Zritel'nitsa

Sorokin after Sots-Art

2011-07-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

The July issue of Open Letters Monthly has some great summer reading recommendations, and includes my thoughts on on Jamey Gambrell's translations of Vladimir Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik and the Ice Trilogy.

Sorokin, who began writing in the 80's, was initially part of the conceptualists or "sots-artists," a group of mostly visual artists who sought to undermine Russia's sacred myths. In recent years, his (increasingly grotesque) writing has taken, among other things, 21st-century nationalism as its target. These books are not for the faint of heart, but if you are like me, you will want to keep reading out of respect for his audacity. If violence, explicit language, or brutal iconoclasm makes you uncomfortable, you should probably stay away from Sorokin's prose.

our perestroikas

2011-02-25T00:47:00.000-08:00

Last week my dear friend and colleague Natalia Roudakova went to Russia for a conference, so I got to show Robin Hessman's 2010 My Perestroika to her undergraduate "authoritarianisms" class. Hessman had lived in Russia in the 1990s, working as the producer for the Russian Sesame Street. This film was about Russians her own age:

Just coming of age when Gorbachev appeared, they were figuring out their own identities as the very foundations of their society were being questioned for the first time. And then they graduated just as the USSR collapsed and they had to figure out a completely new life as young adults, with no models to follow. (-Hessman)

Hessman was strangely absent from her own film, but the way her subjects spoke to the camera evoked a distant addressee, as though they were sharing their experience with someone who would never really know the full story, but whose relationship to them mattered. Did perestroika itself, the viewer might wonder, with its lines for MacDonalds, its blue-jeans, its Pepsi Cola, also have an absent American addressee? Maybe this phantom-like American presence is why the film made me think of my perestroika. I turned fourteen in 1989, and my bedroom was plastered with Soviet gymnasts: Yelena Shushunova, Dmitri Bilozerchev, Svetlana Boginskaia. That year I started taking Russian. A few months later Nadia Comaneci defected from Rumania and the Berlin wall fell. In 1991 I came home from Russian camp, newly enamored of Russian folk songs, a couple of weeks before the putsch that put Yeltsin in power. This coincidence of my personal passions with the riveting geopolitical changes of the early 90's is probably why I stayed in Russian, long after I left gymnastics and choir for other hobbies. And yet I went through high school with the Scorpions' "Wind of Change" playing as background music, but didn't stop to think about the words until years later, when I listened to someone in Ukraine play it on a guitar and sing it in broken English.

When the film was over I looked out at Natalia's students and realized that most of them were born after 1991. They have as little a recollection of Gorbachev's Soviet Union as I do of Nixon's presidency. Chances are good, though, that they, and I, will look back at 2011 as a defining moment, a moment that tied our lives to the enormous, shifting, global politics around us, a moment we lived through but will not have the space to assess for a long time. The other day Mikhail Gorbachev wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times that suggested he is, two decades later, still assessing his perestroika, and still holding out hope:

Looking at those faces, one wants to believe that Egypt's democratic transition will succeed. That would be a good example, one the entire world needs.

proletpen, the rock-opera

2011-02-11T16:26:00.000-08:00

Friends, readers, musicians in search of lyrics! Forgive the descent into self-promotion, but I have just gotten word from University of Wisconsin Press that Proletpen, America's Rebel Yiddish Poets will be offered in its attractive hardcover edition at only $26.99, down from its earlier $45 (it can also be purchased electronically for $16.95). I translated the 100 poems in this volume while I was in graduate school, and edited it together with David Weintraub of the Dora Teitelboim Foundation. The book is bilingual. It also features woodcuts by the illustrator Dana Craft. The historical introduction is by Dovid Katz whose father, the poet Meynke Katz, features prominently in the volume. Most of the poems here are from the 1930s, and most of the poets were fellow travelers (if not members) of the CPUSA, which means that there are love songs here to Lenin and red flags. But there are also love songs to people, and sad songs about war and the unforgiving city landscape.

The sentiments in these poems range from political alignment with leaders like Julio Melo and Anna Pauker to vitriolic criticism of the Party. In the five years since the book came out, I have come to see them as emotional documents that give us the tiniest glimpse into the fury of a strange, and often forgotten, episode in American history.

I have a fantasy that a musician will pick up this volume and put together an indie rock album based on these poems. Klezmer would also do nicely.

my enchanted contemporary

2011-02-07T01:29:00.000-08:00

The same year I was born in California, Ëzhik was born in Moscow. Yury Norshteyn created him out of 2-dimensional cut-outs, entrusted him with a jar of raspberry jam, and lowered him into a foggy night. The little hedgehog embarks on a journey and gets terrifyingly, blissfully, lost. He encounters danger, love, regret, exhilaration, hopelessness, and finally, a peaceful acceptance of his fate, which (spoiler alert) carries him safely to his destination. I'm never sure when it will happen, but about once a year I pass through a week or two when I must watch Ëжик в тумане every night before falling asleep, in hopes, I guess, of dreaming about a white horse or a very tall oak.

Ночь, улица, фонарь

2011-01-27T00:30:00.000-08:00

I found this ad for Russia's MTS cell phone company on a search for Aleksandr Blok's 1912 "Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека," and it warmed my Russophile heart. Here is the full poem:

I have taken much license with my translation:

A night, a street, a streetlamp, drugstore,

Unthinkable and fading light.

Live but a quarter century more:

Nothing will change. There's no way out.

You'll die then start from the beginning,

All the old patterns will repeat:

The night, the canal's icy rippling,

The drugstore, streetlamp, and the street.

The ad wouldn't work if 99% of it's viewers hadn't once been made to memorize this poem. A man is dictating Blok's famous words into his mobile phone, and the words float out into the night, finding their reflections in posters and ads around the city. But the resolution is tragic: the addressee is a student with a casually hidden ear bud. Instead of memorizing the poem, he has the technology to find it on the same streets that inspired Blok. Blok's poem will probably disappear from the storehouses of his readers' minds; but the lonely quotidian of a winter city night will remain. A night... a street... a cellphone... drugstore.

eyes on eyes

2011-01-20T01:05:00.000-08:00

St. Jerome called the face the "mirror of the mind." But Lev Kuleshov taught us that the mind being mirrored isn't necessarily the one attached to the face, but rather the one attached to the person observing and interpreting that particular face's expressions. In a short sequence from 1917-18, Kuleshov spliced close-ups of the popular character actor Ivan Mozzhukhin staring intently into the camera with alternating images of a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a beautiful woman. The audience was thrilled by his portrayals of hunger, sadness, and lust: they didn't notice that the same footage of Mozzhukhin was repeated over and over. (The only version of this on the internet includes Spanish subtitles -- gracias to those who made it available!)

A few years earlier Mozzhukhin had played the devil in Starevich's 1913 adaptation of Gogol's "Night Before Christmas." Here is a Kuleshov test you can take at home: in this frame, is he:
a. hungry for a bowl of soup?
b. terrified that he will be beaten by an upstanding blacksmith?
c. craftily plotting to snatch the moon from the sky?
or d. with some careful montage, any of the above?

When I taught my Soviet film class in 2010, one of my students, Amanda Goodman, created her own Kuleshov experiment to successful effect. Rather than alternating between hunger, sadness, and lust, Amanda's protagonist is pictured observing a strip tease with apparently increasing interest. Her films have already screened at in the Sixth College UCSD Film Festival. Keep an eye out for this creative eye.

New Year's Furry Things

2011-01-07T03:02:00.000-08:00

Youtube videos probably say at least as much about the late-night viewer as they do about the producer. This particular viewer is not quite ready to embrace her own strange fascination with Chai Vdvoem's New Year's furry things, the slender woman-with-a-key who rises like a yolochka toward her flat-screen TV, or the gogolian pig-demon the woman's lover for some reason sees fit to present her with. (Notice how the poor pig sniffs around the presents as if looking for a lost sleeve.) But I am posting this anyway, a placeholder for deeper thoughts on overturn... or at least a warm, fuzzy tribute to mandarin oranges and desire.

Netflix Files: The Man Who Cried

2011-01-07T02:36:00.000-08:00

As far as I’m concerned there are 3 reasons one might spend a regrettable evening watching this movie. The first is Golijov's rather nice original score. The second is a brief sound cameo featuring my friend Jeremy exclaiming something in Yiddish from off-screen. The third is Cate Blanchett's wonderful, if somewhat anachronistic, portrayal of a Russian émigré. Blanchett's character is a masterful combination of desperate seductress, anti-Semite, and faithful friend. All of the other characters in the film are stiff, frankly offensive, caricatures. Christina Ricci who, miraculously rescued from a pogrom must sing her way to America to find her father (Oleg Yankovsky), plays a less human version of Feivel the Mouse from "An American Tale." Ms. Ricci, whose childhood alter ego is played by an undeniably cute Claudia Lander-Duke, utters a handful of lines throughout the entire film; what she does say is spoken without the least hint of expression. The doe-eyed gazes that the actress employed so brilliantly in Buffalo’66 simply do not work for this character. Johnny Depp's role as a gypsy horse-trainer is the stuff of bad porn. For a film with the word "cried" in the title, with the exception of Blanchett's aging Russian ballerina and the diva-breakdowns of John Turturro's fascist opera singer, any attempts at emotion are either misplaced, or simply unconvincing.

From the Netflix files: Russian Ark

2011-01-07T02:28:00.000-08:00

Don't watch The Russian Ark [Russkii Kovcheg] (2002) for the plot (there isn’t a plot), or for the costumes (some appear to have been stolen from tourist-photo-op-actors on Nevsky). But Aleksandr Sokurov’s virtuosic single shot is pleasantly dizzying, and marks an important innovation in the cinematic portrayal of time and space. The entire film can be boiled down to the following: a whispering Marquis de Custine (Sergei Dreiden) with an unidentifiable European accent guides the viewer in an hour-and-a-half-long polonaise through various chapters of Russian history. By setting the entire film in St. Petersburg’s splendid Hermitage (the permission for which marks a heroic achievement in its own right), Sokurov likens his contemporary audience’s distant perception of history to a tourist’s first picturesque walk through a winter garden in bloom.

Demons on Governors Island

2010-08-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

The August issue of Open Letters Monthly is now up. There is a lot of film and theater in this issue, in addition to its usual high-quality literary reviews and literature. I offer my assessment of Peter Stein's production of The Demons, a 12-hour performance on Governors Island a few weeks ago. I learned about the play from my friend Anne Eakin Moss, a Russian literature professor at Johns Hopkins. Anne offers her two cents, as well.

Announcing the Spring Russian Film Series at UCSD

2010-03-05T02:01:00.000-08:00

U.C. San Diego's Program in Russian and Soviet Studies is pleased to present the Monday Evening Russian Film Series, Spring 2010

(Films will be shown at 7 PM, Center Hall, Room 214. All are open to the public.)

March 29: “The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks” (Kuleshov, 1924) This satire about the United States' slanted view of the Soviet Union revolves around Mr. West, president of the YMCA, and what happens on his trip to the Soviet Union.

April 5: “Dersu Uzala” (Kurosawa, 1975) In 1902, a Russian army expedition is assigned to explore Siberia under the command of Captain Arseniev. He befriends the Goldi (Nanai) hunter Dersu Uzala and invites him to guide the explorers through the stark forest up to Khanka Lake.

April 12: “Three Songs About Lenin” (Vertov, 1934) Lenin, through the eyes of the Russian people, is represented by three songs. The first, "My face was in a dark prison," concerns the life of a young Muslim woman. "We loved him" deals with Lenin's life and death. The third song, "In a big city of stone," shows the accomplishments of his rule.

April 26: “The Circus” (Alexandrov, 1936) An American circus acrobat with a mixed-race child is indentured to a German ringmaster in exchange for keeping her secret. When the circus performs in the USSR, they are surprised to learn who is welcome and who is not.

May 3: "Cossacks of the Kuban" (Pyryov, 1949) This popular musical comedy is a love story based on a collective farm in the Kuban region.

May 10: “Ballad of a Soldier” (Chukhrai, 1959) With only a few days' leave from the front, a young hero connects with a number of others, all of whom are affected by his sincerity, simplicity, and love.

May 17: “I am Cuba” (Kalatozov, 1964) Four stories show the rise of the Communist revolution in Cuba. Battista's Havana and the poverty and oppression of the Cuban people

May 24: “My Friend Ivan Lapshyn” (German, 1984) A police investigator relentlessly and mercilessly pursues a gang of criminals, but comes to realize the distance between the idealism of the revolutionaries and the grim, frightening reality of the Stalinist era.

June 7: “Little Vera” (Pichul, 1988) A sullen, sultry teenager with few goals in life tries to deal with a brooding boyfriend, an abusive alcoholic father, an ineffectual mother and the futility of a life trapped in her small industrial town.

vilde khaye

2009-11-19T21:22:00.000-08:00

The domination and taming of childhood nightmares? A grown-up fetish? I haven’t read Dave Eggers' The Wild Things yet, nor have I made it to the recent Eggers'/Spike Jonze film collaboration… but Janet Potter's review in the current issue of Open Letters Monthly supports a suspicion I developed whilst spending several minutes in a bookstore last week stroking the luxury edition, which has a furry cover with creepy eyes: We may have an inkling as to where the wild things are, but we'll never know what they are. But we do have an idea about Max. Max is a kid, like us. With demons. A terrified kid who temporarily triumphs over his monsters, becomes one with them, tames them. And his dark world can also be hauntingly beautiful.

A current exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco presents Maurice Sendak's art with an eye to his East European Jewish origins. In a compellingly candid interview with Bill Moyers, Sendak, whose mother called him Wild Beast ("Vilde Khaye") in Yiddish, admits that the wild things were modeled on his relatives, hairy immigrants who spoke poor English, would eat anything, and terrified the young, American children. "They have to know it is possible things are bad... but they are surrounded by people who love them." Of his 2003 collaboration with Tony Kushner, a retelling of the Holocaust opera, Brundibar, Sendak (his life partner was a psychoanalyst, after all) said, "you can't get rid of evil". To Catherine Keener, who plays Max's mother in Jonze's film, Sendak said, "Make it your own and don't pander to children. Be honest."

if you let me keep my google books i promise to stop talking about it

2009-10-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, published a good Op. Ed on the Google Books project in the New York Times today. I thought I'd take advantage of this forum to post my own letter to the editor, which appeared this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education (to view the complete discussion, you will need a Chronicle Account):

Anxiety about Google's library-digitization projecthas ranged from concern that it will rob authors of income to concern it willturn libraries into a capitalist enterprise. The U.S. Copyright Office fearsthat the settlement "alters the property interests of millions ofrights-holders of out-of-print works without any Congressional oversight, andhas the capacity to create diplomatic stress for the United States."Geoffrey Nunberg, in his recent essay ("Google's Book Search: A Disasterfor Scholars,"The Chronicle Review,online edition, August 31),has suggested that Google's hasty, and monopolistic, digitization of books willyield a faulty catalog.
Thesefears must not bury an important breakthrough in offering old and rare books inan increasing number of languages and alphabets to those who cannot easily viewthem. The Copyright Office must take a stronger leadership role in makingliterary and scholarly work more, rather than less, visible in a virtualmarketplace dominated by advertisements and instant publication. And theacademic community must seek ways of helping Google to address our needswithout undermining its efforts to adapt time-honored texts to a digital era.
Forthose who, like me, measure rooms in square feet of not floor space but wallspace, Google Books helps to navigate an existing library. My own buying habitshave increased with the online visibility of books' content. Since Google'sLibrary Project was initiated in 2004, I have spent full evenings browsing newreleases without leaving my living room. Intrigued by a new title? Left a bookin my office and need a page number? Choosing what to assign next quarter?Check Google Books. Occasionally I find myself searching for an elusive page ina book that is sitting next to me.Publishedbooks are all too often eclipsed by unmediated, ephemeral, online literature;this is, unfortunately, apparent in the college literature classes I teach.Enabling Google's access to published material (and yes, in all editions) willensure the relevance of the libraries of the past to the libraries of thefuture. Library digitization promotes intellectual engagement, even on a topic,or in a language, enjoyed by a minority. Just as I am able to browse earlyeditions of 19th-century Russian literature, future readers may view my worklong after its expected print life.
Likeall teachers, I am wary of the dangers of misinformation, plagiarism, andperpetual distraction—dangers that the digital age did not invent, but that ithasn't eliminated either. In what some might call a reactionary gesture, I banlaptops in my classroom and require students to bring hard copies of theirbooks to class and take notes by hand. The goal is to demonstrate the beauty ofdiscussing literature across a table, of corresponding with writers of the pastin the margins of their books while thinking slower than one can click.Thelibraries that have joined forces with Google have had the foresight to usepaperless technology to reinforce a long literary tradition. Not only have theyopened their holdings to a readership that could not otherwise reach them, theyare stocking the world's virtual bookshelves with time-tested sources. Whenstudents leave my classroom, restart their computers, and curiously type a wordinto a search engine, they will retrieve not only encyclopedic definitions ofdubious origin, but volumes that have been written and carefully edited sinceGutenberg's remarkable 15th-century invention.Virtualmedia represents a new intervention, which brings with it new anxieties aboutthe spread of text. But digital libraries spread texts worth reading.

manuscripts don't burn

2009-09-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

My sabbatical is officially over. In a few days I will leave Harvard and its colossal Widener library, and return to San Diego, to my own books with my own handwriting in their margins, and to UCSD's Geisel library, a building named after Dr. Suess and made famous by Steven Spielberg, who inventively cast it as an alien spaceship in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". UCSD's Slavic holdings are decent, and inter-UC loans are relatively fast, but they have nothing on Widener's Slavic collection, including the largest Ukrainian holdings outside Kyiv.

Happily, I get to take a lot of Harvard's library with me. And a lot of Stanford's, Michigan's and New York's libraries with me. And I can search their contents. In multiple languages. My greatest use of Google's digital library project over the past several months, as I have prepared my own manuscript for publication, has been checking page numbers and citations in older editions. A year or two ago this would have involved several trips to different libraries. Books that once would have taken weeks to arrive through interlibrary loan I can now download through "Полный просмотр". I have also used Google Books for hours of browsing (which inevitably leads to buying).

Some of my colleagues would question my optimism about Google, a company that, doomsayers warn us, threatens to track our whereabouts and digitize our daydreams. But Google's aspiration toward omniscience and creative experimentation with organizational algorithms promises to make literary texts accessible to a vast population of readers in the United States and abroad.

In a few weeks a "fairness hearing" will assess the settlement Google Books has reached to ensure publishers and authors adequate compensation. I will be relieved when this date has passed and I am assured continued access to Google's digitized treasures. In the mean time, I will return to my office in San Diego and unpack my own library. And in the process I will unearth the old xeroxed copy of Walter Benjamin's 1931 "Unpacking my Library" I once absentmindedly stuck between a couple of volumes while in college, and which has remained a kind of inside joke with Benjamin as I have packed and unpacked it with my books ever since. "I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order." (Benjamin, "Selected Writings, V. 2," Cambridge, MA: 1999, 486)

(I am not yet home with my boxes and shelves, and therefore have yet to unpack my old copy of this essay; I looked this passage up on Google Books.)

Update: For a collective discussion of this issue, see my and others' notes to the editor in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

thoughts on the eve of a new school year

2009-09-10T21:58:00.001-07:00

This summer I had the weird sensation of watching debates about University budget cuts and furlough plans from the other side of a looking-glass. In Petersburg, conversations about my state (California) and its economy(bankrupt) with Russian colleagues left me with a mixture of sheepishnessand foreboding. Who am I to complain about an 8% salary cut when I still travel, have benefits, food and clothing without taking a second orthird job? On the other hand, the measly resources allocated to a oncethriving Russian academy might serve as a cautionary tale. The collapse of theSoviet Union two decades ago held enormous potential for new forms ofintellectual engagement. But education has been lost in the shuffle of a tumultuousmarket. Academics have seen travel and research budgets disappear. A Petersburgmathematician remarked to me, “Neighbors used to respect teachers and scholars.They were curious about what we did, what books we had. Now that they make tentimes our salary they pity us and we envy them.” While no self-respectingacademic would expect the deference of their neighbors, the fact that educatorsare now viewed not only as idiosyncratic, but even as foolish, reflects achanging cultural priority. Many Russian professors conduct their research athome, traveling to campus only to give lectures because public universitiescannot afford office space or staff. Their most famous colleagues have goneoverseas and their brightest students are tempted away by far more profitable,far less thoughtful or intellectual, careers. A growing number of collegestudents did not score in the top percentile of the applicant pool but wereaccepted based on their ability to pay higher tuition.

Education is not a luxury. It is our right to live in aliterate state among citizens who adapt easily to new technology and are inspiredto enter medical and research fields. It is our right to live among people whothink critically and creatively. It is our right to be curious about world history,politics and culture. Today each UC student, parent and employee might beprepared to absorb what has been called a “shared sacrifice”, but the entire state will feel the totalloss of educational resources. We don't need a sharing of sacrifices but a readjustment of priorities.California must do everything it can to raise its educational standards.It is too easy to grow accustomed to lowering them.

Sergei Mikhalkov, z"l

2009-08-31T14:18:00.000-07:00

Sergei Mikhalkov died last week, at 96. My friend Sasha Senderovich told me that when he (Mikhalkov, that is) got to heaven, he presented St. Peter with a copy of an anthem he’d composed for the occasion. “I’m sorry, but there’s been a mistake,” said St. Peter, who put the lyricist on an elevator and sent him down several floors. Soon Mikhalkov started to feel the fires of Hell, so he quickly took out his pen, and made a few adjustments. (Sasha found the anecdote here.)

In 1943 Mikhalkov completed lyrics for the heart-warming National Anthem of the Soviet Union. Lines like “splotila naveki velikaia Russ” [Great Rus’ united forever] mixed references to Leninist ideology with nationalist messianism, hinting at the transition from an idealistic worker’s state to a dictatorship that would readily manipulate old Imperial rhetoric. And, in fact, the anthem replaced the “International” as the Soviet hymn. Years after Krushchev had disclosed Stalin’s atrocities, Mikhalkov conceived a new version, which was institutionalized in 1977, where things like “Nas vyrastil Stalin na vernost’ narodu” [Stalin has raised us on devotion to the people] had been replaced by “Na pravoe delo on podnial narody” [He (Lenin) lifted the nations to do the right thing].

For a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union there was no real Russian national anthem. There was some kind of hard-to-remember tune that no one really liked, and many complained that they missed the minor chords and strong chorus of their Soviet anthem, even if they didn’t like what it had said. (True, this is more to the credit of the composer, Aleksander Aleksandrov, than the lyricist.) But then one December morning in 2000 I awoke at 6 am sharp, Moscow time, in a run-down hotel to a wordless "Soiuz ne rushimyi" being blasted from a scratchy Soviet-era radio. I had arrived the night before for a conference, and had been dreaming I was back in California, and for a minute or so, could not figure out where, or when, I was. Was I still dreaming? Had I died and landed in some bizarre Slavicist limbo? Had a second Bolshevik Revolution taken place overnight? As I slowly came to and listened to the broadcast I learned that a few days earlier Putin had ordered a return of the old anthem. For a little while it remained wordless, but in 2001 Mikhalkov came to the rescue again, emerging from retirement at the age of 88 with a new ballad for a new Russia, complete with lines like “Khranimaia Bogom rodnaia zemlia” [Kept by God our native land].

Now Mikhalkov, may his memory live on, has left us. What will Russia do if there is another Revolution? Who will slip Lenin and God in and out of these verses, all the while maintaining the powerful refrain, “slavsia otechestvo nashe svobodnoe” [praised be our free fatherland]? I do not know. But I will admit that every single version of this anthem gives me chills, a fact that terrifies and disgusts me and also makes me fear the logic-crushing power of music. This video is my favorite, with its fabulous hair and glasses, its we-are-the-world united-front recording-studio feel and its Lenin-spelling birds. I love how it just goes on and on and on, far longer than a parody requires, so that after a while you start to suspect they’re not reveling in their mischief, but in the song.

A Jewish Wedding

2008-10-10T14:48:00.000-07:00

"The wedding ceremony ended, the rabbi sank into a chair, then he left the room and saw tables lined up the whole length of the courtyard. There were so many of them that the end stuck out of the gates onto Gospitalnaya Street. The tables, draped in velvet, coiled through the yard like a snake on whose belly patches of every color had been daubed, and these orange and red velvet patches sang in deep voices." -- Isaac Babel, "The King"

Babel's images of Jewish life in Odessa may have seduced the Russian reader of the 1920s and 30s, but the carnival of Jewish life that comes out in the Odessa Stories has had at least as great an impact on American Jewish writers. In this montage, set appropriately to Leonid Utesov and beginning with a Babelian image of decapitated poultry, Gregory Freidin notices the uncanny similarity between the wedding scenes in Vladimir Vilner's 1926 Benya Krik (a cinematic interpretation of Babel's Odessa Stories) and Larry Peerce's 1969 film version of Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus. Internalized antisemitism on all sides? A celebration of Jewish culture? Nothing to do with Jews or secular diaspora culture? The comments logged in response to this you-tube posting are almost as entertaining as the films themselves.

Woody Allen would later mine Russian literature to embellish his own version of American Jewish comedy with his 1975 Love and Death.

Next stop: the moon.

2008-03-04T09:24:00.000-08:00

Vladimir Motyl's 1970 "Beloe solntse pustyni" (White Sun of the Desert) may be an artistic failure, but the Okudzhava soundtrack and now-famous one-liners have turned it into a cult classic. Soviet astronauts, rumor has it, used to watch the film before take-off. A curious choice, particularly given the space voyages they had to choose from. Tarkovsky's brooding 1972 "Solaris" may have been inappropriate to the mood, but why not Protazanov's 1924 "Aelita, Queen of Mars"? The heroic exploits of captain Sukhov (Anatoly Kuznetsov), a Red Army officer who must fight counter-Revolutionary warriors and protect a harem in the Central Asian desert, must have evoked, for a superstitious cosmonaut, distance and adventure far more than the familiar martians of science fiction. The cheerful Sukhov, comforted by visions of his blond, red-scarved country wife, cannot bring himself to return home until he has rescued every last peasant he finds buried in the sand. Quite accidentally, the name given to Sukhov's greatest "Eastern" allie, Sayid (Spartak Mishulin), may recall, for more recent viewers, Edward Said's definition of Orientalism as "the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." (3) Of course, Orientalism, hardly a Soviet invention, was at least as important to literary and cultural self-formation in Russia as it was in Western Europe. Pushkin's 1823 "Bakhchisaraiskii fontan" (The fountain of Bakhchisarai) tells of a Tatar khan who kidnaps a Polish noblewoman, sparking envy in his harem. The poem was adapted into a ballet by Afasev and Zakharov in the 1930s. I am struck by certain similarities between the harem scenes in the ballet and in "Beloe Solntse" (scroll to 1:28 above). Below is a clip from a 1953 performance (danced by Maia Plisetskaia and Galina Ulanova). The Eastern woman's body, seductive and bare-waisted, provides important ornamentation; the Western woman, be she Polish or Russian, is the faithful (and faith-meriting) bride.

52 Seconds

2008-02-20T02:58:00.001-08:00

Film is a collaborative art. So is teaching. In an effort to lace my film syllabus with an unexpected challenge or two, I googled "film, syllabus, soviet" and was lucky enough to find a good idea by my colleague Yuri Leving, who teaches at Dalhousie University in Canada, and I quickly plugged it into my own nascent course. (Thanks Yuri -- and feel free to mine mine!) The good idea: a 52-second film, exactly the length of the Lumiere brother's first efforts, to be shot with whatever is on hand -- a cell phone, a macbook, a borrowed camera. I made the assignment optional and gave my students a week to put their projects together, but got a great collection of responses, from eccentric cats to a sunset-disco montage. Here is an especially impressive time-lapse, shot and edited by Tristan Loucks and featuring San Diego's Seaport Village.

Thank you, President Castro!

2008-02-20T01:24:00.000-08:00

I'd like to thank Fidel Castro for timing his resignation to fall on precisely the week in which I planned to teach Mikhail Kalatozov's marvelous 1964 film, "I Am Cuba/Soy Cuba/Ya Kuba." The film, which begins with a beauty pageant and ends with the triumph of the guerilla movement, presents the Cuban Revolution through a series of episodes increasing in solidarity and violence and decreasing in shadows that resemble cages.

My friend Roger Levy, upon seeing yesterday's New York Times photo essay, pithily summed up what many hope and others fear may be a disillusioning reversal in Fidel's revolutionary poetics: "He is wearing Adidas."

Image: www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/world/americas/20cuba.html

I am fire, you are water.

2008-02-13T15:37:00.000-08:00

Just twist! To be sure, the former Soviet Union is crawling with matreshka dolls, be they innocent and scarved or political (Lenin in Stalin in Brezhnev... all in the gullet of a stony-faced Putin; this particular set can be found at www.craftsofrussia.co.uk). In the last decade or two the matreshka has become multicultural: L.A. Laker matreshkas were popular in the 90's; I have a couple of Jewish klezmer matreshkas at home, bought in Odessa (clarinet in fiddle in accordion). But nobody understands the nesting doll better than a Russian, whose tiny babushka has been ever swallowed by greater forces.

So of course Matreshka should make a guest appearance in folk singer and choreographer Vladimir Devyatov's 2006 music video "Ia ogon, ty voda" (I'm fire, you're water). When opened by American characters of apparently increasing levels of social power, the doll becomes a folk-disco Pandora's box, the ultimate souvenir, offsetting American society from the courtyard janitors to the president. It's worth pointing out that the actors playing African American janitors are as unconvincingly American as the "dvor" in which most of the video takes place. The bizarre narrative is somehow at once complex and formulaic. (For more on the latter, take a look at some of the great work done by my friend Steve Lee.)

I doubt Devyatov had this in mind, but the soul of Russianness (marked here by ethnic music, costume and dance) that disrupts and exposes America's own social nesting dolls might be read as a new Slavic-centered version an old-fashioned Soviet suggestion that Leninism might disrupt the pattern of American racism. Compare this to Ivanov and Amalrik's 1933 Soviet cartoon "Chernoe i beloe" (Black and White), inspired by Mayakovsky. Even the costumes that open Devyatov's video take you back to the final Black-White confrontation in this haunting piece of Soviet animation. While both works are problematic, the older one is at least clear about its social message.