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"Porter, Cathy"
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Sex and the Soviet girl
Interview with Natalya Negoda, star of Soviet film Little Vera
Journal Article
IN BRIEF
Victor Pelevin first captured our attention two years ago with Omon Ra, a stunning space fantasy about Real Soviet Men conquering the psychic void of the Communist future. His second novel inhabits another brilliantly conceived space, a rundown Soviet holiday-camp on the Black Sea where a cast of racketeers, mystics, dope-heads and prostitutes interchange with the most repulsive specimens of insect life.
Newspaper Article
My little sperm-whale
Anton Chekhov met Olga Knipper in 1898 at the newly formed Moscow Art Theatre during rehearsals for The Seagull, his first major work for the stage. Chekhov was already dying of tuberculosis and was condemned to live hundreds of miles south in the Crimea; Knipper was unknown and 30 years old, far too young for her role of Arkadina. But he was struck by the passionate spontaneity she brought to the play, and it was the beginning of a relationship which endured until his death six years later. Knipper went on to become one of the Moscow Art's leading actresses. Tied to the theatre and separated from Chekhov, she wrote to him every day, and correspondence became the currency of their relationship, a letter- drama of tangled love and the living material for the dark dramatic roles he went on to create for her. Since most of his letters are already published, the translator has slanted this book to hers, supplementing them with her memoirs. Writing late at night after returning from the theatre, she pours out her heart to \"My Writer\", \"My dear and distant friend\", often adopting the tone of whatever character she is playing as she struggles with the roles of Elena in Uncle Vanya, Masha in The Three Sisters, and Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard.
Newspaper Article
Painful lessons learnt by heart
IN 1934, after years of persecution, Osip Mandelstam was arrested for writing an unflattering poem about Stalin. Tortured and interrogated, he twice attempted suicide before finally being sentenced to three years' exile in Voronezh in central Russia. From a state of numbness and \"blinding darkness\", he summoned up his last burst of creative energy to evoke this town forced into being by Peter the Great, with its \"muddy crops\" and \"eiderdown whiteness of snow\". Since 1987 over half a dozen editions of Mandelstam's poetry have appeared in Russia, some with print-runs of half a million. The 90 complementary poems of the three Voronezh notebooks, handwritten by his wife Nadezhda [Mandelstam] at his dictation, were his own \"formula for breathing\". Everything is in the different emotional tonalities of the voice, screaming, murmuring, excluding linear logic and all but impenetrable to translation. Elizabeth and Richard McKane, translators of Mandelstam's Moscow Notebooks, have achieved the apparently impossible in their versions of the Voronezh poems.
Newspaper Article
BOOKS : Buried evidence of a richer life
Digging deep in the burning sands to uncover the past, his archaeologist hero, Georgi Zybin, finds a buried sarcophagus containing a Bronze Age skull and a gold diadem depicting a sorceress mounted on a dragon. As he pieces together centuries of lost evidence from archaeological maps, bones and fragments, Zybin contemplates the skull and speculates on the causes of death. For him, the diadem represents a whole world captured in gold, a thing of beauty, a key to the past and to the two women with whom he is in love. For the authorities, the diadem's value is reduced to mere \"sunflower seeds\" - the \"useless knowledge\" of the title.
Newspaper Article