IZO

Top films at the Russian box-office 2008. First two places go to Russian movies (1st: Irony of Fate 2 (Ирония судьбы-2) – $50 million; 2nd: The Admiral (Адмиралъ) – $33.4 million), the rest I think are imports (Open Space, in Russian). In books, Stephanie Meyer's vampire trilogy topped the pre-New Year shopping list (Open Space, in Russian) and the top-selling Russian-language author was Boris Akunin, no. 5; obviously, this line-up reflects gift-giving preferences with young people in mind so it may not indicate the sales pattern in other weeks. Apparently Meyer the books, on which the excellent movie Twilight is based, were inspired by a dream (Stephanie Meyer).

The views of the nutty Russian professor, Igor Panarin, are getting re-runs in the US press (WSJ) for some reason that I can't fathom: we covered them a month or two ago (IZO, earlier). His contention that, for example, Texas will secede to Mexico due to the influx of Hispanic immigrants is plainly ridiculous: the immigrants are coming to Texas and surrounding states in order to escape from Mexico, surely. The WSJ article, although it states clearly that the Panarin US break-up theory appeals to the "Russian state media", may give the impression that it has broad intellectual currency in Russia: it doesn't. Prof Panarin's views do however veil very real anxieties about Russia itself. Vladimir Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik, the 2006 novel which many fear is a blueprint for the Russian future, contains the following dialogue between "traitors":

Chairman of the Duma:
So, we'll seize power. But what shall we do with Russia, Sergei Ivanovich?

Minister:
Chop it up and sell it off.

Chairman:
To whom?

Minister:
The East to the Japanese, Siberia to the Chinese, Krasnodar Terrirtory to the Ukrainians, Altai to the Kazakhs, Pskov region to the Estonians, Novgorod region to the Belorussians. And the middle bit we'll keep for ourselves.

Now, the transformation of Russia won't happen by means of "chop it up and sell it off", but may well occur organically. An acquaintance of mine who visited Irkutsk recently tells me that the city is filling up with Chinese traders and businessmen, many of whom are marrying the local Russian girls. Apparently they don't drink and work hard and thus make, in some ways at least, ideal husbands. One can imagine that the Chinese one-child policy, which has led to a preponderance of boy children, could increase this kind of sexual expansionism. Sorokin's novel, set about 2030 I think, posits a huge Chinese presence in Russia; and the now-fashionable Eurasian political movement led by Alexander Dugin is, in a sense, an acknowledgement of such a future.

If you feel like it, you can watch the whole of the recent dramatisation of The Master and Margarita on youtube, with English subtitles.

Michael Nicholson replies to Zinovy Zinik on Solzhenitsyn (TLS). Zinik's original letter (IZO, earlier).

Rich man's fancy: Russian businessman Evgeni Yakovlev has paid for a series of photos featuring Isabelle Adjani as Margarita from Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita (kinomania).

More Syava. 

The separation of Russia and Ukraine puts a cat among the cultural pigeons. Who's whose? Is Mikhail Bulgakov a Russian or Ukrainian genius (Guardian). The same sort of question could be asked, I suppose, about Malevich, Kulik, or even Ilya Kabakov (born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine) – or indeed about a host of other artists born in, and trained in, the regions of the former Russian Empire. But, wherever an artist came from, usually we find that a particular city has a formative professional effect. Bulgakov became a major writer while living in Moscow, where he moved in 1921. If he's a Ukrainian writer, then maybe Picasso is a Spanish painter.

Trailer for movie of Pelevin's classic novel, Generation P.

Marat Guelman knows why he was beaten up in October 2006 (IZO, earlier, at end of post) (galerist, in Russian):

Not for internationalism, not for the exhibition of a Georgian artist at the time of an anti-Georgian campaign, and not because the Blue Noses depicted Putin naked and Christ next to Pushkin. But because I allowed [Eduard] Limonov to hold his book presentation in my gallery.

Zinik re-kindles Solzhenitsyn controversy (TLS). UPDATE: Zinik's letter:

In his thorough survey of contemporary studies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s life and works (November 28), Michael Nicholson quotes from an essay by Alexander Genis in which the Russian writer refers to Solzhenitsyn as “the last prophet of Apollo in the abandoned temple of absolute truth”. This quotation is taken out of context and Genis’s words are, in fact, ironical. They refer to the title of a pompous essay by Solzhenitsyn, published in an émigré journal, in which (quoting Pushkin’s verse in the title) he attempted to debunk the enemies of the Russian sense of morality and beauty, comparing them to those who tried to shake the temple of Apollo. A sense of righteousness never left Solzhenitsyn throughout his tumultuous career.

In a BBC documentary which recorded Solzhenitsyn’s pilgrimage from Vladivostok to Moscow, after twenty years of exile in Vermont, there was a brief exchange (in Russian) between the writer and his wife as he prepared to alight from the train to meet the crowd of admirers on Russian soil. “Smile, smile!” prompts his wife. “No smiles”, retorts the grand man. “An expression of restrained benevolence is what we need now.” This bit of dialogue was not translated for the British audience.

Solzhenitsyn always knew which facial expression was appropriate for Russia at any given moment. Not everyone, though, accepted this. He was regarded as a mendacious political manipulator by Varlam Shalamov who, like Primo Levi, created out of his own experience of the prison camps a picture of an unmitigated and unredeemable hell that shows us everything and teaches us nothing. Solzhenitsyn, instead, created a pedagogical fable of suffering that leads to a Dostoevskian kind of redemption.

Since Russia’s politics are now heavily influenced by a ruling group made up of former KGB employees, this conception of Russian history suits the authorities very well. Solzhenitsyn was nominated for the Order of Lenin by Khrushchev, but went too far in his exposure of Stalinist atrocities, and fell out with the Soviet leadership. Many decades later, however, he was granted a similar state award by Vladimir Putin. It was presented to him by President Putin himself, in Solzhenitsyn’s new home in Moscow.

This visit was filmed by Russian state television. Solzhenitsyn, the former political prisoner, showed every corner of his house – even his study – to Putin, the former KGB officer who had publicly defended Stalinism as a historical necessity. Putin praised Solzhenitsyn for demonstrating to the younger generation how difficult this patriotic road to great statehood had been. The scene was a heartbreaking betrayal of everything that Solzhenitsyn had declared he stood for; unless in reality he stood for something else altogether.

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Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the possibly misleadingly-named Liberal-Democratic party, gives his views on literature. It turns out that чукча не читатель, чукча писатель (Dni.ru, with video; in Russian).

The tenth Non/Fiction book fair for "intellectuals" at the Central House of the Artist is proving tremendously popular (drugoi).

Zinovy Zinik's new book, Letters from the Third Shore (Письма с Третьего Берега), apparently about life in Britain, will be presented at Kvartira 44 on Malaya Yakimanka this evening at 20.00.

It's a general misapprehension that Britain is an island. Britain is several islands. And each has its own Robinson Crusoe. More than one. And what's more, since each man is an island, we are all the Crusoes of our own existence," says Zinovy Zinik in one of his sketches about Britain.

The obscure career of Bohumil Konečný, 1905-81 (Tony Ozuna/Prague Post):

Bohumil Konečný ... has been unjustly ignored, and ultimately forgotten by Czechs due to an unfortunate turn of events at the peak of his career.  ... In 1965, Konečný had made an acquaintance with an admirer of his work, Petr Sadecký. ... In 1967, Sadecký emigrated to the West, though he kept in touch with Konečný, sending him letters and postcards. What Konečný didn’t know was that Sadecký was busy trying to pass himself off as the author of Konečný’s works, first for Karel May Publishers in Germany, then more ambitiously as the discoverer of a group of disaffected Soviet dissidents who, he claimed, had created a heroine named Octobriana, a voluptuous woman with superhuman powers. In 1971, in London, Sadecký published and promoted a false samizdat book, Octobriana and the Russian Underground, which briefly became a media sensation. David Bowie was so inspired by Octobriana that he wrote songs about her intended for a film. In reality, however, Octobriana was the Amazona character originally drawn by Konečný, simply altered by the imposter Petr Sadecký.

Berlin-based philosopher Mikhail Ryklin has published a new book, Kommunismus als Religion (Communism As Religion) (shaherezada, in Russian).

Karl Marx's Das Kapital re-issued as Japanese manga (Independent).

The number of readers of the first chapters of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s internet-published novel Metro 2034 has reached 100,000 in a month (Russia-IC):

According to the author’s concept, the content is updated every two weeks. The number of readers interested to know the continuation is growing thanks to the music accompaniment: the popular musician Delfin composes soundtracks for each chapter

Darya Dontsova is the most prolific detective author (Russia IC)? Flying out of Sheremetevo recently I bought her book Fanera Milosskaya, featuring the quaintly-named private eye Evlampiya Romanova, but even given that I had nothing else to read on the plane I found it tough going. The text is apparently a husband-obsessed disquisition pandering to female anxiety. The first half-dozen pages feature Evlampiya's extended opinion on how you will lose your husband if you nag him; a cameo of an alcoholic husband and despairing wife; and a client who wants Evlampiya to check up on her possibly cheating other half.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky's punishment for giving an interview to Boris Akunin (IZO, earlier) – 12 days in solitary confinement – has been judged illegal by a Chita court (Open Space, in Russian).

Artist Anna Gutova, using the pseudonym Anna Zhukova, has written a novel called Did I Promise You? (Я Тебе Обещала?) "about life, set in the art world" (galerist, in Russian).

Eleven leading writers, including four Nobel Prize-winners, have published a letter in a French newspaper support of Milan Kundera, accused of acting in 1950 as a communist stool-pigeon (svobodanews.ru, in Russian) (IZO, earlier).

Yesterday's Evening Standard (not on internet as far as I can tell) draws attention to an editorial in the summer 2008 issue of Kritika, entitled Marketing Russian History, which looks sceptically at the huge advances given to Antony Beevor and Simon Sebag-Montefiore (Kritika; click on Volume 9, Number 3, Summer 2008/From the Editors).

The French publisher Diane de Selliers is claiming that the Russian publisher Slovo has plagiarised a number of its art books and is claiming compensation in a French court (Bibliobs, in French, with side-by-side comparison).

Writer Zakhar Prilepin answers oligarch-turned-literary-critic Petr Aven (radulova, in Russian). IZO mentioned Aven's critique of Prilepin's book a couple of weeks ago (IZO).

I've come across Victor Serge in the history books, but never read any fiction by him; now he is in print thanks to New York Review Books (Confluence City).

Bloomsbury Auctions NY Russian Literature and Art sale is on Wednesday at 10.00 am (Bloomsbury Auctions).

Rare books have shot up in price in Moscow recently. At a recent sale (I think, Sovcom's of 23 October, but it's not specified) Mandelshtam's Stone (1913) made 350,000 roubles ($13,000) from a reserve of 37,000. The first three issues of Apollon art magazine for 1909 made 48,000 roubles ($1,750) (Kommersant, in Russian).

A square in Paris – exactly which is not clear – will be re-named in honour of Solzhenitsyn (Open Space, in Russian).

Vitali Komar and novelist Gary Shteyngart to speak at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art on the University of Oklahoma campus, Friday and tomorrow respectively (Norman Transcript).

Interesting perhaps as an insight into the oligarch mindset: top art collector Petr Aven's review of Zakhar Prilepin's novel San'kya (v-orlov, in Russian).

Milan Kundera "is no longer acceptable as a moral institution" (Ceske Noviny).

The manuscript of a legendary satirical opera about Stalin and Stalinism by Polish writer Stanislav Lem has been discovered in the late author's archive; he had hidden it so well that he couldn't find it himself (Open Space, in Russian).

One of the things that unites Russia and the West is that no-one has read anything by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (RIA Novosti, in Russian; LA Times; Evening Standard).

The what-might-have-been "alternative reality" list of Nobel Prize for Literature winners does give you pause for thought about the prize's relevance, not just today but, er, ever (Great Books Guide). The literature prize seems to benefit from some kind of reflected glory from the science prizes, which presumably are quite soundly-based. Mind you, the art world throws up just as many overnight wonders. When Graham Greene was alive there'd always be a frenzy of speculation in the British press about whether he'd get it. He never did of course. Then, after the announcement, they'd ask him his feelings about some author he'd probably never heard of. His answer would be something like: "Well, it'll give him a boost." Russia has done OK: four winners in fifty years: Brodsky (already an emigre), Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov (the endless debates concerning his authorship or not of The Quiet Don seem to have been put to sleep: I for one liked that conspiracy theory), and Pasternak.

After much media discussion and anxiety, the State Duma has decided that Russian libraries of national significance will be allowed to make electronic copies of some books for consultation in the library (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

Jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has received seven twelve days in a punishment cell for giving an interview (IZO, earlier) to novelist Boris Akunin (Kommersant, in Russian).

Imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has given an interview to detective-story writer Boris Akunin for Russian Esquire; the text is downloadable from Khodorkosky's website (khodorkovsky.ru, in Russian; via Open Space).

Photos from the shoot of Viktor Pelevin's Generation P at a small railway station in Shcherbinka, Moscow region (drugoi, in Russian). Review of the latest Pelevin in English (NY Times).

Today is the 75th birthday of satirist and journalist Ilya Suslov, former editor the Twelve Chairs Club in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, now resident in Washington, DC.

The Russian Booker (Букер) Prize finalists have been announced (gazeta.ru, in Russian). The winner will be announced on 3 December.

Re: spread of Russia culture in West: Sergei Dovlatov in IKEA catalogue (thanks, MK).

On the naming of Solzhenitsyn Street (NY Times) (thank, MK).

Detective-story writer Daria Dontsova is Russia's top-selling author; she also has the most books in print - 68 (Russia-IC). Here's the first para of A Toad with a Purse (Жаба с кошельком):

Finding a husband is an art, keeping him is a profession.

Good grief, I can't understand why women are always moaning they can't find someone to marry. Girls, getting a guy into the registry office is a piece of cake, but afterwards, when the Mendelsohn march has faded away and you've returned from the honeymoon to sunny Turkey or a resort near Moscow, that's when it begins. You've got some unpleasant surprises in store: your guy, it turns out, snores, demands hot meals and ironed shirts. And you're lucky if you've got your own place to live and your mother-in-law comes round only at weekends.

Chick-lit, Russian-style.

A review of One More Year by Sana Krasikov (Languagehat).

Viktor Pelevin's latest book P⁵ (П⁵: прощальные песни политических пигмеев пиндостана) goes on sale on 5 October (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

Michel Houellebecq will be the latest in a succession of French literary stars to visit Moscow when he attends the 2morrow contemporary film festival 17-20 October (gazeta.ru, in Russian).

Russian writers have written to President Medvedev to complain that new regulations allowing libraries to digitize the books in their collections will lead to wholesale electronic piracy of copyrighted materials (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

Novelist Boris Strugatski on the Russia-Georgia conflict (Novaya Gazeta, in Russian):

People are constituted so as to hear, first and foremost, what they want to hear. ... The media do not create a world-view, they reinforce a world-view. And our world-view (the mass world-view, I mean) remains totalitarian. "Others should fear us." "We are the best." "The master is always right." ... Official propaganda attaches itself to this ingenuous outlook like butter to a pancake: easily and sweetly.

Literary critics feared that after the Soviet collapse, the easy availability of popular romance novels and thrillers would seduce Russian readers away from deeper works. Now they attribute a literary revival to the country's new authoritarianism  (NPR, podcast) (thanks, MK).

How to cheat at reading War and Peace (Michael Gove/Times):

Dive in media res. Go straight to volume 2, part 4, and read it all, only 13 chapters, pages 533-587. (See overall plot summary, p1385.)