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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
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)
