Chekhov's Gun

I must say I knew nothing about Clarice until I read this article.  Now I am very interested, That unexpected encounter brought me friends I never would have met and took me to places I never would have seen. Yes, the same would have been true with Russian or Arabic or Greek: every new culture brings its food, its music, its beaches. But what Portuguese gave me that nothing else could have was Brazil’s great mystic writer, Clarice Lispector, a person so dazzling that she was reputed to be that rare woman who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf. She came to Brazil by way of Ukraine, and adopted Portuguese as her literary language. Read more For those curious, here is The Passion According to G.H.

This is certainly an odd little book.  The story seems to come more from the pages of Balzac than Dostoevsky as the cynical old Jewish banker tries desperately to reconcile his life but finds himself unable to do so without scoring one last deal in Soviet Russia.  Throughout the short account he is plagued by his wife and daughter who seem to have no other interest in him except his money.  At least that is the way he sees it, and Nemirovsky gives us little reason to think otherwise.  A few pages reveal a lighter tone when the author follows young Joy and her boyfriend in the Pyrennes as they escape into a romantic idyll.  But, alas, it is all too brief as they soon find themselves short of cash and have to return.  By this point, Gloria, her nasty mother, has assumed control of much of the Golder estate, while her embattled husband, having suffered a heart attack, retreats inside himself, unwilling to extend anymore credit to anyone, and letting the once ...

One of the things I find most interesting about Russian culture is the way literature, music and theatre have become intertwined.  Operas have been made of Eugene Onegin , War and Peace , and The Idiot .  Imagine an opera of Moby Dick or Whitman's Song to Myself !  The crowning operatic achievement remains Boris Godunov , based on a drama by Pushkin. The drama had been censored until 1866.  Mussorgsky first staged his complete operatic production in 1874.  It is a towering achievement, and finally garnered the attention he deserved.  Unfortunately, he wasn't able to come close to this peak again.  It has been remade countless times, versions by Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich among them.  In 1986, Bondarchuk made a movie based on the story. 

Also worth noting for those who get Mezzo , this television channel is celebrating Russian music this month with many wonderful productions, including Prokofiev's L'Amour des trois oranges , which is visually stunning and a joy to watch and listen to.

Another nice find on YouTube was Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog , broken up into 8 segments.  Known as Dama s sobachkoj in Russian, it was made in 1960 by Iosif Kheifits .  The story became central to Hanna's character in The Reader .  Here's a review of the movie.

I finally managed to get a hold of a copy of Bortko's Idiot with Yevgeni Mironov in the title role.  It was a 10-part television series done in 2003, and is available with English subtitles for those who have poor comprehension of Russian like myself. I had hoped to see Nekrosius's play earlier this month, but it was canceled due to illnesses among the actors.  It is scheduled to come around again in February. In the meantime I had bought an Everyman's Library edition of the novel, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, who appear to have become the foremost authorities on Russian literary translations in recent years.  I have to say I enjoy their translations.  While Volokhonsky does the grunt work of making a word-for-word translation of the original text, Pevear seeks to give it a narrative flow in keeping with the author's original intent, without losing the meaning. Anyway, here is a YouTube link , with English subtitles.  Seems you can follow the ...

Jonathan Weiss wrote a very intimate biography of Némirovsky a few years back.  There are also various websites dedicated to her, including this one .  She seems to enjoy more fame now than she ever did when she was alive.  For many Jews she was very controversial in her day, as she not only converted to Catholicism, but many regarded her early books and articles as antisemitic, in particular David Golder , which was made into a film in 1930.  Weiss appears to feel that her conversion to Catholicism was genuine, and not simply a means of dodging the antisemitic laws of the time.  Either way, she was not able to escape the Holocaust. She was born in Kiev, and raised in St. Petersburg, but French became her first language, especially after her family moved to Paris to escape the Bolshevik Revolution.  She enjoyed a certain amount of success in her day, but it was the printing of the unfinished Suite Francaise in 2004 that appears to have immortalized he...