Category arts

Stalin and John Wayne

Whether or not Stalin ordered John Wayne killed, it is well known that the Great Leader was a big fan of Hollywood movies. As an anecdote goes, he once asked a certain Jewish Soviet composer of popular music whether his…

The abominable crime of bloggery

Nabokov says, in The Gift (Dar), that Hertzen, the famous Russian revolutionary, confused “beggar” with “bugger”, mistaking the two words for one, and came to a conclusion that the English must highly respect wealth. Alexandr Ivanovich Herzen, an illegitimate son…

[Tsvetaeva]

Hundreds of church bells were arguing. It was a Saturday, John the Divine. What year was it? Can anyone recognize the source?

Into the fire of your dilated pupils

There is a Russian (indie?) rock band named Splean. Yes, this is the way they spell it in English. The Russian word splinis indeed an English loan (<spleen), sounding and meaning about the same as the source word – a…

The Old Women

From the Russian daily Kommersant: …The director “ascertained the reality of a ‘gentle Moslem occupation’ exemplified by the co-existence in a faraway Kostroma village of a few lonely old women and a family of Uzbek refugees with their numerous children.…

Movies and clowns

The WSJ on museum looting in Baghdad: Modernist art in Russia all but died in the 1920s, when Lenin denounced it as bourgeois and decadent, decreeing that the purpose of art was to glorify the revolution and the worker. Lenin…

The bad guys from Birthday Girl

Of all the four front-row characters in Birthday Girl, the English fiancé looks the most Russian. Yes, you can find types like that among bank clerks and even computer programmers in Moscow. I thought only Russians wear short sleeves with suit…

Zhivago mini

Colby Cosh, watching the new Doctor Zhivago mini, admits, “I have zero familiarity with the book or the legendary film”. Well, I have some familiarity with the book, having read it at the age of 15 or 16 and taken…

The language of K-19

K-19 is being shown on Russian Channel 1 right now. Dubbed. I’ve seen pieces of it before; Harrison Ford adopting a Russian accent and all that. Just fifteen minutes ago or so, I watched Liam Neeson as sub commander being…

The State of the Arts under Communism

Brian Micklethwait comments on a piece by Alan Little, who is asking: “So why does art produced under Stalin not make me queasy whereas art produced under Hitler does?” Because it is simply not true that all works of art and letters produced…