Chekhov's Gun

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 ...