Russia, Past and Present

Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova

2013-05-18T12:53:00.004+02:00

Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova was born April 24, 1889 near Moscow. She grew up in an enlightened merchant family with a strong interest in art, especially Italian Renaissance painting. At eleven years old she began art lessons at home and in 1907 she studied art with S. Zhukovskiy. Then in 1908 - 1909 she attended the art school of Konstantin Yuon and Ivan Dudin.

Portrait of a Philosopher

Popova traveled widely to investigate and learn from diverse styles of painting, but it was the ancient Russian Icons and 15th and 16th century Italian painters, Giotto and others which at first interested her the most.

Space Force Construction

1909 Travels to Kiev.
1910 Then to Pskov and Novgorod.
1911 Other ancient Russian cities including St. Petersburg to study icons.
1912 Works in Moscow studio known as the Tower with Ivan Aksenov, Vladimir Tatlin. Visits Sergei Shchukin's collection of modern French paintings.
1912-13 Studied art in Paris with Nadezhda Udaltsova.
1913 Meets Alexander Archipenko and Ossip Zadkine. Returns to Russia and works with Tatlin, Udaltsova and Vesnin.
1914 Travels in France and Italy at the development of cubism and futurism.

Portrait of Artist's Sister

Through a synthesis if disparate tendencies Popova worked towards the culminating painterly arcitectonics. Exploring firstly an impressionist style, by 1913, in Composition with Figures, she is experimenting with the particularly Russian development of Cubo-Futurism; a fusion of two equal influences from France and Italy. In the painting The Violin of 1914 the development from cubism towards the painterly architectonics of 1917-18 is clearly visible. Before joining the Supremus group her paintings , the architectonic series have defined their own artistic trajectory, quite different to that of Malevich, Rozanova, Tatlin and Mondrian in abstract form. The canvas surface is an energy field of overlapping and intersecting angular planes in a constant state of potential release. At the same time the elements are held in a balanced and proportioned whole as if linking the compositions of the classical past to the future. By 1918 colour is used as an iconic focus; the bright colour at the centre drawing the outer shapes together.

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Mayakovsky’s muse on the road

2013-05-17T20:45:00.001+02:00

Alexander Rodchenko immortalized Lilya Brik in an iconic 1924 portrait for the cover of a Soviet art magazine. She is again Rodchenko’s subject in an exhibition of photographs on display at the Multimedia Art Museum, which show a never-completed 1929 journey Brik made in a Renault that the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky sent to her from France.

Brik was Mayakovsky’s muse, and the pair had a famous and passionate love affair, despite her marriage to Oleg Brik. Mayakovsky dedicated many of his most famous poems to her, such as “Lilechka! Instead of a Letter,” in which he wrote, “besides your love I have no sun.” A portrait of Brik, eyes staring intensely, is on the cover of his poem “Pro Eto” (About This).

The pair were no longer a couple in 1929, but remained on good terms. Brik had written to Mayakovsky with instructions of what kind of car she wanted: a Buick or a Renault, definitely not one that looked like a taxi. She also asked for motorist’s gloves and clothes.

“Her enthusiasm for the ‘Renoshka’ was unconditional and true to character,” said curator Alexander Lavrentiyev, using the diminutive term for the Renault. Rodchenko captures moments such as Brik taking advantage of a f lat tire to fix her makeup, and an impromptu picnic.

“I was in one dress, then I got changed and popped into the gas station on Zemlyanoi Val. He took a photo of me in the backseat,” Brik wrote of the trip she and Mayakovsky later nicknamed “the incomplete journey.” “We agreed that I would go 20 versts, he would take photos and then go home, and I would go on further. But I didn’t go any further, as I found out the road was terrible and the car started to sneeze and, well, going so far alone is boring and dangerous.”

This brief glimpse of Brik is on at the same time as a more substantial exhibit, “Mayakovsky’s Family,” dedicated to the 120th anniversary of the poet’s birthday.

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A collection of poems by Soviet dissident poet published in English

2013-05-15T20:37:00.003+02:00

The novice reader who dives into Alexander Vvedensky’s flood of words will find strange, but not un-beautiful depths: Themes float and grow like seaweed, shoals of images flash past and submerged ideas lurk in the shadows.

The writer, who died on a prison train in 1941, has garnered a new English-language audience since Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova quoted Vvedensky at her trial in August 2012. The New York Review of Books published the first English-language collection of Vvedensky’s poetry in April 2013. “Invitation For Me to Think” challenges poetry lovers and politicians alike.

Alexander Vvedensky was born in St Petersburg in 1904 and as a young adult became part of Leningrad’s Futurist movement. Much of his work has been lost and destroyed and what remains, mostly published posthumously, is not easy to understand. “The only thing that is positive to the end is meaninglessness,” he wrote.

The hundred-odd lines of “The Meaning of the Sea,” written in 1930, begin: “to make everything clear/ live backwards.” The poem has no capital letters or punctuation and nouns congregate seemingly at random: “here’s a candle snow/ salt and mousetrap.” The poem’s structure – such as it is – relies on echoes and metaphorical patterns, like the repeated images of drowning: “sea time sleep are one/ we will mutter sinking down” and “glory to heaven washed away/ my oar memory and will.”

Several poems draw on theatrical conventions, with stanzas spoken by different characters and bizarre stage directions in italics (“The servants bring in a large sofa”). The longest poem in the book is one of these quasi-dramatic verse-dialogues, “God May Be Around” (1931), a manifesto of profound nonsense to suit an era of apocalyptic doom; it ends: “A star of meaninglessness shines,/ it alone is fathomless./ A dead gentleman runs in/ and silently removes time.”

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Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna - Biografy

2013-05-13T20:54:00.002+02:00

HIH The Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia (Elizabeth Feodorovna Romanova _ru. Елизавета Фëдоровна Романова), (1 November 1864 – 18 July 1918) was a German Princess of theHouse of Hesse, and the wife of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, fifth son of TsarAlexander II of Russia and Princess Marie of Hesse and the Rhine. An older sister of Alexandra, the last Russian Empress, Elizabeth became famous in Russian society for her beauty, charm, and good works among the poor.

Grand Duchess Elizabeth was born HGDH Princess Elisabeth Alexandra Louise Alice of Hesse and the Rhine on 1 November 1864. She was the second child of Grand Duke Ludwig IV of Hesse and the Rhine and British Princess Alice. Through her mother, she was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Princess Alice chose the name "Elisabeth" for her daughter after visiting the shrine of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, ancestress of the House of Hesse, in Marburg. Alice so admired St. Elizabeth that she decided to name her new daughter after her. Elizabeth was also called "Ella" within her family.

Though she came from one of the oldest and noblest houses in Germany, Elizabeth and her family lived a rather modest life by Royal standards. The children swept the floors and cleaned their own rooms, while their mother sewed dresses herself for the children. During the Austro-Prussian War, Princess Alice often took Elizabeth with her while visiting wounded soldiers in a nearby hospital. In this relatively happy and secure environment, Elizabeth grew up surrounded by English domestic habits, and English became her first language. Later in life, she would tell a friend that, within her family, she and her siblings spoke English to their mother and German to their father.

In the autumn of 1878, diphtheria swept through the Hesse household, killing Elizabeth's youngest sister, Marie on November 16, as well as her mother Alice on December 14 . Elizabeth had been sent away to her paternal grandmother's home at the beginning of the outbreak and she was the only member of her family to remain unaffected. When she was finally allowed to return home, she described the meeting as "terribly sad" and said that everything was "like a horrible dream".

Charming and with a very accommodating personality, Elizabeth was considered by many historians and contemporaries to be one of the most beautiful women in Europe at that time. As a young woman, she caught the eye of her elder cousin, the future German Emperor William II. He was a student then at Bonn University, and on weekends he often visited his Aunt Alice and his Hessian relatives. During these frequent visits, he fell in love with Elizabeth, writing numerous love poems and regularly sending them to her. Flattered as she may have been by his attentions, Elizabeth was not attracted to William. She politely rejected him, and his resulting frustration caused him to give up his studies and return to Berlin.

Besides William II, she had many other admirers, among them Lord Charles Montagu, the second son of the 7th Duke of Manchester, and Henry Wilson, later a distinguished soldier.

Yet another of Elizabeth's suitors was the future Frederick II, Grand Duke of Baden, William's first cousin. Queen Victoria described him as "so good and steady", with "such a safe and happy position," that when Elizabeth refused him the Queen "deeply regretted it". Frederick's grandmother, the Empress Augusta, was so furious at Elizabeth's rejection of Frederick that it took some time for her to forgive Elizabeth.

Other admirers included:

*Elizabeth's husband's cousin, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich (the poet KR). He wrote a poem about her first arrival in Russia, and the general impression she made to all the people present at the time.
*Prince Felix Yussupov considered her a second mother, and stated in his memoirs that she helped him greatly during the most difficult moments of his life.
*As a young girl, Queen Marie of Romania was very fascinated with her Cousin Ella, and would later describe her beauty and sweetness in her memoirs as "a thing of dreams".
*The French Ambassador to the Russian court, Maurice Paleologue, wrote in his memoirs how Elizabeth was capable of arousing what he described as "profane passions".

But it was a Russian Grand Duke who ultimately won Elizabeth's heart. Elizabeth’s great-aunt,Empress Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, was a frequent visitor to Hesse. During these visits, she was usually accompanied by her youngest sons, Sergei and Paul. Elizabeth had known the boys since they were children, and she initially viewed them as haughty and reserved. Sergei, especially, was a very serious young man, intensely religious, and he found himself attracted to Elizabeth after seeing her as a young woman for the first time in several years.

At first, Sergei made little impression on Elizabeth. But after the death of both of Sergei’s parents within the same year, the shock of his loss caused Elizabeth to gradually see Sergei “in a new light”. She had felt this same grief after the death of her mother, and their other similarities (both were artistic and religious) began to draw them closer together. It was said that Sergei was especially attached to Elizabeth because she had the same character as his beloved mother. So when Sergei proposed to her for the second time, she accepted--much to the chagrin of her grandmother Queen Victoria.

Sergei and Elizabeth married on 15 June 1884, at the Chapel of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. She became Grand Duchess "Elizabeth Feodorovna". The new Grand Duchess made a good first impression on her husband’s family and the Russian people. “Everyone fell in love with her from the moment she came to Russia from her beloved Darmstadt”, wrote one of Sergei's cousins. The couple settled in the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace in St. Petersburg; after Sergei was appointed Governor-General of Moscow in 1892, they resided in one of the Kremlin palaces. During the summer, they stayed at Il’yinskoe, an estate outside Moscow that Sergei had inherited from his mother.

The couple never had children of their own, but their Il’yinskoye estate was usually filled with parties that Elizabeth organized especially for children. They eventually became the foster parents of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, Sergei’s niece and nephew.

Although Elizabeth was not legally required to convert to Russian Orthodoxy from her nativeLutheran religion, she voluntarily chose to do so in 1891. Although some members of her family questioned her motives, her conversion appears to have been sincere.

On February 18, 1905, Sergei was assassinated in the Kremlin by the Socialist-Revolutionary, Ivan Kalyayev. The event came as a terrible shock to Elizabeth, but she never lost her calm. Her niece Marie later recalled that her aunt’s face was “pale and stricken rigid” and she would never forget her expression of infinite sadness. In her rooms, said Marie, Elizabeth “let herself fall weakly into an armchair...her eyes dry and with the same peculiar fixity of gaze, she looked straight into space, and said nothing.” As visitors came and went, she looked without ever seeming to see them. Throughout the day of her husband's murder, Elizabeth refused to cry. But Marie recalled how her aunt slowly abandoned her rigid self-control, finally breaking down into sobs. Many of her family and friends feared that she would suffer a nervous breakdown, but she quickly recovered her equanimity.

Elizabeth personally visited Kalyayev in his jail cell, asking him to consider the gravity of his deed and repent. Later, she asked her brother-in-law, Tsar Nicholas II, to forgive her husband's assassin, but the revolutionary refused to accept a pardon and accused Elizabeth of misrepresenting his conversation with her. Kalyayev was hanged on May 23, 1905.

After Sergei’s death, Elizabeth wore mourning clothes and became a vegetarian. In 1909, she gave away her magnificent collection of jewels and sold her other luxurious possessions; even her wedding ring was not spared. With the proceeds she opened the Convent of Sts. Martha and Maryand became its abbess. She soon opened a hospital, a chapel, a pharmacy and an orphanage on its grounds. Elizabeth and her nuns worked tirelessly among the poor and the sick of Moscow. She often visited Moscow’s worst slums and did all she could to help alleviate the suffering of the poor.

For many years, Elizabeth's institution helped the poor and the orphans in Moscow by fostering the prayer and charity of devout women.Here, there arose a new vision of a diaconate for women, one that combined intercession and action in the heart of a disordered world. Although the Orthodox Church rejected her idea of a female diaconate, it did bless and encourage Elizabeth's many charitable efforts.

In 1918, Lenin ordered the notorious Cheka to arrest Elizabeth. They then exiled her first to Perm, then to Yekaterinburg, where she spent a few days and was joined by others: the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich Romanov; Princes Ioann Konstantinovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, Igor Konstantinovich and Vladimir Pavlovich Paley; Grand Duke Sergei's secretary, Feodor Remez; andVarvara Yakovleva, a sister from the Grand Duchess's convent. They were all taken to Alapaevsk onMay 20, 1918, where they were housed in the Napolnaya School on the outskirts of the town.

At noon on July 17, Cheka Officer Petr Startsev and a few Bolshevik workers came to the school. They took from the prisoners whatever money they had left and announced that they would be transferred that night to the Upper Siniachikhensky factory compound. The Red Army guards were told to leave and Cheka men replaced them. That night the prisoners were woken and driven in carts on a road leading to the village of Siniachikha. Some 18 kilometres from Alapaevsk there was an abandoned iron mine with a pit, twenty metres deep. Here they halted. The Cheka beat all the prisoners before throwing their victims into this pit, Elizabeth being the first. Hand grenades were then hurled down the shaft, but only one victim, Feodor Remez, died as a result of the grenades.

According to the personal account of Ryabov, one of their killers, Elizabeth and the others survived the initial fall into the mine, prompting Ryabov to toss in a grenade after them. Following the explosion, he claimed to hear Elizabeth and the others singing a Russian hymn from the bottom of the shaft. Unnerved, Ryabov threw down a second grenade, but the singing continued. Finally a large quantity of brushwood was shoved into the opening and set alight, upon which Ryabov posted a guard over the site and departed.

Elizabeth was the second daughter of Alice and Louis, and was eight years older than her youngest sister, Alix. She spent much time in England with her sisters and Grandmother Queen Victoria, but she was more 'German' than Aleksandra.

Elizabeth, called 'Ella" by her family, married the Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich Romanov, brother of Alexander III and Nickolas II's uncle. He was an unusual man, who was strongly disliked by many and was the subject of many rumours and gossip. They had no children.

Grand Duke Sergey was blown up by a terrorist bomb in the Kremlin in 1905. Elizabeth heard the explosion and rushed outside, only to find here husband blown to bits.

Elizabeth was, in great part, responsible for Nickolas and Aleksandra's marriage. She acted as matchmaker, to the chagrin of Grandmother Queen Victoria, who wanted the lovely Alix for her grandson, Albert Victor.

After Sergey's death Elizabeth devoted herself to good works and the poor, opening a hospice and hospital convent dedicated to Martha and Mary in Moscow. She became abbess of the convent. The building was designed by the same architect who would, one day, design Lenin's Tomb and was embellished with exterior reliefs in old Russian Style. The interior was painted by the famous Russian painter Nesterov, who also designed the pearl-gray and white habit worn by the sisters of the convent. Surrounding the church was a lovely garden filled with fragrant lilies, flowers and lawns of grass.

Elizabeth dedicated the convent to the poor of Moscow. It was a hospice, hospital and had a dental clinic attached to it. The sisters came from all walks of life. Orphan girls from the Moscow slums were raised at the convent and given an excellent education. Many of these girls went on to become hospital workers and nuns themselves. The convent was famous in Russia for its charity work, and the work of the convent was unique in Russia, setting an example for the rest of the country in good works. Elizabeth herself would care for the poor, nursing the worst cases of injury and disease herself. The nuns would collect the dying from the streets and bring them to the convent, where they were given a place of shelter and care during their last days.

Elizabeth eventually became somewhat estranged from her sister, Aleksandra, over Rasputin and the growing chaos in the country. Untouched by the revolution in her beautiful Art Nouveau convent, she was eventually arrested by the Bolsheviks and exiled to Siberia, where she was brutally murdered and thrown down a mine with five other Romanovs, a nun companion and a servant. Her body was recovered and now rests with her nun-companion, Barbara in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem. Elizabeth has been canonized by the Orthodox Church. The convent was closed in the 1920's but the nuns continued their work underground during the Soviet Era. They survived and are trying to reestablish their work in Russia today. The convent is preserved and houses a ikon restoration studio. A statue to Elizabeth has been erected in the remains of the church gardens.

Helen Rappaport - Romanov's Last Days

2013-05-11T11:23:00.001+02:00

Interview with author Helen Rappaport about her book Romanov's Last Days.

'Nothing Has Been Invented': The War Journalism of Boris Polevoy

2013-05-10T20:39:00.002+02:00

By Don Heddesheimer

Krushinsky and I had been the first correspondents to visit Oswiecim, then still called by its German name, Auschwitz. We had flown in after our troops and seen this vast death camp virtually still in running order ... By the time Sergei Krushinsky and I reached Birkenau, all the buildings of this fake junction and the gas chambers had been blown up and only a maze of railway tracks remained. An ordinary railway time-table was jutting out of the heaps of smashed concrete: "Train departures to Vienna ... Belgrade ... Paris ... Milan ..." We met a Polish partisan in a railwayman's uniform and square cap who knew Russian. He told us about everything that had been going on here. He showed us the so-called bath house lying in ruins and gray mounds of something resembling charcoal mingled with white stony fragments. This was ash, human ash from the ovens, 'fireplaces," as they were called here. It crackled rather strangely as though it were moaning in pain and begging for retribution." See note: 1

These emotive words, written over twenty years after the war, are those of Soviet journalist Boris Polevoy. See note: 2 Once a celebrated literary figure in the USSR, today Polevoy is known to revisionists as the author of one of the first news reports on Auschwitz after its capture on January 27, 1945. Thanks to the work of Faurisson, Walendy, and others, that story, which appeared in Pravda, the leading newspaper of the Soviet Communist party, on February 2, 1945, is now widely known to differ drastically from the later orthodox account of the camp. Polevoy described how Auschwitz inmates were exterminated, not in gas chambers, but on an electric conveyor belt that electrocuted hundreds of them simultaneously, then dropped their bodies into a flaming blast furnace. He reported enormous mass graves, filled with at least four layers of bodies. Polevoy also described zinc-covered benches fitted with straps for restraining inmates, on which inmates were beaten to death with truncheons manufactured by the Krupp factory in Dresden. See note: 3

Revisionist researchers have concentrated chiefly on the factual discrepancies of Polevoy's report, consistent with their general approach to the extermination literature. Such work is of course vital, but Polevoy's activity as a journalist was not limited to writing on Auschwitz or the Holocaust. As a propagandist Polevoy had few equals in depicting German savagery or in glorifying Soviet heroism. His numerous writings on the war, published in the most influential newspaper of the USSR, not only epitomized Soviet propaganda but also influenced Soviet behavior. The purpose of this article is to acquaint readers with Boris Polevoy, his writings, and certain literary techniques which rendered them effective.

A Life for the Soviet

Few reporters of the Second World War were as accomplished, or as influential, as the Soviet writer Boris Nikolaevich Kampov (1908-1981), who wrote under the pseudonym Boris Polevoy. Polevoy, the son of a physician, although of Jewish heritage, was born "beyond the pale" in Moscow in 1908. As a young writer he showed enough promise to join a select group of Soviet writers under the patronage of Maxim Gorky. See note: 4

It was not until the Second World War that Polevoy became famous throughout the Soviet Union. From the 1939-40 "winter war" with Finland to the fall of Berlin, Polevoy covered the front as a reporter for Pravda, while holding the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Red Army. He served six months on assignment to Stalingrad, and was present when General von Paulus emerged to surrender from his headquarters in a department store basement. Polevoy reported on the Red Army's advance from Kharkov through Bessarabia, across Poland, and into the heart of Germany. When American and Soviet forces met on the Elbe, Polevoy was there, and he visited Hitler's underground bunker in Berlin while fighting still raged in the German capital. See note: 5 Following the Allied victory Polevoy, heading a team of Soviet journalists, reported on the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as special correspondent for Pravda.

Polevoy's books, articles, and political commentaries gained him an international readership well before the end of the war. He remained influential until his death in 1981, at which time he was secretary of the all-powerful Union of Soviet Writers. During his lifetime, Polevoy was named a Hero of Socialist Labor and awarded the Stalin Prize for literature, three Orders of Lenin, two Red Banners, the Red Star, and the Gold Medal of the World Peace Council. To this day a commercial cargo ship bears his name; See note: 6 an opera has been written about him; See note: 7 and at least one of his admirers still leads a nation: Fidel Castro praised one of Polevoy's books in a meeting with Leonard Brezhnev. See note: 8

Gorky's Influence

Polevoy's mentor Maxim Gorky (Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, 1868-1936), whose pseudonymous last name means bitter, had been a close friend of Lenin. While his attitude toward the Soviet Union was sometimes ambivalent, in his last years he became a committed Communist. Gorky was the USSR's leading authority on the complex relationship between political and literary issues, so important in the history of Russian letters, and was the most important link between pre-revolutionary and Soviet literature. See note: 9

Gorky set out to create a literature that would express the ideals and further the goals of the Bolshevik revolution. He saw "the people," rather than religion, as the only inexhaustible spring of spiritual values. Indeed, Gorky's school of Soviet writers strove to produce a literature that would instill in the masses the kind of loyalty and dedication to the Soviet regime that they had once felt toward religion. "This concept of the people, and the new Communist Russia they belonged to, gave rise to a feeling for the mother country which could lead people to dedicate their lives to it." See note: 10 Gorky elaborated these goals in the 1920s and 1930s, and, put into practice by his many disciples, they exercised a profound influence on Soviet literature in the following decades.

Gorky urged his apprentices to study and learn from the great Russian writers of the past. In one recorded counsel to Polevoy, Gorky, commenting in 1928 on one of the younger writer's manuscripts (probably "The Forge Shop"), wrote that "just as a lathe worker shapes wood or metal, the literary man must know his material: language and words." See note: 11

Reportage in Red

During the war Polevoy wrote diary-like accounts of his activities as Pravda correspondent with the Red Army. His reports on his own experiences and on his interviews with soldiers and civilians reliably followed the Soviet line. Polevoy portrayed the German invaders as technologically advanced barbarians who had assaulted the peaceful USSR treacherously and without provocation, unleashing a struggle between good, personified by the Soviet peoples, and the evil of Nazi "fascism." What made Polevoy's writing stand out, however, was not rote propaganda abstractions, but the impact of particular, tangible, and often ordinary details that lent both credibility and emotion to his words.

Typical of this genre of Polevoy's reportage was "Regimental Colors," See note: 12 which was published in England in 1945, but had certainly appeared in the Soviet Union before that. It describes how eight survivors of a Red Army tank regiment that had been decimated in battle saved their unit's standard, then fought on behind the lines as partisans. Nazis from the Gestapo captured three of the Soviet tankers turned guerrillas, and interrogated them to no avail. After stripping the Soviet heroes to expose them to the full fury of the frigid Russian winter, the fiendish Nazis poured cold water over the Soviets until they were frozen into statues. The secret they went to their terrible deaths to conceal? Where they had hidden their regimental colors. The Nazis then went to work on the peasants. Polevoy assures his readers that the Germans "burned their bodies with soldering irons, drove nails into their arms and legs and lopped off their ears, sliced their noses and gouged out their eyes," but the peasants too went to their deaths rather than reveal the banner's whereabouts. And the regimental flag was never captured: a lovely young collective farm girl had wrapped it in clean linen and wound it around her body. She wore it day and night until the arrival of its rightful bearers, the Red Army.

"A Copy of Pravda" See note: 13 recapitulates that simple story of Red loyalty and heroism in defense of Soviet ideals, as objectified in the regimental banner, against Nazi savagery. But Polevoy tells his Pravda tale with a twist that reminds of his aim, as Gorky's disciple, to transform the religious fervor of the people into a burning dedication to the Communist regime. Writing of how fervently the leading party newspaper was esteemed by Soviet readers under German occupation, Polevoy writes, quoting one of them:

There are all kinds of legends current in our village about this paper. It is said that the Germans threw it in the fire but it didn't burn; then they tried to drown it in the river but it wouldn't drown. So they became furious, crumpled it, pushed it into a shell and fired the shell, but the paper wasn't lost and now there are thousands of them.

Thus, in Polevoy's telling, a solitary copy of Pravda proves indestructible, and even (metaphorically) capable of multiplying independently and indefinitely. The irony of the single most influential newspaper of the world's leading force for dialectical materialism behaving like a prop in a fairy tale was probably lost on a good many of Polevoy's readers.

Polevoy could conjure up the mawkish as well as supernatural in the service of Soviet propaganda. One of his dispatches from the battle of Berlin was entitled "Front Line at the Eisenstrasse" (which he described as an avenue lined with old beech trees that ran through no man's land). He reported that a curly haired German girl, no more than two or three years old, wandered out between the two front lines, lost and crying. She was rescued by a Soviet soldier -- but no sooner than he had performed that heroic act, he was cut down by an SS man's bullet (a statue commemorating this alleged incident still stands in eastern Berlin). The absence of an Eisenstrasse in Berlin was remedied some thirty years later when the Communist East German authorities decided that Polevoy meant "Elsenstrasse," and that the "l" on the street sign must have been hit by a bullet so that it looked like an "i." See note: 14 Whatever the truth of this suspicious story, it stands the actual conduct of Soviet troops toward German civilians on its head.

More here.

Nikolay Nekrasov: The Capitals Are Rocked with Thunder

2013-05-10T11:50:00.000+02:00

A Portrait of the Poet Nikolai Nekrasov Writing “The Last Songs” (Ivan Kramskoi, 1877)

THE CAPITALS are rocked with thunder
Of orators in wordy feuds.
But in the depths of Russia, yonder,
An age-old awful silence broods.
Only the wind in wayside willows,
Coming and going, does not cease;
And corn-stalks touch in curving billows
The earth that cherishes and pillows,
Through endless fields of changeless peace.

Victory Day Parade 2013: Military glory in Moscow's Red Square

2013-05-09T11:48:00.001+02:00

Moscow takes 2nd place globally among in number of billionaires

2013-05-08T21:05:00.001+02:00

London-based analytic agency WealthInsight has given Moscow 2^nd place in its latest study of where billionaires reside globally. Russia’s capital is home to 64 billionaires (in U.S. dollars) and accounts for just under half of the country’s total (130), according to CEO magazine.

Moscow was beaten by New York (70) and followed by London (54), Hong Kong (40) and Beijing (29).

At the same time, when measured by the amount of multimillionaires (who own assets valued at or above $30 million), Moscow doesn’t make the top 20 cities in the world. That list is led by London (4224 multimillionaires), Tokyo (3525), Singapore (3154), New York (2929) and Rome (945).

During December of last year, WealthInsight published a report which counted 160 thousand multimillionaires in Russia. Among the BRICS, the country trailed China (1.3 million), India (250 thousand), Brazil (194 thousand), but was ahead of South Africa (45 thousand).

Moscow takes 2nd place globally among in number of billionaires

Describing Russian intellectual life in fiction

2013-05-06T21:16:00.002+02:00

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote his tight, absurdist masterpiece, “The Heart of a Dog” in 1925, but it would not see the light of day in the Soviet Union until 1987. Thus was the beginning of Bulgakov’s long and tortuous relationship with political power.

The U.S.S.R. was not a good place, nor was it a good time, to write with a biting sense of humor.

When he settled in Moscow in 1921 and quit medicine to pursue journalism and literature, Bulgakov began to explore the contradictions of socialism, the problem of housing, and the absurdities of bureaucracy. In short, Bulgakov reflected upon the preoccupations of Muscovites and the rules that governed life in the city.

The year after he arrived in Moscow, the OGPU (the secret police of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1934) started keeping a secret file on the writer.

The apparent motive is trivial: Bulgakov published an article in a Berlin magazine announcing his intention to create a bibliographic dictionary of contemporary Russian authors without distinguishing between those who lived in the Soviet Union and those living in exile.

This news was received with suspicion by the government: Writers who lived abroad were considered enemies of the people.

In secret report number II0, an informer explained that Mikhail Bulgakov gave a reading of his new novel to the literary circle he moved in. The novel was titled “The Heart of a Dog.”

“The entire work is written in hostile tones and breathes an infinite contempt upon the Soviet order…,” the writer of the report concluded.

Suspicions about the writer began to grow and the OGPU tracked his movements. It was right at that time when Bulgakov began to enjoy some success thanks to the publication of his first novel, “The White Guard,” and also “Diavoliada,” his collection of satirical stories about Soviet life.

More here.

Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life - Nikolai Gogol

2013-05-06T11:01:00.002+02:00

One of the enduring mysteries of literary history is the appearance in 19th-century Russia, that vast and barbarous country, of the greatest writers of fiction in all of literature. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are supreme among the novelists of all nations, with Ivan Turgenev not far behind. Then there is Anton Chekhov, master of the short story, and Ivan Goncharov, author of "Oblomov" and "A Common Story." Among the Russians, the purest artist is Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), author of the play "The Inspector General," some unforgettable stories, and a single novel, "Dead Souls," which, even though unfinished, is nonetheless a masterpiece.

Gogol is the comic genius among Russian writers, always playful but never shallow. He had a magnificent eye for the bizarre, for the madcap, above all for what was extraordinary in the ordinary. In his story "The Nose," he wrote about a barber who wakes one morning to discover a nose stuffed into his morning loaf of bread. The nose turns out to belong to one of his customers, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov. How the nose got into the barber's bread and how one morning it reappeared on the face of its owner is never explained. Plots are not Gogol's strong point. Nor was he much interested in ideas, at least not directly.

"Dead Souls" is about Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, who travels the provincial countryside buying up dead serfs from small landowners. These serfs remain on the landowners' books until the next census and, even though dead, are still taxable. Chichikov offers to relieve the landowners of their tax burden. His plan is to install these dead serfs on the tax rolls of a far-away estate, on which he will then be able to get a generous government mortgage and come away with a small fortune.

The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin was Gogol's friend and supporter, and the man who gave him the idea for "Dead Souls." Gogol refers to the book not as a novel but as a poem. "Dead Souls" is a poem about Russia, its provincial backwaters, its secondary characters (clerks, minor officials, small landowners), its heartbreaking squalor. "Russia! Russia!" Gogol exclaims midway through the book, ". . . Everything in you is open, desolate and level; your squat towns barely protrude in the midst of the plains like dots, like counters; there is nothing to tempt or enchant the onlooker's gaze. But what is this inscrutable, mysterious force that draws me to you?"

What gives "Dead Souls" its poetic quality is its author's exuberant passion for the details—one might even say the irrelevant details—of provincial Russian life. In his brief, brilliant study "Nikolai Gogol," Vladimir Nabokov accounts for Gogol's artistry through this and what he calls Gogol's "four dimensional" prose, a sinuous style that captures characters in their inner being. Gogol's scenes light up their surroundings, his characters flame into life, his tragicomic vision touches the reader's heart.

I write "tragicomic," for Gogol was far from the mere humorist he is sometimes advertised as being. "I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life," he wrote in "Dead Souls," "to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through unknown invisible tears." The book's characters might be thought stock—the miser, the spendthrift, the bearish Russian and the rest—but for their creator's ability to bring them to life with a shimmering individuality.

Chichikov, the character at the heart of Gogol's masterpiece, is a lower-echelon civil servant with a corrupt past who specializes in what Gogol calls "blandiloquence," or elaborately empty compliments. Chichikov was brought up by a father whose last words of advice to his son were to please his superiors, not to be seduced by friendship, and to remember that nothing in life is so important as money—advice, notes Gogol, "that remained deeply engraved in his soul."

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Done with Tolstoy

2013-05-03T12:43:00.003+02:00

"In Crime and Punishment, there is a sentence that goes like this: ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Richard Pevear lets the words hang in the air, along with a note of faint bafflement. From his Paris apartment, one half of the world’s only celebrity translation team is recollecting some of the knotty, cross-lingual jumbles that he has spent his working life trying to untangle.

“I came running to Larissa”—Larissa Volokhonsky, Pevear’s wife of thirty years and collaborator on twenty-one works of Russian-to-English translation—“and said, ‘Can that be? Is that what he said?’ And she checked and said yes. ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Reassured, if still skeptical, he jotted it down and moved on to Dostoyevsky’s next syntax-warping creation.

The inconspicuous passage would resurface before long, though. The translation was published and, Richard recalls, “one very eminent reviewer . . said, ‘They occasionally lapse into banalities, for instance.’ And he quotes this same sentence.” First lodged years ago, the complaint is a rare blemish on a generally worshipful public reception, perhaps tempting the duo to tidy up such repetitive, infelicitous wording. Instead, two decades and many printings later, Richard shrugs off the critic’s jibe and sticks to his guns. “But it’s unmistakable in Russian!”

“It’s very simple,” adds Larissa in her heavy Slavic accent, “so simple, I later found the same sentence in Chekhov.”

But there is nothing simple about the ongoing Pevear-Volokhonsky partnership (known widely in literary circles as PV). Their output, spilling over tens of thousands of pages and encompassing the hundred-fifty-year golden age of Russian literature, rivals even their most prolific forerunners in both quality and quantity. It is easier to list the canonical prose authors they have neglected (only Turgenev and Nabokov, though Larissa has lobbied her husband to turn their attentions to the former) than all of those they have translated. From the Patriotic War against Napoléon to the era of nineteenth-century radicalism and reform, and then on to the October Revolution, the Communist terror, and the postwar period, the Pevear-Volokhonsky project now surveys a cultural expanse as broad as the Siberian frontier.

Even their unconventional division of labor sets them apart from their contemporaries. Occupying separate rooms, husband and wife execute a two-step process that begins with Larissa’s word-for-word English rendition from the original. Richard, who speaks only basic Russian, then shapes Larissa’s special proof into literary English while rejecting anachronistic vocabulary and constructions. After hundreds of chapters, revisions, and personal consultations, the method has resulted in two prestigious PEN Translation Prizes and—as a mark of their uncommon public acceptance—a much-coveted selection to Oprah Winfrey’s juggernaut book club.

Now they have passed another important milestone. In putting their stamp on Lev Tolstoy’s final novel, Hadji Murat, they have at last reached the end of the great author's major writings. But if translating the life’s work of Russian fiction’s foremost master were cause for a certain amount of triumphalism, you wouldn’t know it from talking to P and V.

Asked if he believes they have delivered dispositive English versions of the great works of Russian literature, Richard responds flatly, “I don’t believe in definitive translations.” Larissa similarly demurs: “The thing is that, we cannot set ourselves such a goal. We set ourselves a goal to make a faithful translation that conveys the style, the voice, the spirit of the original. . . . Some translations live for a very long time—but that does not mean that there should not be new translations. In fact, if there are no new translations, that means something’s wrong. The work is dead.”

The Russian classics were in little danger of falling into neglect before the arrival of their most recent custodians. Aylmer and Louise Maude, another husband-wife team, active at the turn of the century, were friends and admirers of Tolstoy; their translations of his early works won the author’s personal approval. Ann Dunnigan, a stage actress whose love of Chekhov led her to render her own editions of his finest plays, inspired the non-Russian-speaking Tennessee Williams to pen a loose adaptation of The Seagull. British and American linguists have generated an array of creditable offerings, and, ever since the books fell into the public domain decades ago, competing publishers have sought out their own translations.

No figure, however, casts a larger shadow across Russian-to-English translations than Constance Garnett, who was the most important Russian interpreter of her generation and is still widely read today. Her contributions range from the colossal tomes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Chekhov’s vast collection of short stories and the memoirs of Alexander Herzen. Garnett, a gifted student of classics at Cambridge, began studying Russian while enduring a difficult pregnancy in the 1890s. She became acquainted with the exile Sergei Kravchinsky, who fled the Russian Empire, after assassinating the head of the tsar’s secret police, and settled in London. With Kravchinsky’s early assistance and the encouragement of her husband, the editor and publisher Edward Garnett, Constance Garnett began a career that would result in some seventy volumes and introduce English speakers to the flower of nineteenth-century Russian letters. Garnett counted among her admirers Ernest Hemingway and D. H. Lawrence. Joseph Conrad, in a 1902 letter to Edward, lavished special praise on her version of Anna Karenina. “Of the thing itself I think but little,” he wrote, “so that her merit shines with the greater lustre.”

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Nijinsky (Book by Lucy Moore)

2013-05-01T23:09:00.002+02:00

Vaslav Nijinsky was almost immobile at the last moment of his real life. Only his expressive hands moved, turning magazine pages as he waited outside the office of a pioneer psychiatrist at a Zurich asylum. After a consultation the doctor privately announced to Nijinsky's wife, the incorrigible Romola de Pulszky, that her husband was incurably mad. Nijinsky already knew his condition; he had kept an inventory of his own disintegration in a journal. As De Pulszky came out of the office, he said – if she is to be believed, which she usually isn't – "You are bringing me my death sentence." Which she was – there followed 31 years of schizophrenia with rare lucid episodes. He was never himself again.

Fini. Just like that. Page 213, within days of Nijinsky's 30th birthday in 1919, and thebiography is almost all over but for a coda on a fading legend. Half his short life had been in training, first as the infant-phenomenon son of dancers scrabbling around the Russian provincial entertainment circuit – here the boy begged a tap lesson from a black American duo, there he fell into a circus animal act, or taught himself piano. Then his mother twanged every string to get him into the splendid Mariinsky theatre school in St Petersburg, a rigid classical grind, in the hope he might do well enough in ballet to retire on an imperial pension at 36. Nijinsky was a byproduct of pre‑revolutionary Russia, a culture wide open to influences western and eastern, high and low.

The energy from his lowly childhood elevated him. As a student, he was cast by the choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who thought ballet should be a revolutionary art rather than merely court cabaret and an academy for grand-ducal mistresses and princely rent-boys. He wanted a male dancer with attitude to redress the sexual balance on stage – not a safe pair of hands to loft a prima ballerina, but a power. Nijinsky was certainly that. Anna Pavlova soon refused to partner him because audiences wanted to see him as much as her, and when Fokine defected to Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1909, Nijinsky, aged 19, went too.

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Olga Berggolts: My Home

2013-05-01T01:27:00.002+02:00

In the home where I lived many years,
From where I left the winter of the blockade,
A light once again appears in the evening windows.
It is pinkish, festive, elegant.

Glancing at the three windows that used to be mine,
I remember: the war happened here.
Oh how we darkened, without a ray of hope...
And everything darkened, everything darkened in this world...

Afterwards the owner did not knock on the door,
As though he had forgotten the way back to his own apartment.
Where is he now, absent-mindedly roaming?
What is the last place that gave him shelter?

No, I do not know who lives there now,
In these rooms where you and I used to live,
Who, in the evenings, knocks on that very door,
Who left the blue wallpaper as it was,
The very same wallpaper that was chosen so long ago...
I recognized it from outside through the window.

The windows’ inviting comfort,
Awaken memories of such bright, forgotten light,
That I believe that kind people live there,
Good, welcoming people.

There are even little children there,
And someone young, who is perpetually in love,
And the postman only brings them happy news,
And only the truest friends come here for noisy holidays.

I want so dearly for someone to be happy,
There, where I suffered immeasurably.

Possess everything that was denied to me,
And all that I gave up for the war...

However, should such a day arrive,
When the tranquil snow and glimmering twilight,
Will light ablaze my blessed memories,
So vividly that I will not resist knocking on the door,
Coming into my home, standing in my threshold,
And asking...well asking, “What time is it?”
Or “Water,” like I did on those roads of war.
If that happens, do not judge me,
Answer me trustingly and compassionately,
After all, I have come here to my home,
And I remember it all and believe in our happiness.

1946

Translated by Andrew Glikin-Gusinsky

Varya Panina - Biography

2013-05-01T01:15:00.000+02:00

Varvara Vasilievna Panina (Vasilieva) was born in 1872 in Moscow into a family of a petty trader, a gypsy by birth. As a 14-year old girl she was put to the Moscow “Strelna” restaurant’s choir, conducted by the Gypsy woman singer Aleksandra Ivanovna Panina. After marrying Panina’s nephew, who was a chorister, she started to perform in the restaurant “Yar” with her own gypsy choir. In “Yar” Varya Panina soon gained fame with her solo singing, and her glory spread around Moscow at once. In spite of profitable offers from impresarios for a long time she refused to leave “Yar”. In 1902 the impresario Semyonov induced her to perform in a solo concert in the Petersburg Nobility Assembly Hall (nowadays Big Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic). The concert was a triumphant success, launching the singer’s breathtaking career. Varya Panina finally parted with “Yar” and started to tour around various Russian cities as a soloist performer of the gypsy romance. The concert activity was getting more and more successful. Panina came to be called the “Queen of Gypsy romance song”. “Celestial Varya Panina” – this is what the poet Alexander Blok called her. Writers Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Shalyapin, Alexander Kuprin, Anton Chekhov, and artist Konstantin Korovin were among the admirers of her talent. Varya Panina was endowed with a great original talent and outstanding musicality. Her voice, immensely deep and of rare beauty, its range reminding of the violoncello, and her manner of singing, deeply dramatic and contagiously emotional, though outwardly reserved, were captivating for the listeners. Not once her contemporaries noted that the singer produced the greatest impression when singing in modest chamber surroundings rather than in large concert halls.

“Celestial Varya Panina” – Alexander Blok once wrote in his diary. The poet liked to listen to gramophone records of the famous singer: “I met Remizov, we had gramophone going, mainly with Varya Panina” – another page of the diary says. Alexander Kuprin also wrote about “the last of the Mohicans” of gypsy song with great respect: “I listened – alas, only on the gramophone - to Varya Panina. In absence I understand what enormous power and beauty harboured in this deep, nearly man’s voice”.

The artist Konstantin Korovin once took the liberty of opposing Varya Panina’s singing to the music art of his friend Fyodor Shalyapin.

Varvara Panina died of a heart disease, aged 38, on the 10th of June 1911. Thousands of Muscovites went to accompany the singer’s coffin to the Vagankovskoe Cemetery. Lots of remarkable figures of Russian art came to bid her farewell.

Нищая (A Beggar) - romance of A. Alyabjev on words of P. Beranzhe, russian text belongs to A. Lenin.

It is romance about fate of old actress. She was beautiful, famous and reach She had a lot of admirers and friends. But once she lost her voice and sight and became beggar. All, whom she knew forgot her and she had to stand near church and to ask for alms.

Dmitri Shostakovich - Waltz No. 2

2013-04-30T13:00:00.001+02:00

Nicholas II - The last Emperor of Russia

2013-04-27T18:06:00.000+02:00

Nicholas II was the last Emperor of Russia.

Born 6 May 1868, Nicholas was the oldest son of Tsar Alexander III and his wife Maria Feodorovna. His parents took particular trouble over his education. Nicholas was taught by outstanding Russian academics at home, he knew several languages and had a wide knowledge of history, and he also quickly grasped military science. His father personally guided his education, which was strictly based on religion. Nicholas ascended the throne at age 26 after the unexpected death of his father in 1894. Although a well educated man, he felt unprepared for the hard task as the ruler of the Russian empire, he was not properly prepared to officiate as a monarch and was not fully introduced to top affairs of the state. Nicholas's reign was marked by tragedy from the very beginning. A national celebration to honor the formal coronation of the new tsar turned into a disaster. Overcrowding resulted in a stampede and hundreds of people were crushed to death.

Shortly after the death of his father, Nicholas married the German Princess Alix of Hesse who, after taking the Orthodox faith took the name of Alexandra Feodorovna. Their union was a rare one among royal families in that they married “for love” and Nicholas was a devoted husband throughout their life together. Alexandra bared him five children: Olga, Tatyana, Maria, Anastasia and Aleksey, the only male heir to the throne. Aleksey was diagnosed with a life threatening illness, hemophilia. In 1905 a so called 'holy man' named Grigory Rasputin was presented at the palace. He was the only one who was mysteriously able to help ease their son’s pain. Despite Rasputin's well documented stories of drinking and womanizing, Alexandra absolutely believed that Rasputin was sent to the royal family by God and soon he exerted a powerful influence over the tsar and tsarina advising them on state matters.

Nicholas was a confirmed autocrat, much like his father. In a speech made in January 1895 he said: “Let them (the people) know that I, devoting all my efforts to the prosperity of the nation, will preserve the principles of autocracy as firmly and unswervingly as my late father of imperishable memory.” But Nicholas did not inherit the strong will of his father and mostly continued the work his predecessors had started which brought rapid economical and trade growth. Devoted to his wife he was influenced by Alexandra, who shared his views on government and country and truly believed that autocracy was for the good of Russia and must be preserved at all costs.

In 1904, Nicholas took his country into war with Japan. Russia's embarrassing defeat ruined the monarchy's prestige among all sectors of society, the nobility and the peasants, leading to a revolution in 1905 and to an event that became known as Bloody Sunday. Unarmed crowds demanding radical constitutional and social reforms were shot down by the tsar's army near his palace. This set off more riots and strikes throughout Russia. To ease the wave of opposition and regain support Nicholas created a parliament, the State Duma, Russia's first nationally elected representative assembly to give the people a voice.

However, unrest continued and in 1914 Nicholas felt obligated to prevent a German invasion of Europe and took Russia into World War One. He personally took command of the army and left Alexandra in charge. The Russian army suffered heavy loses and was defeated, resulting in a political crisis. Soaring prices and food shortages strained relations between the government and the common people, who had come to hate the ongoing war and blamed Nicholas for it. In 1917 a strike movement against the tsar broke out and even spread to the army. Abandoned by his generals Nicholas was eventually forced to abdicate, and all the power was transferred to the Provisional Government. ...

Olga Spessivtzeva - Biography and Giselle's Mad Scene

2013-04-27T18:04:00.000+02:00

The story of Olga Spessivtseva is the saddest I have known. Although she was born into a prosperous family, her father's death imposed financial hardships on the family, and Olga was sent to an orphanage. At the age of ten she became a student at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg. Here she found the order and discipline that she needed in her life. A shy, withdrawn child, Olga dedicated her existence to ballet. She graduated in 1913 and became a soloist in the ballet company in1916.

Although she did not support Serge Diaghilev's ideas about dance, in 1916 she agreed to replace Tamara Karsavina on the American tour of The Ballets Russes. When she returned to Russia in 1918, she was promoted to Prima Ballerina. Here she had her chance to dance Giselle for the first time. For many, Spessivtseva was the perfect Giselle, her flawless dancing and air of vulnerability eclipsing even the interpretation of Pavlova.

Spessivtseva's fragile health and the deprivations of the Russian Revolution contributed to her contracting tuberculosis circa 1919. By 1921 she had regained her strength, and rejoined the Ballets Russes in London to dance Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Princess. The ballet was a financial failure, but when Spessivtseva returned to her homeland, she danced Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty and was a great success.

In 1924 she left Russia for the last time and became the star of the Paris Opera Ballet. She had problems with the management and left in 1927 to briefly dance again for the Ballets Russes. Afterward she returned to the Paris Opera, where she danced Salomé and created a role in Serge Lifar's Creatures of Prometheus.

The invitation to dance Odette in the second act of Swan Lake at Covent Garden induced Spessivtseva to return to Diaghilev's company in 1929. He also promised Spessivtseva he would revive Giselle for her. Diaghilev's death shattered her. She did get a chance in 1932 to dance Giselle again in the Camargo Soviet production at the Savoy Theatre. This heralded the revival of native classical ballet in England.

Spessivtseva's fanatical perfectionism often caused her trouble and cancellations of contracts. In 1934 she toured Australia, again eclipsing memories of Pavlova. Spessivtseva gave her farewell performance in Buenos Aires in 1937. The coming war in Europe brought her to America to live. Here she became an advisor to a new company -- Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre).

In 1940 she had a mental breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital in New Jersey. The hospital knew nothing of her past. For some time she was believed dead by many of her colleagues. Anton Dolin, Dale Fern and Felia Doubrovska managed to have her moved to the Tolstoy Farm in Valley Cottage, NY, where she died in 1991.

Of her Giselle it was said, "She danced not for herself, not for an audience, but for Dance itself." ...

Grigory Sokolov: Schubert Sonata D 664

2013-04-26T20:27:00.002+02:00

Grigory Sokolov (born April 18, 1950 in Leningrad) In the 40 years since the 16-year-old Grigory Sokolov was awarded first prize at the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1966, the world has been blessed with what one American critic recently called "a kind of pianism, musicianship and artistry one thought had vanished forever". Championed at a young age by Emil Gilels and a prominent figure on the Russian music scene since his early teens, Sokolov has gained an almost mythical status amongst music-lovers and pianophiles throughout the world. He is considered by many today to be the world's greatest living pianist. Ever since his first major piano recital in Leningrad at the age of 12, Sokolov has amazed everyone again and again with the enormous breadth of his repertoire and his huge, almost physical musical strength. Using little pedal, and thus superior finger-work, he draws from the concert grand an immense variety of sounds; he has an unlimited palette of colours, a spontaneous imagination and a magical control of line. His interpretations are poetic and highly individual, and his rhythmic freedom and elasticity of phrase are perhaps unequalled among pianists today.

Those who are used to his art are most particularly attracted by the naturalness of his performing manner, which is part of his artistic credo. His playing betrays no influence from past masters, his style and approach are entirely his own, and are completely unique. Whatever Grigory Sokolov performs, be it a Pavane of William Byrd, a Bach Fantasia, Chopin Mazurka or a Prelude of Ravel, it suddenly sounds completely new. Even a familiar Beethoven Sonata can be rediscovered as a new piece. But all this magic has its earthly roots: Sokolov knows more about a Steinway than many piano technicians, and before he sits down to play a strange instrument, he first examines its inner mechanics, taking it to pieces. He is used to studying for many hours every day, and even on the day of a concert, practices on stage for hours, "getting to know" the piano. That he prefers his CDs to be recorded live is not surprising, since he likes to capture the sacred moments of a real, live concert and avoid the sterile atmosphere of a studio.

More here.

Gothic tales from Russia haunt the imagination

2013-04-26T20:02:00.001+02:00

Obsession, possession, insanity, incest and horror wander through the pages of “Red Spectres,” an erratically brilliant collection of Gothic short stories from 20th-century Russia. In the opening tale, a woman’s reflection in a mirror “seized me by both hands and wrenched me towards her,” plunging the unhinged narrator into a terrifying world of shadows. These stories do the same to their readers, haunting the imagination on many different levels.

Valery Bryusov’s pre-revolutionary gem “In the Mirror” (1903) shows that the genre was not only a response to the nightmarish phantoms of Soviet life. But most of the other stories here were written the 1920s and use images of supernatural or psychological disturbance to reflect the contemporary world. Only two of them have appeared in English before.

In her conscientious introduction, Muireann Maguire explores historical and literary contexts and observes that Gothic stories often appear at times of cultural upheaval: “Russia by the mid-1920s had endured two revolutions…and a shattering civil war…” But – as responses to living in a time of frightening change – these tales also “transcend the specificities of the Soviet era.”

The mysteries of madness and mortality, a “dread and fascination with technology,” ghosts, grotesques and monsters are all generic features, their shades and tentacles reaching back to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and beyond, and forward into contemporary horror. With a population of flame-haired Siamese twins, zombie fetuses or mad scientists, these stories explore life and death, town and country, crossing continents in the turn of a page, visiting a factory in Heidelberg or death row in Sing-Sing. One recurrent and suitably gothic setting is Venice, “great city of masks, ghostly mirrors, silent doges…”

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Sergei Mikhailovich Lyapunov: Symphony No. 1 Op. 12 I. Andantino

2013-04-24T11:22:00.001+02:00

Symphony No. 1 by Sergei Lyapunov.
Conducted by Vassily Sinaisky with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.

Sergei Mikhailovich Liapunov - Composer

2013-04-24T11:20:00.000+02:00

As a pianist who champions the works of lesser-known composers, I have discovered several composers over the years whose works are not only of high quality both pianistically and compositionally, but that cause audiences to respond with gratification and surprise. Two such composers, Alkan and Medtner, have enjoyed the patronage of first-rate pianists, and good representation in recordings (though there is room for many more). Sergei Liapunov (also spelled Lyapunov), however, has not had as much attention devoted to his music as he deserves, in spite of a few fine recordings.

Sergei Mikhailovich Liapunov was born on 30 November 1859 in Yaroslavl, Russia, a town about 250 km northeast of Moscow. His father, Mikhail Vasilievich Liapunov (1820-1868) was a mathematician and astronomer who became the director of the Demidovsky Institute in Yaroslavl, while his mother, Sofya Alexandrovna (née Shipilov), an accomplished amateur pianist, did much to foster Sergei's interest in music. Sergei had two brothers, Alexander (1857-1918; photo), who became a famous and influential mathematician, and Boris (1862-1943), a philologist who was a member of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.

After Mikhail's early death, the family moved to Nizhny-Novgorod, where Sergei was enrolled in a class of the Russian Musical Society. When his mother died in the late 1870s, the Liapunov sons were assisted by the Shipilov family, but for which the three brothers would have suffered severe financial disadvantages.

Nikolai Rubinstein (1835-1881) advised Sergei to move to Moscow to enter the Conservatory there, which he did in 1878, studying piano with Karl Klindworth (1830-1916), Paul Pabst (1834-1897), and V.I. Wilborg, and composition with Nikolai Hubert (1840-1888), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), and Sergei Taneyev (1856-1915). While in Nizhny-Novgorod, Liapunov had already been attracted to the music of Mily Balakirev (1837-1910) and his cohorts Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), Modeste Mussorgsky (1839-1881), and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908). Now that he was in Moscow, where they were not well known, his leanings toward their style became evident in spite of his exposure to the more western-oriented works of Tchaikovsky and Sergei Taneyev prevalent at the Conservatory.

Liapunov turned down an offer to teach at the Moscow Conservatory in favor of moving to St. Petersburg to pursue his work and put himself under the influence of Mily Balakirev, which he did in 1884. It is a more or less received opinion that Balakirev completely controlled Liapunov's musical development, as he had done at first with the other members of the Moguchaya Kuchka ("The Mighty Handful"). (Rimsky-Korsakov, in his memoirs, describes Liapunov as being completely under Balakirev's sway.) I, however, do not totally agree with that assessment, as it is clear that Liapunov early on developed a melodic style entirely his own, and though he owes much to Balakirev's (sometimes despotic) influence, he was never completely overwhelmed by his teacher and mentor.

A major influence in Liapunov's work was his collaboration in 1893 with Balakirev and Anatol Liadov (1855-1914) in the collection of folksongs from northern Russia, particularly the provinces of Kostromsk, Vologodsk, and Vyatsk. Many of these folksongs found their way into his Russian folksong arrangements of Opp. 10 and 13, the Solemn Overture on Russian Themes, Op. 7 of 1896, as well as into other works throughout his career. Perhaps the most famous of the pieces that demonstrate this influence is the 10th of the Twelve Transcendental Etudes, Op. 11, Lezhginka, which must surely rank as Liapunov's "hit tune." ...

In the Lava Mountains

2013-04-23T02:39:00.001+02:00

In the Lava Mountains: Going to the mountains is fun, but going to the mountains is even more fun when it is a volcano, an active Russian volcano. Team of explorers went there and post beautiful images of a mesmerizing natural wonders. You can … Read more...

Rachmaninov - Prelude in g sharp minor op 32 - Elisabeth Leonskaja

2013-04-22T18:20:00.001+02:00

Sergei Rachmaninov - Prelude in g sharp minor op 32
DR Symphony Orchestra - Dmitrij Kitatjenko -
Piano: Elisabeth Leonskaja

Largest Exhibition of Mikhail Nesterov to be Opened in Moscow

2013-04-20T17:00:00.002+02:00

Mikhail Nesterov - Portrait of Olga Nesterova

On April 24 the Tretyakov Gallery in Krymsky Val opens the largest exhibition of the year dedicated to the outstanding artist Mikhail Nesterov (1862-1942).

His creations convey and reflect the most important features of national character and the nature of Russia. The contents and depth of Nesterov’s art is in accord with religious quest of the Russian literature and domestic philosophical thought at the turn of the 19th- 20th centuries.

Nesterov, Mikhail - 1906 Autumn

About 300 works from 24 museums of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and 9 private collections will present a wide range of the artist’s creative interests: paintings on religious subjects, portraits, landscapes, and sketches of church frescoes.

Many works presented at the exhibition, are displayed for the first time after carrying out of most complicated restoration works.

RiC