Chekhov's Gun

I'm amazed this blog still generates hits as I haven't posted anything of substance in years.  The last post was simply a meander on my thoughts on the current state of affairs in Russia.   I sorted through my Russian books as I cleaned my attic space in an effort to make more room for my ever growing vinyl collection.  I kept my favorites upstairs, stuffing them into a narrow cabinet in one corner.  Trying to fit everything into this small place made me think of a short story by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, in which he stumbles upon a magic paint that makes his tiny room grow bigger and bigger until he eventually gets lost in it.  He was a forgotten writer until resurrected not so long ago by the New York Review of Books, which has since translated his short stories and novellas into five volumes .  Well worth reading. There are so many of these writers who wrote during the Soviet era and whose works were essentially buried.  Bulgakov's The Master ...

The other night one of our guests said she was torn over Russian literature and culture these days.  Should she read Dostoyevsky?  Is it OK to listen to Tchaikovsky?  She threw it out more as a question in general.  Over the past year, Ukrainian officials have been urging persons to turn away from Russian culture as it is used as a means of propaganda.  Certainly one can argue as I did in a post  9 years ago at the time of the Euromaiden protests that the notion of a "Greater Russia" has long been promulgated in Russian culture and is still very much alive and well, but does that mean I turn my back on Russian culture? I have lost interest in certain writers like Dostoyevsky who was an ardent Pan-Slavist but I like to think that if Chekhov was alive today he would be very much against this war in Ukraine and critical of the Russian government.   Russia has been exposing its metaphorical and literal gun since it invaded Georgia in 2008, but we look...

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...

I found myself having to read Boris Godunov so that I could make any sense out of Eimuntas Nekrosius' latest production .  He was originally going to stage it in Moscow with a Russian cast but when Russia annexed Crimea, Nekrosius chose to cancel the production and reset it in Vilnius with a Lithuanian cast. It came out last May, 2015, but my wife and I only got around to seeing it this past weekend.  Lithuanian theater is very different in that you don't get long running shows, but rather recurring shows.  It must make it tough on actors as one has to hold a whole repertoire in his head, as one could very well be performing one play one week and entirely different play the next week.  Each director has his core actors, but they draw actors from each other quite often.  It is quite impressive seeing these actors take on so many roles during the theater season. Unfortunately, Boris didn't translate very well to the modern era.  In my opinion, this ...

In an effort to kickstart this blog again, I recently received a copy of Roadside Picnic , which inspired Tarkovsky's Stalker .  I saw the movie years ago, and quite frankly couldn't make heads or tails of it, so am hoping that the book will help me put together some of the pieces before doing another viewing.  It was interesting to read that I wasn't the only one interested in the classic Soviet sci-fi novel.  WGN bought the screen rights to it and is planning a television series based on the novel.   A video game has also been designed around the theme. Neither of the Strugatsky Brothers are with us anymore, but for decades they were kind of like the Coen Brothers of Soviet science fiction, turning out a great number of novels in the genre dating back to 1958.  They were mostly collaborative efforts, but there were a few solo novels as well, with Boris penning the last work in 2003. Soviet sci-fi is what propels Victor Pelevin, one of my favorite w...

It is hard to imagine what BBC expected when they signed a young director, Tom Harper, to do War & Peace .  The 35-year-old director did do Demons , but it was based on the fabulous adventures of van Helsing, not Dostoevsky.  There is little in Harper's resume to suggest that he was up to the task, which I suppose is why BBC enlisted veteran screenwriter Andrew Davies to adapt the novel to the television screen. Suffice it to say young Tom is no Sergei Bondarchuk.  I question whether he even read the book, but rather adapted Bondarchuk's enthralling epic film to the television screen.  This new version was more about scenography than acting, with the characters pretty much reduced to stand-ins for the roles.  There were a few big name actors like Paul Dano, Jim Broadbent, Stephen Rea and Gillian Anderson, but for the most part these were newbies or actors you hadn't heard about unless you tune into BBC programming. Lily James was the star of the sh...

I took Sergei Dovlatov's The Suitcase with me on a short holiday to the salt baths in the South of Lithuania.  I got a great kick out of this set of anecdotes based on articles of clothing from the Soviet era.  Dovlatov's books are few but are being reprinted and we should all be thankful for it.  He looks at the Soviet past with a wry sense of humor.  I particularly liked his short piece on a statue of Lenin with his two caps. The New Yorker has a great piece on Dovlatov lifted from the afterward of Pushkin Hills , which is next on my reading list.  He was a journalist for many years, which he recounts in The Suitcase , as well as other brief stints as a sculptor's apprentice.  The Lenin stature fiasco sets up and even more farcical piece on a huge wall relief for a subway station devoted to Mikhail Lomonosov, out of which Sergei managed to nab the mayor's boots. The stories are more or less based on his experiences, set up when his son discover...

The Zhivago Project , as it was called, was an attempt by MI6 and the CIA to disseminate Dr. Zhivago among Soviet citizens at the height of the Cold War.  While it was an Italian publisher who ultimately made the book available to a wider audience, with Pasternak's knowledge, it was the British and Americans who exploited the controversial book in an attempt to stir up emotions in the Soviet Union, without the author's knowledge. Pasternak with his wife, Olga, and daughter, Irina, 1959 Pasternak was already in trouble in the Soviet Union.  As Finn and Couvee describe in the prologue, the 66-year-old author was living in a state-supported writers' village, Peredilkino, when he was approached by a representative for a new Italian publishing company, which was desperate for writers of note.  Pasternak hadn't published anything in years, but was still regarded as an important poet in the USSR.   It seems Sergio D'Angelo would have been content with some of Pa...

One of my recent discoveries is Danzig Baldaev , a graphic artist from the Soviet Union who became famous for his illustrations of tattoos he copied while serving as a prison guard in Leningrad.  Fuel publishers has generously reprinted these illustrations in three volumes.  The tattoos served as an inspiration for David Cronenberg, who liberally borrowed from the tomes in illustrating Viggo Mortensen and other characters in Eastern Promises. But, what caught my eye was a collection of Baldaev's political cartoons, simply entitled Soviets , which cover a broad range from the mid 1950s to 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.  Baldaev is not only a fine illustrator, but has a wonderful dark humor that is obviously a product of his years as a prison guard.  Needless to say, these cartoons weren't published in their time.  Baldaev also offers a collection of cartoons in the same vein entitled Drawings from the Gulag . Robert Crumb has nothing over Danzig, ...

This Ukraine Brawl Is Better Than Michelangelo (2paragraphs)   Capturing the perfectly-timed photo is not easy: when it happens it’s by accident. Usually the result is funny or weird . Occasionally it approaches Art: that’s the case with this photo of a brawl in the Ukrainian parliament that artist James Harvey thinks has all the compositional beauty of a Renaissance painting. Harvey found the image at Imgur, complete with Fibonacci Sequence overlaid to show its Golden Ratio . According to Ben Beaumont-Thomas of The Guardian , “the Fibonacci spiral has been placed on top of it to show just why its elements cohere so satisfyingly… the violence spirals exponentially outward from the focal point of the fight up to the reddened face of the man at the top of the image.” Luckily for art and mathematics enthusiasts, there should be other accidental Renaissance art waiting to be discovered courtesy of the Ukrainian and other parliaments .

This story broke in Lithuania shortly after the petition was made available, and now it is gaining much wider circulation.  Seems the government is calling on Russia's cultural elite to back its annexation of Crimea, an action not seen since Soviet times.  Many leading cultural figures signed the petition, some out of patriotism, like Valery Gergiev who considers the Ukraine "an essential part of our cultural space."   Others out of fear of reprisals. Boris Akunin (pictured above) stands out as one of those who refused to sign the petition, “It’s just that under Stalin, if a prominent cultural figure dared to protest he’d be shot; under Brezhnev he’d be imprisoned; now he just risks losing state donations and having to travel economy class — but this often proves enough.  It’s a fascinating sight to watch people make this moral choice.” When hearing of the petition, Lithuania's leading theater director, Eimuntas Nekrošius, and favorite of Russian theaters,...

I was pleased to find what appears to be a reprint of Catherine Cooke's AD profile of Yakov Chernikhov, one of the leading avant-garde architects of the early Soviet era.  Like many of these architects, his ideas remain largely on paper as the rise of Soviet realism in the 1930s had little room for these "futurists," with their ideas being absorbed by European schools like the Bauhaus in Weimer Germany.  The Architectural Design Profile is pretty hard to find these days and fetches a collector's price, but the Dom book is readily available. I don't talk much about architecture in this blog, but it was a major component of the early Soviet period, with architects like El Lissitzky working with Mayakovsky on For the Voice, a pamphlet that evocatively captured the era.  Here is a wonderful short animation feature  based on the book.  Lissitzky would eventually have a profound influence on European modern movements, particularly in his use of the " proun ...

As Russians try to rewrite what they see as a historical wrong, I find myself digging into the history of Crimea.  Orlando Figes has written two books on Crimea, including this history  in 2010. It was in 1954 that Khrushchev decided to attach Crimea to the Soviet state of Ukraine, primarily so it would benefit from a new hydro-electric dam.  I suppose at the time Khrushchev never imagined Ukraine becoming an independent state.  Neither did many Russians, especially those who lived in Crimea. As far as history goes, it depends on how far back you want to go.  For centuries this was a Greek enclave, before being annexed by Catherine the Great in the late 18th century.  It became bitterly fought over by the Russian and Ottoman empires in the 19th century, culminating in the Crimean War in the 1850s. I suppose from the point of view of history, Khrushchev's "gift" couldn't have been more ill-timed, coming 100 years after the start of the Crimean War...

I still find myself waiting for a translation of Viktor Pelevin's latest book, SNUFF .  In the meantime I've gone back and read some of his earlier titles and recently ordered Buddha's Little Finger .  The English translation dates from 2000 and was reviewed in The New York Times.  It first appeared as   Чапаев и Пустота (Chapayev and Void) in 1996, and under the title Clay Machine Gun in the UK. Pelevin revisits that chaotic time when Gorbacev was desperately trying to hold the crumbling Soviet Union together through the eyes of a poet, Pyotr Voyd, who has run afoul of authorities over a couple poems he had published in an underground newspaper.  Once again we get a character caught between two worlds, trying to make sense of the mechanisations behind the world we see, not much unlike in Generation   π . What makes all his books interesting is the way he plays with time and space, much like Kurt Vonnegut, who I imagine is one of his literary her...

Watching the Sochi Olympic Games and viewing the unrest in Ukraine these past two weeks has inspired me to kickstart this forum once again.  I greatly appreciate that persons are still looking in and that there is actually a couple new followers.  It's a one-man show and I encourage those looking in to drop comments. A few months back I found an early English edition of Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches .  It is a real treat as it is a cloth-covered pocket book that dates back to 1887.  Apparently, there wasn't much call for a rare book such as this and I didn't pay too much money for it.  Tolstoy was a young man, who served in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War.  Here is a 1916 copy , courtesy of the National Library of Australia. Once again Ukraine finds itself on the battlefront, although this one seems to be more over identity, which nearly erupted into a civil war this month.  Fortunately, cooler heads have prevailed, but now there is ...

After watching a documentary on the Trans-Siberian railway , I looked for an early account of this famous journey by Eugen Zabel.   He was apparently the first foreigner to take the route from Moscow to Vladivostok, publishing his account in Germany in 1903. Construction was yet to be completed and Zabel had to take a ferry at Lake Baikal to meet up with the under end.  He seemed to revel in this long journey, which stretched over 9000 km, noting the beauty of the iron bridges.  This is twice as long as the Trans-continental railroad in the United States, which the Romanovs used as a model. Russia was being industrialized at a rapid rate and the only way to bring together this far-flung empire was with a railroad line linking East and West.  It wouldn't be until 1916 that the railway line was completed, 25 years after its inception date. Russia was in a massive state of upheaval, which would stretch beyond WWI into the civil war that divided Red and White...

As Edmund Wilson found out, it is best not to try to predict Nabokov's literary tastes when he lent him a review copy of Faulkner's Light of August thinking Vladimir would appreciate it as much as he did.   Nabokov dismissed this work like he did all of Faulkner's work as trite and tedious romances. Nabokov was infamous for dismissing canonical authors such as Dostoevsky and Henry James and Albert Camus.  He had no soft spot for the much revered Cervantes either, calling Don Quixote "a cruel and crude book," although he doesn't deny the influence it had on Russian writers of the 19th century.  He just felt that his dear Pushkin and Lermontov greatly rose above it in their poems and stories. I was a bit surprised to see he so disliked Henry James.  Portrait of a Lady struck me as the type of novel that might appeal to him, as James rises above the social milieu of the time to create a very striking portrait of Isabel Archer, and James has a wonderful...

I suppose if you had been locked away in a castle only to come out at Christmas time each year, you would be on the verge of madness, but Eleanor holds herself like a true queen in this Russian adaptation of The Lion in Winter. The play closed the Summer International Drama Festival in Druskininkai, hosted by Rimas Tuminas.  We had earlier seen an excellent Russian adaptation of Medea with Julia Rutberg.  The old theater at the Egles sanitorium has seen its better days, and the stifling heat must have been a challenge for the actors, as they were all dressed for winter in their heavy robes. It was only afterward that I made the connection, as I struggled through the darkly comic dialog, relying on my wife to give me a recap at intermission and when the play was over.  I was truly held spellbound by the great performance of Liudmila Chiursina as Eleanor and the wonderfully charismatic Sergei Kolesnikov as Henry, her despotic husband. The play has been recast ma...

One of the difficulties in following contemporary Russian writers is that there is a notable lag in translation of novels.  Viktor Pelevin's 2011 book, S.N.U.F.F. remains inaccessible to most non-Russian speakers, and he has since come out with Batman Apollo which continues his fascination with vampires.  One has to be content with fragments for the time being. Pelevin is perhaps the best known contemporary Russian writer, whose books are now finding their way into film, such as Generation " П " in 2011.  Given its success, you figure more film versions are in the planning.   Although Pelevin's books have been ostensibly about the void left from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attempt to fill it with Ameircan-style consumerism, there is a deeper reading in each one, as this is clearly someone who understands the psychological underpinnings of the chaotic world many Russians find themselves living in.  Given his flair for a good action yarn, ...

Interesting to see that Elem Klimov's Come and See topped the list of Time Out's 50 greatest WWII movies.  It is one of my favorites as well as Klimov gives the viewer a very visceral account of the battle lines in Belarus during the war.  This side of the Soviet-German war was rarely mentioned at the height of the Soviet Union, and I don't think Klimov would have gotten the movie made if not for Perestroika. Surprisingly, the only other Soviet film to make the Top 50 was Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying .  Notable omissions include Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent .  Shepitko was married to Klimov. However, I would say that the seeming simplicity of Ivan's Childhood is deceiving.  As I noted before, I'm not convinced the war scenes were real, but that Tarkovsky was using the standard war film conventions to tell a much more compelling story that prefigured such works as The Stalker , which ostensibly was ...