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Rating/reviewing my Russian lit compulsory readings (Part 1)
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Евгений Замятин - Мы) 8.5/10
I had a lot of fun with this one!!! I was actually surprised by how much it pulled me in and how much I enjoyed it, I finished it in two days and I usually read really slow. If you like 1984 by Orwell, this was what inspired it so you can expect something very similar in vibe and themes. There's racism in the descriptions of one character and it really irked me so that's what made my rating drop a bit.
Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel (Исаак Бабель - Конармия) 6/10
It was not bad but not to my tastes, it's a short story collection and some of them I liked, some I didn't enjoy as much. It's quite gruesome at parts in the "realities of war" kinda way so if you don't take those topics well, I don't recommend.
The master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Михаил Булгаков - Мастер и Маргарита) 9.5/10
I loved it!!! I know it's a big classic and I actually read it many years ago and now that it's required for class I only leafed through it again, but still it's among my faves. It's suspenseful, the story and the characters are all great, overall just such a good read. Not giving a 10 only bc I rarely give a perfect rating to anything vsjdgskgdjd
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov (Владимир Набоков - Приглашение на казнь) 8.5/10
I read this back in high school too but it was really fun to freshen up my memories about it, it's quite a condensed and hard read if you ask me, as it's very surreal and philosophical, but it's very good! If I had to describe it in one expression, it would be fever dream.
Liompa by Yury Olesha (Юрий Олеша - Лиомпа) 7.5/10
It's just one short story but I decided I'd rate anything longer than two pages so here we go. It was fun and I really liked the atmosphere of it, it gave peace of home (other than the obvious theme of dying gdksgskdhjs).
#russian literature#russian langblr#studyblr#русская литература#the course is called 'Russian literature from avant garde to present days'#and it's my very last semester lit course!#I have a lot a lot of workload this semester so I decided to start posting again to motivate myself :')#I have a C1 Russian language exam on April 6th I'm so anxious about it#and my thesis is due on 15th April#shrews post#if you're curious about any of them or have read and wanna chat#you can message me anytime!
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Charlie Chaplin in Moscow
Early Soviet filmmakers took great inspiration from Charlie Chaplin, but his critique of mass production put him at odds with them.
In Charlie Chaplin’s 1914 film The Fatal Mallet, you can see “IWW” chalked on a wall in the background. While no one knows if the director — who grew up in south London’s slums and became a globally recognized comedian — supported the Wobblies at the time, we do know that the characters he played in dozens of short films in the 1910s and early 1920s would have.
In The Adventurer, he plays an escaped convict; in Police, an ex-con forced into burglary by unemployment; in The Bank, a janitor working next to, but unable to get ahold of, money; in Work, a downtrodden contractor; in The Immigrant, a migrant so frustrated by his treatment he kicks an immigration officer; and, of course, in The Tramp, a homeless man looking for a stable life. All these men, who populated the rapidly changing, expanding, and radicalizing United States, might well have written IWW on a fence in Los Angeles.
Chaplin wouldn’t state his politics explicitly until well into the 1930s, a move that would put him in the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ crosshairs. But in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, young Soviet artists, designers, and filmmakers already thought they knew exactly what his politics were.
In 1922, the new Moscow magazine Kino-Fot, edited by the constructivist theorist and committed Communist Aleksei Gan, published a special issue on Chaplin. Throughout, painter and designer Varvara Stepanova depicted the actor as an abstract object, his body’s parts transformed into exploded shards and flying polygons, identifiable only thanks to his trademark hat, cane, and moustache.
Aleksandr Rodchenko’s text declares, manifesto-style:
[Charlie’s] colossal rise is precisely and clearly — the result of a keen sense of the present day: of war, revolution, Communism.
Every master-inventor is inspired to invent by new events and demands.
Who is it today?
Lenin and technology.
The one and the other are foundations of his work.
This is the new man designed — a master of details, that is, the future anyman.
That same year in Petrograd, teenagers Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, and Sergei Yutkevich, who collectively called themselves The Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), published something called “The Eccentric Manifesto.” Under the sign of “Charlie’s arse,” they demanded:
ART AS AN INEXHAUSTIBLE BATTERING RAM SHATTERING THE WALLS OF CUSTOM AND DOGMA. But we have our forerunners! They are: the geniuses who created the posters for cinema, circus, and variety theatres, the unknown authors of dust jackets for adventure stories about kings, detectives, and adventurers; like the clown’s grimace, we spurn your High Art as if it were an elasticated trampoline in order to perfect our own intrepid salto of Eccentrism!
Meanwhile, a film director was perfecting a technique that would eventually bear his name: the Kuleshov effect, in which the juxtaposition of unrelated material creates a new mental link between them. He argued against slow paced, European montage, which treats cinema as a high art form akin to theater, and for the high-speed American montage that thrilled audiences.
Somehow, these people, all trying to create art in the young Soviet Union, agreed that Chaplin represented their ideal. In a series of theatrical productions and films over the next decade, they would try to make something that had the same effect on their viewers — a socialist, avant-garde slapstick comedy, informed by silent farce, technological romanticism, and contempt for high culture.
This history sits a little strangely with what many know about the Soviet Union’s first fifteen years of experimental filmmaking. Its directors, including Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Vsevelod Pudovkin as well as documentary pioneers like Dziga Vertov and Esther Shub, have earned formidable reputation for applying Marxist methodology to film.
Their contributions, including “the montage of attractions,” the “camera eye,” the “intellectual montage,” and the aforementioned Kuleshov effect, have grounded film curricula since the 1960s, often used in contrast to Hollywood’s formulaic spectacles. In fact, when French filmmaker Jean Luc-Godard stopped making crowd-pleasers in the 1960s and opted instead for punishing Althusserian didactic tableaux, he signed his films Dziga Vertov Group.
What this story leaves out is how Soviet directors’ ideas came out of their obsessions with the crassest and most lurid kinds of American film, its chases, special effects, and pratfalls. In translating Chaplin for Lenin, they combined these elements with their equally strong interest in another aspect of 1910s America: scientific management and industrial efficiency, especially the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford.
The resulting films shared a bizarre and unstable comic Americanism, which you can see still in films like Kuleshov’s Adventurers of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, a high-speed, Keystone Kops satire about Western perceptions of the Soviet state; Boris Barnet’s Miss Mend, where an international communist secret society foils the evil plans of nefarious capitalists; Sergei Komarov’s A Kiss For Mary Pickford and Pudovkin’s Chess Fever, which used footage of American stars on Soviet visits and put them into new, bizarre farces; and Eisenstein’s first feature, Strike, where insurgent workers move with all the bounce and assurance of a mass circus troupe.
Stage director Vsevelod Meyerhold helped pioneer this style. From the early 1920s onwards, he developed a “biomechanical theater” that borrowed equally from the circus’s high-wire tricks and gymnastic leaps, from Charlie Chaplin’s and Buster Keaton’s jerky, ironic slapstick, and from the USSR’s development of Taylorism, led by government-sponsored think tanks like the League of Time and the Central Institute of Labor. The latter’s founder, Aleksei Gastev, a former metalworker, union leader, and poet, became a key figure for most of the 1920s avant-garde.
Looked at coldly, his ideas are unnerving and dystopian. He imagined the new Soviet working class as nameless machines working in seamless unified motion, a somewhat unlikely and wholly unfulfilled demand of the chaotic, largely rural, and unskilled labor force of the Soviet 1920s. Yet while Taylorism involved monitoring the worker’s motions to transform them into a predictable, high-performance cogs, Meyerhold’s biomechanics saw its protagonists as Chaplin-like comic machines, capable of humor and exuberance, not drab labor.
This appears even more strongly in another form of Soviet Chaplinism, which comes from an unlikely direction — formalist literary criticism. The great Viktor Shklovsky used Chaplin as an exemplar of his concept of “ostranienie” or “making-strange.” In his 1922 Literature and Cinematography, he tried to work out what set Chaplin apart from other actors, finally deciding that “the fact that [the movement] it is mechanized” makes it so funny.
In the American context, Chaplin was satirizing industrial, mass-production labor, but in the Soviet landscape — destroyed by seven years of war and economic collapse — the little tramp who moved with jerky assurance through a mechanized world was exactly the sort of “new man” they needed.
American visitors found this all disconcerting. The sympathetic artist Louis Lozowick had to explain to eager young constructivists in Moscow that he didn’t know anything about biomechanics, and that they, the Russians, had invented it themselves. A Ford Motor Company representative, treated by his hosts to some biomechanical theater, thought the whole thing ridiculous and farcical.
In the mid-1920s, the Soviet Eccentrists would move away from the leaps, special effects, and extravagant silliness of movies like The Adventures of Mr West and develop a more sober style, although equally indebted to the frantic pace of American montage and cartoonish American acting styles. The results, such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Pudovkin’s Mother, had a mixed reception in the USSR but became international sensations. Their kinetic action sequences changed cinema history, and their rousing revolutionary narratives got them banned across the free world.
This is when Charlie Chaplin first became aware of his Soviet fan club. He opposed the bans and helped get these films shown to American audiences. When Eisenstein made an abortive attempt to film Dreiser’s American Tragedy in Hollywood, the two directors became fast friends. But the Soviet film director who had the strongest effect on Chaplin — whose feature films like The Gold Rush and City Lights had become ever more sophisticated and socially critical — was Eisenstein’s great adversary, Dziga Vertov.
A groundbreaking documentarian, Vertov thought fictional films were inherently bourgeois and escapist. Nevertheless, his special effects, comic juxtapositions, and pounding sense of rhythm made him an Americanist in his own way. In 1930, he made the first Soviet sound film, Enthusiasm — Symphony of the Donbas. This hour of grueling industrial propaganda doesn’t much resemble The Fatal Mallet. It depicts mechanizing the Donets coalfield in Eastern Ukraine and teaching the mineworkers Taylorist efficiency.
Chaplin, however, was attracted to the unrivalled intensity of its juxtaposition of sound and image. Using field recordings from Ukraine’s mines and steelworks, Vertov created an industrial jazz of still-astonishing power, a relentless clanging pulse echoing that puts the soundtrack closer to Einsturzende Neubauten than to Al Jolson. Chaplin called it “one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have ever heard.”
Six years later, he made his response. Modern Times has become justly famous for its definitive critique of Taylorism and Fordism. In the factory sequences, machines feed Chaplin, his all-seeing boss monitors him on film, and the production line eventually eats him, until he floats, weightless, through the cogs inside, a tragic and bitter image of the smooth and seamless mechanized labor the Soviets longed for. Insisting on keeping the film wordless, Chaplin used a soundtrack of rhythmic clangs and crashes that mirrored Vertov’s “Donbas” symphony.
Coming when Taylorist speed-up was sparking some of the greatest strikes in American history — not to mention the CIO’s formation — you might expect that the Soviets welcomed the film as a critique of American capitalism’s brutality.
They didn’t. In a text called “Charlie the Kid,” Eisenstein criticized his friend for his satire’s infantilizing and utopic take on what mass production does to workers. Regarding the factory sequence, he asserted, “At our end of the world, we do not escape from reality to fairy-tale, we make fairy-tales real.”
The tramp of Modern Times, exhausted by labor and made homeless by unemployment, accidentally picks up a red flag midway through a strike, getting him arrested as a dangerous agitator. Chaplin himself would be notably supportive of the Soviet Union, and his refusal to fall in with McCarthyism was admirable; but the tramp might have silently held other opinions about industrial efficiency and five-year plans than those he helped inspire.
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Polina Barskova by Michael Juliani
Source: BOMB — Artists in Conversation
Written in the Dark
Polina Barskova was born in 1976 in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), a city that hosted one of the most destructive arenas of the Second World War. The Nazi Siege of Leningrad claimed more than one million lives, trapping its citizens for over three years in a landscape of darkness, starvation, and disease. Barskova left Russia at the age of twenty to pursue a PhD in Russian Studies at UC Berkeley, having already earned a graduate degree and become an accomplished poet in her homeland. I first found her work in The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, co-edited by fellow émigré Ilya Kaminsky, who translated a short volume of her poems for Tupelo Press, This Lamentable City (2010). Barskova is also the author of several books in Russian, the earliest of which was published during her adolescence. Some of this work is represented in The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems (Melville House, 2011). As a professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College, Barskova began an archival project that resulted in Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), an anthology of work written during the siege that remained unknown for decades. Barskova's book gives form to the fluidities of poetic lineage, cultural context, and literary translation, a meld of aberrations optimized by what Barskova calls "the siege surreal." In service of these five poets, who found themselves caught in an often misrepresented moment in Russian history, Barskova and the several translators of this book have rendered these pieces from the catacombs of the twentieth century.
Michael Juliani In the introduction of Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad, you mention how being in America for many years enabled you to study the blockade in a new way. What was that process like and how long did it take?
Polina Barskova Forever. At least five years in making. It's been one of the most important and humbling discoveries in life—that everything takes long, and good things take forever. The book came out of my larger project about the siege culture and literature. The siege is not a big mystery or a hidden secret, but for decades we knew only the official version—that it was absolutely heroic and courageous. Which, of course, has nothing to do with reality. One million people were not starving to death courageously, but for political and ideological reasons Soviets couldn't say this. What's curious is that it's still the case—or rather again the case, because Putin is making a very useful thing out of the Second World War and the so-called Great Victory. So, it wasn't a good idea, and it still isn't a good idea to talk about the actual price of the Siege of Leningrad.
I was always interested in the incredibly rich twentieth-century culture of my city, all its hidden layers, the avant-garde. While working on this topic [in America], I found names and texts I had never heard of before, which was kind of offensive to me. I thought I knew the culture of my city. How was it possible that I, such a nerd, a totally bookish person—this is all I do, basically, unfortunately—didn't know that such unbelievable texts remained hidden and invisible? And then this whole process of thought began: What happened to that culture? Why are there hidden nooks of culture? The hidden culture of the siege became my obsession. So I thought, okay, we don't have a book where strange siege poets are together. [They were] a phenomenon, a world of which people are not so aware.
Hampshire College generously gave me a prize for this work, and I took it to Matvei Yankelevich [at Ugly Duckling Presse] and then there was this huge adventure of translating these poets. There were discussions, quarrels, exaltations, but it happened. I think these are good translations, as far as I can understand. English, for me, is very much a second language. These were difficult translations. This poetry is ugly. This is not beautiful poetry, and one of the problems was to overcome the desire to make it beautiful in English.
MJ Because it's an anthology of five poets, I could experience each of them individually, but they also seemed to weave a collective fabric. I'm curious about the thought process behind choosing these particular poets and poems?
PB The world of siege poetry is rather big. I like to think about this in crazy architectural terms. There are many stories, many floors. The obvious one is "official" poetry. There are some poets, for example, like the most famous, Olga Bergholz, who wrote for Leningrad radio. In the official siege cemetery, Piskariovskoye, her words are engraved in gold, and it says, "Nobody is forgotten, nothing is forgotten," which is absolutely the opposite of the situation as I see it. So, there is this well-known official poetry, some of which is actually very strong.
For this particular project, I decided to concentrate on the strangest, least publishable, and least published—only surrealist poetry about the siege. We do know of surrealist art and poetry coming from the Holocaust. I think such poetry, on some level, makes lots of sense. Human minds cannot process these events. It stops and says, "I do not want to process you, Siege of Leningrad. I do not know what to do with you." Another reason why I became interested, [is that] they were connected to my favorite Leningrad poets—this generation who Matvei Yankelevich and Eugene Ostashevsky, for example, translated beautifully. This group was called OBERIU, which included Kharms and Vvedensky and Oleynikov, who were all murdered in the purges of the 1930s. These absurd, funny, beautiful men in their thirties, writing strange poetry about god and music and numbers, they were killed. Which is one of the most surreal things, because one understands why one kills Mandelstam, on some level. Mandelstam writes a poem where he calls Stalin a cockroach.
MJ Going right to the source.
PB Right. But Kharms and Vvedensky didn't call Stalin a cockroach. They wrote a lot about insects, but in very metaphysical ways. While they were playing their games in the 1930s, younger artists and poets were observing these strange masters. And when the masters died, these young gentlemen remained. This was the next generation. Which is also kind of touching and poignant, because when you study literature and its history—maybe this is a human thing to believe there is some connection—after you, your students will follow. This is why we teach. To create this texture. So on some level of reading, observation, whatnot, these poets are the disciples of the murdered OBERIU, and these are disciples who happened to live in the siege with this amazing language to describe one of the least believable events of the twentieth century.
MJ With a number of writers I love from the Siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian War, the situation set up time for them to write, because the social fabric was so destroyed they couldn't work. They just had to find food and survive, and write. These Leningrad poets also experienced total collapse. I guess for some writers it could destroy their ability to write, but with these poets it enabled them to write in a way they wouldn't have been able to before, as well as process their relationships with their heroes.
PB I really like what you say about a hole in the social fabric. A lot has been written about this. We don't have women [in this book], but one of the most important people who wrote about the Siege of Leningrad is Lidiya Ginzburg. More of her work is being translated into English, to my delirious happiness, because she is great. She was working with the word relief. The siege was a time of hell, but it was relief. For one thing, it was relief from silence, because they were so tired from the 1930s, when things were unspeakable. Nobody could even remotely write about the arrest of their best friends, husbands, wives, or children. You couldn't talk about it, basically. So your best friend, husband, child disappear at night and you go on, if you're lucky. You continue being in the society, in silence, which is like the worst thing ever. The siege allowed people to scream about it. One could say that the pressure of unspeakability was relieved. And this is what happened, great poetry, just like water, it went under this pressure.
MJ I was also very interested in how the OBERIU poets released themselves from historical references, and how the siege made these poets attach to their historical moment in the process of playing with language.
PB Yeah, this is one of my main observations. If you study history of literature, this is your weird disease. When we say that these people, like Gor and Zaltsman, learn from OBERIU, they learn to break language. They learn that smooth, ornate, orderly language doesn't work for the twentieth century as they saw it. But what was absolutely crucial for OBERIU, I think, was to create a capsule of some sort where Soviet reality was like a gas you breathe. OBERIU played many games, social games, but they were these brilliant young people who, on some level, pretended that the Soviet thing didn't exist. It was their experiment, it was an artistic endeavor. They were womanizers, gamblers. They had very peculiar obsessions for the 1930s. They loved mathematics. They were interested in theology, a strange interest to have in the Soviet Union. They were obsessed with Bach, for example, with very high music, which is almost as strange as theology and mathematics. When we read their diaries it's like reality, history, is almost nowhere to be found. It's not like, "Today is the First of May parade, everything is colored red—disgusting," or something. It's just not there. And it's more or less not there in their poetry, at least not directly. What makes the siege generation different is that, using the toolbox of OBERIU, they do write history. Now their camera is very much on. This is history written through a surrealist lens.
MJ As an American, I never learned anything in school about Russia except that they were our enemy in the '60s or something. So, I learn a lot from studying literary figures. One of the things I've heard, especially with Mandelstam, is that before Russian modernism there was an emptiness of tradition, as if there was Pushkin and then modernism. I'm wondering if that's at all fair. It's extremely complicated, I'm sure.
PB It is extremely complicated. There were people between Pushkin and modernists, indeed. Since I teach literature in this country, I think about it all the time, as do friends and colleagues. When American students study Russian things, it's Pushkin then Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—where did Lermontov and others go? What happened to Leskov and Goncharov?
Russia has its own problems with the history of Russian literature. This is a little bit more of an immediate, urgent concern for me. Sometimes we look at the medieval maps of the world, like for example, an old Spanish map—there is Spain, there is France, and a little bit further [out] you see dragons and mermaids and monsters. Certain topics are covered too well on the map of twentieth-century Soviet literature. And then we see monsters and white spots. How can it be that [we don't know about] a poet of the scale of Gennady Gor? It's like waking up and realizing you've spent your whole life next to a whale. Like, "Ah, mama!"
MJ Moby Dick.
PB Right, Moby Dick! Precisely. How can it be that we didn't know that such was Soviet history, such were social pressures. We are still very much in the process of active discovery. Gor never published one poem in his lifetime—by which I mean he didn't read one poem to anybody. When I say this to my American friends, there is a difficult pause. I claim that Gennady Gor is one of the ten greatest poets of the Russian century, if this would be the right way to view this discipline, which it is not. There are no strongest poets; it's not sports. Somehow it works in a different way. But how can you spend your whole life without reading one of your poems to your lover, to your child, to your best friend?
We are still trying to understand what it means for Russian literature that suddenly we have this island, it's like Atlantis coming up from being hidden. It's a big event. When our friends learn about this anthology, their first reaction is, "Great!" and the second is, "What do we do now? Where do we find a place in the sequence of things?" Twentieth-century Russian literature is like an earthquake since we're not sure what will end up where, what the mountain will be.
MJ Most of these poets were prominently involved as artists or philologists. Was that a symptom of their need to hide their poetry, or were they truly more involved in other pursuits? Would that make their siege poetry an aberration?
PB Gor's poetry is an aberration. Everybody who knew him after the war speaks of him as nice, agreeable, and curious. According to his poetry, he is a total monster—a genius. Nothing is nice or agreeable. He produced huge numbers of well-disciplined, pro-Soviet sci-fi about good Soviet citizens traveling to other planets. He hid himself rather well. Zaltsman was much more difficult, but he was a brilliant artist. He went to Kazakhstan and decided never to go back to Leningrad. Many people did that on some level. For example, the greatest philosopher of the Russian century, Bakhtin. Everyone around him was eliminated, but [sarcastically] Bakhtin was a teacher of literature in Saransk, with his cat, and somehow nobody found him until it was not a murderous adventure to be found, not a death sentence. Rudakov died at the front, but everybody else was rather good at assimilation, which makes each of these cases more interesting than just a book of siege heroes. I'm a huge enemy of the notion of hero. I'm interested in humans. Survival and writing are acts of outlandish strength.
MJ It would seem, at least from a civilian perspective, a non-poetic perspective, that maybe sitting and writing poetry during the Siege of Leningrad would be an absurd thing to do.
PB I think some of them didn't even imagine going to the front. They were not of that material. Again, it was a different form of strength, a different form of courage and humanity. There was nothing military about them. They were, I would say, like children. This understanding that children can be crazy, weak, and strong. I am a mother, I know weak and strong. But they could not play war, and this poetry is what they did.
MJ Because you've been involved in this archival and editorial work for a number of years now, can you trace any effect it has had on your own writing, your own practice, or the way you think about being a poet?
PB It completely changed me. I've become an archival poet. It changed my language. I stopped writing beautiful poetry. I stopped being interested in beautiful poetry. I became interested in the hidden. I'm like a mole hunter. I'm interested in subterranean culture that says 'I will trick you' to official culture, 'I will play you.' Bergholz, who we just mentioned, now has huge diaries being published. She understood everything about the Soviet era, and she wanted to play different games. She wanted to be a Soviet-accepted, huge canonical poet, but also to write real stuff, and she desperately tried to figure out how one can do both. It's a question of whether it's possible at all—that's why we're talking now about Bergholz now. All this is possible because we have documents. This is the whole thing about archive fever. None of this would exist otherwise. It's like a ghost. Who are they? What are the notepads that were never found? I think this book, and all books of this kind, are memorials to things that disappeared.”
“Michael Juliani is a poet, editor, and journalist from Pasadena, California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in outlets such as The Adirondack Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Conversant, Truthdig, and The Huffington Post. The editor of three books by the filmmaker and photographer Harun Mehmedinovic, he earned a BA in Print & Digital Journalism from the University of Southern California and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. He lives in New York City.”
#poetry#soviet union#russian literature#russian language#surrealism#siege of leningrad#communism#thekidswantcommunism#tkwc#museumsofbatyam
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