Who is Mikhail Ivanovich?

Mishka (RIAN.ru)

BBC's investigative Panorama programme on Monday (25 Jan 2016) looked into allegations of corruption against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Brave or meek, sensationally revealing or we-knew-it-all-along, it left quite a few questons unanswered.

One of them, with which non-Russian friends bombarded me, was about the nickname that is allegedly referring to Putin in coded conversations — 'Mikhail Ivanovich.'

One friend asked, all right, Mikhail Ivanovich, I get it, but what is his surname?
Without thinking, I replied: Toptygin (Топтыгин).

Mikhail Ivanovich Toptygin is one of the many affectionate, or not very affectionate folklore names for the Bear. The bear in Russian imagery is always the biggest of them all; he can be stupid, funny, clumsy, threatening; he can be a secondary character, or the main character, the Big Boss. Russian dictionaries have numerous entries on the bear and his nicknames. And the name, Mikhail-Michael, is quite common. Gorbachev is Mikhail Sergeevich. Kutuzov, the Russian army commander in history and in Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' was Mikhail Illarionovich.

In 'War and Peace', Pierre, Anatole and Dolokhov get drunk, borrow a bear from the gypsies for fun, and, when a gendarme arrives, they tie them back-to-back and push the two in the river. The Bear appears in Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin' chasing Tatiana in her dream (see in English here, Chapter 5, XII, Russian text here). Saltykov-Schedrin, the great 19 Century satirist, has a tale of three bears serving as governors of different regions with the rank of Major. One of them, the cleverest, even gets promoted to Colonel. Each of the three have the same name Toptygin: Toptygin I, Toptygin II and Toptygin III. And at least one of them is Mikhail Ivanovich (Ivanovich being the patronymic, or middle name, with the stress on A). Chekhov wrote a one-act comedy sketch 'The Bear' (summary in English and text in Russian) in 1888, in which a burly land-owner challenges a young widow to a duel, after which they fall in love. The play was made into a film by Isidor Annensky in 1938.

The image of Russia as a bear, both in the West and in the East, is so strong that it merited a separate Wikipedia article. President Putin himself described the Bear as the master of the forest in October 2014.

But Mikhail Ivanovich the Bear, is he as strong in the Russian mind as Mikhail Ivanovich the Boss? Yes and no.

On top of Mikhail Ivanovich there is also the cute Mishka, the 1980 Moscow Olympics mascot, and there is also a Mikhail Ivanovich the 'Chef' in the popular 1969 comedy 'The Diamond Arm' by Leonid Gaidai (summary in English on Wikipedia). Thanks to Valery Adzhiev for the reminder! 

In fact, the film is so popular that the actual name of a character in the film, Mikhail Ivanovich the police officer, a Captain later promoted to Major, shifted to the wicked smugglers' ring-leader, the Chef. It must be thanks to the scene, when one of the gangsters disguised as a cab driver, learns that the police are on their trail and rushes off to call the Chef.
'You mean, Mikhail Ivanovich?' asks the main character.
'Yes, yes, him!'

This is how 'Mikhail Ivanovich' travelled from the Bear to the Boss.

'I must call Mikhail Ivanovich' scene from 'The Diamond Arm' -



Vladimir Putin on the Master of the Taiga forest (from RT YouTube channel)  -

Piaf, Milord and the Spy.

(Russian cultural references)

'Seventeen Moments' (screenshot)

In this sovietesque country called France, only two pleasures reconcile me with her: French women's pretty smiles and Piaf. Take away either — and there'd be nothing left in la Belle.

From as early as I can remember myself, Milord has been cheering me on — what, you're crying? come on, laugh, come on, sing! Allez, riez, milord, allez, chantez, milord! My parents got a 45 rpm single with it soon after it came out.

Non, je ne regrette rien or La vie en rose, really, aren't they, not La Marseillaise, with its hate-filled lyrics about those with 'sang impur' — impure blood, the true French anthems?

On Russian cultural references, Milord, together with Je ne regrette rien, pops up quite unpatriotically and anachronistically in the superpopular Soviet spy thriller series 'Seventeen Moments in Spring' ("Семндацать мгновений весны"). Milord was released in 1959 and Je regrette rien was written in 1956 and recorded by Piaf in 1959. The events in the 'Seventeen Moments' are unfolding during the closing months of the second world war in 1945.

In one of the scenes, the Soviet superspy, an SD Standartenführer Stierlitz aka Colonel Isayev is driving his agent Pastor Schlag to the Swiss border. In the car, they listen to Piaf on the radio.
The Pastor says, 'No, I don't like it, it's how they talk in the markets. I prefer Handel or Bach.' Stierlitz replies, 'This singer will live beyond her death, people will keep listening her.'
'You are too gracious to her,' says the Pastor.
'No, I simply love Paris. And have been in love with it for a long time,' says the Soviet spy.
After his words Je ne regrette rien kicks in with footage of the French national tricolour, de Gaulle and the Resistance fighters. The narrator explains, Stierlitz was there, watching them leave to fight on after the fall of France.'

The full 12-part series are available in full on YouTube (first episode here). For any student of Russia/Soviet Union, it's an absolute must. Most Russians know the film practically by heart and use quotes from it and references to it all the time. There are numerous anecdotes (jokes) based on the characters and situations in the film. On the surface, Tatiana Lioznova's series is gloriously patriotic, but in fact full of hidden, sometimes subversive, motives.

Here is the Alpine drive scene with Edith Piaf on the radio:

 

The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors.

Vitaly Churkin.
Photo: www.kremlin.ru

Western media is giving much coverage today to the Russian ambassador Churkin's UN press-conference where he used a curious phrase, 'the kingdom of crooked mirrors.' This quote is from the BBC report (follow the link to read in full and watch the video):

But speaking to the UN Security Council, Russia's UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin accused Western powers of distorting reality.

"Sometimes it reminded me of the kingdom of crooked mirrors because some members of the Council were not concerned about the fact hundreds of civilians are dying."

In case you are wondering what is this kingdom he was talking about, it is a reference to the Soviet fantasy film The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors (1963, wiki here, watch the video below) based on the novel of the same title by Vitaly Gubarev (wiki about him). The translation is a bit awkward but that’s how the film was titled in English. ‘Crooked mirror’ is a literal translation of the Russian term “кривое зеркало” — distorting mirror as the ones used in ‘hall of mirrors’ attractions at fairs and carnivals. The Russian name for such attraction is “комната смеха” — ‘room of laughter.’ 'Crooked mirror' is also used figuratively to mean distorted reality or distortion.

In the film, a young girl Olya falls through the mirror and, together with her mirror image twin Yalo, accidentally finds herself in a magic kingdom where all mirrors are distorted to show the opposite of what is real. The girls who played Olya and Yalo are real-life twins. Characters in the film have talking names spelled backwards. 

The chase starts when the girls decide to save a boy called Gurd, drug (friend) spelled backwards, a glassmaker who refuses to make the lying mirrors for the rulers of the kingdom. He is beaten and chained to the top of the Tower of Death to die slowly. In the end the girls overthrow the tyranny, the mirrors are smashed and evil characters turn back into creatures that their names represent, for example, Anidág-Gádina (viper) into a snake, Abáje-Jábba into a toad, and king Yagoupop-Popugay into a parrot.

It’s a bright, cheerful film with lots of music, catchy phrases and exciting play on words. I loved it as a young boy and then introduced my own children to the film, who enjoyed it as much as I had.

There are recognisable motives from Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass, but Gubarev must have also found inspiration in Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen. In Andersen’s tale, a troll makes distorting mirror that turns all good into evil. The mirror is smashed and shards are scattered all over the world. One gets into the little boy Kai’s heart. An animated Russian version of The Snow Queen was released in 1957 and has been a top children’s favourite ever since. (Wiki about the film here, it was restored and dubbed into English in 1990s.) 

The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors:

The Tale of Putin and the Pike.

(Russian cultural references).

Fisherman and the Golden Fish.
Illustration by Ivan Bilibin.

President Putin's most recent outdoor exploit in Southern Siberia when he caught a 20 kilogamm pike caused disbelief and widely circulated jokes.

Putin, accompanied by the Prime-Minister Medvedev and the Minister of Defence Shoigu, was fishing on a lake in Tuva, a Russian Federation republic on the border with Mongolia. In one of the photos with his pike, Putin seems to be talking to the fish or kissing her.

Some claimed that the pike in photos shouldn't have been more than 12 kg. The Kremlin insisted that the weighing was genuine. The long-standing British record for a pike is 21 kg 234 g.

Others simply rolled their eyes — no, not another one! Putin previously flew on a micro-light with a flock of  storks, chased whales on a speedboat, shot a Siberian tiger with a tranquiliser, and, most hilariously, 'discovered' a cache of Greek amphoras while diving in the Black Sea.

The pike episode is special in that it evokes numerous cultural references in Russia. All of them derisive.

One is the popular folk tale of The Simpleton Yemelya and the Pike (a version in English here and in Russian here). Yemelya, the lazy third son of a peasant, refuses to do any work at home or in the fields except when bribed by 'presents'. One Winter, he goes to fetch some water in an ice-hole on the river and catches a pike in his bucket there. The pike, being a magical creature, asks him to let her (or him in some versions) go, and promises that any of Yemelya's wish will be fulfilled if he adds to it a short incantation: "по щучьему велению, по моему хотению" — 'on the pike's behest and on my request.' Yemelya goes on to marry the tsar's daughter and later on becomes the tsar himself.

The 'moral' of the tale seems strange or absent at first, but only if you forget that many folk tales have a reverse message, that is they tell you what not to do or not to expect to happen. In Russian language, the phrase 'on pike's behest' is often used to mock wishful thinking or empty boastfulness.

The second reference is to Pushkin's tale in verse "Сказка о рыбаке и рыбке" (The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish, Robert Chandler's version in English here and in Russian here, wiki about the tale). The tale uses the plot of the Brothers Grimm Vom Fischer und seiner Frau (in Russian here) but while many of the Grimms' tales are well-known in Russia this one is better known  in Pushkin's rendition.

The old fisherman lives in a mud hut by the sea with his wife whose only possession is a разбитое корыто (broken trough). One day her goes to the sea and catches a goldfish who talks to him in human language and, again, as in the tale about Yemelya, asks him to let her go. The old man, charmed by the beauty and gentleness of the sea creature, lets her go. But the fish-wife scolds him and makes him go back to the sea to ask the goldfish for a log cabin. The fish, who turns out to be the Queen of the Sea, turns the mud hut into a log cabin. The fish-wife wants more and more with all her demands granted. Until one day when she is deciding that she wants to rule the Sea herself. After which the Goldfish has had enough and everything returns to where it was, the mud hut and the broken trough.

Остаться у разбитого корыта — to be left by the broken trough became an idiom which means to be no better off than before, to be left with nothing, or to be back where one started.

And the third reference is "Бриллиантовая рука" (The Diamond Arm, wiki here), Leonid Gaidai's 1969 comedy. If it isn't a number one then it certainly is in the top ten of the most loved Russian/Soviet films. Every Russian-speaking person knows it practically by heart and almost every line went into the language as an idiom.

The plot turns around a gang of smugglers whose latest shipment of gold and diamonds from abroad has, by accident, landed in the cast on the supposedly broken arm of an unintended man, Semyon Semyonovich (played by the famous comedian Yuri Nikulin). Nikulin reports the incident to the police, and they decide to use him as live bait to catch the criminals.  The crooks, one of whom befriends Nikulin, didn't realise that Nikulin saw the treasure being hidden inside the cast, and go on trying, unsuccessfully,  to lure him into a series of traps to get the cast off him. Now, in one such attempt, Nikulin and his 'friend' go on a fishing trip to a remote place. Nikulin, an experienced angler, doesn't believe there's fish there, but is promised that "клёв будет такой, что ты забудешь всё на свете" (the fish will be biting so much that уou'll forget everything). Because another, scuba diving crook, is sitting at the bottom of the sea with a netful of live fish and hooking them on as soon as Nikulin throws in the line.

The staged fishing success that makes the fisherman 'forget everything in the world' is being remembered now and repeated in connection with Putin's pike, genuine or not.

There's the triple counter-punch for you, fire the PR.

The Diamond Arm with English subtitles. The fishing episode comes at 44th minute into the film.



In this 1957 Soviet cartoon version of Yemelya and the Pike there is an added motive of Yemelya beating the foreign princes, defeating an invading army and the tsar deciding to emigrate abroad. (bad syncing)


  

Sponge Blues. (Mochalkin Blues)

Jamie Olsen posted in The Flaxen Wave about Chukovsky’s children’s classic “Moydodyr” (had Chukovsky ever had anything non-classic?) with a parallel analysis of Timur Kibirov’s parody. It’s illuminating and fun, and I highly recommend the analysis.

Here, a small and — hopefully — amusing point on the meaning of the word мочалка (mochalka - a scrubber, a loofah or luffa, or a sponge). In Russian it has long had a slang meaning, i.e. a girl who wants fun and is not much interested in anything else.

Don’t ask me to explain the etymology. I’ll just say that a traditional Russian ‘mochalka’ is a mop of stringy thin strips of the underlay of lime-tree bark used to scrub yourself clean in a steam-house, a banya.

In Sergei Soloviev’s 1980s cult film “ASSA” there is a song “Mochalkin Blues”, which plays on exactly that meaning of the word. 

The illustration above is a 'footnote' from "ASSA" explaining the meaning of 'mochalka'. Here’s a video from the film with Sergei 'Afrika' Bugayev singing:

Later on, the young ‘mochalka’ falls for the young singer nicknamed Afrika.