Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
I was going to write about a Russian’s author’s reaction to Herta Müller‘s Herztier but did not get far past the title. Literally, it means “Heart-beast.” The German Wiki entry claims it is a rendering of a Romanian neologism, inimal = inimă…
My comment, expanded and modified, to Tim Newman’s post on the government-supported restaurant chain proposed by the Russian filmmakers Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky and Nikita Mikhalkov. As La Stampa writes incredulously, “what is somewhat astonishing” is that the people promoting “patriotic food”…
This is shameful and sad. Russian theater seems to be going through a golden age but artistic censorship can quickly put an end to it. Timofey Kuliabin, principal director at the Red Torch drama theater in Novosibirsk, is one of the younger contributors to…
Ivan Bunin (1870-1953), the fine story writer and poet who was also the first Russian author to win the Nobel prize, wrote in his diary known as The Accursed Days, referring to the folly of the Bolsheviks and their followers: Besides, much is…
By default, the Russia word slivki means “cream” (only in the sense of the dairy product) but can also mean “little plums.” It has been claimed that Constance Garnett, the industrious translator of Russian classics into English, more than once…
In one of his bitterest poems, In Front of the Looking Glass, Vladislav Khodasevich wondered how he, once a young dancer at summer balls in Ostankino, near Moscow, had mutated into a critic whose every riposte induces “revulsion, animus and fear”…
Following up on this, I must admit haven’t read the dramatic trilogy, The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard, and I’m not sure I’m going to, any time soon. The brothers Ostrovsky, who translated the work into Russian, faced difficult…
I have finally seen Alexei Borodin‘s and Russian Youth Theater‘s production of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. The work consists of three full-scale plays so the show lasted for 10 hours gross and eight hours net of intermissions. Yet, to my…
I have come across at least two comparisons of Amanda Knox to Isabel Archer, the protagonist of The Portrait of a Lady, a great American novel by Henry James. I had tried reading James before but found him boringly pedantic.…
Every other Russian knows this joke. A telephone rings. “Hello, is this the laundry?” “Laundry, shmaundry! [Prachechnaya-kherachechnaya!] This is the Ministry of Culture.” Last week, Russia’s culture minister Vladimir Medinsky vowed not to hand out government grants to documentaries negative…
I’ve looked up “яростная судьба” in different cases and unearthed three other instances of its use in poetic translation, none of them as appropriate as Lozinsky’s. “Средь диких дум о яростной судьбе” (prepositional case) is found in Georgy Shengeli‘s 1930s translation…
I have commented on Argumentative Old Git‘s post on Shakespeare performances outside Britain. Preti Taneja’s call in The Guardian, “It’s time to break the national monopoly on Shakespeare,” is two centuries late. Maybe more. Russia was a latecomer to the fest but…