Chekhov's Gun

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, show...

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 ...

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...

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 and other national calendars.

“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 colo...

  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 ...

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.