#after years of crowing and subsequently flaking out

[teadrunktailor]

Boy, do I ever have some good bad news for you

[topmixtrends]

“OÙ SONT les neiges d’antan?” Throughout my childhood, at odd moments, I heard my stepfather Vasily Yanovsky — a noted Russian émigré author who provides one of the bookends to this brilliant, poignant anthology — burst out with that melancholic line from François Villon. Even as a child, I could hear its wounded beauty. Now, as an ageing translator from the Portuguese, I can see it as a manifestation of saudades, the famously untranslatable Portuguese term best glossed as a yearning, a longing, both for what is now in the past and for what perhaps never existed. One might speculate that saudades and les neiges d’antan represent a universal response to our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. We are all exiles from a vague paradise that, by its nature, is forever blocked to us, creatures fallen from grace. Bryan Karetnyk, the expert editor of Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, suggests this poignant connection to the expulsion of our mythic ancestors with the epigraph to his introduction, taken from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; / The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest.”

Strange as it may seem, though born in New York and speaking at best an embarrassingly rudimentary Russian, I found myself quite at home in this anthology — at home in a world where loss was the starting point, death the never-forgotten conclusion, and love a desperately desired antidote or anodyne. Again I remember the expulsion, the rude thrusting of man and woman into a world of suffering and death, but also with the possibility of salvation: “They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.”

  Memory

Along with their clear, familiar tones of joy and despair, these tales also include minor details that remind me of my Russian-American childhood in New York in the 1940s. For example, Georgy Ivanov, in his tale “Giselle,” describes a billiard player’s apartment back in St. Petersburg, where the “windows […] had not yet been sealed with extra putty against the coming cold.” And suddenly I remember, for the first time in almost 70 years, my fascination with the gray strips of putty that my grandfather, a survivor of Siberian prisons, always clean-shaven and redolent of Eau de Cologne 4711, meticulously pressed into the gaps between window and windowsill in our ordinary apartment in ordinary Rego Park, Queens, allowing me the pleasure of pushing my fingers against the softly receptive substance. This unprofessional aside leads me back to the collection, and the title of a lengthy Parisian tale by Yury Felsen, “The Recurrence of Things Past,” with its obvious Proustian echo. Like Proust’s masterpiece, this anthology is, in fact, a book of memory. And suddenly I remember that Yanovsky’s last published book was Elysian Fields: A Book of Memory (1983, translated by my mother, Isabella Levitin Yanovsky, in 1987), in which he recounts the Russian émigré experience in Paris between the wars, with firsthand sketches of many of the writers included in the present anthology. And then I notice that Bryan Karetnyk initiates this very anthology with a salient quote from Vladimir Nabokov, in response to the question: “What is your most memorable dream?” His answer is: “Russia.”

As I step back for a wider view, I see a kind of double nexus permeating this collection of stories, a nexus of the remembered, seemingly distant past in Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sebastopol) — a kind of ghost that cannot be escaped — jostling against the more recent past of eternal displacement in Berlin, Paris, Nice, or Montpellier. And this doubleness, I now realize, explains why Yanovsky gave the fictional protagonist of his best-known novel No Man’s Time (1967, translated by my mother and Roger Nyle Parris, and introduced by W. H. Auden) two names: Cornelius Yamb and Conrad Jamb. As the protagonist says of himself: “It is not at all clear who I really am. For instance, one person will say: I, and the other also says: I … Do these two feel something different or is it exactly the same?” A dilemma indeed — the dilemma of the exile.

It’s appropriate, then, to begin my survey of the themes and symbols that recur throughout this collection by looking at memory’s dream, incarnated as les neiges d’antan.

  Snow

Ivan Shmelyov’s “Shadows of Days” is a lengthy, disjunctive nightmare of the past. But in the chaos of the narrator’s dreaming, religion and nature provide some solace: “I recall the lovely icons, my icons. They exist only in one’s childhood.” And then he encounters snow:

The night street shows blue. The snowdrifts are swept in mounds — you could drown in them. It has been snowing heavily all day. Great bales in snow-capped rows. It’s so quiet on our little street […] Atop the posts, atop the fences — little mounds of snow. Soft, powdery. Lanterns covered in snow shine drowsily; dogs dig up the snow with their snouts. Beyond the fence, among the birches, a crow croaks hoarsely, foretelling more snow.

For the American reader, this gentle, endless snow reminds us of Robert Frost’s ambiguous vision of stopping by woods on a snowy evening, where “the only other sound’s the sweep / of easy wind and downy flake” and where seduction is not easy to resist, for “the woods are lovely, dark, and deep.” In any case, as the dream flickers on, Shmelyov’s narrator is left with “joy, loss — all in a flash.” And when he awakes, it is in alien Paris, to the calls of a rag-and-bone man passing in the street.

In another nightmare vision, Nabokov’s “The Visit to the Museum,” the narrator leaves the titular building and finds himself, unexpectedly, in a snowy landscape:

The stone beneath my feet was real sidewalk, powdered with wonderfully fragrant, newly fallen snow, in which the infrequent pedestrians had already left fresh black tracks. At first the quiet and the snowy coolness of the night, somehow strikingly familiar, gave me a pleasant feeling after my feverish wanderings. Trustfully, I started to conjecture just where I had come out, and why the snow, and what were those lights exaggeratedly but indistinctly beaming here and there in the brown darkness.

Soon he realizes that the “strikingly familiar” snow-covered streets are those of Russia, which is now in Soviet hands. The story ends: “But enough. I shall not recount how I was arrested, nor tell of my subsequent ordeals. Suffice it to say that it cost me incredible patience and effort to get back abroad.”

  Love

A possible salvation from the long shadow of displacement is love. For example, in Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin’s “In Paris,” the narrator finds love in a Russian restaurant in the guise of Olga Alexandrovna, a waitress. We assume that solace has come to the uprooted protagonists in the form of a convenient alliance, and only at the end do we understand that the younger waitress had not only found support and comfort in the well-to-do older Russian gentleman, but had actually fallen in love with him. By that point the elderly gentleman is dead and the former waitress, turned rich by his death, is “convulsed by sobs, crying out, pleading with someone for mercy.” What touched me in this tale was the understated and simple drift from a casual pickup to a true love between two Russians, making their lonely way in the alien West.

Another story that turns with an unexpected rush toward love is Irina Odoevtseva’s “The Life of Madame Duclos,” in which, after a lifetime of compromises, the Russian protagonist, having bought comfort and success by marriage to an elderly Parisian, suddenly senses salvation in the offing with a younger Russian. This time, however, the heroine can only declare herself to her mirror:

“Hello,” she will say, in Russian. She can see her lips moving in the mirror, struggling to remember the long-forgotten Russian word.

“Hello.”

She leans closer to the mirror.

“Kolya …”

And, so close now that she’s touching the cool glass, she whispers:

“I love you. I love you!”

Alas, the yearned-for lover, unaware of her feelings, has slipped aboard a ship returning him to Russia: “And then there is nothing. No ship, no happiness, no life.”

Finally, Irina Guadanini’s “The Tunnel” is a sad retelling of the author’s doomed love for Vladimir Nabokov, who was then already married to Véra. The intensity of her love is sustained through the 13 sections of the tale, but in the end the unfortunate woman, grown frantic, falls from her perch high above the Italian coast — where she was seeking distance and perspective, while also trying to spy on her lover — and tumbles downhill to the railroad tracks. There she lies, perhaps dead, perhaps only dying, but clearly reminiscent of Anna Karenina, her literary progenitor. The glory and obsession of love give way to despair. The exile does not find salvation.

  Gambling

Though gambling is a universal human pursuit, Russian literature has given it a particular focus. In his notes, Karetnyk traces the literary portrayal of this obsession to Alexander Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades” (1834) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Gambler (1867), which was based on the author’s own experience with the deadly fascination of roulette. In fact, Dostoyevsky used proceeds from the novel to pay off large debts he had accumulated in the casino. In this collection, we encounter, in Georgy Adamovich’s “Ramón Ortiz,” an Argentine version of Dostoyevsky’s obsessed youth. With no restraint, no realistic self-appraisal, the young man, fond of being considered a baron, gambles his way from early success to utter destitution and resolves his situation by committing suicide. The narrator approves of this final act, seeing it as a proper response to the universe’s indifference toward the individual’s sufferings. Adamovich himself was the chief arbiter of the Paris Note, a Russian-Parisian literary movement that sought, in Karetnyk’s words, “to combine the despair of exile with the modern age of anxiety.” Certainly Ortiz’s suicide can be seen as indicative of both the despair of exile and the age of anxiety pressing on these displaced people. And I recall that shortly before Adamovich died, Yanovsky invited him to his home in New York to meet W. H. Auden, the man who coined the very phrase “Age of Anxiety.” It was a great satisfaction to Yanovsky to bring together the two intellectuals he admired most, one from his youthful years of exile in Paris, the other from his mature exile in the United States. Within one year of that meeting, both Adamovich and Auden were dead.

One of those who gambled over the bridge table with Yanovsky and Adamovich in Paris was Vladislav Khodasevich, whose story “Atlantis” depicts a circle of obsessed Russians immersed in games of bridge in a basement below the cafe Murat. (Interestingly, the lost land of Atlantis is also the setting for Yanovsky’s unpublished short story “The Adventures of Oscar Quinn.”) And in Dovid Knut’s “The Lady from Monte Carlo,” we again encounter an obsessed gambler, who can see the truth in others, if not himself: “these indifferent people [are] eternally — tragically — lost and disassociated from one another.” He is tempted by an older woman with a secret for winning (borrowed from Pushkin’s tale a century earlier), but in this version we have a seemingly happy ending: the ancient temptress resists her own urge to pass along her secret and insists that he leave her. Still, indifference reigns: “She kissed my forehead. The evening was cold, majestic, and indifferent.”

  Chaos

Entropy is, of course, our common foe — the one to whom, in the end, we must succumb. But for the exile, the onslaught of chaos can come early and in a heightened, phantasmagoric form. Here are snippets of chaos from Shmelyov’s “Shadows of Days”:

Night. Snow. I’m in the alleyways. […] Dead houses, closed gates. I’m lost, I don’t know where mine is. […] Dark, blind buildings. They’ve all gone. Now there’s just one road — […] I run in trepidation. The Champs-Élysées, my final road. […] The Elysian Fields! […] The end!

And “It’s them, they’ve come for me … I know it. […] The trees and the wind are whispering. Footsteps below the windows. I listen — a scratching at the window sill, they’re climbing up. […] I scream, I scream.”

In the anthology’s final text, Yanovsky’s “They Called Her Russia,” we encounter a vortex of entropy in a circular vision of hell: a trainful of soldiers going round and round through jumbled fields, never engaging “the enemy,” slowly spiraling through the repetitive brutality and madness of the Russian Civil War toward utter dissolution. In fact, it is never clear who the enemy is. Their own “engine-driver offered to find a way through to the Reds; the stoker tried to persuade them to join the partisans.” Eventually, “[t]hey decide to break through up ahead: if not Whites, then Reds — whomever they meet.” In this nightmare — where the commandant’s refrain is “Dream or real?” — the enemy they engage is themselves.

  Two Horses

It seems appropriate to conclude with the most painful, touching image I found in this anthology, an image that occurred twice: a horse without a rider, striking out into the sea — one in Gallipoli, the other in the Crimea. Both horses are valiant, yet have nowhere to go, no function to fulfill; nothing awaits them but death in an alien sea. They are abandoned by history. The narrator of Ivan Lukash’s “A Scattering of Stars,” a poetic evocation of the retreat to Gallipoli, tells of his beloved horse and its shameful end:

I spot my Leda […] craning her neck towards the water, whinnying, nostrils flaring. […] I see her suddenly, with all four legs, leap into the water. She couldn’t bear the thirst. She went crashing down, placed her lips to the sea salt and began jerking her head about. She jerked her head, Leda did, but she was soon swept away by the current.

And in Galina Kuznetsova’s “Kunak,” the denouement is even more poignant: “Above the grey misty water, a horse’s head could be seen craning. It was swimming apparently without knowing where it was going, borne by the current out towards the middle of the bay.” A rowboat comes to the rescue, but in fact only offers the hopeful horse three sudden bullets in the head, and then “the current was freely, and with terrible speed, bearing it away. It disappeared again, then reappeared … until finally it vanished for ever in the quick-flowing water.” The onlookers “all gasped in horror and compassion.”

And there we stand, observers of an entire culture carried out to sea, but with nowhere to go. There is much grimness, much pain, much despair in this collection, but it is also struck through with deep emotion and a pulsing sense of life. We contemplate the struggle of the exiles with horror and compassion, for we know that, at some level, we all share their plight.

¤

Alexis Levitin, a professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, translates works from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. His 40 books of translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions Publishing.

The post “Où sont les neiges d’antan?”: On “Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2C2EoLW

[londontheatre]

Lenny Henry in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at The Donmar Warehouse

The Donmar Warehouse today announces full casting for Bruce Norris’ new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s satirical masterpiece The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Simon Evans with design by Peter McKintosh. As previously announced, Lenny Henry will make his Donmar debut as Arturo Ui, he is joined by Michael Pennington, who recently played the title role in King Lear at the Royal & Derngate Northampton, as Dogsborough. Other casting includes Philip Cumbus, Lucy Eaton, Tom Edden, Lucy Ellinson, Simon Holland Roberts, Louis Martin, Justine Mitchell, Gloria Obianyo, Guy Rhys and Giles Terera.

Chicago! A city of jazz and gangsters, prohibition and poverty. Amongst the murk of the Great Depression, there’s room for a small time crook like Arturo Ui to make a name for himself.

Ui and his henchmen just want to look after you, to offer protection for workers, for jobs, for businesses. Nothing to fear. But a little bribery here, some harmless corruption there, and soon something much more dangerous takes hold.

Brecht’s satirical masterpiece about the rise of a demagogue will be given a new translation by Pulitzer, Olivier and Tony Award-winning American playwright, Bruce Norris. Lenny Henry makes his Donmar debut as Arturo Ui. Making theatre accessible to as many people as possible remains at the heart of the Donmar’s mission. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui has tickets available throughout the run via KLAXON TICKETS: a new allocation of tickets, starting from £10, being made available every Monday for performances two weeks later. Tickets will also be available across the auditorium at every price band.

The Donmar’s new YOUNG+FREE scheme, which provides free tickets to those aged 25 and under will also continue throughout the season, with releases for tickets on the last Friday of each month. YOUNG+FREE is made possible thanks to donations from Donmar audiences via PAY IT FORWARD. The Donmar has now received almost 2,750 donations alongside their partnership with Delta Airlines, which has enabled the venue to allocate almost 5,600 of these free tickets so far to those aged 25 and under.

Audiences can sign up to receive information about tickets on the Donmar’s website http://ift.tt/QGnINs Philip Cumbus (Clark/Prosecutor) makes his Donmar Warehouse debut in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Philip has made multiple appearances in productions at Shakespeare’s Globe including Comus, The Inn and Lydda, The Lightning Child, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Macbeth, Much Ado about Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo & Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. Other theatre credits include First Light (Festival Theatre), The Importance of Being Earnest (UK Tour and Vaudeville Theatre), Moon Tiger (Theatre Royal Bath and Tour), The Norman Conquests (Liverpool Playhouse), The Master Builder (Chichester Festival Theatre) and The Crucible (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre). Philip’s television credits include The Rebel.

Lucy Eaton (Dockdaisy) makes her Donmar Warehouse debut in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Lucy’s theatre credits include A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Southwark Playhouse), Almost Maine (Park Theatre), Win Lose Draw (Waterloo East) and The Duchess of Malfi (Old Vic).

Tom Edden (Announcer/Ragg/Sheet/Actor/Butler) makes his Donmar Warehouse debut in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Tom’s extensive theatre credits include Amadeus (National Theatre), Doctor Faustus (Duke of York’s), Peter Pan Goes Wrong (Apollo Theatre), Measure For Measure (Young Vic), Les Misérables (Queen’s Theatre), Oliver! (Sheffield Crucible) and One Man, Two Guvnors (National Theatre) for which he won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor, and was nominated for a Tony Award and Outer Critics’ Circle Award. Tom’s television credits include Upstart Crow, The Woman in Red and Dr Who. Film credits include Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens, Cinderella, The Wolf Man and Mr Turner.

Lucy Ellinson (Giri) makes her Donmar Warehouse debut in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Lucy’s theatre credits include Grounded (Gate Theatre), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (RSC), Mad Man (Plymouth Theatre Royal), Money: The Game Show (Bush Theatre), Trojan Women (Gate Theatre), Oh The Humanity! (and other good intentions) (Northern Stage/Soho Theatre) and Fib (National Theatre). Television and film credits include New Tricks, Underworld: Dublin Gangland and Really.

Lenny Henry (Arturo Ui) makes his Donmar Warehouse debut in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. He made his West End acting debut in the role of Othello in the Northern Broadsides production at the Trafalgar Studios. His portrayal won him critical acclaim and the London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Newcomer. Other theatre includes Fences (on tour and West End), Rudy’s Rare Records (Birmingham Rep and Hackney Empire) and The Comedy of Errors (National Theatre).

Lenny has been a comedian since the age of 16, finding fame as a comedy impressionist on 70’s TV talent show, New Faces. Other television work includes TISWAS, Three of a Kind, The Lenny Henry Show, Hope & Glory, Lenny Henry in Pieces, Chef! and the Saturday night BBC1 show, The Magicians. He has completed many sell-out live stand-up tours in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. On radio, Lenny worked for three years as a DJ on BBC Radio 1. He has also worked extensively for Radio 4, starring in the comedy Rudy’s Rare Records, he wrote the Radio 4 play Corinne Come Back and Gone and presented the series Lenny and Will.

Simon Holland Roberts (Butcher/Judge) has previously appeared at the Donmar Warehouse in Artistic Director Josie Rourke’s production of Saint Joan. Theatre includes Cyrano, All My Sons, Hamlet, Arms and the Man, Aristocrats, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Taming of the Shrew and Arden of Faversham (Theatr Clwyd), Of Mice and Men (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Assembly 13 (National Theatre Wales), Love’s Labour’s Lost, Othello, Sex Strike, Edward IV, Henry VI, The School for Scandal, The Comedy of Errors and Sweet William (Northern Broadsides), Sheepish (Manchester 24:7), The Tempest (Northern Broadsides, New Vic Stoke, UK and China tour), The Man with Two Gaffers (Northern Broadsides, Theatre Royal York and UK tour), Richard III (Northern Broadsides, West Yorkshire Playhouse and UK tour), Sea of Silence (Quicksilver), Man is Man (Steam Industry). Television credits include All at Sea, Da Vinci’s Demons, Stepping Up, Coronation Street, Hollyoaks, Shameless, Eric & Ernie, Accused, The Street.

Louis Martin (Bodyguard/Caruther) makes his Donmar Warehouse debut in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Louis’ stage credits include Future Conditional (Old Vic), Love’s Labour’s Lost, Last Days of Troy (Shakespeare’s Globe) and A Witness For The Prosecution (The Agatha Christie Theatre Company).

Justine Mitchell (Public Defender/Betty Dullfeet) has previously appeared at the Donmar Warehouse in Michael Grandage’s production of King Lear. Justine’s extensive theatre credits include The Plough and the Stars (National Theatre), For Services Rendered (Chichester Festival Theatre), Love For Love (RSC), Man – Three Plays By Tennessee Williams (Young Vic), The Rivals (Arcola Theatre), Mr Burns (Almeida Theatre), Gastronauts (Royal Court) Detroit and Children of the Sun (National Theatre). Television credits include The Suspicions of Mr Whicher II, Harry and Paul, Doctors, New Tricks and Wild At Heart. Justine has also appeared on film in The Stag, Imagine Me and You, Citizen Verdict, The Honeymooners, Goldfish Memory and Conspiracy of Silence.

Gloria Obianyo (Flake/Hook) makes her Donmar Warehouse debut in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Gloria’s stage credits include The Wild Party (St James Theatre), The Grinning Man (Bristol Old Vic) and Jesus Christ Superstar (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre).

Michael Pennington (Dogsborough) has previously appeared at the Donmar Warehouse in The Cosmonauts Last Message to the Woman He Loved. Michael’s most recent theatre credits include King Lear (UK Tour), She Stoops to Conquer (Theatre Royal Bath), A Winter’s Tale (Garrick Theatre), Richard II (RSC), Dances of Death (Gate Theatre), Judgement Day (The Print Room), Sweet William (Michael has also appeared in numerous productions at Chichester Festival Theatre, including Anthony and Cleopatra, The Syndicate, The Master Builder, Collaboration and Taking Sides). Michael has appeared on television in Endeavour, Father Brown, Silent Witness, Holby City, The Tudors, Lewis, Walking the Dead and The Bill, and on film in The Iron Lady and Return of the Jedi. Together with director Michael Bogdanov, Michael founded the English Shakespeare Company in 1986 and is an honorary Associate Artist.

Guy Rhys (Givola) has previously appeared at the Donmar Warehouse in Artistic Director Josie Rourke’s production of Saint Joan. Most recent theatre appearances include Pomona originating at the Orange Tree Theatre, and subsequent National Theatre/Manchester Royal Exchange revival. Other theatre credits include Jason and the Argonauts (Unicorn), Bird (Sherman Cymru and Manchester Royal Exchange), Wendy & Peter (RSC), Rafta Rafta (Bolton Octagon) and Mother Courage and Her Children (National Theatre).

Giles Terera (Roma) makes his Donmar Warehouse debut in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Giles’ stage credits include Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Hamlet, Death and the King’s Horseman, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, Troilus and Cressida, Candide, Honk!, The Darker Face of the Earth, Mind the Gap and Walk in the Light (National Theatre), The Tempest (RSC). Other theatre credits include The Book of Mormon (Prince of Wales Theatre), Pure Imagination (St James’ Theatre), The Merchant of Venice (Globe Theatre, International Tour) King John (Globe Theatre & UK tour), Don’t You Leave Me Here (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Up on the Roof (Chichester Festival Theatre), Six Degrees of Separation (Sheffield Crucible) and Generations of the Dead (Young Vic). Giles has appeared on television in Horrible Histories and Doctors, and on film in The Current War, Muse of Fire and London Boulevard.

(All other characters will be played by members of the company.)

THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI By Bertolt Brecht Translated by Bruce Norris Friday 21 April – Saturday 17 June 2017 Press Night Tuesday 2 May 2017 Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street, Seven Dials, London WC2H 9LX http://ift.tt/QGnINs

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