Slouching toward Moscow

I see there is a paperback version of The Slynx now available through New York Review of Books. I ordered an earlier hardback published by Houghton Mifflin with a much more evocative cover. The NYR copy is the same translation by Jamey Gambrell, so you can take your pick. I'm not sure when Tatyana Tolstaya originally penned the book, but it was sometime in the 1990s at the height of the corruption that plagued Russia, and in particular Moscow, no doubt lending to the dystopic futuristic world she imagines in this novel.

Tolstaya is best known for her unvarnished criticism and trenchant essays of post-Soviet Russia. Pushkin's Children is well worth reading. She has no soft spot for Putin, even if a certain amount of stability has emerged in the wake of the wild and woolly 90s. Since then, she has taken her acerbic wit to the airwaves, co-hosting a popular television show, The School for Scandal. Here's a clip from an episode featuring Grebenshchikov for Russian speakers. My wife would help translate some of the content. Tolstaya came from a literary family (as her name implies), and has tried more than most writers to maintain a high level of discourse in a very fractured society.

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Ward No. 6

Ward No. 6 is a short story written by Chekhov in 1892. It has appeared in various collections of Chekhov short stories, including The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories translated by Constance Garnett in 1921. In this story, Chekhov explores the inner working of a run-down lunatic asylum in a provincial town. He introduces the readers to a coarse porter who speaks mostly with his fists, various patients, a doctor who presides over this ward, and expresses his thoughts with a local postmaster. It was recently made into a movie , featuring Vladimir Ilyin. Here's a clip . There's also this very recent short film (30 min.) by Suzana Purkovic, with English subtitles.

Roadside Picnic: Life inside the Zone

If you're like me and wondered what the hell Stalker was all about, I would suggest reading Roadside Picnic , the book on which it was nominally based. Tarkovsky took his idea from the character, Redrick Schuhart, a laboratory assistant and Harmont Branch of the International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures, leaving the rest up to the imagination. The names were changed to protect the innocent. While Tarkovsky chose to shroud the story in mystery, the Strugatsky Brothers lay it out pretty clearly in their science fiction classic. Redrick, the Stalker, has gone into the zone countless times but each time represents a new set of challenges, especially with the Harmont Branch cracking down on the plundering of alien objects left behind by a visitation to a small rural town in Canada. I suppose setting the story in a place outside Russia, allowed the Strugatsky brothers more room to explore new ideas and avoid heavy censhorship, but according to Boris in t...

Light and Dark

I'm still trying to sort out the ending. The story had to end tragically but was surprised that Rogozhin actually sought forgiveness in Myshkin after what he had done to Nastya, although I think that Dostoevsky intended the two to be read as one, along similar lines as The Double . He kept Rogozhin a shadowy figure throughout the novel, ever lurking in the dark of the Prince's soul. Try as he might, Prince Myshkin could not alter events and thus the fantasy world he had lived in upon returning to Russia crumbled before his eyes, leaving him at a total loss as how to reconcile himself with it. Once again, Dostoevsky plumbs great depths of the human soul. This is a psychological drama told in theatrical terms, perfectly suited for the stage. Characters appear and disappear as if moving from the shadows of the stage. I can see the "green bench" as the central stage piece. In the final part, one gets the sense that Lebedev is orchestrating event...

Chekhov's Gun

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