamanaka in the lead roles. Last night we saw Romas Ceizaris and Nailia Adigamova in the leads. Both were excellent and Nailia Adigamova very lovely in the fatal wedding scene dance.

Remembering Vysotsky

2011-02-01T23:11:00.000-08:00

Vladimir Vysotsky is probably known more as a singer than an actor, but for years he dominated the Soviet stage and screen with his commanding presence. His first performance was in Sverstnitsy (1959), or Teenagers. His last production was Little Tragedies, a television mini-series based on stories by Pushkin. This week, Russian television showed a retrospective of his career and his relationship with Marina Vladi, one of Godard's favorite muses. Vysotsky and Vladi only appeared in one movie together, The Two of Them. He was born on January 25, but alas he cut his life short with vodka and morphine. He died of heart failure in Moscow in 1980.

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Photograph by James Andanson, March 1980, courtesy of Corbis

Black Snow

2011-01-17T00:20:00.000-08:00

I am enjoying Bulgakov's Black Snow, which is more or less a biographical account of the process of making his early book, The White Guard, into a play. But, he spends most of the time satirizing the Moscow Art Theatre, which he dubs the International Theatre (IT) in this book. His prime target appears to be Stanislavsky, who Michael Glenny notes in his forward Bulgakov characterized as an "old bitch." Seems Bulgakov and Stanislavsky came to odds over his story Moliere, which Stanislavsky drastically revised into a play. But, in this story Bulgakov focuses mostly on his first foray into playwriting and the personages he faced at the IT.

Bulgakov has great fun with Stanislavsky in the second half of the book, as the old man takes a cleaver to his play. The scene where Maxudov visits Ivan Vasilievich (Stanislavsky) in his home is hilarious, especially as Bombardov had described in detail exactly what would happen, but Maxudov chose to ignore the actor just the same. Seems that Stanislavsky had a great fear of gunshots (probably for good reason) and so when Maxudov insists on keeping the suicide on the bridge in his play, Stanislavsky has little interest in the budding playwright. Bombardov tells Maxudov later that you have agree with everything he says, but you don't necessarily have to do it.

While fascinating to read, it isn't one of his better books. The writing is uneven and the satire falls flat so many years after Bulgakov's stint with the Moscow Art Theatre. It is interesting more from a historical point of view as the book provides a glimpse into the machanizations of 1920s Soviet theatre. Bulgakov was successfully able to turn The White Guard into a play. The Days of the Turbins was one of the most successful early Soviet plays despite its positive portrayal of White Russians during the civil war.

The Theme-Catcher

2011-01-10T02:43:00.000-08:00

No question about it, Krzhizhanovsky is a fabulous storyteller. In "The Bookmark," he tells the story of a theme-catcher, a man who can make up a story on the spot on any theme you give him. The narrator of the story meets the theme-catcher on a crowded park bench, able to capture anyone's attention with the stories he tells. He points to a spot on a distant ledge and immediately falls into a story of a tomcat trapped on the ledge facing the indifference of tenants who won't let it back in through their windows. Left to suffer his fate over two grueling nights and days, which the theme-catcher meticulously describes, creating a fabulous sense of suspense in the process, an ill-wind eventually lifts the shivering cat off the ledge and drops it to its sad end.

Eventually, the narrator learns more about the theme-catcher, a man not much unlike Krzhizhanovsky who came to Moscow in 1922 and has struggled to get himself into print these past 5 years. He tells stories of his encounters with editors and the many rejections he faced, finally giving up on the process and keeping a mental log of his many themes.

Turnbull noted that the story is a thinly veiled criticism of the social realism that came to pervade Russian literature. The theme-catcher feels that the art of storytelling has been lost, as does the narrator who can no longer find a book worthy of his finely woven silk bookmark. But, while the narrator seems to harbor a sense of nostalgia, the theme-catcher is only willing to look into the future, holding out hope it seems that the art will one day be revived.

Memories of the Future

2011-01-08T01:08:00.000-08:00

I currently find myself reading Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Don't ask me how to pronounce his name. Joanne Turnbull notes in her introduction to the collection of short stories, Memories of the Future, that Krzhizhanovsky originally came from Kiev, mastered a number of languages and traveled around Europe, and eventually settled in Moscow in 1922 in a small dark flat rented to him by a former Countess in exchange for English lessons. Thanks to an undemanding job he was able to devote the next 20 years to his dark, otherworldly prose that evoked Gogol in such stories as "The Runaway Fingers," in which a concert pianist's hand literally runs away from him in a major recital. Unfortunately, these stories languished for decades in the State Archives, only to be retrieved in recent years and find their way into print. Vadim Perelmuter has since compiled and edited a five-volume collection of Krzhizhanovsky's work, and in Memories of the Future Turnbull translates seven of his short stories, including the title story.

The first was "Quadraturin," a magic tube of paste that when applied to walls and ceilings can make even the most cramp Soviet apartment grow and metamorphosize into a spacious room. The protagonist, Sutulin, is given a tube, which doesn't look much unlike a tube of artist's paint, by a mysterious man, and applies to his room, which measures a little less than 9 square meters. Unfortunately, he drops the tube before he can apply any of the quick drying paste to the ceiling.

The next morning he awakes to find that has room has indeed grown outward in all directions, but it has taken on more polygonal proportions. This unnerves him but for the first time he finds he can actually pace in his room and this pleases him. He rearranges the furniture to better suit his new space. But, fear again grows as he hears a knock at the door and worries that the landlady will see his greatly enlarged room and call the authorities. He manages to keep his apartment secret for several days, but now grows more and more perplexed by the proportions his room has taken, growing ever deeper in lengths to the point his single light can no longer illuminate all of it. The window appears as a distant portal into another dimension. I won't give away the ending, as it has a wonderful Gogolian twist.

Here is a review of the book from The Nation.

Celebrating Gudonov

2011-01-07T06:31:00.000-08:00

Today in history, Boris Gudonov ascended to Tsar of Russia in 1598. Pushkin immortalized Gudonov in his play. In some ways Boris was like Richard III, as he was believed to have disposed of Ivan's sons so that he could become Tsar. His reign was relatively short - 7 years, but he left his legacy to his son, Feodor II. Mussorgsky made Pushkin's play into an opera, which premiered at Mariinsky Theatre on 5 February 1873, although earlier versions existed. The opera has been staged countless times since and is considered one of the great masterpieces of Russian opera. Here's the death scene from the film version (1954) of the opera, with Aleksandr Pirogov in the lead role.

A Bitter Farewell

2011-01-04T08:31:00.000-08:00

Zhivago eventually finds his way back to Moscow after another long trek, bringing a teenage boy along with him who had escaped from the labor gang on the train headed to Yuriatin several chapters before. Interesting how Pasternak likes to bring these characters back into the story. But, their relationship eventually sours as the boy grows and develops a mind of his own, detaching himself from the cynical Zhivago who seems content to live a low life much to the chagrin of those around him.

In time he even finds another woman, although the young woman is there mostly to serve him, and he fathers more children by her. Just when it seems Yury has the opportunity to return to his beloved medical profession he dies. By chance Lara has returned to Moscow and learns of Yury's death and attends his memorial. It is an odd gathering of new and old friends, most not really knowing each other. But, everyone is curious in the lovely Lara.

Not content to end the story here, Pasternak jumps forward to WWII, and it is here that Yury's old friend Misha comes across a young woman who turns out to be Yury's daughter by Lara. Seems Lara died a short while after Yury died, and young "Tonya" relates the sad story to Misha. The young woman appears to have little trace of nobility but Yury's enigmatic brother has apparently promised to send her to school after the war, hoping to restore some semblance of the family legacy.

This rather dyspeptic view seems to reflect Pasternak's own disillusionment with the course Communism had taken in Russia. He chooses to close out the novel with a set of poems that Zhivago had penned at Varykino, and had managed to survive all these travels, thanks in large part to the young boy who had helped get them published in Moscow, along with some of Yury's insights into medicine.

...............

Hard to draw too many conclusions from this novel. In many ways, it seemed to me more a "work in progress" than a complete work like those of Tolstoy. I think its impact on readers was largely due to the notoriety the book had at the time, and the romantic film that David Lean made in 1965. I think readers today would be perplexed to find that the great love between Yury and Lara occupies so few pages in this novel. That it is really more about Russia and the state of vast turmoil it found itself in following WWI. Yury Zhivago is a "pilgrim" in his own strange way, trying to sort out this troubled landscape as he wanders from one end of Russia to the other and back again.

Varykino Again

2011-01-04T07:47:00.000-08:00

After several weeks, Zhivago stumbles back to the town of Yuriatin, looking like a ragamuffin. He manages to find a seamstress who cuts his hair and beard so that he will look more presentable to Lara, who has left a note for him in the little brick hole by the door to her flat.

Yury had made the conscious choice to return to Lara and not Tonya, although it wouldn't have mattered as Tonya and her father had long returned to Moscow and were now in the process of being deported, along with Yury's son and daughter. Lara had gone with her daughter to Varykino thinking Yury would first return there.

Eventually our lovers find each other, but the final love scene plays out in a rather odd unromantic way, as Yury is once again torn by his emotions. Lara plays the dutiful lover, administering to his every need. Yury seems to find more appreciation for work habits than the tenderness she shows toward him. With Komarovsky sniffing around town, they decide to hide out in Varykino.

Yury used the time mostly to put his poems in order while the two battled the cruel winter. Lara's daughter seems to feel trapped in the remote estate. A sense of uneasiness pervades the scene, the two seemed to realize that what they have wouldn't last long, although Lara has fully committed herself to Yury. Komarovsky reappears, warning them that their lives are in imminent danger, as is that of Strelnikov, who has gone AWOL. Not sure what to do, Yury urges Lara to go with Komarovsky while he stays behind to tie up a few loose ends before joining them on a train to the East.

As if on cue, Strelnikov pitches up, and he and Yury once again have a tete-a-tete, although much more pleasant than the one before. All the fire seems to have gone of Pavel Antipov. He just wants Yury to tell him as much as he can of Lara. The next day, Yury finds Strelnikov face down in the snow with a little rivulet of blood streaming from his head, the color of wild rowanberries.

Yury never makes it to the train. He knows he will never see Lara or Tonya or his children ever again. He consigns himself to his fate, returning to Moscow a defeated man.

..........................

The oddest thing to me about this story is how the love between Yury and Lara is never fully realized. It floats more like a dream throughout the novel, with the action pretty much consigned to 3 or 4 chapters. Pasternak appears to struggle with these scenes. His heart seems more in the war scenes and the journeys across the vast countryside, seeming to indicate that Pasternak's, and in turn Zhivago's, real love is for Mother Russia, which has literally been cleaved in half by the warring factions. Yury's love for Lara hovers over the story as some democratic ideal, something Zhivago knows he will never be able to realize.

The Forest Brotherhood

2010-12-22T06:10:00.000-08:00

Much of the second half of the novel plays out during the civil war that ravaged Russia from 1918 to 1922. Yury found himself a captive of Liberius Mikulitsin's Red Army faction, which was fighting against Kolchak's White Army. Life was pretty miserable for Yury during this time, as Liberius' faction pretty much housed themselves in earth huts in the great Russian taiga, hoping to hold out against the advances of the White Army until reinforcements came. Yury tended to the wounded as best he could given the limited supplies. He had support from a Czech paramedic who had joined the Communists and a couple of other interns.

Pasternak uses these chapters to highlight the ravages of the civil war, noting the towns that were under siege, in particular Holycross. All these towns along "The Highway" found themselves torn between the Red and White Armies, with split allegiances. Many had been burned by one faction or the other, and morale among the armies was low as they came across the burnt-out remnants of their former villages.

Yet Liberius remained hopelessly optimistic. The young commander, son of Mikulitsin who guarded the state, had chosen Yury to confide in. Yury was unconvinced that any good will come out of this war, but as long as he found himself captive he had to pay deference to the commander.

Yury had twice tried to escape, only to be run down each time. He had become ever more fatalistic in his views. He was asked at one point to counsel an ailing soldier, one of Liberius' subordinate officers, who was suffering from "the creeps," a sense of morbid doom, which ultimately led him to butcher his family rather than have them fall victim to Kolchak's forces.

Yury was also forced to witness an execution of soldiers who had operated an illicit distillery, only to have the distillery rebuilt as to have alcohol for medicinal purposes. Liberius himself had become addicted to cocaine, depleting Yury's much needed supply.

One can see how the Soviet censors wouldn't have been pleased at all with these passages, as Pasternak painted the revolutionary army in anything but heroic terms. Instead, he painted a bleak portrait of chaos, confusion and ever diminishing morale until Kolchak's army is finally defeated and these red factions finally emerged from their forest hideouts.

Varykino

2010-12-22T04:19:00.000-08:00

Varykino proved to be an all too short retreat for the Zhivagos. They seemed to settle into a relatively comfortable domesticity at the old Krueger estate that once belonged to the Gromeko family. Now it was state property, guarded by Mikulitsin and his second wife. Yury seemed to envy the cozy house Mikulitsin lived in for its study, as he imagined himself returning to his writing after all the travails he had been through. He and his family made due with one of the other outbuildings on the estate as Mikulitsin wouldn't allow them to live in the main house, much to Alexander Alexandrovich's chagrin.

The time seemed idyllic. The setting seemed more or less modeled upon Pasternak's home at Peredelkino, not the fabulous "Ice Palace," David Lean created in his version of the movie. Yury grew closer to Tonya and Sasha. Tonya became pregnant with another child. He seemed to enjoy working the land, taking on the role almost that of a gentleman farmer. His reputation as a doctor proceeded him and he finds patients coming to him almost on a daily basis, bartering food and services for his help. Pasternak provides some interesting character sketches of Mikulitsin, his wife and four sisters who once lived on the estate, one of whom had been Mikulitsin's first wife. Samdevyatov keeps them connected with the outside world, dropping in from time to time.

Still you get the sense that Yury is restless. He eventually starts going into town to continue his reading at the library. As fate would have it, he comes across Lara one day at the library and soon their passions boil over into an affair. Lara's daughter seems to accept the wayward doctor. Yury learns that Antipov is Strelnikov and he tells Lara of their encounter. She still harbors great love for him, but knows that they will never see each other again. Guilt eventually overwhelms Yury and while riding back to the estate he vows to tell Tonya, who to this point is oblivious of Yury's affair. But, again fate intercedes and Yury finds himself captured by the Forest Brothers and conscripted into their Red Army as a doctor.

The Journey to Varykino

2010-12-14T08:37:00.000-08:00

Pasternak lavishes a long chapter on the train ride to Varykino with Yury, Tonya and Gromeko seeking the isolation of the old Krueger estate to ride out the rest of the civil war. Along the way, Pasternak offers grim notes of the strife that has ripped Russia in half. At one small burned out station, everyone has to get off and help shovel the snow off the railway line as the dreaded Strelnikov had shelled the town recently, crushing one of the many rebellious provinces in Russia. But, Yury seems to relish the bleakness. It fits into the nihilism he has developed.

Yury Zhivago is appearing more and more like a Turgenev character, a throwback to 19th century "revolutionaries" rather than a Bolshevik or a Menshevik. While his wife and father-in-law see the estate as their only chance for survival, Yury seems to view it as a means to rediscover the Russian heartland.

He and Alexander Alexandrovich discuss the fate of Russia while Tonya looks after little Sasha. Aboard are a gang of conscripted labor which Pasternak provides a few character sketches, including that of a boy who finds himself pleading with the foreman for his release as he committed no crime other than to be held as collateral for the return of his uncle. These scenes seem to show the randomness of events and how everyone is subject to the ever-changing laws of the state, which can be seen pinned up to walls of railway stations.

Eventually the train rolls up to Yuryatin, apparently modeled after the former industrial town of Perm, which was an area much under contention during the civil war. He meets a man who is a jack of all trades, but primarily a lawyer, who fills him in on the state of things and warns him that he is in for a tougher time at Varykino than he imagines. Yury also comes across Strelnikov, which is an alias Pasha Antipov has taken for himself after escaping the clutches of the Germans.

Strelnikov, which means "the shooter," is a ruthless general who now commands an entire theater and has the rebels under control for the most part. He makes no mention of his wife or daughter, but menacingly notes that he has heard of Zhivago before. The mini-series made this scene more tense than the novel, or I was just prepared for it. Zhivago is eventually returned to his family, where they prepare for the final leg to Varykino.

Tolstoy: A Russian Life

2010-12-14T02:21:00.000-08:00

Rosamund Bartlett weighs in on Tolstoy in a new biography that has garnered mixed reviews. Rather than offering fresh insights, Christopher Tayler writes that she plays this one by the numbers. Of course, it is hard to top the previous biographies by Troyat and Wilson.

Coming Home

2010-12-13T06:37:00.000-08:00

After serving on the front line for over a year, Yury returns to Moscow to find a city reduced to groveling for firewood to keep warm against the oncoming winter. He finds his home among the ruins of the city only to be forced to wait until finally Tonya comes down to greet him. It is an awkward homecoming as Yury finds his son a toddler who runs for cover when he enters. As best he can he tries to resume the life he formerly had with no mention and apparently not even any thoughts of Lara.

Pasternak has a wonderful eye for detail in this chapter and those that follow, capturing the sense of a city and a country at its lowest point, unsure which direction the revolution will take. He paints a portrait of the fledgling house administrations and the chaos that surrounds the city as the provisional government struggles for control.

Yury seems to have adopted a fatalistic view, taking each day as it comes. In these chapters, we are finally introduced to the Gromekos. He accepts the harshness of the conditions, almost relishing the reduced status of their former household, as they now have to make due with three rooms in the former city villa. His father-in-law fills him in on the details, and eventually he reunites with Misha and a few other of his old friends. He renews his relationship with Tonya and seems quite happy to be part of the family again.

He goes back to work at his former hospital, noting the changes that have taken place. He can neither bring himself to fully align himself with the Bolsheviks or accept the defeatism of the old guard. Yury is very much his own man, taking time out to write poems in between managing the supplies of the hospital.

There are some odd encounters, such as a young man in the vestibule of an old building, which Yury had ducked into to escape the cold. The young man in his heavy fur coat drifts in and out of his dreams as he battles typhus. Afterward, Tonya tells him that the boy was a distant relation of his and provided badly needed food and supplies during this time.

But, just as things seems to have finaly fallen into a pattern, his father-in-law and Tonya decide to flee to their old estate in the Urals. Yury is against the move, but the Gromekos feel this is their only chance to survive what promises to be another harsh year as the Soviet government has yet to restore any order to the country. They get by mostly on favors and at the tale end of a long miserable winter decide to leave for Varykino.

Lara gets only passing mention at the end of the chapter as Yury encounters the mother of a soldier who helped Lara and him out at the hospital on the front.

Farewell to the Old

2010-12-07T01:45:00.000-08:00

Seems the first three chapters serve as little more than introduction. Pasternak chooses to sketch these chapters, culminating in Lara's attempt to strike back at her tormentor Komarovsky at the Sventitsky's Christmas Party. Again, Yury is there to witness the event and finds himself once again drawn to this mysterious woman who would come to dominate his thoughts and emotions.

Pasternak then thrusts his protagonists into the war. Yury is consigned to a field hospital in which the ravages of war quickly dispense of his innocence. He meets with Misha again and a much more cynical world view emerges. Lara had signed on as a nurse in search of her husband Pasha Antipov, leaving her daughter with a close friend in Moscow. Yury has also left his family behind, witnessing the birth of his son to Tonya shortly before being sent to the front. Essentially, here begins the story.

Yury doesn't actually meet Lara until the fifth chapter, Farewell to the Old, at an estate that has been converted into a hospital, where unrest ferments in the village and a group of secessionists led by a blind prophet, Blazheiko, hide out in the forest. Pasternak chooses to build his romance slowly. Lara finds herself drawn to the wounded Yury because of his intelligence and Yury finds himself drawn to Lara for her foreign beauty.

As the war winds down, the two find themselves ever more in contact with each other, with Yury happy to have someone he can freely share his thoughts with. He confides his relationship in a letter to Tonya, who takes it all the "wrong" way with Yury reaffirming his love for his wife in a subsequent letter. But, the seed has been planted, and everyone around them sees the love the two have for each other. However, in the chaos that followed both return to their separate homes. Lara deep in the heart of the Urals and Yury to Moscow.

You might call this a philosophical tale of love in the tradition of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, set against the rapidly changing face of Russia. Pasternak does not delve too deeply into the war. Instead he focuses on the relationship between Yury and Lara, a democratic love which he feels defies both tradition and the false promise of the revolution.

The Five O'Clock Express and A Girl From a Different Circle

2010-12-06T00:42:00.000-08:00

Interesting how Pasternak tells his tale of Yury and Lara in parallel episodes, keeping Yury pretty much above the seismic shifts taking place in Russia, while Lara finds herself at street level. Pasternak opens with a boyhood tale of Yury that was a lot like Chekhov's The Steppe, with young Yury being taken through the countryside on a troika with his uncle and a local priest, after the young boy lost his mother. This idyllic reverie is broken by the fateful news that someone has committed suicide by throwing himself off a train. Unknown to Yury this is his father. Pasternak also uses the scene to introduce the young Misha Gordon, who would become Yury's lifelong friend, and the contemptible Komarovsky, a lawyer who had apparently aided Yury's father in making his jump.

Komarovsky is portrayed essentially as a snake in the grass, tangentially bringing ruin on Yury, although the young boy had no contact with his father, and despoiling young Lara in the succeeding chapter. The man entangles himself into many lives, but with Yury and Lara he proves to be an intractable part of their lives. Pasternak gives Lara much more attention. She too comes from a broken family. Left with her mother and brother to struggle in the seamy streets of Moscow. Unlike Yury who has a soft landing in the Gromeko household, Lara is forced to make due with her overbearing mother and a conniving Komarovsky who takes full advantage of her lowly position. At the close of the chapter, Yury and Lara first cast eyes upon each other in the Montenegro Hotel during the 1905 strikes, which resulted in Lara's mother trying to kill herself by swallowing iodine after seeking refuge in the hotel.

There is a serialized feeling to the first two parts, which continues into the third part. Pasternak seems content to play out his parallel stories through a series of episodes. Lara meets Pasha Antipov through whom we get a street level view of the strikes. Yury's uncle becomes a successful writer, trying to give the events some sense of perspective.

There is a clunky feeling to the narrative, made even moreso by what appears to be an awkward translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. I found myself going back to the 1958 translation by Hayward and Harari, which is indeed much easier to read. I suppose the PV edition is closer to the original but at times it reads like a word for word "google translation" with jumbled syntax. The HH edition is more polished, even if it may compromise some of the translation, and left out some passages due to publishing time constraints, as Ann Pasternak Slater noted in her review.

More impressive to me is how Richard Bolt (1965) and Yuri Arabov (2006) managed to turn this novel into a screenplay. There really isn't much in the way of dialog in the early going. Yet, Arabov in the 2006 Russian mini-series gave a much fuller sense of those early chapters by filling out the characters of Alexandr Gromeko and his daughter Tonya, as well as create a very compelling villain in Komarovsky in his relationship with Lara and her mother.

Yuriy's Labor of Love

2010-12-03T07:19:00.000-08:00

In a cinematic world increasingly dominated by CGI it is great that there are still animators like Yuriy Norshteyn who painstakingly pore over every detail of their work, taking 30 years if necessary to bring a story dear to his heart to life. This is the case with The Overcoat, an animated feature Yuriy started back in the late 70s, of which he has only provided glimpses to the public like this one. He says he has some 25 minutes of this feature completed to date. He planned to show the film in 2007, but it remains unfinished. Here's more on the long overdue Overcoat.

Leonid

2010-11-25T05:17:00.000-08:00

Interesting to read that Boris Pasternak's father, Leonid Osipovich, was an accomplished portrait artist and took Boris with him to Astapovo station to see Tolstoy before his death. Pasternak had painted and sketched several portraits of Tolstoy over the years, including this one of the Count at Yasnaya Polyana in the late 1890s. I love this painting entitled The Night Before the Examination.

They walked and walked and sang "Memory Eternal" . . .

2010-11-25T01:06:00.000-08:00

I have to say I like the British book cover better than the American one, but it is between the covers that counts, and it seems in this case you get the same narrative. Ann Pasternak Slater is not happy with the literal Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, preferring the more lyrical original English translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari. You can read her review in the Guardian.

I did notice that P-V can be too literal in previous translations like that of The Master and Margarita, to the point of calling Bezdomny "Homeless" throughout the book, when it would have sufficed to provide a footnote that the surname Bulgakov used means "homeless." In that case, I preferred the earlier Michael Glenny translation.

It has been a long time since I read the Hayward-Harari translation so it will be hard to compare, but from what I read in Richard Pevear's introduction he and Larissa Volokhonsky have chosen to maintain the awkwardness of Pasternak's original text rather than smooth out the rough edges as Hayward did to make it more palatable to an English-speaking audience.

Pevear also provides an interesting short bio of Pasternak, noting his earlier brushes with the Symbolists and Futurists before being suffused in the "socialist realism" of the Stalinist era. Being a poet, he was drawn to Blok and Mandelstam and of course Ana Achmatova, who were all looking for something beyond the lyrical, something that challenged themselves as well as readers. Here is a classic collection of his poems, My Sister - Life. Not surprisingly, this didn't fit with Stalin's vision of a new Soviet Union, and these great poets found themselves struggling to deal with the constraints of the newly created Writers' Union which all Russian writers were forced to subscribe to.

The story surrounding the book is as fascinating as the book itself. When Pasternak sought Soviet publishers for Doctor Zhivago in 1956 he was rejected, and only by a fortuitous turn of events did the book find itself into print thanks to an Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who printed it in both Russian and Italian. The Hayward-Harari edition followed, adding to Pasternak's new found international recognition. He initially accepted the Nobel prize for literature in 1958, but under pressure from the Soviet Writers' Union subsequently rejected it. Pevear quotes both telegrams. This is too bad because shortly thereafter a thaw occurred in the Soviet Union, which saw a number of previously banned books find their way into print, including Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Pasternak had died in 1960, and it wouldn't be until 1988 that his son pressed to have Doctor Zhivago printed in the Soviet Union, at the time of Gorbachev's Perestroika.

Books to be 'Dreamed Through'

2010-11-16T22:41:00.000-08:00

‘I heartily recommend taking as often as possible Chekhov’s books … and dreaming through them as they are intended to be dreamed through’ -- Vladimir Nabokov

For those with an unbridled passion for Anton Chekhov there is this box set of Collected Stories, weighing in at 1400 pages, bound in buckram, that would be a very handsome addition to any book shelf. It appears to be lavishly illustrated as well. I have a copy of The Shooting Party which I cherish.

Theater of the Absurd

2010-11-02T02:29:00.000-07:00

I've been enjoying the bits and pieces of the literature and theater of the absurd which characterized a part of the Russian avant-garde in the late 1920s. Daniil Kharms kick started the movement with his reading of the OBERIU manifesto in 1928, although the organization apparently dates back to 1926 (read more). Kharms along with several others contributed greatly to this movement, and many of their writings have been collected into anthologies like The Man with the Black Coat and OBERIU - An Anthology of Russian Absurdism. In many ways, this movement seemed to echo that of the Italian Futurists and Dadaism, but the Russian absurdists tended to shun all political relationships, preferring to explore universal ideas and playing these ideas out on stage with the theater group, Radix. Nice to see this movement getting more attention.

Scary Fairy Tales

2010-10-19T23:40:00.000-07:00

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's book of Scary Fairy Tales, which includes There Once Was a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby, interests me more. Especially now with Halloween approaching. Excellent review in the NYTimes.

Russians have long been fascinated with the macabre, psychics and false prophets. And, don't forget all those stories of rapacious wolves. I suppose those long winter nights have a lot to do with it. There is a long history of horror and supernatural tales dating back to Aleksey Tolstoy. Perhaps his most famous Gothic work is Vampires: Stories of the Supernatural. Even Gogol's Dead Souls conjures up the dead in its own beguiling way, and Dostoevsky long had a fascination with the dark side in all his characters that at times bordered on the macabre.

I can only imagine that Petrushevskaya draws on this rich tradition in her haunting stories.

Sonechka

2010-10-19T22:51:00.000-07:00

A friend mentioned Ludmila Ulitskaya the other day and the name sounded familiar. Sure enough, I had a copy of Sonechka: A Novella and Stories sitting on my shelf and read Sonechka that night. Odd little story as it seems more a sketch for a broader novel that Ulitskaya had in mind than a novella. The story starts to get quite complicated as Sonechka's elderly husband finds himself infatuated with their daughter's beguiling friend, Jasia, a Polish girl who was trying to re-invent herself in Moscow in the late 70s. Sonechka seems oblivious to these events swirling around her, remaining devoted to her books which consoled her during her mundane childhood and years in a public library. You expect more to come out of this story, but it doesn't. It just trails off with Sonechka once again absorbing herself in her books.

The story is quite interesting, as Sonechka was born out of WWII whereas Robert, her husband, was a well-known artist who had managed to survive the concentration camps and moved back to the Ukraine after the war. After some time in the shetls, the two move to Moscow with their young daughter. Sonechka had inherited her mother's sewing machine and saved up money to buy three rooms of a wood house in an old quarter of the city. Robert had revived his painting. Tanya, their daughter, was budding into an attractive high school girl, but then she meets Jasia at night school and the peaceful life Sonechka had long imagined is turned upside down. Sonechka made me think of Kathe Kollwitz, especially as she sunk into old age.

I read one of the other stories, Dauntless Women of the Russian Steppe, which had a very eye-catching title. It focused on three Russian women drinking away their man-problems in a New York apartment in the early 90s. Seemed to echo Moscow Does not Believe in Tears.

Not quite sure what to make of Ulitskaya after this little foray. My friend tells me that Daniel Stern, Translator is well worth reading, but it doesn't seem there is a copy in English. The Funeral Party has been well received. May turn there next.

The Ray of Life

2010-10-13T03:04:00.000-07:00

The Fatal Eggs is another little gem by Mikhail Bulgakov. It has been translated several times, including this excerpt from a recent translation by Michael Karpelson. It was even made into a movie, Rokovye yaytsa by Sergei Lomkin in 1996. The story takes place in the near future, narrated from a time four years beyond which Bulgakov wrote the novella in 1924. It concerns the fateful discovery of a ray of red light, artificially produced, that creates drastic effects in microscopic offspring, and eventually in frogs. Bulgakov, a doctor by training, infuses his story with enough clinical terms to make it all seem quite possible, as was the case in Heart of a Dog. The story appears to delight mostly in a H.G. Wells-like vision of the future, but is not without its social allegory of early Soviet times, leading censors to question his intents.

BetweenTwo Horsemen

2010-10-06T03:54:00.000-07:00

Pushkin wrote The Bronze Horseman in part as a response to Mickiewicz's The Monument of Peter the Great. Mickiewicz had been jailed and forced into exile following the student uprising at the University of Vilnius in 1823. Mickiewicz had been protesting the oppression of Lithuania and Poland following the partitions first made by Peter the Great, and continued with his daughter Catherine, who had the bronze sculpture of her father on horseback erected in St. Petersburg. To Mickiewicz, Peter was an usurper, not a liberating force, and creates an imaginary conversation between Pushkin and himself which Marinus Wes describes in his book Between Two Horsemen.

Mickiewicz was more explicit in his text than Pushkin was in his response. Pushkin took the statue as having a dark side, in the way it came to life and chased down a bedraggled Yevgeny, who carried with him the scars of the 1824 flood. The only direct reference to Mickiewicz is a footnote,

Mickiewicz, in one of his best poems, Oleszkiewicz, has in most beautiful lines described the day preceding the Petersburg flood. It is only a pity that his description is inaccurate. There was no snow--the Neva was not covered with ice. Our description is more correct, although it has none of the brilliant colors of the Polish poet.

attached to the lines,

O'er darkened Petrograd there rolled
November's breath of autumn cold;
And Neva with her boisterous billow
Splashed on her shapely bounding-wall
And tossed in restless rise and fall
Like a sick man upon his pillow.

Mickiewicz and Pushkin were friends, even if Mickiewicz tended to view all Russians as enemies by this stage in his life, eventually emigrating to Paris where he hoped to revive a Polish-Lithuanian state in exile.
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Portrait of Mickiewicz by Walenty Wańkowicz (1827-28), portrait of Puskin by Vasily Tropinin (1827).

Woe from Wit

2010-10-04T03:22:00.000-07:00

So often referenced in literature and reproduced on stage many times is Alexander Griboyedov's Gore ot Uma (Woe from Wit). Here is a subtitled scene from a 1998 production of the play, featuring Oleg Menshikov, and a clip from the 1952 movie, or you can view the 1998 production in its entirety in Russian.

Griboyedov, like Lermontov, had a hard time getting his plays past the censors in his time. Written in 1823, it was not published in full until 1861, although many versions of the play appeared in the years in between. A number of the catch phrases have since become part of the Russian language.

Herzen in Paris, 1848

2010-10-04T01:27:00.000-07:00

After watching a Lithuanian production, Mistras, I found myself looking for some perspective on Paris in 1848 and found Herzen's section of his time in Paris from 1847-1852 in My Past and Thoughts. What a fascinating time! While the play focuses mostly on Adam Mickiewicz, Herzen takes in a broader section of the revolutionary ferment, noting how Mickiewicz had fallen under the influence of Towiański and had become much too religion for his taste. Herzen's sympathies laid more with persons like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who tried to keep a respectable paper going in the face of mounting governmental censorship, while being held in jail.

Herzen was one of the more famous Russian emigres in Paris. He was great friends with Turgenev and sat with him when Turgenev felt he had come down with cholera, which was sweeping Paris at the time. Fortunately for Turgenev he had a much lesser malady and was able to recover after a fortnight.

As Issiah Berlin noted in the forward, I was one of many who was well aware of Herzen but had never read him. I'm glad to have finally overcome that shortcoming. Herzen is fascinating to read, not only for the time he covers in his Memoirs, but the immediately accessible way in which he writes. Berlin noted that Herzen was a master of observation and one of the few writers to successfully capture a conversational tone of voice in his writing. Well acquainted with so many leading political and cultural figures of his time, Herzen provides invaluable insights into their characters, not least of which Mickiewicz, who he felt had outlived his time and become a caricature of himself.

Herzen's sharp, often acerbic comments reflect his skepticism with the Revolutionary fervor of the time. He was a strong believer in individual liberty and didn't like the way so many persons were falling in lockstep behind movements, fearing that many of the mistakes from the earlier French revolution were being repeated. He couldn't understand why Mickiewicz would idolize Napoleon to the point of doffing his hat each time he passed his statue. Herzen eventually found solace in Switzerland, after being unceremoniously deported from Paris for funding Proudhon's efforts.
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The photograph by Sergei Lvovich dates from after this time.

The Masquerade

2010-09-29T01:57:00.000-07:00

Maskaradas has become a staple of the Fall season, and one we've watched several times. Lermontov had a hard time getting this play staged in his day. Vladimir Golstein notes that the poet made drastic revisions to please censors, but it wasn't until 11 years after Lermontov's death that the play was first seen. Rimas Tuminas first staged the play in Vilnius in 1997. He is currently directing Moscow's Vakhtangov Theatre.

Ana Karenina

2010-09-20T23:45:00.000-07:00

My wife and I had been looking forward to the premiere of Ana Karenina, a modern dance production by Anželika Cholina. We weren't disappointed. Cholina appeared to take the story from the point of view of Ana, creating a dream-like atmosphere in which Ana wrestles (at times quite literally) with the tempest of emotions inside her. The Kitty-Levin story serves more as counterpoint, with Levin portrayed as an oafish man, dogging Kitty through the first act before bringing her to his estate and marrying her in the second act.

Beata Molytė shines as Ana, overwhelming the rather sober looking Vronsky, as portrayed by Gintaras Visockis. Torn by her passion for Vronsky, her place in society and her love for her son, Ana plays out these emotions on stage, at times bordering on the hallucinatory, in keeping with the emotions she for the most part kept suppressed in the novel, until her tragic end, which Cholina handled beautifully. She portrays Ana as disappearing into the darkness, with the clatter of chairs against the stage floor serving as the wheels of the train.

Juozas Statkevičius' form fitting costumes wonderfully evoke the period. The lighting could have been better, as the hanging chandeliers created a rather odd haziness to the ballroom and other group scenes, such as the marvelous horse race in which Vronsky takes a fall. Ana can not disguise her emotions, much to the chagrin of her husband.

Seems Cholina pretty much followed the format of the original ballet, which was also divided into two parts, and featured the music of Rodion Shchedrin. Cholina used the music of Alfred Schnittke.
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Here's a clip with Cholina on the production. Photos from a/ch, klubas.lt and diena.lt.

Teaching Tevye

2010-09-19T22:39:00.000-07:00

I was bemused by this article by Dara Horn on Teaching Tevye. I'm not sure where Dara is coming from, but I think she should take a closer look at the stories in question, because Tevye is no "ignoramus," and the quotes he takes from the Bible and Talmud may seem broad and sometimes out of context, but as Hillel Halkin noted in his introduction, were in most cases a propos, as we must remember that Sholem Aleichem is speaking through Tevye as he relates the changing face of Yiddish life in Ukraine.

These stories, ostensibly about the marriages and misfortunes of Tevye and his daughters, serve to tell us about various forces shaping Yiddish life. One daughter marries a revolutionary, and moves to Siberia to be with him after he serves his jail term. Another marries an Orthodox boy, with Tevye finding it very difficult to reconcile himself with the loss of his daughter to the local priest, who appears to gloat over this conversion. Another daughter flirts with a wealthy young Jew, only to pay the ultimate price when his relatives intercede on his behalf. These are for the most part sad tales that tell of the insufferable conditions many Jews found themselves in the Pale of Settlement. If Aleichem relates Tevye's tales with a robust sense of humor, it is to conceal the physical pain and emotional hurt suffered during these times. Tevye is a vehicle for these stories, although Halkin notes that Aleichem may have actually drew his inspiration from someone like Tevye.

According to Halkin, Yiddish humor was a relatively new thing, emerging in the mid 19th century. Finding themselves second-class citizens, humor became a means of dealing with the injustices and indignities that were being heaped upon Yiddish people in Tsarist Russia. Aleichem grew to become one of the most beloved story-tellers because of his ability to use humor to convey searing stories that struck the nerve of his audiences. The Hebrew references often flew over the heads of his audience, Halkin noted, which is why he leaves many of these references in Hebrew in his English translation, with a glossary in the back. The irony today is that Yiddish has been lost in time, kept alive by Yiddish scholars like Dovid Katz, who teaches Yiddish studies at Vilnius University, and has published a wealth of Litvak culture and literature.

Halkin also notes that the Tevye cycle has been adapted into many stories over the years, not just Fiddler on the Roof, and that Aleichem himself reforged some of these stories himself. It is unclear how many daughters Tevye actually had. Aleichem periodically mentions seven, but in the stories he only deals with five, and mentions no more than six by name. The stories arose over a 20 year period, intermixed with other stories either read or published during this time, and were collected later into the stories of Tevye the Dairyman, or Milkman if you prefer.

Of Time and Space

2010-09-18T01:59:00.000-07:00

I found myself asking if Petersburg constituted the first "Post-Modern" novel? So many of the elements we now regard as "Post-Modern" are right here in Bely's "Astral Novel" from 1913. Seems that the Post-Modernists stole from the pages of Symbolist literature.

Bely shifts back and forth in time effortlessly, with the events in the novel all taking place within a span of two days. The ticking clock inside the homemade bomb, hidden in a sardine can, comes to dominate the second half of the novel. The tension is wonderfully wrought, as Bely moves back and forth between a handful of characters in those fateful hours of the strikes that would bring about the first Russian revolution of 1905. Nikolai Apollonovich finds himself breaking these hours down into seconds, with each one ticking away slowly on a collision course with "zero."

Meanwhile, his father contemplates the distance that has grown between his son and him, and in snooping around his son's room comes across the sardine tin, not sure what to make of it. He thinks it is some kind of toy from his son's past and takes it to the library for closer examination.

Nikolai struggles to get himself free of various entanglements, including an old friend who feels Nikolai has dishonored his wife and is demanding an explanation. But, the real nemesis is Lippanchenko, who appears to be taking advantage of not only the restless young nobility in persons like Nikolai and Sofia Petrovna, but the general unrest of the city.

Lippanchenko remains a shadowy figure throughout the novel. Nikolai's dealings are mostly with Alexander Ivanovich, who seems to be the only one who understands the meaning of the revolution taking place. But, numerous misunderstandings and the nefarious activities of Lippanchenko threaten to unhinge everything. Reminded me a lot of Dostoevsky's Demons in this regard.

Through it all, Apollon Apollonovich tries to maintain his decorum, but even he feels it is sagging under the pressure of events taking place. When his wife, and the mother of son, unexpectedly returns, there seems an opportunity for rebirth, but ultimately this is a tale of disillusionment.

The novel has been compared to Joyce's Ulysses, mostly I think in the way the two authors dealt with the concept of time. Petersburg pretty much remained an obscure novel until first translated into English in the 1959. Cournos was very familiar with events in Russia at the time of the second revolution, having traveled to Petersburg in 1917. He provides some background to the novel in his introduction, but not much in the way of insight into how Bely composed this novel. It appears the recent Ellsworth translation sheds much needed new light on the novel.
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The painting is The Magi (1914) by Pavel Filonov

Tevye the Dairyman

2010-09-17T23:05:00.000-07:00

I find myself reading Sholem Aleichem's stories of Tevye the Dairyman, after finishing Petersburg (more on Petersburg later). I have a translation by Hillel Halkin, who also writes a lengthy forward describing the Jewish condition in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the time in which these stories are set. Aleichem eventually immigrated to America, as many Eastern European Jews did during this time, escaping the harsh tsarist rule that had consigned them to the Pale of Settlement. Still, some Jews prospered as Aleichem noted in his amusing introductory chapter, as Tevye meets a wealthy family from Yehupetz (Kiev) in an odd and round about way.

The stories are filled with religious anecdotes as Tevye tries to come to terms with his lowly place in the world. These amusing reveries are passed along to Aleichem, who sets himself as the narrator of these stories. Halkin noted that Aleichem used a number of pen names, this being the one that stuck, which literally translates into "Hello, there." He grew up in the vicinity of Kiev, where a monument commemorates him on Rognedinskaya street. These stories were first published in the Warsaw yearbook Der Hoyzfraynt, constituting a vibrant part of Yiddish culture in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Le Nez

2010-09-14T04:15:00.000-07:00

Here is a wonderful adaptation of Gogol's classic short story, The Nose, by Alexander Alexeieff from 1963.

The Bronze Horseman

2010-09-13T00:09:00.000-07:00

Bely draws on Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman as his inspiration for Petersburg, prefacing each part with pieces from the immortal poem. In this poem we find a young man, who the narrator has chosen to call Yevgeny, driven mad by the destruction wrought from the flood of 1824, which destroyed his his love's home and cast about its inhabitants if after a battle. Yevgeny wanders around for a year in a state of delirium eventually coming upon the bronze sculpture of Peter, at which he hurls his abuses, only for the menacing statue to come to life and chase him through the streets of Petershburg and to his doom. With the popularity of the poem, Falconet's statue of Peter the Great became known as The Bronze Horseman.

The Neva figures heavily into the poem, like an untamed beast, whose waves plunge the city into chaos. It took decades for the city to bring the waters under control with a series of locks and canals. Pushkin appears to wrestle with the strengths and weaknesses of this great city that Peter built, protecting Russia from the North and exposing it to the West.

And thus He mused: "From here, indeed
Shall we strike terror in the Swede;
And here a city by our labor
Founded, shall gall our haughty neightor;
'Here cut'--so Nature gives command--
'Your window through on Europe; stand
Firm-footed by the sea, unchanging!'
Ay, ships of every flag shall come
By waters they had never swum,
And we shall revel, freely ranging."

By contrast, Bely seems to take an opposite view, seeing Petersburg as a decaying vision, personified by Apollon Apollonovich. Here again the Neva figures heavily into his novel, as if on the verge of retaking the city.

Madman or Genius?

2010-09-10T05:10:00.000-07:00

Pasternak to Isaiah Berlin,

".. of course Andrey Bely was a genius – Petersburg, Kotik Letaev are full of wonderful things – I know that, you need not tell me – but his influence was fatal."

and what did Berlin think of Andrei Bely?

"... a man of strange and unheard-of insights – magical and a holy fool in the tradition of Russian Orthodoxy."

here's more.
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Andrei Bely (1905) as seen by Leon Bakst.

Strike

2010-09-09T22:56:00.000-07:00

Sergei Eisenstein goes back two years before the first Russian Revolution to the strikes of 1903 and the subsequent suppression that followed in his feature length debut, Стачка. The film was made in 1925 and was steeped in revolutionary references, including the famous scene near the end of the film where he compares the suppression to cows being slaughtered at the abbotoirs. He would go onto make Броненосец Потёмкин (Battleship Potemkin) that same year, which dealt with the mutiny that occurred in 1905. His strong visual style would become the hallmark of early Soviet film.

Petersburg

2010-09-09T01:53:00.000-07:00

As I read Petersburg, first published in 1916, I probably could use a few more annotations, as there are so many references that if you aren't fully knowledgeable of the events that surrounded the 1905 uprising, you will find yourself missing a lot of them. My overall sense of the novel is that Andrei Bely was channeling Gogol while setting his characters against each other like chess pieces. Each chapter seems to represent a "move," or series of moves, leading toward a fateful ending. I can see why this is one of Nabokov's favorite books from the 20th century, as it has much of the sardonic wit and clever juxtaposition of characters that you read in Nabokov's books.

A new translation by John Elsworth apparently breathes more life into the novel. I have been reading the Cournos translation, which I haven't found that stilted, as Katya Galitzine notes in her review of the book, but am curious to read the Elsworth translation as he goes back to the "more complex 1913 version" of the novel. Here's an audio interview with John Elsworth from The Leonard Lopate Show.

Here's a set of reflections by Nikolai Berdyaev regarding Bely's Petersburg, which he describes as an Astral Novel, written in 1916.
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The painting is Manifesto of October 17th, 1905 by Ilya Repin

Hedgehog in the Fog

2010-09-05T02:06:00.000-07:00

On a lighter note, one of my favorite Soviet animated features is Hedgehog in the Fog, made by Yuriy Norshteyn in 1975, and winner of numerous international awards in the years that followed. Norshteyn has done a number of other wonderful animated features, but has yet to finish his long overdue adaptation of The Overcoat.

The Steppe

2010-09-02T02:24:00.000-07:00

Don't know quite what to make of this early short novel by Chekhov. He seems to be presenting young Egor as the future of Russia as the boy finds himself thrust into a journey across the limitless Steppe with his uncle and a bishop in a mad race to catch up with the mysterious Varlamov. While this action propels the first half of the story, it seems little more than a way to hold the reader's attention as Chekhov seems more interested in describing the vast prairie land of his mother country and Egorushka's impressions, as he is being taken to a boarding school in a distant town.

Along the way we are treated to some rather odd characters sketches such as two Jewish brothers where the shabby covered chaise stops briefly as the boy's uncle, Ivan Kuzmitchov, tries to gauge how distant Varlamov remains on the road. The description of the Jewish brothers would make many readers today cringe, as they are cast as gross caricatures. Forced to sit for a cup of tea, Kuzmitchov can barely hold himself, so anxious to continue the journey despite night having fallen. He wants desperately to complete his transaction with Varlamov before others get to him first. When Father Christopher wants to do his blessings, Kuzmitchov can contain himself no longer, but the elderly Bishop does so just the same.

In time, we learn that Varlamov is a wealthy landowner. One of the wealthiest in the broad region. Meanwhile, Egorushka tries to absorb all these new impressions and make sense of them, especially when he finds himself passed over to a wagon train so that Kuzmitchov and Father Christopher can continue their chase unfettered by Egorushka's questions and complaints.

The wagon train dominates the second half of the story with the young boy forced to deal with a whole new set of circumstances. We are treated to a variety of character sketches of persons barely removed from serfdom and one story after another of the dangers that befall merchants like Kuzmitchov on this seemingly desolate road. The stories are told at night with everyone sitting around the campfire, leaving Egorushka with fitful dreams. Eventually, a storm overtakes the caravan and the young boy is left chilled to the bone.

Without much drama, Egorushka is eventually reunited with his Uncle and Father Christopher in an unnamed provincial city. He finds out that his Uncle has competed his deal with Varlamov, but finds himself too sick to share in his Uncle's pleasure. Father Christopher takes care of the boy, rubbing oil and vinegar into his body that night to take out the chill. The next morning the young boy awakes reinvigorated and ready for the next stage of his journey. His Uncle pawns him off on a distant relation and this is where Chekhov chooses to leave the reader, as if the first act in a much broader play.

It seemed to me that Chekhov projected Young Egor as the future of Russia, and that those he fell into association with on this journey the past and the turbulent present. The Steppe encompasses and comes to hang over this story in the form of a massive thunderstorm that shakes the boy to the bone. He describes the landscape in detail, noting a couple of villages along the way, and reveling in the streams in which the boy gets to swim. It is a pleasant story but one that doesn't have much meat to it, like his other more character driven stories.

I see that Sergei Bondarchuk adapted The Steppe to film in 1977, but I haven't seen it.
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The painting is Vladimirka Road (1892) by Isaac Levitan

Ivan's Childhood

2010-09-01T04:31:00.000-07:00

While technically a war movie, Tarkovsky chooses to take a more abstract approach to the ravages of war in My Name is Ivan. We find a young Ivan moving between blissful reveries with his mother and sister by a minimalist lake shore to those where he is seen penetrating behind German lines during WWII, bringing back reconnaissance to numbered Soviet commanders.

The war scenes are presented realistically while the idyllic beach scenes are far more dream like, but in watching it again I'm not convinced the war scenes are real. Rather, a product of his imagination, especially the use of code in the beginning and the counting he does with the twigs, berries and seeds in the young lieutenant's office. I think Tarkovsky purposefully tried to keep the relationship between the conflicting images ambiguous, using marvelous camera work such as the scene where young Ivan drifts off to sleep and moves up a well in his dream to the image of he and his mother looking down a well.

You can see the influence Kalatozov had on Tarkovsky, as many scenes are reminiscent of The Cranes Are Flying and The Letter Never Sent. Apparently, Tarkovsky had approached Kalatozov's camera man Sergei Urusevsky to do the film, but the credit goes to Vadim Yusov.

Wonderful first feature length film that opened the door for Tarkovsky to a much wider audience. He had previously done a short film of Hemingway's The Killers (1958).

Ilf and Petrov

2010-09-01T02:08:00.000-07:00

The Golden Calf sounds a lot like a modern update of Dead Souls. In this case Ostap Bender rides through the Hinterlands in a yellow jalopy in search of an elusive millionaire. Sounds like a good translation. As Mark Twain once wrote in The Awful German Language, it is very hard to translate humor.

Ilf and Petrov love the idea of searching out millions, probably best characterized in The 12 Chairs, which Mel Brooks made into a movie back in 1970. Here's the classic Soviet version directed by Mark Zakharov and featuring Andrei Mironov as Bender, but alas no subtitles. Well worth the look just the same.

Also great fun is the adventures of Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip.

Everybody Loves Chekhov

2010-08-31T01:51:00.000-07:00

Seems everyone is celebrating Chekhov these days. Two new films, Ward No. 6 and The Duel came out this past year, and many earlier films were being screened at festivals such as this one sponsored by the NW Film Center of the Portland Art Museum, this past May, which included Soviet classics such as The Seagull (1970), directed by Yuli Karasik.

Of course, The Seagull is one of those favorites that has been done several times, including this earlier version by Sidney Lumet. I guess the main draw of Chekhov is that he still appears so modern more than 100 years after his untimely death.

My Life

2010-08-30T04:53:00.000-07:00

I continue to work my way through Chekhov's short novels, although not in chronological order. I finished My Life (1896) the other night. It is told through the point of a young man with the ostentatious name of Misail, who has opted for a workingman's life, much to the indignation of his father, the town architect. Chekhov uses this character to voice his own misgivings about growing up in a provincial city of 60,000 inhabitants. He offers a number of interesting character studies, including an amusing view of local theater.

Initially, Misail finds himself having as difficult finding a place among the workers as he did among bureaucrats, but in times settles on housepainting as his vocation, representing the flip side to his father. Misail lives among the poor as he struggles to shed his noble bearing. His father can't stand it and repeatedly tries to get his son to change his ways, but to no avail. When Misail attracts the attention of some of the younger aristocrats, including his sister, this becomes too much for his father to bear and he has the governor of the town threaten his son with a public flogging.

Misail remains undeterred, but eventually his attraction for the daughter of a railroad engineer earns him a place back in society, as they opt to restore a farm her father had bought off an old lady along Tolstoyan lines. Of course, Chekhov isn't content to revel in this rustic idealistic life and shows how Misail's and Masha's best laid plans go to ruin. Misail felt Masha was like an actress who adopted her role as a countrywoman only to shed it when things didn't work out like she had imagined.

Misail comes across a bit too much like a paragon of virtue, admonishing himself for being taken in by the aristocratic life and their flirtation with the condition of the poor, criticizing everyone around him and eventually returning to his role as a housepainter as if it is his true nature. I liked the way Chekhov initially pitted the son against the father, but I think it would have been a more effective story if Misail had not so easily been able to reconcile his feelings.
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The painting is Spring, Kitchen Gardens (1893) by Alexei Savrasov.

Tolstoy by Henri Troyat

2010-08-27T05:03:00.000-07:00

Here is an abridged copy of Troyat's magisterial biography of Tolstoy. Unfortunately, there are only a few pages from the Last Days of Tolstoy's life with all the arguments over Tolstoy's diaries which Chertkov had in his possession and Sofiya (or Sonya as Troyat calls her) very much wanted returned. Tolstoy kept promising they would be returned but apparently Chertkov retained them. Anyway, she felt great animosity toward Chertkov which was reflected in the movie.

You can buy a second hand copy of Troyat's biography from Abebooks and other sources at very low prices.

Tolstoy Is Dead; Long Fight Over

2010-08-27T01:17:00.000-07:00

Here is a copy of the obituary from the New York Times, dated November 20,1910. It is noted,

ASTAPOVA, Sunday, Nov. 20.--Count Tolstoy died at 6:05 this morning.

The Countess Tolstoy was admitted to the sickroom at 5:50. Tolstoy did not recognize her.

When one of the heart attacks seized him Tolstoy was alone with his eldest daughter, Tatina. He suddenly clutched her hand and drew her to him. He seemed to be choking, but was able to whisper:

"Now the end has come; that is all."

The Free Age Press

2010-08-27T00:03:00.000-07:00

Interesting to find out that Chertkov helped create The Free Age Press when exiled in London in 1897. This is where he met up with the Maudes who would eventually translate much of Tolstoy into English, and Aylmer Maude would write the biography The Life of Tolstoy Later Years. But, it would seem that Chertkov and the Maudes had a falling out, judging by this undated letter from Tolstoy. Interesting that he praises their translations. I don't know how well Tolstoy understood English, but the Maude translations have been raked over the coals in the years that followed, most notably by Nabokov.

The Last Station

2010-08-26T06:56:00.000-07:00

I finally had a chance to watch The Last Station and have to say enjoyed it, largely because of Helen Mirren's marvelous performance as Sofiya. She really held this movie together, as it threatened to devolve into a rather tedious melodrama at times. Christopher Plummer gave Count Tolstoy the weight he deserves on screen, and the rapport between he and his wife was very good, particularly the wonderful bedroom scene.

I was a bit bemused by the portrayal of Vladimir Chertkov. He comes across as such a cad. From what I've read, Chertkov was completely devoted to Tolstoy's legacy, and wasn't trying to steal the estate out from under Sofiya, as was implied in this movie. He organized a new publishing house, Intermediary, in 1885 at Tolstoy's initiative, which published Chekhov, Leskov, Ertel, as well as Tolstoy. Here is Chertkov with Tolstoy,

and a book Chertkov published of his Last Days with Tolstoy. Chertkov came from a wealthy background himself and was able to fund many of his efforts, including the publishing house.

I can understand Sofiya's worries over the estate within the context of this film, and certainly Helen Mirren made you greatly empathize with her character, but one has to wonder how much of this story was actually the case, even if Parini apparently pored over reams of journals, memoirs and reminiscences. You can see Parini casting himself as Valentin Bulgakov, taking the side of Sofiya in the disputes which followed. Anyway, it was great fun and one has to expect a few artistic liberties along the way.

The Life of Insects

2010-08-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't call it light reading, but The Life of Insects is a book you can consume at one sitting. You will probably find yourself wanting to reread parts of it, particularly the interesting dialog between fellow moth-men, Mitya and Dima, which as their names imply appear as two halves of the same coin.

Viktor Pelevin's short novel from the early 90s is not so easy to categorize. Some have viewed as allegory, others as science fiction and fantasy. It would seem Pelevin took his cue from a few lines of Brodsky,

I sit in my garden and the lamp is burning.
Not a single lover, friend or servant.
Not a single lord or beggar present
Nothing but the harmony of insects' droning.

not Kafka as many persons would like to think. Pelevin purposely keeps the reader off balance with all the shape-shifting that takes place as his insect humans move freely back and forth from one form to another.

The book essentially follows three stories with three other short pieces fit into the interlocking chapters. Perhaps the most compelling story is that of Marina, a queen ant who descends to earth in the form of a shapely young women in a tight-fitting mini skirt and stiletto heels, finds herself having to clip her wings to adjust to a new world along the Crimean coastline. She happens to have just enough crumpled up ruble notes in her little purse to see a French film that more or less serves as her training film. From that point she begins to build her nest using a trowel to dig and her skirt as a little sack to help disperse dirt away from her entrance at the base of an decaying motel. In her hunt for food, she encounters a rival queen ant with Pelevin seeming to relish the "ant fight" which ensues. Marina also waits longingly for her male ant to come, decorating her chamber more or less as she remembers in the film, doing the best she can from available materials. At the extreme point of despair, she hears the tell-tale sound of a trowel nearing her chamber, finding her mate in the form of a decorated soldier named Nikolai. True to the nature ants, the world she soon finds herself invited into is a military one. The ball Marina attends gives the reader the sense that this military order hopes to revive Tsarist times in the wake of the Soviet collapse. But, the happy spell she finds herself in soon crumbles and Marina is left to tend to a cache of white eggs. Only then does Marina seem to fully realize who she is, abjectly consigning herself to her fate.

Pelevin's metamorphoses take on dream-like proportions in his tale of two moths, which is reminiscent of Dostoevsky's The Double, with the hallucinogenic dreams evoking an "underworld" not unlike that of Alice. The moths, Mitya and Dima reach the most existential levels of the novel as they try to discern between light and dark. Unlike Kafka, where it is essentially a long journey into darkness, Pelevin plays with both halves of the same sphere, quite playfully even in his chapter with the dung beetle. There is no clear beginning or end, but rather a fascinating little journey into the lives of insects.

Russia Against Napoleon

2010-08-17T23:01:00.000-07:00

Lieven's account in Russia Against Napoleon could not be more different [than War and Peace]. He concentrates on the men who led the Russian Army to victory -- the young Czar Alexander and his close advisers -- and shows that they won because they got more things right than Napoleon did. They understood him better than he did them, and while Napoleon may have been a battlefield genius, Alexander showed greater diplomatic skill in bringing together the coalition that eventually defeated him. That was no easy matter, given the fear of the French that prevailed in the German lands, and the fear of Russian predominance as well.

Heart of a Dog

2010-08-17T06:55:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite film adaptations is Sobachye serdtse (1988), serialized here on Youtube, replete with English subtitles. Vladimir Bortko captured the spirit and textural feeling of Bulgagov's classic short novel. You have to do a double take as the film looks like it was made in the 30's, but was produced during the Perestroika years. A lot of credit goes to Yevgeniy Yevstigneyev, who is excellent as Professor Preobrazhensky.