commander in chief

This spring Putin may have won the election, but the past year has revealed a vocal opposition, with rallies the likes of which Russia hasn't seen since 1991 and a whole genre of dark commentary about the leader. Images and videos comparing Putin to Brezhnev or the Czar are still circulating on Facebook; thoughtful opponents to the current government are creating a space for resistance. Masha Gessen, in her courageous The Man Without a Face, The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, describes the events of the ongoing Putin era with sobering clarity. You can check out my review of Gessen's book in the July issue of Open Letters Monthly.

a kind of freedom

I love trains. Especially Russian trains. I love the way my glass of tea jingles in its special metal holder. I love looking through the window at endless forests of birch, then rolling out my sleeping mat on the top bunk and falling asleep to the jolts and screeches of the tracks.

I even love taking trains in California, a place where the train system is so inefficient that if I get on Amtrak in San Diego I'll arrive in San Jose, if I'm lucky, 16 hours later, more than twice the time it would take to drive. But I don't care, because as long as I am in the train car I can sit back, pull out a book, and follow the track. All decisions have been made, the tracks are already there.

So I was excited to finally see Aleksei Uchitel's 2010 Krai [The Edge], a film promising hours of train porn. And on this front, it delivered. The film takes place in the wake of World War II, in a correctional camp (called "Krai") someplace in the taiga. There are races between trains. There is coal, shoveled into the burning pit of the train engine. There is an old, abandoned train that is brought lovingly to life by a concussed Soviet train engineer, just back from the German front and a pretty, wild, German girl who has lived out the war in the pit of said abandoned train. There is a lot of steam. There is an accident with an unfortunate bear.

The acting is solid and the shots are stunning, although the metaphors tend to be irritatingly heavy-handed (the carcass of the aforementioned bear is spread over the front of a train like a crucified Russia).  The protagonist, Ignat (Vladimir Mashkov), has been forbidden from driving trains due to recklessness. Disregarding this command, he attempts to find a place on the train tracks of history, which are fixed, but which he nonetheless manages to manipulate with brute force. 

The inhabitants of "Krai" show the worst in human nature -- in their struggle for a trace of humanity, they steal, insult, and injure one another; most have been marked as potential collaborators with Germany. The group awaits the arrival and judgment of the a Soviet official, Fishman, who proves to be a far more frightening and horrible character than any of the supposed enemies of the people being held prisoner. It is only the arrival of this truly evil figure that unites the disparate inmates of "Krai." (Should I muse about the possible Jewish or German suggestion in the name Fishman? No -- I'd really rather not.)

I will spare you the details of the traumatizing denouement, but I will tell you that in the final shot, the heroes, along with the adopted German boy they picked up along the way, push themselves through the snow-filled forest toward the future on a manual train car. They have left, it would seem, their trains, taken off on the tracks on their own, and achieved a kind of freedom.

Filmic Turpitude

Why hasn't more of Nabokov's fiction found its way to experimental cinema? Combine the theatricality and visual splendor of everything he wrote with smart, tech-savvy Nabokovians and good things happen. This quarter, on a whim, I told my class they could choose between writing an in-class midterm essay and creating a short film inspired by Nabokov.

Among the episodes that came back to me was Mary Manu's tragicomic stop-action sequence from Invitation to a Beheading, starring the stoical LEGO Cincinnatus C. No heads are severed, but I think the juxtaposition of reality and artifice illustrates Cincinnatus' gnostical turpitude beautifully. You can practically hear the poor grinning LEGO cry (a la Blok), "Help, I am bleeding to death with cranberry juice."

California Slavic Colloquium at UC San Diego

This weekend, for the first time in history, UCSD will host the California Slavic Colloquium. I partook in this tradition as a graduate student, and then watched from the sidelines as our UCSD graduate students have presented their work to their peers from up and down the state. Props to Yuliya Ladygina for putting it all together this year. I am looking forward to this stimulating program in our own backyard:

Update, April 16: Many thanks to all participants for their presentations, discussion, and presence this weekend. And thanks again to Yuliya Ladygina, who with James Shin led the group of California Slavicists in a post-conference intensive sandcastle workshop. (In the interest of Russian visual culture, I present the fruits of our collaboration.)