Chekhov's Gun

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 ...

It's been awhile.  I haven't forgotten about this blog, just focused on other topics the past month.  I had started reading Rowan Williams' book on Dostoevsky and the matter of faith in his novels.  It is quite good, as Williams offers his interpretations of how Fyodor addressed the subject, drawing from Dostoevsky's own notes on the books, which are available in print.  Williams also heavily references Bakhtin, who wrote a study on Dostoevsky's poetics, which is also available in print . From the accounts I've read, Dostoevsky was very faithful to his Orthodox religion.  Perhaps the most explicit of his novels is The Devils  where one of his characters categorically states that there is no Pan-Slavism without religion.  This is what unites the Russian people.  Dostoevsky was always quite harsh on the budding socialist movement in the country and the nihilism so often expressed in the youth.  He even poked fun at other author's literar...

Sergey Zhilin opts for jazz groups rather than symphony orchestras when it comes to Tchaikovsky, giving the great composer's work more bounce and playfulness, such as this fun interpretation .  Zhilin also likes to go solo like this intimate and warm rendering entitled March .  Of course, Tchaikovsky has long been a favorite of jazz musicians from Shorty Rogers'  The Swinging Nutcracker  to Kenny Barron's Classical Jazz Quartet Play Tchaikovsky .  But, few do it beer than Zhilin, who will be in Vilnius this weekend, drawing from his latest album, Tchaikovsky in Jazz: The Seasons .

Yuri Knorozov was more than just a noted ethnographer with a passion for the Mayan language .  He was also a cat lover.  While a soldier in the Soviet Army in WWII, he had stumbled upon a rare collection of Mayan codices in the Berlin library, which he brought back with him to Moscow.  This apparently life-changing event inspired to devote his energies to "Mayanology" in virtual isolation from all the other work being done by Eric Thompson and others.  Michael Coe in his book, Breaking the Mayan Code , said this gave Knorozov fresh eyes, as up to this point the elaborate Mayan hieroglyphs had been primarily seen as a graphic language, not a written one.  It seemed the Knorozov had largely been forgotten at the time of the writing of this book in 1992. Knorozov, who had previously focused on Egyptology, wrote a paper, Ancient Writing of Central America , in 1952 in which he made the case for the hieroglyphs being phonetic, not logographic as widely believed...

Ivan Kramskoy apparently never said who the woman in this painting was.  The portrait created quite a stir in its day, as critics were appalled by her coquettish look.  Later, many came to take this painting as Kramskoy's impression of Anna Karenina .  After all, he had been commissioned by Pavel Tretyakov in 1873 to paint a portrait of Tolstoy for his gallery.  Pavel had no luck himself getting the count to pose for a portrait, but Kramskoy managed to win Tolstoy over.  It just so happened that Tolstoy was working on Anna Karenina at the time.  However, Kramskoy painted the "unknown woman" several years later.  Maybe he was inspired by Anna, maybe not. Others have erroneously attributed the unknown woman to a poem by Alexandr Blok.  If anyone was inspired here it was Blok, as the painting predates the poem by several years.

As the story goes, Marianne Faithfull gave Mick a copy of The Master and Margarita , inspiring him to pen the lyrics to the classic song, which first appeared on the album, Beggars Banquet .  Pretty amazing when you consider the book only first appeared in print in 1967.  It was translated into English by Michael Glenny the same year (still the best translation). The album came out the following year.  Godard recorded a film of the Stones trying out the song in the studio, which was released in 1970. The novel has a long history.  Bulgakov wrote it between 1928 and 1940 when he was assistant director at the Moscow Art Theater (MAT).  The story derives its most compelling scenes from the stage, which is probably why it has been so hard to make into film.  There have been several attempts over the years, each more infuriating than the one before. Bortko's TV mini-series was the last attempt, which met with luke-warm response.  He literally rec...

We have been watching a 2005 mini-series on Sergei Yesenin .  It seemed to me a rather sloppy production with Sergei Bezrukov emoting all over the place.  He was most maddening in his brief interlude with Isadora Duncan, poorly played by Sean Young.  You feel sorry for the young "translator" caught between them in these tumultuous scenes that took him from Moscow to the beaches of Italy and eventually to New York, where he very quickly grew weary of this relationship and returned to Mother Russia. As the poem title implies, Yesenin was a reluctant Bolshevik at best, and eventually turned his back on Trotsky, played very well by Konstantin Khabenski, replete with his famous pince-nez.  This pretty much sealed Yesenin's fate in the brave new Soviet Union, which emerged from a bitter four-year civil war. Yesenin served briefly in WWI, but was able to avoid the worst of the civil war, focusing on his poetry.  He did a number of collaborations which brought ...