Edward Crabtree

TOTAL ABANDON.

My first live encounter with Altpop/rockers TOTAL/CHERKUNOVA in Moscow’s relocated Mumy Troll Music Bar.

TOTAL/CHERKUNOVA, a pop rock sensation who sent up a flare at the beginning of this millennium, have been sprinkling Russia with soulful songs for two decades now, but are not yet ready for the anniversary gig routine.

At first known only as TOTAL (the addition to their moniker began last year), the band represent another brainchild of the ever-fertile composer and music manager Maxim Fedeev (who can also claim Linda and Yulia Sachayevo as amongst his discoveries).

Marina Cherkunova is his cousin and they both emerged from Kurgan, the `capital of the Trans – Urals` in Southern Russia where they each received a musical education. At the age of thirty Mariana became the lead singer of the new band.

TOTAL’s idiosyncratic trip-hop influenced alt pop-rock sound – and corresponding urban shaven haired image – found a ready audience and with it came a popular studio album and a string of high-profile festival appearances. Proud Russian magazine columnists likened them to the overseas Guano Apes and Skunk Anansie.

They came my way in around 2007 in the form of their second album TOTAL2: Moye Mir (`My World`). Injected with real feeling and with not a dud track on it, the band climbed high in my hierarchy of affections. (It helped too that that Cherkunova both has a role in and provides some of the music for, one of my favorite recent Russian films – Lost Island ( 2019) ). )

I had not, however, managed to catch them live before.

Altered abode.

There was not much notice about TOTAL CHERNUKOVA’s show on January 14^th: I only got wind of it at the last moment.

It was to be at the Mumy Troll music bar. But wait…didn’t that place close during the lockdown?

It turned out that the venue had teleported to the less salubrious but more populous environs of Novy Arbat.

The new Mumy Toll – as much as it strains to keep up the appearance of continuity (with all the nautical bric a brac) – is more commodious and feels somehow seedier and more `street`. The security is till as stiff as ever. No, I couldn’t take my rucksack in. The bar too remains as sluggish in its service. I only managed to get in two German beers all evening, being forever walled behind higher priority parties of cocktail sippers.

The establishment finds itself torn between the different demands of its demographics. There are those who come to in groups partake of the seafood at tables, caring not a whit what band may be playing. Then there are those to whom the place is a nightclub and are there to dance after the band has packed up. Then – oh, excuse us -there are the actual music fans who have, sort of, come to see a live band in a live music venue.

Band update.

The latter congregates bit by bit near the stage. Twenty to thirty somethings for the most part, they seem about two thirds female and a collision between glam girls and specky hipsters.

The first ripple of excitement comes when Anastasia Cherkunova – Mariana’s daughter and now director of the operation – comes on stage to deliver the water bottles and tape down the playlists.

The enter TOTOAL/CHERKUNOVA in their 2022 incarnation. This is a four piece with some new blood. The youthful Ilya Andrus supplies the guitar, Konstantin Mikyukov the DJ on the turntables, with the percussion being meted out by the chunky shade-wearing Stanislav Aksyonov .( They seem to manage to do without a bassist). In baggy jeans and floppy headgear, they exude a Nineties aesthetic.

Marina herself spots cropped peroxide-blonde hair in place of her more familiar bald pate (and looks better for it, if you ask me). Otherwise she combines knee length black dress with sturdy Gothic type boots.

Firebird.

Throughout their regulation two-hour set, this quartet guide us all their most loved tunes -`Hits the Eyes, Sparks, Karamasutra...with much upbeat banter between the songs from Marina. The fans, made somnolent by the January slush begin to thaw out and to jump and sway and to cheer and sing.

Even the attentions of security as they make sure we all keep are masks on at all times (compensating, no doubt, for a lack of QR code entry requirement) cannot dampen the conviviality.

What functions as the dynamo behind the whole experience is Maria Chernukova herself. I have not seen someone work so much at a performance since seeing Julia Volkova at the previous Mumy Troll some years ago. Embodying the joys and angst of life she puts in a writhing, impassioned full bodied, erotic performance like some sort of female Mick Jagger.

That she functions as an unacknowledged icon is evidenced by the excess of raised cameras all around me the whole time.

Urban folk.

The musicians augment the operatic delivery with some tongue-in-cheek `rockist` stadium gestures such as dragged out finales to songs with sections of drum and guitar solos.

TOTAL/CHERKUNOVA can boast one rather effective trick and it consists of clothing power pop ballads in a more urban, modern trip-hop stylistic.

They have a lot to live up to this night. I am seeing one of my most cherished acts for the first time and it is my first gig of the new year too.

They do not disappoint.

SPACE CORN: STAR MIND reviewed.

Russia’s much awaited Space Adventure film arrives at last. But haven’t we seen it all somewhere before?

STAR MIND (Syesdni Razoom) had been in the offing for half a decade before it made it into the Russian cinemas on January 6^th this year, doing so amidst precious little in the way of public poster campaigns or journalistic coverage (which may account for my seeing it in an almost empty cinema hall).

STAR MIND constitutes a 98-minute-long `adventure fantasy` certified at 12^+.Whilst its trailers seem to promise a horror, it would be more accurate to view it as pure (`hard`) science fiction laced with some thriller and action elements.

R.D Studios, who focus on the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres and who brought us Abigail (2019) are behind it.

The 38-year-old man with the megaphone Vyacheslav Lisnevsky, who worked on the fantasy drama Eclipse from 2017 here directs a young cast of relative unknowns.

The main protagonist, Doctor Steve Ross, is played by Egor Koreshkov. Russian television viewers will know him for his role in the series Eighties this year and he stars in the much-anticipated future world drama We due out this year. Alena Konstantinova supplies the love interest. Other players include Dmitry Frid, Alexander Kuznetsov (who sadly died before this film was released) and – it is interesting to see – a `woman of colour` in the form of Liza Martinez.

The picture, shot in the more futuristic areas of Moscow and in Charyn Canyon in Kazakhstan, represents something of a test case. We already know that Russia has the capability to roll out some credible science-fiction blockbusters because of the precedents of Inhabited Island (1 and 2) and Invasion (2020). STAR MIND however, consists of an off-world space adventure requiring even more lavish visual effects. Can Russian cinema meet this challenge?

Interrupted Quest.

The film opens a decade or so hence with the Earth in the grip of an ecological virus which takes a malign toll on the biosphere leading to plants and animals perishing and our planet becoming ever more uninhabitable.

In the midst of this, however, strange artefacts get discovered in caves around the world. These take the form of orbs and hail from we know not where. Doctor Ross is the man who learns how to activate them. It appears that they function as `seeders` and are able to make planets with oxygen and water even more able to cradle new life.

It is he who sets up Project Gemini. The mission of this is to seek out Earth’s twin planets and then terraform them using these orbs, thus finding a new habitat for humanity.

Egor Koreshkov as Doctor Steven Ross [Kinofilmpro.ru]

A team of men – and one Afro-Caribbean woman -and he take a shuttle through an intergalactic wormhole set for just such a planet.

Meanwhile, via flashbacks, we learn that the good doctor has a complicated relationship with a woman back on Earth who is pregnant by him (a romantic subplot which will go on to gain significance).

The ship carries them off course and they arrive at a planet they had not planned to – which nevertheless seems to have the right credentials for terraforming. All the while, a slimy critter has been a stowaway with them, hiding in the orb that they had taken on-board with them (Because – because…whatever). This tentacled monster is now at loose in the ship, picking off the crew, and with its own plans for the new planetary home….

We can see that this storyline is not the product of a lengthy brainstorming lunch. In fact, it is a stitching together of Interstellar (2014) and the Alien franchise (from 1979). The scriptwriters have made some attempts to put their own stamp on things. The life-spreading orbs are a fresh creation and there is a twist concerning the monster: it is a robot.

Dejavu.

The iconography of STAR MIND seems all rather familiar. We have ship with chunky steel doorways and crepuscular interiors with plenty of brightly lit consoles, and a cast of uniformed young men -and one black woman (who is given to running about in her underwear – Ripley style). The new planet too is all craggy and rocky in its terrain.

The technology on show seems like an odd clash of the current and the fantastical. The crew’s spaceship is a shuttle much like the ones employed by NASA in the present day and it is blasted off in a rocket also like the ones we know and are used to. Later, however the ship enters an` interdimensional wormhole` type thing of a much more extravagant nature.

The most jarring aspect of the film is the fact that all the characters are known by Western names. All the signs and computer readouts are in English too. Even the inclusion of a black woman can be taken as an attempt to underscore the impression that this is an American crew rather than any move towards diversity.

K.D Studios seem to be leaving nothing to chance: they are casting their net for the widest demographic which means the Anglosphere and having a 12+ certificate.

The problem here is that all the production team’s grey matter seems to have been expended on the – quite striking – visual impact of the film but at the expense of the plot and characterization. It is like an ornate chocolate box housing mediocre chocolate.

Popcorny.

That being said STAR MIND does retain some charms. Taken as a creature-feature it faces stiff competition from its compatriots in the form of Kola Superdeep (2020) and Sputnik (2020) and cannot even begin to compete. It does, nevertheless, feature some tense sequences: the frozen body of one of the crew slams into the window of their craft, the monster punches its way through the reinforced steel doorways and so on.

Also, while the ideas in the film may be second-hand, these ideas are interesting and do inform the events in the film.

STAR MIND may not be the epic that it promised to be. It is more of a popcorn-friendly B-movie, but is none the worse for that. There is even something endearing in its desperation to please its demographic. I am reminded more of the film Life (2017) more than anything else.

The Russian online feedback to its debut seems divided. Some claim to be duly impressed by the professionalism of its production values. They are in the minority however. There are much more couch critics who sneer at the film’s copycat nature.

Perhaps we should not worry too much. STAR MIND has demonstrated that the Russian film industry can muster up a respectable space adventure to match anything of the kind from Hollywood. Next time they just need to make sure that everyone knows that it is Russian!

The Western title will be PROJECT GEMINI [Kinopoisk.Ru]

Lead image:Datavyhoda.ru

GHOST SHIP: premier hard rock exponents CHORNY OBELISK at Izvestia Hall last year were SO last year.

I thought it would be good to check out a new venue for a change. Izvestia Hall is located in the former building of the publishing and print plant of the first Soviet newspaper – Izvestia – no less.

The publishers of this, after six years since starting in 1918, needed a new headquarters for their flourishing concern. In 1924 architects were invited to compete for the honour of being the designer of such a new building. Urban planner Grigory Barkhin’s Constructivist number won the day and it began to be built a short time thereafter. Izvestia itself closed shop in 2011. The current building, now an all-purpose venue for all manner of social events, has been restored to something like its former Modernist glory by Ginsburg Architects headed by Alexey Ginsburg.

Such a renovated relic seems like fitting host for a band like CHORNY OBELISK. This act too has lost its original driving purpose: their charismatic lead singer and bassist, Anatoly Krupnov, died 25 years back at just 31, after forming the band in Moscow in 1986. The current assembly – a string and drum four piece combo lead by 54-year-old rock veteran Dmitry Borisenkov – represents a reboot undertaken in 1999 which continues to sail despite the loss of its captain, like some sort of ghost ship.

They are at least gifted with an evocative name – Black Obelisk (and extra points to them if this is a tribute to the German novelist Maria Remarque’s first novel) and overall have some thirteen studio albums in their name. Their main rivals on the same turf – Aria – are often called `the Russian Iron Maiden` and in the same way CHORNY OBELISK could be seen as (although it fails to do justice to the variety of their output) `the Russian Motorhead`.

Grand old men of Russian metal.[drive2.com]

This event was packaged as being a special 35-year anniversary. Just as, from this year Elizium’s and Lumen’s shows were anniversaries. (What does this tell us about the state of the contemporary Russian music scene?)

Mature set.

A crowd of about a thousand forty and fifty somethings filed in from a snow-bound Sunday on December 19^th last year to have their QR codes and vaccine status scrutinized. They seemed to be in groups of friends composed of husbands and wives and had not brought their children. I saw few people below their age except for one or two blue haired and dreadlocked students here to show their respects.

The entrance of the main attraction was drumrolled by a lit backstage legend announcing their 35^th year. Then a telescopic rifle sight seeking a target circled on the screen against a brick walled background. Bee Gees disco music played (I gather that this was some kind of established in-joke). The masses meanwhile chanted `Chor – ny Ob-El -isk!`

The band played onstage for around three hours and thrashed out quite a beef goulash of a sound for four people (albeit sometimes aided by pre-recorded keyboard additions). The fans, in high spirits, joined in with plenty of rhythmic clapping and `Hey-hey-hey`s.

Borisenkov, with a caul covering his bald pate, was a genial host but seemed more the musician than any kind of ring leading front man.

The bassist and backing vocalist, Daniil Zakharenkov – resembling a piratical Robbie Coltrane -tried to compensate by working hard to whip up a `rock and roll party` ambience by gurning at the audience and so on.

The axe wielder – and original band member – Mikhail Svetlov – by contrast seemed a little bored. After pointing to some individuals in the crowd with mock-familiarity, he lapsed into dead-eyed mode, looking like an economics lecturer worrying about the state of his car.

This being a birthday bash, some `unexpected` guests clambered onto the stage to help out. I recognised none of these stars but can tell you that one of them was a white-haired plump guy in all denim with a growly voice and another was a tall dark young man in some sort of uniform-like get up who resembled a sinister leader of some kind of neo-Nazi cult.

The band did showcase quite a spectrum of song styles. Of course, there was state-of-the-art Eighties style Metal but we also got some speed core punk as well as the inevitable sing-a-long ballads. They even dusted down some iconic golden oldies such as `Ya Ostanous` (`I will Stay`) from 1994. When the audience started getting showered by glitter bombs I decided to take my leave.

Tribute act.

It is hard not to feel that CHORNY OBELISK would have cut a more significant profile back in the mid-Eighties when Gorbachev had not been long in the Kremlin and they were offering something fresh and with a more characterful kingpin. They now appear to be going through the motions a bit even if they do still deliver some satisfying adrenaline friendly riffs.

I feel that Borisenkov’s standardized vocal contribution provides no substitute for Kuprinov’s Kilminster-like roar. Indeed, at times I felt myself wishing that I could switch off the singing the better to bask in the rock instrumentals.

All that said, in comparison with Aria, the Obelisks are the edgier and more authentic of the two bands.

TEARS OF A CLOWN: An iconoclastic revival of the British play LOOK BACK IN ANGER by Ermolova Theatre.

John Osborne’s classic is often seen as a play of dissent concerning class differences and religious hypocrisy. How would such a play fare in Russia’s stifled atmosphere?

For some it was Catcher in the Rye, for me it was Look Back in Anger. That is to say a piece of writing which captured us in our youth and never let us go.

In my case this seems quite hard to account for. The seventeen-year-old that caught a revival of the play on the radio one summer was not working-class, nor a jazz fan, was not married nor in love and – at that time! – was not living in a flat in the Midlands.

It was the play’s double whammy of tone and eloquence that cut through.

Against all odds.

Look Back In Anger constitutes the third stage play by a 27 year old London touring actor called John Osborne. It was a domestic melodrama and the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square took it on in 1956 whereupon it was met with a polite disavowal – that is until one Kenneth Tynan, an influential critic from The Observer newspaper penned an enthused description of it as a generation defining piece. Then a TV showing of some of it followed and a new audience flooded in to see the whole thing. The play has been viewed as representing a stylistic trendsetter – towards greater contemporary realism and outspokenness on certain issues ever since. The play even made it to Moscow a year later. The role of Jimmy Porter – the so called `Angry Young Man` – has since become a popular script used for auditions for aspiring young male thespians.

So how would a Russian theatre of the twenty twenties serve up this hoary old classic to a Russian theatregoer?

The great adaptors.

A visible presence on Tverskaya street these last several years, Ermolova theatre was set up in 1933 and was named after the revered actress Maria Nikolaeva Ermolova (1853 – 1928). Today, the role of artistic director is filled by Oleg Menshikov (the military father in the films Attraction and Invasion). Under his auspices the company seems to be pushing at the boundaries somewhat. At the time of writing they are showing a rendering of Glukhovsky’s Text and also something called Russian Psycho which is not from the film of the same name but a tribute to Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. Indeed, some of their reworkings of established drama standards have discomfited audiences and critics alike – and Oglyanis Vo Gneve (Look Back In Anger) is nothing if not an established drama standard.

Nothing is sacred.

The clearest rupture with the original play is the defiance of naturalism. With its dinghy one room flat and above all, its ironing board, Look Back In Anger brought the punch of realism to an audience that had grown accustomed to mannered performances which wee at several removes from the worlds they lived in themselves.

In this revival, nevertheless, we discover the players in a rather commodious and stylish abode. There are wall lamps fixed to the walls and what can only be called French windows at the back of the stage (those emblems of pre-`Kitchen sink` theatre!) Old black and white antique looking pictures are festooned around the place and there are cushions on the floor. This is no bedsit in a Midlands town (although it might serve as a symbolic comment on the attachment to an Edwardian past that bedevils Jimmy).

Then – in a nod to Osborne’s subsequent play The Entertainer – the action gets interrupted by the arrival onstage of a clown- costumed Jazz troupe who seem to comment on the proceedings with their songs. This theatre of the Absurd-cum-circus element represents a thoroughgoing new realization of the play.

Misfit.

Resplendent in bright yellow socks, Andrei Martinev, who plays Jimmy Porter portrays him as very much the romantic-poetic archetype (his mannerisms put me in mind of the young Anthony Andrews). It was difficult to see this oddball adolescent as any kind of generational spokesman, however, still less imagine him running a sweet stall. His loyal sidekick Cliff Lewis – played by Makar Karyagin -is chunky, with blonde-haired clean-living looks that together with his braces make him look like a preppy young American more than a Welsh scruff. He spends a lot of time plucking guitar strings and bursting into song.

Not only is this version of the play vaudevillian in this way but it also seemed to be afflicted with ADHD! The players always had to be doing something as they spoke – unpacking something, fiddling with something – the script was never enough. There was also a fair bit of distracting drumming on tables with it all.

Stuck with the essentials.

What the production remained faithful to was the bare bones of the plot. Jimmy is a malcontent who is married to Alison (Polina Sinilnikova) , a woman from a higher class background than himself (this providing material for him to taunt her with) and Cliff is the more straightforward Welsh working-class friend who looks on as their marriage seems to teeter on the edge.

Enter into this `menagerie` Alison’s actress friend, the more dynamic Helena, come to stay for a week. Regarding her as a `natural enemy` Jimmy clashes with her, but not before she has arranged for his wife (who we learn earler is pregnant) to flee the scene.

Jimmy and Helena, in the classic attraction of opposites, fall into each other’s arms leaving a dismayed Cliff to also later vacate the household. All seems blissful, until the return of Alison, minus the baby….

All of that was there but the dialogue had been shuffled around and some scenes seemed to have been hollowed out: Cliff nursing Alison after she has burnt her arm on the iron, Jimmy shouting at the church bells and the final reconciliation scene between Jimmy and Alison.

It was disconcerting to find that Jimmy and Alison’s game of bears and squirrels – the very thing that keeps their relationship alive in tense – moments had gone. So had Jimmy’s pipe smoking (although we do see a cheeky reference to it when Alison momentarily has one in her mouth). Most of all, the visit from Alison’s father – Colonel Redfern -had been cut, leaving no one to counterpoint all the bohemian chaos.

The stand off between Jimmy and Helena however not only remained but had been placed at the centre of this piece and was played to dramatic perfection. Osbone gained a reputation as a `misogynist`, but the fact remains that he wrote some great roles for women and Helena Charles is one of them. Veronkia Safonova projected a credible take on her as a statuesque, Amazonian Alpha-girl and it was not difficult to envisage how even a despiser of phonies like Jimmy could succumb to her charms.

Overall, this production made the play less like a one-man show than more faithful versions of Look Back In Anger have seemed.

What does it mean here?

The stress on this play was somewhat on the `affairs of the hearts` end of things and it was all viewed through a veil of sadness and tears. What of the sociopolitical undercurrent that made the play notorious? What would a – say – manager from Yugo Zapadnaya – make of the depiction of life in a Midlands town in the Fifties? Or of the subtle, but all too real, distinctions between Working and middle-class culture? Or of Cliff’s Welshness? Or of the mention of Britain’s former imperial role in India?

All of this would be somewhat hard to translate into Modern Muscovite but what would not be lost on a contemporary Russian is the ethos of anticlericalism and antimilitarism that runs through this play.

Likewise, as a man born out of his time and unable to find anything the present scene to fire up his ideals, Jimmy Porter could be viewed as a Superfluous Man, if there ever were one. I am not so sure if anything of this came out in this production though.

Overcooked.

The acting was strenuous but the overall aesthetic was camp, without being effete. Osborne himself might even have approved. However, the `anything-goes` approach to the staging left us with something cluttered and frenetic, with the cabaret aspects of it detracting from the theatrical tension. Sound-wise, there seemed to be too many scores vying for our attention: Jazz, chanson and modern classical.

Osborne’s plays often seem to ruffle people’s feathers. These spectators left bemused and maybe a little dazed but not otherwise indignant. I did, however, notice a lack of laughter (for this is a funny play, for most British people). It might be telling that the only appreciative chuckle came when a theatrical joke was made about passing Lady Bracknell the cucumber sandwiches.

For myself I was just as unsettled as when I watched a play calling itself A Clockwork Orange a few years back. Their production set my mind into gear, however, and I am still processing it all.

Lead image: Ermolva.ru

THE INTRIGUER, THE MINDBLOWER AND THE ROMANCER: A Look Back at Three Soviet period Science fiction writers

Leaving aside the translated works of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and, to a lesser extent, those of Alexander Belyaev, the science fictioneers of Soviet period Russia are not much trumpeted in the Western world.

So what a pleasant thrill it gave me to chance upon, in an expat bookstore, three compendiums of translated science fiction stories by authors new to myself and from that period.

Thank you Raduga.

From their base in Zubotsky Boulevard in the Park Kultury region of Moscow, Raduga (`Rainbow`) Publishers began making available foreign language imprints from their inception in 1931 up until the end of the Soviet Union. These publications included children’s books, language guides, photographic albums and popular fiction. As a part of a series called `Adventure & Fantasy`, Raduga brought some representative science fiction authors to the Anglophone world in the era when glasnost and perestroika where being spoken of in the Kremlin.

A futuristic doppelganger tale.

Vladimir Mihanovsky’s The Doubles was first published by Progress Publishers in 1981 but Raduga bought the story six years later when the Ukranian writer was 56 years of age. By this time Mikhanovsky had been a teacher of Maths and Physics at Kharkov University and penned a few tales speculating on humanity’s relationship with robotic technologies.

The intriguer: Vladimir Mikhanoivsky [esu.com.va]

Mikhanovsky’s stories – there are four in this collection -take place in an urbanized future that appears to be somewhere in America (`the Rockies` get a mention in one story). Interplanetary travel is a part of daily life (but not integral to these tales), domestic robots grace every home and the cities are crisscrossed with moving walkways. The Land of Informa is the exception, being a charming Wellsian tale of a man stumbling on an alternate world near a railway station outside of Moscow. The Violet is a sometimes zany detective tale set in the aforementioned future world (indeed the author would later devote himself entirely to the detective genre).

The title story – The Doubles – seems to have as its title a play on Dostoevsky’s tale The Double (1846) – the quintessential doppelganger story. In it we meet Newmore, an obsessive and gifted scientific researcher who, very much like Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll, dreams of isolating the more virtuous side of man’s psyche away from his baser part. He employs the latest in particle physics to do so and creates a sort of ethereal anti-human entity (which he calls `Alva`) which has the capacity to absorb the worst of a human being and turn into their negative doppelganger in the process. However, the original person and their Alva must never meet as this will result in mutually assured destruction in the form of an explosion – yet the Alva is drawn by magnetism to seek out it’s opposite and so needs must be avoided at all costs.

Despite these drawbacks, Newmore finds an all too willing guinea pig. Arben is a man desperate to rid himself of the guilt and irascibility that has overruled his life so far.

Indeed, after Newmore’s procedure, Arben does gain a new life: he receives a new approval from his workmates, forgets his guilts, gets back with an old, now adoring, girlfriend, acquires a swish new automobile and so on. However, the Alva is always Out There, seeking him….

Soon he is begging Newmore to reverse the whole experiment, particularly as his double seems to be breaking the expected rules in its urge to meet him. With a heavy heart Newmore agrees, but will the Alva get to Arben first?

Mikhanovksy tells a fine up-tempo tale even if some of the dialogue (in translation at least) reads like something from a television soap opera. His writing – not all that `Russian` really – resembles an Asimov but with a more vivid appreciation of the pitfalls of technological development.

Signals from a doomed species.

The Odessa born Segei Snegov died at the age of 84 in 1994 after having become best known for his space opera extravaganza People as Gods which he tapped out between 1966 and 1977 delighting many fans in Eastern Europe who resonated with his galaxy spanning quasi-Biblical excursions.

The mindblower: Sergei Snegov [Yandex.Zen]

First appearing in Detskaya Literatura in 1977, Snegov’s addition to the `Adventure & Fantasy` series consists of twelve stories which revolve around Roy and Henry, two scientific investigators tasked with getting to the bottom of inexplicable events or unusual crimes involving technology.

They live in a future world not unlike Mikhaonovsky’s. We are not given a location but weather is controlled, we have interstellar travel, robots of course, and a hinted at world government. The means exist to record and project the thoughts and dreams of the human mind and this features in a great many of the stories.

In the title story Ambassador Without Credentials Roy’s job has become personal. He is investigating the mysterious crash onto Mars of a spaceship which was carrying Hemry, his brother who is now lying comatose in a hospital on Mars.

Events accelerate when it transpires that the catastrophe had defied the laws of physics. The crew were befuddled by receiving warning signals that had reached them at faster than light speeds (an impossibility). Meanwhile, in his coma Henry is dreaming about physical and mathematical concepts which are way beyond his own capabilities….

The plot, as brilliant as it is preposterous, goes on to encompass an imperiled civilisation trying to reach out by using pseudo-humans planted into Earth’s society and by moulding the dreams of performers who sell their own dreams for entertainment purposes. We also get an alien visitor masquerading as a monkey that feeds off electricity and the use of an invisibility suit.

The tone is upbeat, even jocular at times, yet it is a very homosocial world. There are no women in this story, not even there as objects of desire. Despite this Ambassador Without Credentials delivered one of the most fun reading experiences I have had for a long time whilst playing with such solemn themes as the nature of Good and Evil and personal responsibility in the face of cataclysm.

An archeologist’s Mediterranean mission.

The still living Yuri Medvedev, from Krasnoyarsk, is the youngest of the three and his reputation still precedes him. Type his name into Yandex.ru and you will encounter shadowy insinuations about this writer including him being a key player in the “defeat of Soviet science fiction` no less.

The romancer: Yuri Medvedev. [swarogfond.livejournal.com]

Such accusations, which he has rebuffed, seem to refer back to his time as the Editor of Molodiya Gvardira . He steered this publication in the direction of pan -Slavic nationalism and in so doing set himself up in opposition to such figures as Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.

This was all some time ago and it is now difficult to sort out the facts from the gossip so – to the texts themselves!

The first and longest tale in The Chariot of Time (a collection introduced by the cosmonaut Vitaly Sevastyanov!) is called The Cup of Patience, a sort of science fantasy folk tale narrated by a young archeologist called Oleg Preobrazhensky.

In the Far East of the Soviet Union, Preobrazhensky had unearthed the dwelling and preserved body of a legendary princess called Snow Face. Later, however, his breakthrough discovery gets buried under the rubble of an avalanche triggered by an earthquake.

Later an imperious teacher of his sends him on an unexplained errand in Sicily, where most of the action will henceforth unfold. In Sicily a strange epidemic is underway and there is talk of UFO sightings and fires that seem to be caused by them. Nearby there resides an American military base. What part does this play in it all?

Preobrazhensky then meets up with Snow Face – except she is really the representative of an intergalactic community bent on safeguarding the Earth’s environment….

This itemization of the main plot elements does little to convey the experience of reading it. Medvedev seems to be a part of the Ray Bradbury school of science fiction which has a lot of poetic ruminations throughout. Stylish and sophisticated though his prose is, it is also high-falutin and over-romantic and I came close to returning the book to the shelf unfinished. The Cup of Patience does reach a kind of focused conclusion however, and it seems to be a simple `Yanks Go Home` one (and which had already dated by the time of the translation of this story in 1985).

A Challenge to Stereotypes.

Encountering Soviet Period culture can so often be something of an eyebrow raiser, failing, as it often does, to conform to our prejudices. The only writer here with a clear ideological axe to grind is Medvedev although even his brand of Pan-Slavism meets Green consciousness was not exactly the party line in the Eighties. As for Mikhanovsky and Snegov, they were very akin to their Western science fiction counterparts of their day. They even gave their protagonists Western sounding names.

Mikhanovsky, Vladimir The Doubles (Moscow: Rasduga Publishers, 1987) (Translators: Raisa Bobrova, Miriam Katz, Katherine Judelson).

Snegov, Sergei Ambassador Without Credentials (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1989) (Translated by Alex Miller).

Medvedev, Yuri The Chariot of Time (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1988) (Translated by Robert King).

PHANTOMS OF THE CRIMEA: REVIEW OF THE FILM `GUESTS`.

A routine paranormal drama tastefully delivered with pleasing locations and sets.

Like many less supported Russian cinema releases GUESTS was alloted a desultory run at the cinemas. I have only just caught up with it now in DVD form (which had to be ordered at that). 2019 – the year that GUESTS was put on the market already feels like a distant era. Then you could travel where you liked and mixing in groups was unproblematic (both things form the backbone of this film).

Part of a lineage.

GUESTS , a 16+ certificate 88 minute long film by Emotion Films, represents a formulaic ghost chiller of the young-people-in-an-abandoned -old-house type. The promotional poster boasts that the picture is from the same producers that brought us the chillers Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite and The Route is Built, both from 2016 .Indeed the names Georgy Malkov,Vladimir Polyskov and Danil Makhort all appear, among others, in the roll call of the producers of all these films.

Evgeny Abusov is a man you would not have predicted would have been behind the camera. Little would you know from this film that this director is better known for his comedies.

The leading role is taken by Angelina Stretchina, whose persona here is quite apart from the spunky dreadlocked tough girl she played in Queen of Spades2:Through the Looking Glass (released in the same year). The Dzhezkagan born 44 year old prolific actor Yuri Chursin brings class to the proceeding as the would -be romantic interest.

The screenplay was by Sergey Ageev who also worked on First Time (2017) a biopic concerning Alexei Leonev, the first man to space walk.

A special shout out should go to Alexandra Fatina, the photographer. She has provided the visual element to other ghost stories such as Envelope (2017) and here enriches this story with the special flavour of its location. Indeed the Black Sea coast location shots do much to impart a special character to what, on paper, seems a run-of-the-mill supernatural yarn.

Katya (Stretchina), who seems a rather timid, even frosty young woman, is working as a waitress in a cafe on the Crimean coast as the summer draws to an end. Her colleague introduces her to a new crowd. These are a gang of young hedonists whose idea of a good time is to find a property where they can lay on a private techno-rave, with one of their number being a professional DJ. Furthermore one of the men in the group takes an immediate interest in Katya.

The old dark house.

Rather against her own better judgement Katya directs their attention to an unoccupied old mansion on the coast that she knows of. (From a costume drama style prologue we know this to have been the lair of a local occultist back at the turn of the century). Soon the crew are partying in the property that they have squatted in, and trying not to think too much about the old textbooks about demonology that they have found about the place.

It is then that the long absent current owner bursts in on the scene. Andrei (Churshin) is a desperate man and he seems deranged enough for the men in the group to overtpower him and imprison him in the cellar. Then we learn that Katya had had an unconsummated tryst with this strange man when she had worked as a home-help at the mansion earlier. She begs them to release Andrei. Upon returning to the cellar, however they find that he has vanished….

Then the spirits of the house begin to make themselves known. A black ooze begins to disgorge from the walls. A phantom woman and satanic boy- child are seen. They have extendable talons and a tendency to hiss like angry cats.

Sedate.

The narrative pace is slow with many drawn out scenes. For example one long sequence just involves the youths poking around their new found prop erty. Jump scares are few and indeed even denied in scenes where you might expect one. Likewise there is no blood and guts. A young woman is impaled on a tree branch after being flung into the air by an angry spirit but we see very little. The most effective sequences are as low key as they are low tech: An unnoticed child stamds stock still in a doorway gazing in a baleful way at a room full of self-absorbed dancers.

Otherwise GUESTS constitutes a a cascade of spook paraphenalia: a seance, figures glimpsed in bathroom mirrors, people being levitated and so on. However, the real take-away from it all is the aesthetic appeal. We get stunning shots of the coast early on and then when we go indoors it’s all the muted browns and pastel green shades of an antique interior. Lovely.

Then Mark Dorbsky’s unobtruxive but brooding score reinforces the dreaminess of it all.

Here we get shown the Snapchat generation meeting their doom after kicking the hornets nest of a much older Crowleyesque set. Within that we get the usual kinds of tropes about obsessive love surviving death, the need for jusrice to be restored after so long and so on.

A shoulder shrug from compatriots.

What of the genertion this film is aimed at? Hating on their own domestic cinema is something of a Russian past-time so it comes as no surprise to find, for instance, someone calling herself `Kosmonaut Misha` on Otzovik.com, in a piece entitled `I’m sorry I saw this`:

There is an atmosphere, but it is an aymosphere of stupidity and absurdity

Yet some people appreciate these more subdued slow burners. GUESTS belongs to the same spectral category as the Spanish film The Others (2001). It might seem anodyne in comparison with the circus thrills on offer from other glitzier films but it works on its own terms. This is by no means a breakthrough film, but a stepping stone towards a cinema genre that Russia remains quite new to.

Lead image: Film.Ru

ON GOLDEN CLOUDS: ELIZIUM LIVE AT ADRENALINE STADIUM.

NIZHNY NOVGOROD’S LOCAL HEROES HAVE BEEN BLASTING OUT THEIR UPBEAT SOUND FOR OVER TWO DECADES. BUT WHAT ARE THEY SO HAPPY ABOUT?

So it is up the Green line to the north-west of Moscow to the Adrenaline Sradium, one of the live music venues to have come out of the other end of the Big Stop.

The hype for this event had only been an on-screen one: I saw no posters about it, but what hype it was! The event – billed as `Twenty Five Years in Space` was to be an Anniversary bash and was evoked with nostalgic fanfare:

`It seems like yesterday we were putting on plaid shirts and mohawks and the walls of the Nizny Novgorod `Manhatten club thudded together with any musicians we could…`

And so on. Yet despite this generational framing, the assembled masses lining up outside the club on 17th September prove a nondescript bunch in terms of style and of all and every age. I catch sight of one man who seems to be accompanied by what might be his septugenerian mother. Conversely, another mother in her forties accompanies her daughter – who looks perhaps not yet sixteen – to as far as the entrance to the show.

Another incongruous aspect to the set up is the fact that a vaccine passport( in the form of a QR code) proving that you had had the Sputnik V jab is demanded for the privelege of them taking your money to see them. (The band, or their management are, I suppose, entitled to make such stipulations if they want but my ferverent wish is that such schemes do not become viral throughput Moscow).

Power Pop Dance.

ELIZIUM first took to the stage in 1995 in the tourist town of Nizhny Novgorod on the river Volga. The bass player Dmitry Kuznetsov, who took up music after having taken two degrees, is the kingpin and together with the singer Alexander Telekhov forms the mothership of a band that is characterised by a revolving door of contributors coming and going.

The band, somewhat lionised in their local city, boast some ten albums and, for all the line up changes, a distinct sound. `’`Space rock` (as they sometimes style it) it is not – or at any rate not if this term puts you in mind of Hawkwind and the like. (The only cosmic part of their performance lays in the numinous electronic ambient introductory soundtrack as the band enters the sage). Nor, nowadays at least, could the sound be pigeonholed as `punk` or even `ska punk`: it is too polished for that. If pressed I would call it `Power Pop Dance music`.

Sporting a mohican doesn’t make you a punk.

Heads up all the way, they deal out big slabs of melodic sound held aloft by peppy rhythms and enthused vocals. They are a slice of cherry pie swimming in cream and perhaps with some smarties in it. Their very name, which they are weary of being asked about, is the Greek word for `bliss`.

Jamboree.

ELIZIUM comprise the usual string and drum set with two horns and a keyboardist, making them a seven piece plus backing girl singers and an occasional electric cello. With so much going on on the stage they do not add any dry ice or strobe lights or anything of that kind. They are of indeterminate age and favour skinny jeans, casual shirts and shades giving the proceedings a beach party ambience.

Doing some synchronised hopping from one foot to the other, they sustain an unstoppable dance machine for three hours or so. Some of the best performances are provided by the audience. In front of me a shapely peroxide blone bombshell girates about with her uber-chad boyfriend. It was what they had come for.

One of the band’s songs features a chorus which translated as `Golden Clouds` and this seems to pretty much encapsulate the carefree ethos which they are determined to put across.

This being a birthday do, there are guest stars too. Among those that I recognised are Lu Gevorkyan, the leade singer of LOUNA . She materialises, quite without preamble, looking chunkier than I had remembered, and her trademark roar seemed a little askew amidst all the froth. Likewise, isn’t that the dimunitive form of a pink haired version of SLOT’S Daria Stavrovich that I see before me?

ELIZIUM are self-conscious crowd pleasers and the devoted punters reward them for it. Even the brass section, it is refreshing to see, can bask in some of the kind of love more often given to guitar heroes. Searching my lexicon for a pithy word or two to pin them down I come up with `brassy` and `vaudevillian` and I think that about nails it as much as I can.

However, the brassy vaudevillianess is diluted a bit by the presence of several television camreras on and offstage. I sense that the quality of the musician’s playing has a detached feel about it, as though they are performing for on-screen posterity more than for us.

Without waitng fo the encore, I clamber out into the wide and dark boulevards outside feeling a bit out of sorts. The `golden clouds` may have been covid-free, but there was a kind of toxic positivity about them. I find myself sickening for some kind of confrontational bite – of the kind that a band like ICE3PEAK or, sometimes, PILOT can deliver. This seems vanishingly rare in the rock-pop world of Russian in the fourth term of Putin.

EASY TARGET: The dubious appeal of THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER.

DON’T BREATHE, the American horror thriller from five years back featured a crusty elder fighting back against youthful miscreants. The Russians get there first with VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER . Except that this is no horror movie, and the old guy is the hero!

I have hinted before that there exists a glut of gun wielding tough guy shows on Russian television. Every now and then something impressive shows up from this overcrowded market. COLD SHORES (out on Starmedia last year) – not, I admit a typical cops and robbers yarn – did boast some high production values and could have been summarised as `Russia-pulls-off Scandanavian noir`.

If you dig back a few decades,there could be some other contenders. THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER (1999) has been broadcas a few times on the TV 1000 Russian film channel of late. Despite my grave misgivings about it, it must be a tribute to its witchcraft that I had not intended to ever write about it, but find myself doing just that!

A product of the closing years of the tumultuous nineties, this film is no Bright Young Debut. The producer was Stanislav Govorukhin, a director best known for his iconic T.V seriesThe MEETING PLACE CANNOT BE CHANGED from 1979.

The leading role was filled by none other than Mikhail Ulyanov, a grand old man of stage and screen, who, among much else, was Dmitry Karamazov in the 1968 rendition of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.

Furthermore, the film is an adaptation of a novel by Victor Pronin, a leading doyen of crime fiction, called WOMEN ON WEDNESDAYS published four years earlier than the film.

For all these august connections,THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER can be pigeonholed in the Michael Winner-style Vigilantes Revenge crime subgenre that causes such righteous tut-tutting – and for sound reasons.

Yet AFISHA magazine (a hard copy culture review zine from 1999 to 2015) ranked it among a 100 major Russian motion pictures.

THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER details in its 95 minutes one septugenarian’s victory over some of the lawlessness of the early post-Soviet years. It is set amongst `ordinary people` in provincial Russia. (They filmed it in Kaluga, a town some 150 kilometres southwest of Moscow, now known for the Tsiolovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics).

Scenes from provincial life in THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER [Kininews.ru]

GRAMP’S REVENGE.

Ivan Afonin (Ulyanov) seems a respectable former railway worker and veteran who cares for his grand-daughter alone in a modest flat. Nearby, in the neighbourhood, live a trio of young `New Russians`. With well connected parents, these young men spend most of their time boozing and – on Wednesdays – paying for sex. They blast out rock music, drive fancy cars and one of them is a student of Structural Linguistics.

One summer’s Wednesday evening they find themselves without a female plaything and, from their balcony, catch sight of Ivan’s grandaughter in an alluring short skirt and high heels. Exuding a certain vivacious charm, one of them invites her to a `birthday party` and she goes upstairs to join them.

A gang rape ensues with all three involved. Ivan, on discovering the degradation visited on his kith and kin is devastated. He takes the usual route at first of calling the police.

The police response is rather brutal. They barge their way into the boy’s flat on a pretence of being neighbours then separate the boys and threaten them until one makes a confession.

What happens next is that the father of one of the youths shows up. He is a high-ranking policeman and, displeased as he is by his son, shuts down any further investigation.

`You’ve invaded our land` Ivan tells one functionary when he learns this. He then turns to the black market in search of a big enough gun. (`Look at what television is doing to old people these days` remarks one tradesman after turning him down). However, he finds an S.V.D rifle complete with viewfinder and an all inportant silencer – and people shady enough to be willing to sell it. When he gives it a trial run, he seems such a good shot that they compare him to someone from the Voroshilovsky regiment (A Second World War military unit with legendary marksmanship abilities).

On alternate Wednesdays he picks off the rapists one-by-one from the vantage point of a flat which the old man is looking after while the tenant is away – and which happens to be opposite the boy’s place.

The first young turk gets a bullet in the groin as he holds a bottle of champagne between his legs – and the event is assumed to be due to an exploding champagne bottle at first. He is thus castrated.

The second one is sitting in his car when it becomes an inferno owing to a shot at the petrol tank. The third one suffers a breakdown into insanity as he awaits his fate and shoots his own father – the very one who had stymied the case -in a state of paranoia.

All the while our gunman is posing as an enfeebled old duffer oblivious to the drama which he is creating. Furthermore, he attracts a Guardian Angel in the form of a sympathetic cop who stashes away the gun just before his senior colleagues come searching for it.

The vigilante rifleman is the unequivocal good-guy of this film. [recommend.ru]

Vengeance porn.

By all accounts Pronin’s novel featured a political dimension, with the shooter taking up arms on behalf of the `little people` and in opposition to the post-Yeltsin `New Russians`. This aspect is, for the most part, lost in this film. The title, as well as the promotional poster, foregrounds the old man as the Hero. His tormentors meanwhile, are rock music playing pantomime villains (if very well acted).

The violence too is a form of bloodthirsty poetic justice: for example, in the novel the first victim is shot in the leg, not the genitals.

Then there is the sexualisation of the female victim. We are treated to shots of her legs so that, before the distressing rape sequence, we feel somewhat titillated.

This is no Horror film then. Nor is it a Revenge Tragedy in the Jacobean tradition. Nor a call for us to ponder on how `violence begets violence` or somesuch issue. Ivan is set up as the clear Hero of the story and we are invited to relish in his cathartic act of disproportionate revenge.

22 year’s old and still popular to this day- but how much has this film contributed to a runaway gun culture in Russia? {prdisk.ru]

So it is no surprise that there are some who have treated this entertainment as though it were an instruction manual. For instance, In 2008, 57 year old Aleksander Mansurov was jailed for murder after he had shot two people, one of whom had allegedly raped his daughter, in a village near Rostov-On-Don. (Such tit-for-tat brutality may become more rare as gun control measures are being put in place following the school shooting that occured in Kazan back in May of this year).

THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER keeps you watching throughout and then stays with you. I, for one, feel sullied by the moral vacuum at the heart of it though.

Lead image: Vkontakt.

EXHUMATION.

Dug up from the late Soviet graveyard – a still fresh werewolf yarn.

Having been AWOL for some 31 years CHAS OBOROTNYA leapt from its coffin this year. A shadowy fan group calling itself From Outer Space -Vasily and Gleb on Vkontakte – managed to source this one hour and 27-minute-long made for television curio.

Post-Soviet casualty.
A direct translation of the title would be something like Hour of change or Hour of Reversal both of which strike me as both rather good titles in themselves, yet the over-explanatory title The Hour of the Werewolf seems to have prevailed.
Tonnis TV – who were superseded four years ago by Direct -produced it and it was broadcast, once only, by All Union Cable Television in 1990. Following this there were a few hard copy DVDs of the programme around in Moscow and St Petersburg but otherwise it vanished into the ether.
That is until the above mentioned fan group hunted it down and found it quivering in the vaults of the State Film Fund. They then put it out there last April in the form of a YouTube post – with English subtitles to boot.

This film embodies something distinctive having been shot in the Soviet Ukraine in the northern Black Sea region – Odessa no less. The director’s role was taken by a 31-year-old Igor Shevchenko and the company he was working for had been only going for a year. So, we have youthfulness and an interesting locale at play here. An experienced cast helped too.

Mikhail Pakhomenko, the lead, had already been presented with an Honour of the Artist of the RSFSR three years earlier.
Alexander Baluev, playing Grigory’s son, would eight years later have a role in the Hollywood film Deep Impact as a cosmonaut. Marina Starykh, the would-be love interest, is a very busy small screen actress never off Russian television screens.
Man on the brink.
The events occur in a provincial Russian town during one of those sweltering summers that this country specializes in. Grigory Maksimovich works a s a reporter for a local newspaper and, in late middle-age has become a widower.
The newspaper’s one-time editor has absconded leaving his post open. All to aware of his advancing years, Grigory has set his sights on becoming the new chief editor. However, a younger colleague functions as his rival in this ambition.
Meanwhile Grigory keeps a keen eye on a typesetting colleague called Taya, a friendly and desirable woman. Another co-worker, a party chairman presents himself as something of a confidante for Grigory before being unmasked as a man indulging in office politics. (In 1990 such a negative portrayal of a party cadre could well have seemed quite significant).
Otherwise superstition still hangs on in this backwater (The full Moon is a good time to make pickles Taya tells Grigory only half in jest). Howling is heard in the night and a werewolf on the loose gets whispered about. A Dog’s Gate – a sort of wooden structure formed from three intertwined boughs forms part of the local architecture. Grigory, good Soviet man that he is, will have none of it.
How ignorant people are, he tells the party chairman. They read about perestroika in the morning and gossip about evil spirits in the evening.

A rare DVD of `The Hour of the Werewolf`
[auction.ru]

It is shortly after this remark, however, that the journalist is set upon a mysterious black dog just as he is boarding the last tram home. It has taken a chunk out of the man’s ankle….

Metamorphosis.
During the long, balmy nights Grigory undergoes slow and painful transformations. This rational and cultured Soviet citizen will transition into a fanged, four-legged marauder. Furthermore, like Mr. Hyde, in this form he will hunt down his daytime bugbears. (I had to double check that this film came out four years before the Jack Nicholson vehicle and parable of middle-aged revenge – Wolf) His young rival for the office of Editor falls from a stairwell window fleeing the hound, Taya’s other lover and Taya herself are set upon in bed and the party Chairman is duly mauled.

Now a tortured Raskolnikov figure, Grigory attempts to tie himself to his bed at night and hopes that his terrible dreams are but premonitions.
It will be his own son , ahard-nosed young policeman (Alexander Baluev) ,who will unbeknownst to himself, execute his own father – and not with any silver bullets.

Marina Starykh getting an unwelcome visitor. [Kino Poisk]

Twist.
The Dog’s Gate lore was new to me but, otherwise The Hour of the Werewolf pays obeisance to the expected lycanthropy tropes. Under the full moon the transformation scenes are economic but effective, when combined: distorting camera lenses, an impressive array of vampiric fangs, a wolfman mask and a black dog.
The summer setting sets the ambience apart from the usual wintriness of such tales (even if a bit of fake mist is added to some scenes).
The portentous synthesizer mood music courtesy of Artemy Artemiev, – sometimes Bach type organ chords and Giorgio Moroder style rhythmic pulsing -dates the production as much as the electric typewriters do.

Zeitgeist.
There are no heroes in this kitchen sink supernatural thriller, except Grigory seems like a decent man engulfed by his Id. In this though he is not alone in this (the film seems to suggest)as the Soviet Union embarks on perestroika.
A tramp is shown being hurled onto the ground after attempting to join in a street party. A subplot involves sordid money-grubbing as Grigory’s son ties to reclaim some cash that his late mother had lent to a miscreant.
There is a comic interlude involving a satirised hustler in the form of a young would-be poet on a desperate look out for employment with the newspaper. (When asked what workshop he comes from he replies: Frankly a poetical one…actually I’m an operator at the water tower.)
The action climaxes in a scene of social disintegration as residents wait in the night at a furniture warehouse for their names to be called so that they may collect ordered house household items.
The Hour of the Werewolf packs oodles of charm with its nostalgic ambience and relatable protagonist. Of course, to judge the show’s production values with fairness you would have to set it against other Western made for television movies produced that same period.. When you do so, it does not come out looking so bad.

Main image: horrorzone.

ROLL OVER TOLSTOY: SIX STUPENDOUS LOST RUSSIAN LITERARY CLASSICS.

You have already laboured your way through the hit parade of Gold and Silver age Russian greats: War and Punishment, Masters and Sons and The Bronze Orchard and so on. Brought to you by august frock-coated gentlemen, these tomes have been worth the effort. Like a trip to a cathedral or a Schoenberg concerto, however, they are respected more than enjoyed.

Quick resume.

The kingpin, Alexander Pushkin produced material that is youthful, cheeky, and experimental and was decent enough in his politics to boot. As national poets go, you could hardly ask for more.

Tolstoy, the second in the roll call is associated with a thundery King Lear persona which wears a bit thin in our age. It remains an inescapable fact , however, that Anna Karenina (1878)anticipated a great deal of the Twentieth Century novel in the pages of that one book.

The commonplace framing of Russians as being incomprehensible and crazed derives a lot from attempts to read and make sense of the byzantine novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Do read Crime and Punishment (1866), but feel free to leave the others to theologians and pyschoanalysts, say I.

Ivan Turgenev though is a reliable teller of human interest stories with an economy of expression all too rare in Russian letters. There is little by him that I have not read with some unforced interest.

An alternative list.

These are writers of both novels and short stories who published in a forty year period from the time of Tsar Alexander the Second to that of Stalin.

Some of them boast a global reputation but their work has been eclipsed by their most celebrated works; others are known far better in Russia than in the West. What is most crucial, however, is that they all can be found in translated form in paperbacks, or be it some of them only having been republished in recent times.

Moloch is a short story/novelette from Alexander Kuprin which appears in a collection of his writings named after his best known work, The Garnet Bracelet. Kuprin, who lived up to 1938, constitiutes a missing link between the writers of the Silver Age and those that flourished in early Soviet times. Viewed as an exponent of realism, his prose is in fact quite far-ranging

The short story/ novelette `Moloch`appears in this collection published in English by the Russian publishing house Karo books in St Petersburg.

A thirty-something engineer who has devoted much of his working life to overseeing the running of a provincial steel plant, feels alienated from his life and work on account of his sensitive nature. Addicted to morphine supplied by his only friend, a doctor,he has designs on an eligible young woman living in a nearby household. Then the arrival of his ebullient boss onto the scene throws all his dreams into question….

Kuprin’s prose is strenuous in its descriptiveness and from this banal beginning he sculpts something almost apocalyptic and which encompasses in its vision capitalist industrialisation, male hierarchies, and our capacity for self-deception. (The intensity of it reminds me a little of Nathaniel West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust.) Written in 1896, Moloch still speaks loud and clear to us in our time.

Far lighter fare, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Peskov’s The Golden Calf has been brought to life again in English translation just this year by Karo books in St Petersburg. Should you persist in the misapprehension that Russian fiction is all shadow and agony then try this satirical romp.

As we follow anti-hero Ostip Bender on his quest to become a millionaire in the Soviet system, we are treated to a panoramic tour through the Russia of the early thirties and it is one which raises eyebroows in its colourfulness.

The prose brims with zest and serves up a droll observation on every page. (I can even detect their influence on much more recent and edgier writers such as Garros- Evdokimov). There is such a parade of satirised character studies here that everyone who reads this novel has their own favourite one.

Still from a 1968 screen adaptation of `The Golden Calf``[Twitter]

Mikhail Bulgakov sealed his reputation with the puzzling Master and Margarita (1940) – although I tend to think his real masterpiece is The White Guard (1925). For enjoyment however, turn to The Fatal Eggs. This came to see print that same year despite being perceived, for reasons not so clear to the contemporary reader, as a swipe at the incumbent Bolshevik regime.

In the near future – 1928- a crotchety Muscovite zoologist. Persikov, discovers by accident a mysterious ray. This ray seems to have the effect of accelerating the growth any organisms it is directed at. The Soviet powers-that-be are soon eager to co-opt the professor’s new technology. Chickens are in short supply that year owing to chicken plague and something must be done to boost their production. An administrative cock-up, however, results in chicken eggs being swopped by those of snakes and lizards and it is these that receive the dose of the Red Ray. Moscow thereafter becomes encircled by an unstoppable contingent of super-sized reptiles….

This Frankenstinian science fiction yarn all gets Bulgakov’s detached and sardonic treatment. Like some kind of Prosfessor Branestawm-meets-Jurasssic Park, this is a story I can read again and again.

Still from a 1995 Russian screen adaptation of `The Fatal Eggs.[`Vilingstone.net]

His name synonymous with the Superfluous Man novel Oblomov (1859) Aleexander Goncharov had earlier published The Same Old Story (1847).

The narrative concerns an attempt by a dreamy and idealistic young man from the country to embark on a career as a poet in Saint Petrsburg. There he is mentored by his nemesis in the form of a wordly-wise and rather more matter-of-fact uncle. From this situation many poignant verbal clashes result and these form the main part of this comic novel with its drawn out dialogues which are both funny and profound.

The theme of country life versus the cynicism of town life takes on a symbolic stature which makes the inevitable corruption of the protaginist seem like a universal outcome: this is the Same Old Story.

So here we get a bit of a potshot at Romanticism written at a time when Romanticism was in the ascendancy and the would-be villain in the form of the uncle seems to become more likeable as the tale proceeds.

Ivan Goncharev [1812 -1891] [900igr.net]

Nikolai Leskov is known in Russia for the melodramatic crime tale The Lady Macbeth of Mtensk (1865) but also, in the last year of his life, brought out A Winter’s Tale, and critics tend to say that this novella was an expression of his near total disenchantment with Russian society. If so, his disenchantment sparkled.

The central situation is the interaction between a series of characters in an upper-class country estate in an unamed part of Russia in the late Nineteeenth Century. We have two aging female sophisticates and their spunky daughter and a rascal of a retired colonel among others informing the dialogues – for it is talk for the most part.

The sparse writing makes it all resemble the script of a drawing room drama. Moral and sociopolitical ideas are hurled about with great abandon which makes for a stimulating read which still feels fresh.

Leonid Andreev has been called `the Russian Poe` on account of some of his short stories, many of which could be labelled `weird fiction`.

The Abyss, from 1902 and republished in an eponymous collection in 2018 falls into this category. It seems to have unnerved Tolstoy a bit who is quoted on the dust jacket as being ` not scared` by it.

A love struck young couple make their way home through a twilit forest. There they come up against a groupof ne’erdo wells who subject them to an ordeal. This ordeal will test the very core of their humanity….

I am put in mind of early Ian McEwan. At any rate,if you like his brand of `mundane chiller`, with its metaphysical foray into darkness, then this is for you.

Anrd reev’s `The Abyss` appear in a collection of his writings published by Alma books in 2018 – with a great cover design by Will Dady.

You have no need to don a hairshirt to read these fictions. You might also be struck by how they lay waste to assumptions about Russian life while really engaging with our own time.

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Sources:

Andreev, Leonid The Abyss and other Stories (Surrey: Alma Books Ltd. 2018)

Bulgakov, Mikhail The Fatal Eggs (Surry: Alma Classics, 2018)

Goncharov, Ivan The Same Old Story (Surrey: Alma Classics, 2015)

Ilf, Ilya and Petrov Evgeny The Golden Calf (St Petersburg: Karo books, 2021)

Kuprin, Alexander The Garnet Bracelet (Saint Petersburg, Karo Books 2019)

Leskov, Nikolai The Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and other stories (London: Penguin Books, 1987).