Blade Runner 2049.

Milla Fedorova reviews Blade Runner 2049 for Tetradki. 

Milla Fedorova
Photo: Olga Meerson.

The new Blade Runner became a pleasant surprise for me. I am a fan of the original one and had some fears regarding the sequel made by a different director (Denis Villeneuve), but was not disappointed. Blade Runner 2049 does not posit itself as the original's clone; some ideas are pronounced much more directly where the original only hints, and the pace is different — it would have been unthinkable to have such an indulgently slow movie nowadays playing in the theatres — but their cells are interlinked, to use Nabokov’s quote from the new film.

However, it is still stylish, bleak, retro-fitted, and the famous rain sometimes turns into snow. It studies what it means to be human at different new levels, and deals with various forms of doubles and simulacra. The question you might have had after the first one — whether the replicants are made as adults and whether they are capable of having children is in the center of this one.

If the first Blade Runner movie (film, 1982, wiki) was centered around a Christ-like figure, and it was oriented towards accepting death as criterion of humanity (trampling death by death: Roy Batty transcends his replicant nature when he saves Deckard and accepts his own death), while in the center of the second one there is a Mary-like figure, and it is oriented towards birth (trampling impossibility of life by a miraculous birth).

The new definition of humanity — the replicants’ innermost desire — is "I was born, therefore I am a human." For replicants, the miracle is to be conceived and born in a natural way, it is the opposite of immaculate conception. However, this definition does not exhaust the question of who is human in the film: even the simulacra are able to demonstrate human qualities.

The mystery of who Deckard is, a human or a replicant, is still unsolved. Alas, the authors of both films did not consider Aristotle’s characteristic of humanity: none of the characters laughs.

The world is even more post-apocalyptic, demonstrating the effects of an ecological catastrophe, so there are even less people than before: it seems that the world is mostly populated by the replicants. The Russian presence in LA has become rather prominent: we hear police conversations on the radio in Russian, and the protein farm is ironically named “Целина”.*

The erotic scene where a hologram tries to fit the body of a real woman is a masterpiece, however, frightening: it is literally a dream of sleeping with one person, while imagining another.

The idea "to love someone sometimes means to be strangers" applied to the children-parents relations seems very problematic to me.

But in general — it is quite a gripping and beautiful film with several layers, including the references to Nabokov's Pale Fire.

Milla Fedorova is a Russian academic working at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Her Georgetown page is here.

• Целина, or Virgin Lands, refers to the vast area of undeveloped steppes between the Southern tip of the Urals and the Caspian sea that was targeted for rapid boosting of grain crops by Nikita Khruschev in the late 1950s. Nobel prize-winning Mikhail Sholokhov wrote an epic novel "Поднятая целина" ('Virgin Soil Upturned', wiki about the 1958 film) depicting the collectivisation of Russian individual farms at the end of 1920s - beginning of 1930s.  

Official trailer for the Blade Runner 2049 —

Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' New BBC Adaptation (2016)

Tolstoy.

BBC 1 (TV) started a new TV adaptation of Tolstoy's epic 'War and Peace' (by the way, not rpt not the longest novel ever) with Lily James (Downton's Lady Rose) as Natasha, Paul Dano as Pierre and James Norton as Andrei. (article about the cast in Radio Times)

Actors playing leading characters admitted to not having read the book before, and Andrew Davies (script) and Tom Harper (director) skipped a few crucial bits in the opening episode.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, it’s a 6-part series. Prince Andrei, a central character, was only sketched through his dislike of women, while his dislike of the high society and his ideas on Napoleon have all but disappeared;  and with Pierre-Helene they modified the entrapment scene, leaving out the most exciting moment, Pierre's feeble declaration of love, in French, which they had in the 1972 TV series with Anthony Hopkins.

Rebecca Front (wikipedia about her) as Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskaya, a very minor character in the novel, definitely upstaged all others in the first episode in her confrontation with Prince Vassily (Stephen Rea, wikipedia). Front, a very well-known British comedian and actress, has such a strong presence that everybody else around her somehow disappears into the shadows.

Some viewers were also puzzled by the skull on Natasha's cleavage seen on a very steampunk promotional poster (here). What is it? Steampunk or not, it may be interpreted, at least jokingly,
as a surreptitious hint on Pierre, him becoming a free mason in the course of the book, with the skull, or Adam's head, being the masons’ secret symbol. Tolstoy devotes much attention to masons in the novel. Let's see how the makers of the film tackled this, or not tackled at all.

Pierre and Helene entrappment scene ("Je vous aime") from the 1972 series —

English Rules, by Andrei Ostalski.

English Rules, first published in Russian in 2006, is a great romp through the misadventures of a hapless young Russian living with his wife and in-laws in Folkstone, England, where he is desperately trying to fathom the tacit dos and don'ts of English etiquette when his life is turned upside down by a series of catastrophic events.


The opening scene sets the note of the absurd which runs through the book, a genre which has powerful antecedents in soviet literature as does the portrayal of the "little man" manipulated by Kafka-esque conspiracies.

Ostalski's observations on his adopted country – a Russian journalist, the author moved to Britain in the early 90s – are spot on but made with great warmth. On a more serious level, this is also a novel about the emigre/immigrant experience of trying to decipher and fit into a society whose rules appear both impenetrable and unpredictable and as such it also raises questions about identity itself.

But this is above all a skilfully written and very funny novel.

- by Miranda Ingram, former Daily Mail Moscow Correspondent. 

Darling Doves.

Prince Felix Yusupov.

Midnight in St  Petersburg by Vanora Bennett

I never stop being fascinated by the inexhaustible appetite of Western writers — and readers — for Russia's Northern capital. When asking my friends why there is so much interest in Leningrad/St.Petersburg and not, say, Moscow, I get all sorts of answers. One friend, a writer and a big fan of Russian literature, said, ‘Obviously, it’s first of all a window on Russia that is more or less comprehensible. There is fatalism but there is also a sense of infinity. Like nowhere else.’

Vanora Bennett’s new novel Midnight in St Petersburg (link to Amazon) is a story of a young Jewish Russian girl Inna Feldman whose relatives flee to Palestine and abandon her in the South of Russia, within the Pale of Settlement. It is 1911, the Russian tsardom feels it has re-established its authority over the Empire after the turmoil and hope of the first revolution of 1905-1907. And it smells of pogrom everywhere. 

Inna steals a passport to go to Petersburg and find distant relatives to start a new life. On the train a roaming monk with piercing blue eyes stops anti-Semitic banter by berating the passengers for being un-Christian hate mongers. The monk asks a gypsy woman in the carriage to read his and Inna’s hands. They both have lifelines that peter out too quickly. 

The monk, who turns out to be Rasputin, befriends Inna and, in Petersburg, escorts her to her relatives. He wanders off to rise to become the tsar’s family ‘holy man’, and die in a brutal assasination. Inna finds a new life with the help of the family of violin makers and an Englishman, Horace Wallick, who works for Fabergé painting miniatures for rich customers. But not before cutting the lifeline on her hands in a desperate attempt to change her fate.

From here Bennett takes us on a whirlwind tour of Russia in 1911, jumping then to 1916-1917 with the murder of Rasputin, the fall of the Romanovs and the revolution, and then jumping again to 1918-1919 with aristocracy and intelligentsia fleeing the bolshevik regime at the height of the civil war.

It’s not just Rasputin we meet but his assassin Felix Yusupov; Karl Fabergé; the great poet Anna Akhmatova, and, in fleeting episodes, Bryusov, Mayakovsky, Shaliapin; the top aristocrats and the top revolutionaries, including a glimpse of Lenin and the founder of Cheka Dzerzhinsky. The gallery includes Maxim, the thinly disguised writer Gorky, who helps the desperate intellectuals to survive or escape. I started rolling my eyes when I realised the span of ‘things Russian’ in the book, but as I read along I warmed up to Bennett’s knack for making it all credible. It’s not a matryoshka nesting doll with laquered curiosities jumping one out of another. Historic and cultural details are very well-researched and as reliable as an academic work. Then the bits all fall into place to form a convincing mosaic of Russian life at the time.

The main story line of Inna’s tug of love between the pensive selfless Horace Wallick and the passionate Yasha Kagan, I thought, is captivating in that it is free from moralising, it is just, well, as love is: you never know where it will take you without you even knowing. 

There is a wonderful ‘sex scene’ between Inna and Yasha, when they play their violins each in their own rooms separated by a thin partition. (see excerpt below) Even if you don’t know much about violins, violin making or music, you’d love Bennett’s guiding the reader from a chunk of wood to a semi-finished shape, to a varnished piece, and then to the first sound of a new-born instrument. And, the wonder of wonders, the Stradivarius. 

In a hilarious scene, Prince Felix Yusupov, the richest man in pre-revolutionary Russia, asks Horace Wallick to find someone to restore his broken Stradivarius. Yusupov admits nonchalantly that, when boys, he and his brother got bored with violin lessons and used their instruments for fencing instead. Now, that the bolsheviks are strengthening their grip on Russia, he needs to take all the valuables he can and run. Here the story twists and turns in a dramatic way, with the priceless Stradivarius playing a crucial part.  

One obstacle when writing about foreign countries is how to deal with strange foreign words. Vanora Bennet lived in Russia for a long time and discovered a charming way of translating Russian names and phrases into English without explaining too much, and no footnotes. The Lemans, the violin makers’ family, for example, are busy preparing their favourite dish, ‘darling doves’ — cabbage leaf parcels with mincemeat inside, similar to dolma. But why darling doves? Because it’s the literal translation of the Russian word for the dish — ‘golubtsy’. I thought it’s brilliant. Readers may want to find out more about the doves or they may not, the writer is free not to burden them. 

The same technique works with placenames. I didn’t know there was Haymarket or Merchant’s Yard in St.Petersburg. Then I realised they were Sennaya and Gostiny Dvor! 

And don’t skip the Afterword, there is a very romantic surprise disclosure there.

Picture: Felix Yusupov in 1903, o/c by Valentin Serov. 
Yasha and Inna's love competition:

Scrambled Eggs, or Why the Russian Revolution Happened.

Fried eggs - яичница-глазунья.
Design by ©A.Anichkin.

I wrote about Maugham's Christmas Holiday here. Another of his Russian novels is Ashenden.

In a series of novellas Maugham recalls, through his alter-ego Ashenden, how while in the service of the British foreign intelligence he was tasked with preventing the bolshevik takeover in 1917.

Ashenden sets everything in motion to stop the revolution but in the end fails, as we know from history.

It turns out that scrambled eggs were, at least partly, to blame. The passage below describes the falling out between Ashenden and Anastasia, the Russian woman, on whom he later had to rely in St.Petersburg.

There is an awkward translation point here. The Russian translator Victor Veber (see the passage on my Russian blog post here) uses the word омлет  — omelette — for scrambled eggs.

It may be a mistake but could also be a deliberate choice to avoid readers' confusion. Fried eggs in Russian is яичница, or to be more precise, яичница-глазунья — fried eggs with eyes, as in my photo above. Scrambled eggs is also called яичница but with a different extension, яичница-болтушка — whipped, stirred or scrambled fried eggs. To build the growing antagonism between Ashenden and Anastasia on the differences between глазунья and болтушка could distract the reader from the humour of the original, the translator may have thought.

On the other hand he may have missed an opportunity to introduce a play on words: болтушка has another meaning — chatter-box, which is exactly what is Anastasia. See for yourself and enjoy the passage. It's tickling when you think what the world could have been in the past Century had it not been for Maugham-Ashenden's dislike for scrambled eggs.

I also recommend a short review of Ashenden on Tolstoy is My Cat blog.

(English text quoted from here)

Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she would have for breakfast.

'Scrambled eggs,' she said.

She ate heartily. Ashenden had already noticed that she had a healthy appetite. He supposed it was a Russian trait; you could not picture Anna Karenina making her midday meal off a bath-bun and a cup of coffee, could you?

After breakfast they went to the Louvre and in the afternoon they went to the Luxembourg. They dined early in order to go to the Comedie Francaise; then they went to a Russian cabaret where they danced. When next morning at eight-thirty they took their places in the dining-room and Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she fancied, her reply was:

'Scrambled eggs.'

'But we had scrambled eggs yesterday,' he expostulated.

'Let's have them again today,' she smiled.

'All right.'

They spent the day in the same manner except that they went to the Carnavalet instead of the Louvre and the Musee Guimet instead of the Luxembourg. But when the morning after in answer to Ashenden's inquiry Anastasia Alexandrovna again asked for scrambled eggs, his heart sank.

'But we had scrambled eggs yesterday and the day before,' he said.

'Don't you think that's a very good reason to have them again today?'

'No, I don't.'

'Is it possible that your sense of humour is a little deficient this morning?' she asked. 'I eat scrambled eggs every day. It's the only way I like them.'

'Oh, very well. In that case of course we'll have scrambled eggs.'

But the following morning he could not face them.

'Will you have scrambled eggs as usual?' he asked her.

'Of course,' she smiled affectionately, showing him two rows of large square teeth.

'All right, I'll order them for you; I shall have mine fried.’

The smile vanished from her lips.

'Oh?' She paused a moment. 'Don't you think that's rather inconsiderate? Do you think it's fair to give the cook unnecessary work? You English, you're all the same, you look upon servants as machines. Does it occur to you that they have hearts like yours, the same feelings and the same emotions? How can you be surprised that the proletariat are seething with discontent when the bourgeoisie like you are so monstrously selfish?'

'Do you really think that there'll be a revolution in England if I have my eggs in Paris fried rather than scrambled?'

She tossed her pretty head in indignation.

'You don't understand. It's the principle of the thing. You think it's a jest, of course I know you're being funny, I can laugh at a joke as well as anyone, Chekhov was well-known in Russia as a humorist; but don't you see what is involved? Your whole attitude is wrong. It's a lack of feeling. You wouldn't talk like that if you had been through the events of 1905 in Petersburg. When I think of the crowds in front of the Winter Palace kneeling in the snow while the Cossacks charged them, women and children! No, no, no.'

Her eyes filled with tears and her face was all twisted with pain. She took Ashenden's hand.

'I know you have a good heart. It was just thoughtless on your part and we won't say anything more about it. You have imagination. You're very sensitive. I know. You'll have your eggs done in the same way as mine, won't you?'

'Of course," said Ashenden.

He ate scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning after that. The waiter said:' Monsieur aime les oeufs brouillés.' At the end of the week they returned to London. He held Anastasia Alexandrovna in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder, from Paris to Calais and again from Dover to London. He reflected that the journey from New York to San Francisco took five days. When they arrived at Victoria and stood on the platform waiting for a cab she looked at him with her round, shining, and slightly protuberant eyes.

'We've had a wonderful time, haven't we?' she said.

‘Wonderful.’

'I've quite made up my mind. The experiment has justified itself. I'm willing to marry you whenever you like.'

But Ashenden saw himself eating scrambled eggs every morning for the rest of his life. When he had put her in a cab, he called another for himself, went to the Cunard office, and took a berth on the first ship that was going to America. No immigrant, eager for freedom and a new life, ever looked upon the statue of Liberty with more heartfelt thankfulness than did Ashenden, when on that bright and sunny morning his ship steamed into the harbour of New York.

Russian Emigrants: 'Shiftless and undependable'.

WS Maugham.

There is a persistent romanticised view of the Russian post-Revolution emigration: the noble, impoverished and dignified in their suffering intellectuals fleeing the horrors of bolshevist regime.

The reality was, of course, far from romantic. And by the end of 1930s the attitude to Russian emigrants had changed.

W Somerset Maugham's novel Christmas Holiday (1939) is an exploration of the Raskolnikov question, first articulated by Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment: can you kill a fellow human being to prove yourself that you can and in doing so to prove that you are a superior being. An experiment that was part of the revolutionary psychology.

Christmas Holiday is one of the most 'Russian' works of Maugham. Possibly, more insightful than Ashenden, the writer's account of his work as the British secret agent in Russia in 1917. The book is full of witty observations on Russians and comparisons with the English and the French.  

One of the main characters in the book is Lydia, a young Russian woman who works in an upmarket brothel under the name of 'Princess Olga'. It is through her that Maugham makes his comments.

This one is when Charley, an Englishman who comes to Paris to spend Christmas, meets Lydia:

"

Tell the Princess Olga to come here." Then to Charley: "She's Russian. Of course since the revolution we have been swamped with Russians, we're fed to the teeth with them and their Slav temperament; for a time the clients were amused by it, but they're tired of them now. And then they're not serious. They're noisy and quarrelsome. The truth is, they're barbarians, and they don't know how to behave. But Princess Olga is different. She has principles. You can see that she's been well brought up. She has something, there's no denying it.

"

And later in the book, when we learn more about Lydia:

"

It was true that her father had been a professor of some small distinction at the university, but in Russia, before the revolution, and since then Paris swarmed with princes and counts and guardsmen who were driving taxis or doing manual labour. Everyone looked upon the Russians as shiftless and undependable. People were sick of them. Lydia's mother, whose grandfather had been a serf, was herself hardly more than a peasant, and the professor had married her in accordance with his liberal principles; but she was a pious woman and Lydia had been brought up with strict principles. It was in vain that she reasoned with herself; it was true that the world was different now and one must move with the times: she could not help it, she had an instinctive horror of becoming a man's mistress.

"

Later in the book we discover that Lydia is in fact different from other Russians, or at least doesn't fit with the stereotype that had formed, according to Maugham, among the French.

The full text of the novel is here (link takes to the passage quoted in this post) and a Russian translation is here.  

The Time of Women, by Elena Chizhova (review)

Review by Miranda Ingram. (©)

Elena Chizhova's 2009 Russian Booker prize-winning novel has had mixed reviews with too many critics claiming that the novel's style makes it difficult to read. This is a great shame as The Time of Women is a funny, clever, moving – and immensely readable – book (although it is possible that the English language translation by Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas renders the colloquial Russian easier to read).

It is a story, of course, about women – a young factory worker and her illegitimate, mute, daughter share a communal apartment with three elderly women in early 1960s Leningrad. These "grannies" bring up the child while the mother is at work and, when she is later diagnosed with cancer, plot to save the girl from Soviet orphanages. 

Through this domestic, and essentially female, business of onion-frying, laundry rotas and petty squabbles, Chizhova tells the story of  20th Century Russia - of superstition and soviet realism, factories and folklore, belief and dissidence, rule and oppression, ignorance, hope and, of course, Russia's insatiable appetite for suffering. 

The protagonists' lives are gradually revealed through a series of truncated memories and monologues, which we are invited to listen to through the ears of the bewildered child - even while the grown-ups themselves remain bewildered by their own stories. 

This style gives the novel a deceptive aura of simplicity while the scope of the book is anything but. Indeed, these unfinished sentences and unvoiced thoughts, which seem to have annoyed the critics, are essential to the book which is also about keeping quiet. 

The girl, named Suzanna by her mother but Christened Sofia by the grannies, is mute, but in a world where talking is dangerous, everyone is, to some extent mute and the novel echoes with what is left unsaid, what is best not said, with whispers in corners and the sound of taps being switched on and off to drown out words. 

The book's detractors say it is full of rehashed themes - the communal apartment experience, cancer as a metaphor for a rotten society (Lizok's Bookshelf) – and indeed, the mother's bleeding as her illness progresses is a metaphor for  all the blood spilt on Russian soil.

But, leaving aside the truism that all literature deals with a few basic stories, any writer examining their own country's story is bound to revisit the same themes and Russian writers – and readers – are way behind, say, the Germans, in examining and accepting the past. 

It is a point Chizhova herself makes in an interview with the New York Times (which, shamefully, got the daughter's name wrong throughout the entire article). "Under Brezhnev, people averted their eyes from the past out of fear; under Putin, fear has been replaced by apathy, she says. "For the vast majority of people, the Soviet period simply is not interesting. They do not have the feeling that history continues. It seems to them that in the 1990s, we just started over."

This highly commendable novel demonstrates precisely the opposite – that history is an ongoing story.

Visit The Time of Women web-page on Glagoslav Publications. (in English)

Read more about the English language edition and Glagoslav Publications in this post on Tetradki. (includes a video with Chizhova)

The Time of Women, by Elena Chizhova is out in English

Read Tetradki review of the book here.

Glagoslav Publications have sent me a copy of the The Time of Women by Elena Chizhova, the winner of the Russian Booker Prize 2009.

The novel, in its Russian-language version, has been widely reviewed by English language publications. Now it comes out in an English translation by Simon Patterson with Nina Chordas. 

The plot revolves around the fortunes of four Russian women living in a communal flat in Leningrad in the early 1960s. They are plotting to save a young girl from being taken to the orphanage and to raise her themselves.  

The novel is written in the first person, different characters lead the narrative in colloquial language with numerous references to folklore, religion, Soviet bureaucratic jargon and literature. Which makes it quite a challenge for translators. 

Chizhova

Elena Chizhova was born in Leningrad in 1957. She had worked as an economist, teacher, and entrepreneur until a rescue from a burning cruise ship in 1996 inspired her to turn to writing. She now has several successful titles to her name.

Tetradki has published a review of the English-language version of the novel.  

The book can be bought through Glagoslav's The Time of Women web-page.  

In this video Elena Chizhova is at a rehearsal of the stage version of The Time of Women at Moscow's Sovremennik theatre.

   

Glagoslav Publications is an English-Dutch publishing company specializing in contemporary Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian fiction (www.glagoslav.com in English, Dutch and Russian).

Russian Women

OpenBooks sent me an advance blurb of the new book, a collection of essays edited by Wendy Rosslyn (Nottingham University) and Alessandra Tosi (Cambridge) 'Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture'. 

I look forward to reading it, not least because I am familiar with Rosslyn's previous works on Anna Akhmatova and on women in Russian literature of the 18th Century, an obscure but incredibly fascinating subject, considering that Russia had four empresses in that one century. Three of them, including Catherine the Great, were incredibly successful in building a great and dynamic country. It would be interesting to see what Rosslyn and Tosi have to say on women of the 19th (and the beginning of the 20th).  

The blurb says:

Russian women of the nineteenth century are often thought of in their literary incarnations as the heroines of novels such as Anna Karenina and War and Peace. But their real counterparts are now becoming better understood as active contributors to Russia’s varied cultural landscape.
This collection of essays examines the lives of women across Russia – from wealthy noblewomen in St Petersburg to desperately poor peasants in Siberia – discussing their interaction with the Church and the law, and their rich contribution to music, art, literature and theatre. It shows how women struggled for greater autonomy and, both individually and collectively, developed a dynamic but often overlooked presence in Russia's culture and society during the long nineteenth century (1800-1917).

Other works by Wendy Rosslyn:

- Anna Bunina (1774-1829) and the Origins of Women's Poetry in Russia (Studies in Slavic Language and Literature) (on Amazon)

- The Prince, the Fool, and the Nunnery: The Religious Theme in the Early Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (on Amazon)

The Undeserted Island

One of the most optimistic sci-fi novels by the famous Russian duo Arkady and Boris Strugatsky has the title "Обитаемый остров", literally the Inhabited Island.

Max Kammerer, a member of the future Earth's space probing 'Free Search Group' is stranded on a planet which strikingly resembles today's Earth. He quickly realises that things have to be changed on the planet, his Desert Island, and with some help of the local resistance stages a revolution there. Not realising that an undercover agent of the Earth's Committee of Galactic Security (KGB) had been already working for years there to ensure a more painless transition from a totalitarian society to the utopian Earth-like democracy.

The English translation of the book, the first in a trilogy, is called Prisoners of Power. 

The title is different because of the untranslatable Russian pun – обитаемый-inhabited vs необитаемый-desert (island).

The difficulty in the pun is that a 'desert island' invokes desolation, being stranded, while 'uninhabited' or 'inhabited' is simply a geographical note, though in Robinson Crusoe's original title it was just that – 'un-inhabited island'. Max is stranded like Crusoe, except that his island is a planet. In Russian a 'desert island' is 'neobitayemy ostrov', so the title 'Obitayemy Ostrov' (inhabited, non-desert or undeserted) is immediately recognisable as the opposite of 'desert island', practically as an oxymoron, while the English 'inhabited island' is not.

Thanks to Languagehat for the original discussion of Strugatskys and to commenters Mockba and AJP Crown for additional probing on the subject.

Through Chekhov's Eyes. Grossman's Season on BBC.

Read the Russian version of this post here.

BBC Radio 4 opens Vassily Grossman's season today (19:45 GMT) with a reading of one of his Stalingrad reports 'Through Chekhov's Eyes'.

Chekhov here is a Russian sniper who killed 256 nazi soldiers and officers at Stalingrad. Grossman, who later wrote the great war novel Life and Fate, was a correspondent for the Red Star, the army newspaper. He spent months in Stalingrad. The Chekhov article is based on Grossman's first-hand observations when sitting together with the famous sniper in his hideout. In 1942 Chekhov was 19. 

Chekhov survived Stalingrad, but was seriously wounded in 1944 – he lost a foot.  After the war he quarelled with authorities over his living conditions, he didn't even have a room of his own, not to speak of a flat or a house. In 1965, when the 20th anniversary of the Victory was widely celebrated in Russia, Chekhov was 'rediscovered' by another famous war writer Sergei Smirnov and became a hero again.

Konstantin Simonov, the writer famous for his war trilogy The Living and the Dead, wrote once that he couldn't understand the sniper psychology. To kill a man in a general combat, yes, but to hunt down a human, keep him in sights and shoot down, sometimes seeing the face, no, he couldn't comprehend that. In the first Soviet novel about Stalingrad, Days and Nights, which came out while the war was still on, Simonov doesn't say a word about the Stalingrad snipers.

To Grossman they were heroes.

Here is an excerpt from the Radio 4 introduction to the three-episode reading:

 'I wanted to become the sort of man who destroys the enemy with his own hands' [said Chekhov]. The cult of the sniper emerged spontaneously during the Stalingrad conflict. The 'Stalingrad Academy of street fighting' became a new kind of war where every floor, every building, every block became its own front line. Here a sniper could extract a terrible and personal vengeance upon the German invaders who had forced the Soviets to the very banks of the river Volga. Encouraged by their commanders, lionized by journalists like Grossman, the sniper became a heroic symbol of steely determination. Here Grossman delivers a portrait both intimate and heroic of a young man transformed by war amidst the ruined city.

The story is read by Elliot Levey, translation is by Jim Riordan.

Radio 4 is to broadcast in September a play based on Grossman's great epic Life and Fate with Kenneth Branagh in the leading role. The novel was banned in the Soviet Union, smuggled out to the West and published in 1985 in Robert Chandler's translation.

Grossman's article and a biography of Anatoly Chekhov (in Russian) is here. The BBC programme web page is here and here. Tetradki posts about Life and Fate are here and here. 


The 2001 film Enemy at the Gates with Jude Law and Ed Harris is based on the story of the duel between a German ace sniper and a top Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev. Here is a video:

Patti Smith's Just Kids in Russian

Patti Smith's award winning memoir Just Kids is out in Russian.

Patti Smith has a loyal following in Russia and the former Soviet Union countries. As a 70s teenager myself I remember how puzzled we were at first with the new punk sound, then excited with the whole movement. I think the phenomenal growth of Russian rock music in the 80s was influenced by Patti Smith’s sound.

The book was translated by Svetlana Silakova. Here is what she says in an interview about the book:

It is, first of all, a woman’s view of the 60s and 70s in America. With details and atmosphere. With cinematographic clearness. With myths, admittedly, but who cares, it is a kind of mythology that is very personal and without a commercial underlay. Secondly, it is a shining love story, the story of a young love, a love of two people for each other and for Art. And in Patti’s narrative it is a love that is eternal. Third, it is interesting to compare her experiences with that of the Soviet people of the same age. There is of course an element of ‘children should know how their fathers fought’ – with a dash of ‘while you were partying there, the power has changed’. In one of her interviews Patti complains that there is no longer a New York that she knew.

Патти Смит, "Просто дети",
Astrel, Corpus, 2011,
ISBN 978-5-271-34418-3

Here is Patti with one of her best known songs, Because the Night:




 

That Sweet Enemy, by Robert and Isabelle Tombs

The authors, a Franco-British married couple, are both serious historians but this 800-page account of the intertwining fortunes of their two countries, from Louis XIV and William of Orange right up to the Blair and Chirac era, is a page turner.

It demonstratively does not ‘take sides’ in Franco-British rivalry but delicately unravels the hundreds of years of stereotyping, prejudice, mutual admiration and hatred, competition and cooperation, in war and peace, in industries and culture, politics and language.

Throughout their story, double-titled in French as Cette Exquise Ennemie, the authors examine how the love-hate relationship has been a startlingly productive force throughout modern history.

It is full of little known, sometimes paradoxical details, like the fact that Voltaire’s translations of Shakespeare’s plays were the starting point for the Bard’s international fame, or that style anglaise in clothes in France were a mark of free-thinking and that English economic and humanistic ideas hugely influenced the great French philosophers who laid the ideological foundations for the revolution.

It is often underestimated how much English ideas (or rather the French idea of them) of naturalness, self-reliance, enterprising, individualism and personal liberty influenced French thinking in C18th. The 'pursuit of happiness' was originally introduced by John Locke, picked up by the great French philosophers – and then adopted by the Founding Fathers of the USA.

An intellectual treat.


That Sweet Enemy, by Robert and Isabelle Tombs.
Pimlico/Ransom House.

First Russian Collected Works of Platonov

A Russian monument to Platonov

Update: Vremya editor Tatiana Timakova contacted me to say that the final eighth volume of the edition had just come out and is available from Wednesday this week. Great news and congratulations for this fine accomplishment. More information on their website here.

The Russian publishing house Vremya ("Время") says on its Facebook page that it is close to finishing the eight volume has finished publishing the collected works of Andrei Platonov, the first such full collection of works by the writer who is considered by many to be one of the greatest figures of Russian literature. Seven volumes have already been published.  There are eight volumes in the collection.

Platonov came out of the brilliant crop of post-revolution writers of 1920s. He has a unique voice that employs Soviet newspeak, professional engineering jargon and folk motives to construct inimitable images and situations.

He survived the purges, virulent official criticism and front line service during the second world war – to succumb to tuberculosis he caught from his son who got it while in the gulag.

Platonov's 8 volume cover

Platonov was always known for his short stories, but since perestroika he has made a slow but steady return to Russian and international readers also as the author of major novels.

Brodsky referred to him as one of the all time greats. Robert Chandler, who translated Chevengur  and The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan) said, after finishing work on an anthology of Russian short stories, that  'there were only two writers whom I was still able to read with real wonder: Pushkin and Platonov. Even at this late stage I was still able to find new and surprising perceptions in Pushkin's The Queen of Spades and Platonov's The Return. This didn't happen with any other writers'. (Read Languagehat blogs on Chevengur and Kotlovan here.)

Vremya's Facebook says they 'speak' Russian, English and Spanish and they have a blog here.

And this is the song scene from Maria's Lovers, the 1984 American film with Nastassia Kinsky based on Platonov's story 'The River Potudan' ("Река Потудань"). Andrei Konchalovsky had dreamt about making it since he was working on 'Andrei Rublev' with Tarkovsky in the 60s.  (Maria's Lovers DVD on Amazon here)



Photo by Shalin, from here.
Platonov's cover image by permission of Vremya Publishers.

Ken Branagh to Play Viktor in BBC's Drama Life and Fate

Ken Branagh

The BBC Radio 4 has just announced that Ken Branagh will play the leading character Viktor Shtrum in the forthcoming radio adaptation of Vassily Grossman's World War II epic novel Life and Fate. The Radio 4 press-release is here.

Alison Hindell, who is in charge of the production, admits, that, as a Russian speaker, she hadn't even heard the title, but having read the book realised how great it was. This is what she says about how they approached the dramatisation:

The novel is a sprawling epic, telling the loosely interconnected stories of members of one Russian family and their different experiences during the Battle of Stalingrad, the battle which clinched the defeat of the Germans in WWII. It works almost like a series of longish short stories: the number of characters named in the novel runs to over a thousand though the timespan is only a few months (Sept 1942 - April 1943). And the locations range from the frontline in Stalingrad to the Lubyanka in Moscow, from a Russian labour camp to a Nazi gas chamber, from Kuibyshev to Kazan, from the northern forests to the river Volga and more.
But the storylines of each group of characters largely stand alone so it is possible, for example, to read only the chapters about Viktor (the character most closely based on the author himself, Vasily Grossman) and get a complete story. And that structural device turned out to be the key to unlock a dramatic structure.

The book was stolen from three generations of Russian and international reading public – a few days after Grossman submitted the manuscript to a literary journal in Moscow in October 1960 the KGB 'literary critics' raided his flat and the journal's office confisctaing all copies and even the carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. Miraculously a copy survived, kept by a dissident and was taken out of the Soviet Union on microfilm to be published in 1980s.


Hopefully the coming production will return one of the greatest works of Russian literature to the reading public and give it its due place in the pantheon of big novels.

Please read my earlier post on the BBC radio play here.

Photo: Giorgia Meschini, from here.

The Twenty Most Important Russian Reads (a list)

In principle I am against all sorts of rankings and 'top' lists. There is always a degree of subjectivity in them. And anyway, a well-educated reader can always tell good literature from bad, but still have personal preferences based on taste, interests, mood and, not least of all, age and experience.

Still, lists are useful as guides or for comparison or argument. 

The web-site Accredited Online Colleges sent me their recently published list The Twenty Most Important Russian Reads. It has the usual set of Tolstoys and Dostoyevskys. Anna Karenina is number one. For Pushkin they recommend Eugene Onegin, his most renowned work, though probably it is better to start with the great writer's prose, The Captain's Daughter for example (Amazon link, also available for downloading here in a 1914 translation as Marie: A Story of Russian Love).

But I was thrilled to see a few entries there that not always make it onto English language reading lists in Russian literature. In particular I'd endorse the choice of Lermontov's The Hero of Our Time (available for downloading in several digital formats, including Kindle, from Gutenberg, here).

I am not sure whether Nabokov needs several entries (Lolita and Pnin). Lolita, for example, was originally written in English and its Russian version reads a bit rushed and is full of anglicisms. However, in the current climate of 'pervs under beds', the Colleges endorsement is really commendable. 'Unfairly thrown around today as a pervert’s indulgence,' they write, 'Lolita is an absorbing book that truly encompasses the honesty, ego and controversy that can define 20th century literature. Plus, it reads pretty fast compared to other Russian books on this list.'

I loved to see the great innovator Vladimir Mayakovsky's A Cloud in Trousers (English text, Part 1 here) in poetry recommendations. The blurb is slightly confusing, though. It speaks of 'suffering under revolution', while the poem was written in 1915, well before the Russian revolution of 1917, and it is primarily a love poem where Mayakovsky seeks to find balance between the intimate and the social.

I think that translations of English poetry into Russian are worth recommending for students of Russian literature and language, for example, Shakespeare's sonnets (several sonnets in Pasternak's translation are here).

Some of the Russian books well-known in the West did not make it onto Accredited Colleges list:

- Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Heart of a Dog (Amazon link). The Master and Margarita, the novel with parallel stories of Jesus and Pontius and a visit by Satan to the Moscow of 1920s, is full of hilarious satire and moving romance. According to the American literary blog Languagehat it is 'one of the most widely loved novels of the last century'. It circulates in about a dozen different translations.

- Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don (Amazon link) is the Nobel prize-winning epic of cossack life before the revolution and during the first world war and the Russian civil war. Pete Seeger's Where Have All the Flowers Gone is based on an old cossack song quoted in the novel.

- Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (Amazon link) is the first modern antiutopia (or distopia), predating and partly inspiring Orwell and Huxley. 

There are other important works of literature that were created during the Soviet period, but are not as widely known as they deserve in my opinion. Here are a few I'd add:

- Yuri Trifonov's The House on the Embankment (Amazon  link), The Exchange, short stories. Trifonov is the deepest observer of the moral dilemmas of Soviet life;

- Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate (Amazon link). The war epic, described as the Soviet War and Peace.

- Valentin Katayev's The Diamond Crown of Mine is a fictionalised 1977 memoir of Russian literary life, mostly of the 1920s period, with practically all important writers appearing under nicknames. The book has not been translated into English in full as far as I know. It was severely criticised by some, mostly for what it isn't rather than for what it is. Read an analysis in English here and the full Russian text is here.

For lovers of poetry I'd recommend 1960s poets Andrei Voznessensky, Bella Akhmadulina and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Look for brilliant children's authors Kornei Chukovsky and Samuil Marshak, who translated many English nursery rhymes into Russian. I used them in teaching Russian to English speakers.

The Tale of Igor's Campaign is the 12th century poetic epic. Originally written in Old East Slavonic, it has several renditions in modern Russian and a few English translations, notably by Vladimir Nabokov (text here). It contains among other jewels Yaroslavna's Lament, included in Borodin's opera Prince Igor.

The recommendations include, somewhat surprisingly in what is supposed to be a list of Russian books, the American journalist David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, the account of the dying years of the Soviet Union. I've read it, it's a good book, but for a better grasp of Russian national character I'd recommend The Russians and The New Russians by Hedrick Smith (Amazon links).


Thanks to Emma Taylor for sending the link.






 Yaroslavna's Lament scene from the film version of the opera (1969):

The Star-Spangled Trotsky, or St George, Revolutionary Style

St George's Day is the national day of England. It is on 23 April, the accepted day of his death in 303 A.D.  When it falls on Easter week the Church moves the feast of St George to the nearest Monday after Easter. This year for example it is on 2 May. But St George is also popular in many other countries including Russia. St George is the patron saint of Moscow.

The image of St George slaying the dragon has been popular throughout history. Here is a curious example of how an early Soviet propaganda poster showed Leon Trotsky, commander of the Red Army at the time, in 1918,  as St George slaying the dragon of capitalist counter-revolution (the inscription on the dragon's tail).


Note how Christian, nationalist, communist and internationalist symbols blend in this work. The whole composition is unmistakeably Christian. The golden star behind Trotsky's head looks like a saintly halo, but the red star on his shield bears the communist hammer and sickle. He is dressed in a stylised suit of armour of a Russian medieval warrior – a nationalist symbol, but has red stars on boots and shoulders. The dragon wears a silky top hat, a traditional image in Soviet art for depicting bourgeois enemies.

Having looked at several dozen images of St George I couldn't help noticing that Trotsky is charging at the West – to the left, but in most other images St George is advancing on the East – to the right.

St George on British half-sovereign

The best part is the starry sky around the central image. The white-on-blue stars of the background have an unmistakeable resemblance to the US flag. Why? And why so many stars? I counted 91? In the American flag white stars represent the member states of the Union. I think the symbolism may be the same in this poster. It is probably a reference to the coming 'world revolution'. Early on after the October revolution of 1917 many believed that similar events would soon follow throughout the world, at least throughout Europe, other nations will get rid of their bourgeoisie and join Russia in a union of socialist republics.

One of the lesser known maxims of marxism was that revolution can only happen in a country where proletariat (working class) represents a substantial part of the population and is politicallly conscious. Taking into account the number of working class people in Russia at the beginning of the 20th Century many revolutionaries believed that socialist transformation could only happen if revolutions succeeded in other countries as well. In fact, Trotsky was one of the strongest proponents of 'permanent revolution' and the 'export of revolution'. In a few years time Lenin would postulate that it was possible for socialism to succeed in one separate country. That would be one of the major reasons for the split with Trotsky and his eventual downfall when Stalin took control of the country.

Coat of arms of Moscow

But in 1918 the multitude of stars in the poster represented the expectation that other nations would soon join Russia in a revolutionary union and showed Trotsky as the leader of that victorious struggle.

A new book exploring the influence of religious thinking on Russian revolutionaries is out in the US: Laurie Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia.  (A review and an interview with Manchester is on New Books in Russian Studies). Many studies have concentrated on persecution and extermination of the Russian priesthood by the bolsheviks. But many of Russian revolutionaries themselves came from priests' families, including the iconic figure in Russian revolutionary movement Nikolai Chernyshevsky. This book looks at how Orthodox Christian ideas contributed to the intelligentsia's, and in particular the revolutionaries' sense of mission, to their impatient desire to change the world and the people for the better.


Poster from here, author unknown.

The History of Russia. Takes and Breaks.

The BBC starts today a major new series on Russian history, The Wild East (begins at 15:45 Greenwich time). The series are to cover a thousand years from the founding of Kievan Rus to modern day, and explain why the country swings from opening to reforms and democracy and then reverting back to autocracy and stagnation. The series with an accompanying book were apparently commissioned in connection with the 20th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The author-presenter is Martin Sixsmith, a Russian expert and a former BBC Moscow correspondent. He took part in last week's Radio 4 programme Start the Week to explain his idea. From what he says, it appears that he shares the view that Russia is somehow ‘not suited for democracy’ and that periodic returns to autocratic rule happen because ‘autocracy has worked’ there at times. You can almost hear bewildered gasps of other participants in the programme, some of whom also have first-hand knowledge of Russia. Arguments about Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin and other famous rulers have long been a staple of Russian table-talk. They are now brought to Western audiences.

Schedrin in 1872

The series is a huge undertaking and not to be missed. (Links to the programme are below the video.)

To illustrate how views of Russia and her history have been changing over time I add the first part of the US-made 1943 documentary The Battle of Russia. Then, of course, America, Britain and Russia were allies fighting Hitler. Careful: documentary footage there is mixed with sequences from feature films including Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky with the score by Prokofiev.

And for a lighter take on Russian history, do read the hilarious satire by Saltykov-Schedrin (1869-70, wiki,), The History of a Town (Amazon link, Russian text here). Not often cited in the West, the book is very popular in Russia. Quotes, references and characters from it have entered the language as metaphors, idioms and proverbs. (An excerpt from the introduction to the book below the video.)

 

Start the Week discussion with Martin Sixsmith is here, available as podcast too.

The Wild East BBC page with the series schedule and press release here.

from Laughter in the Dark: The History of a Town reviewed years ago by V. S. Pritchett.

Shchedrin is known to English-speaking readers only by his great novel The Golovlyov Family, the most somber and pitiless instance of black comedy in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. Now, in the first English translation of The History of a Town, we see the master of political satire, for which he was best known in his own time. One sees at once that this book gave Zinoviev his model for The Yawning Heights, his uproarious fantasy written at the expense of communism under Stalin and Khrushchev a few years ago; the dissidents take pride in recovering the old Russian tradition. Zinoviev's fabulous lbansk (a double pun which means Ivan's town but also Fucktown)--derives plainly from Shchedrin's farcical history of Glupov or Stupid Town, in which for hundreds of years the bewildered and passive Russian peasants do what they can in a sluggish way to live with the violence and lunacy of their tyrants.

Portrait of M.E. Saltykov-Schedrin by Nikolai Ghe.

Avoiding Cold War Binaries. New Books in Russian Studies.

New Books in Russia and Eurasia is an important, I might say invaluable, resource for analysts, researchers and students of Russia and surrounding regions.  This is how they introduce themselves:

'New Books in Russia and Eurasia, a channel in the New Books Network, interviews authors of new books in any academic field concerning the history, politics, economy, and culture of Russia and Eurasia.'

The website aggregates the multitude of works the flow of which it is often difficult to follow. Along with text reviews it has podcasts (free) of interviews with authors of new books in the field. It is run by Sean Guillory, the American historian at Northern Illinois University, who is known as the author-publisher of Sean’s Russia Blog.

I was excited to see there a review of Thomas de Waal's new book The Caucasus. An Introduction. De Waal and Carlotta Gall covered the Caucasus for the Moscow Times and wrote one of the best books on the war in Chechnya (the first war of 1994-96) published in Europe as Chechnya: A Small Victorious War and internationally as Chechnya: A Calamity in the Caucasus (links to Amazon). De Waal, whose views are not always welcomed in the countries he writes about, is one of the most knowledgeable experts on the region.

Here is an excerpt from the New Books review:

'On August 8, 2008 many Americans learned that Russia had gone to war with a mysterious country called Georgia over an even stranger territory called South Ossetia. Both Georgia and South Ossetia were located not on the southeastern seaboard of the United States, but in a mountainous region south of Russia called the Caucasus.  The war was short, a mere four days, but during that time it became an campaign issue between Barack Obama and John McCain, a moment made memorable when McCain declared “We are all Georgians now.” For the Cold Warriors of yesteryear the world was remade familiar: Russia was enemy #1 again, Mikheil Saakashvili’s was a victim of Russian imperialism, and the Cold War was back as if it had never left.

'Those familiar with the South Caucasus know that the region is allergic to Cold War binaries.  Its ethnic, linguistic, and religious complexity defy even the best social scientific models. Persistent conflicts mark the region.  Azerbaijan and Armenia are at odds over Nagorno-Karabakh.  Georgia has had to contend with seperatist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both Russian protectorates.  Of course, we can’t forget that the region also hosts two important energy pipelines – the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline – making the South Caucasus a geopolitical focus of the United States, the EU, and Russia.'

There is a podcast interview with de Waal.