Edward Crabtree

HERE TO STAY: the band MOSCOW DEATH BRIGADE.

MOSCOW DEATH BRIGADE and their antifascist posse will not be cancelled by the West European wokerati.

Vandalised synagogues, burning croses in the night/Religious fascist radicals burning inifidels die/ The shit of the same type, the shit we must fight/Know your enemy/Recognise the dark from the light.
These lines are trumpeted out in a song called Anne Frank's Army. They are all quite commendable you might think. Later though, in the same piece the words whore get uttered.

This word, among other proscribed attitudes, have been pounced on by Western European critics in a failed attempt to cancel the authors on account of not being worthy of their own professed antifascist ideals.

Moskovkaya Brigada Smerti – or MOSCOW DEATH BRIGADE – are the authors of these words.This five piece hardcore punk/hip-hop oufit, formed in 2007, project a progressive and anti-racist ethos, which they shout out in English, but there are some who feel that they are not woke enough to join their brethren in the West.

Brown wedge.
MOSCOW DEATH BRIGADE augment their sinister name with a ski-maked stage act and hidden identities. However, their stance is pro-inclusivity and they partake in a Russian subculture which, whilst eschewing politics, aligns itself with those on the sharp end of the nationalist resurgence in contemporary Russia. They represent Nice Guy Skinheads the world over and as Discovery Magazine put it are on their way to becoming a household name in the underground scene (21/04/20).

Alongside them are such bands as WHAT WE FEEL, with whom they recorded a joint rocky number called Here to Stay in 2015, and bands like SIBERIAN MEAT GRINDER (who offer a more whimsical take on things with a mythology based on a Russian bear-Czar, and so on).

MOSCOW DEATH BRIGADE live in the here-and-now and know that the menace of fascism is for real. Fyodor Filatov (Feyday), the leader of the Moscow Trojan Skinheads, an avowedly antifascist collective, died in hospital in October 2008 after being found outside his flat with multiple stab wounds.

The Los Angeles Times (August 22nd, 2015) reports that an organisation styling itself Battle Organisation of Russian Nationalists (BORN) murdered ten people between 2008 and 2010. One victim included a Tajik man whose severed head was left in a government office building together with a note threatening further bloodshed.

Street humans.
Emerging from a DIY culture of skateboards and graffiti, MOSCOW DEATH BRIGADE refer to their upbeat and electronically enhanced sound as Circle Hip-Hop and are recognisable from their alligator logo. The verbals are intoned -with rushing Metro carriage syncopation -by the balaclava clad Boltcutter Vlad and six Mosh G. In Papers, please we get a glimpse of their ethic:
Poison the water/Feast of legalised muder they begin. Then:`Their lies about human rights don't cost a quarter/They bomb your home, let the beast roam, close the border.
They can boast about four previous releases including a compilation with other European antifascist protestors called United Worldwide (Voice of the Street Records, 2015) and Boltcutter in 2018 (Fire and Flames Music).
Throughout they have been showing the world that Russia does not just consist of ethnostatist sleepyheads.

Attempt at defamation.
There have been naysayers though.Five years ago in February it happened. A group under the anonymous name of Antifascist Subculture Worldwide posted, on Linksuten, a scathing attack on the whole Russian antifascist music scene, with particular respect to MOSCOW DEATH BRIGADE. It was entitled Russian antifa discredits Antifascism. This missive, which appeared untranslated from German, while the band were on tour,accused the band of being a bunch of nationalists and chauvinists who were using the anti-fascist association for monetary gain.

Not only did MOSCOW DEATH BRIGADE make use of dubious words in their lyrics, they rubbed shoulders with shady characters and projected a macho stance which excluded sexual minorities.

Furthermore, they did not put their heart and soul into a Left cause and were patriots who imagine that the politics of antifascism can be narrowly reduced to only a fight against Nazis. And so it went on….

Objections Overuled.
The band’s reply which they posted on Facebook on 19th February 2015 was detailed, dignified and convincing.
They remind us that the group – composed of Jews, Russians, Ukranians, Tartars, pople from Christian, Jewish and Muslim families have played numerous benefit gigs all done without profit.

They also remind us of their local situation. On the one hand they are in the shadow of a Soviet past which did not encourage much faith in State Socialism and on the other they are facing very real neo-Nazi tendencies from within their own circle (There are even red-brown Stalinist bands such as KLOWNS who sing in dismisive terms, of the tolerant West).

They express a hope totake patriotism away from the Naziz whose slogan consists of Russia for the Russians by embodying the multi-ethnic nature of Russian society. They have signed a non-partisan manifesto against the war in the Ukraine.

In one pointed passage they say: We can't understand why it is necessary to be labelled a Communist of an Anarchist to be a part of the antifascist movement.
The most significant part of it all is when they go on to characterise the slander of them as being Eurocentric and a blatant expression of West European Imperialism and elitism. (Indeed, it does seem as though the Woker-than-thou German critics have channelled a racial stereotype of Eastern Europeans as being brutalised and backward).

Undeterred.

Menawhile MOSCOW DEATH BRIGADE have released a pro-quarantine song called Put On Your Mask – the proceeds of which will go to organisations which help senior citizens in Russia during the coronavirus.

Their newest album, released last April, comes under the telling title of Bad Accent Anthems. This features a standout euro-banger track, which together with a video featuring people of all ages and types flinging themselves about to it, is a friendly appeal to solidarity:
Another run/ We have just begun/One against the storm/They had to lock the gates so we;re talking them by storm.

The main image: Youtube.com

THE ABRAMENKO EXPERIMENT: THE FILM `SPUTNIK`.

Egor Abramenko’s intense cosmic threat thriller SPUTNIK is so much more than a Russian Alien.

With mounting alarm the young psychologist observes the scene unfolding on the CCTV. The cosmonaut is thrown to the floor in a convulsive motion. From his mouth oozes a ridge of slime. Two spindly limbs emerge from this and the being begins to creep forward. The military man, also watching, has seen this all before….

Sputnik means satellite in Russian but also carries connotations of fellow traveller. The film with this title, a thriller with a science-fiction premise and scary movie trappings, is a rare beast in Russia. Such a mix of genres is matched only by The Fatal Eggs, an adaptation of the Bulgakov novel from 1995 and Diggers (2016) and Avanpost from last year.

Intended for release last April, the film ended up getting its premier on the net, owing to the pandemic. There it gathered over one million viewers in Russia alone. I, however, waited for the cinema doors to be flung open again, and my patience was rewarded. SPUTNIK is one picture that deserves to be experienced in a large and loud format.

Egor Abramenko, the man on the high stool, has been churning out commercials for years but his other brainchild was an eleven minute long short called Passenger released three years ago. This was to be the egg that was to hatch SPUTNIK.

Some bankable celebrities signed up for the project. That Golden Boy of the Russian media Fyodor Bondarchuk has come from behind the cameras to fill one of the main roles. So has the stately 33 year-old St Petersburgian Oksana Akinshina, who had a cameo role in Rassvet, this time being given prime space.

Interrupted mission.
Andropov is in the Kremlin – it is 1983 – and around the earth circle two cosmonauts on a routine orbital mission. They are about to re-enter the atmosphere when it happens. There is an unholy knock on the spacecraft’s hull….Only one of the crew members makes it back to terra firma alive – and he has black eyes….

Later a female psychologist – Tatyana Klimova – with a history of employing maverick methods, (Akinshina) is getting a dressing down at a tribunal in Moscow. As she leaves in disgrace she is approached by a military colonel called Semiparov (Fyodor Bondarchuk). He considers her to be of made of the right stuff for a position he has to offer her. This involves reaearch into a unique incident.

He chaperones her on a journey to the Caucuses. There, in a military installation, she learns that a cosmonuat who is supposed to have died on return is alive but infected with a parasite of unearthly origin, and no memory of how it got there. (Pyotr Fyodorov who also appeared in Avanpost).

Soon Tatyana begins to harbour qualms about the humanitarian implications of how this hero of the Soviet Union is being treated – as well as the uses to which the resulting knowledge will be put. Can she escape the compound and return to Moscow to expose the dark doings of this rogue operation?

Space age possession.
This 1 hour and 53 minute drama has a measured pace and highlights the human dilemmas that the situation throws up (challenging the view that science fiction and horror lacks human depth). There is even a sort of sub-plot concerning the neglected child of the cosmonaut, languishing away in a care home in Rostov-on-the-Don.

The two story writers Andrey Zolotarev and Oleg Malovichko had also both worked on Attraction (2017) and Invasion (2020) which were alien contact tales directed by Bondarchuk. Those blockbusters, however, were frothy fun-for-all-the-family affairs whereas SPTUTNIK contains more intelligence in its details.

With SPUTNIK being something of a star vehicle for her, Akinshina makes for a likeable lead. She is no Sigourney Weaver-like action hero but a woman constrained by her professional role while thrown into an extraordinary situation.

Bondarchuk, meanwhile, does what he does best: lend gravitas to the proceedings. He portrays a complex man with some paternal affection for Tatyana and a begrudging dependence on the creature who he wishes to isolate and exploit.

The assistant-to-the-heroine is a stiff white-coated drudge of a research scientist (played with conviction by Anton Vasilev) whose conscience is awakened by Tatyana. It is he who phones through to the Moscow authorities with some important information before being gunned down.

The creature itself is a fine piece of work, if not original.Stitched up by Main Road Post, its a puppet and CGI slimy quadruped with several eyes, insectoid limbs, buzz saw teeth and cute floppy ears. Living off the hormones produced by fear, it has a penchant for cracking open heads and slurping on the contents.

Last, but no means least is the score by Oleg Karpachev. With its bombastic drum-heavy sound, this really signs and seals the sense of a shadowy secret mission.

Well received.
The primary mood is one of mounting unease. It is refreshing to see that the director has not relied on sudden noises and appearances to stun us, but instead there are some drawn out nightmarish sequences, such as when the alien is being fed live prisoners. There is some gross out involved as well as some tomato ketchup flying about (both untypical for a Russian film) but this is restrained.

The 1983 period placement is a puzzle. Is a hidden event in history being shown to us – as in Apollo 18 ? Or is it a way round the problem of how to portray the military as fragmented and corrupted without incurring the wrath of the censors? Or is this just an exercise in nostalgia? (An iconic Russian toy does play a part in the proceedings).

Reaching America and the UK, SPUTNIK has set forth an excited rattle of keyboards and much of what is being said is positive. The default comparison most seem to be making is with the Alien franchise.

True SPUTNIK has a ballsy heroine, but this is less rare in Russian cinema, and otherwise it is earth bound, set in the past, and much less of a stalk-and-slash romp. A more telling comparison is with the British television series from 1953 – The Quatermass Experiment. The initial premise is almost identical except that SPUTNIK then takes off on a different tangent.

Russian language promo for the British series `The Quatermass Experment` Was this the real inspiration behind the film? [sweet.tv]

For me, the film leans too much on hackneyed tropes about a caring, maternal woman in opposition to a monomanic, ruthless male. Otherwise, the borrowing fom Nigel Kneale aside, it is quite fresh and there is something primal and archetypal in the idea of a man having a goblin in his stomach which comes out by night. As Tatiana asks: Parasite or symbiote?.

Many Russian horror movies seem targetted at a young South East Asian audience and tend to play down their national origins. Not so SPUTNIK, which -with its setting in the steppes, glimpse of Soviet times and concern with military machinations – is Russian through and through.

Lead image: in-rating.ru

The trailer (English subtitles):

LOOKING FORWARD TO THE PAST? VLADIMIR SOROKIN’S `DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK`.

When Russia’s foremost iconoclast came over all committed, the results still resonate even more 14 years later.

Liberals differ from the lowly worm only in their mesmerising, witch brewed speechifying. Like venom and reeking pus, they spew it all about, poisoning God's very world, defiling its holy purity and simplicity, befouling it as far as the very bluest horizon of the heavenly vault with the reptilian drool of their mockery, jeers, derision, contempt,double-dealing, disbelief,distrust, envy, spite and shamelessness.

Welcome to the World According to Andrei Danilovich Komiaga – and there’s plenty more where that came from in DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK by the sixty-five year old Vladimir Georgevich Sorokin. This writer and artist has been baiting hidebound traditionalists with his installations, stories and novels for forty odd years now.

His work offers a challenging double-whammy of weird fiction and post-modernism making this Moscow dweller a bete noir of both Soviet and post-Soviet establishments. He has only just escaped from prosecution for obscenity, and that is despite being in receipt of prestigious awards such as the Maxim Gorky and Andrei Bely prizes.

Try reading, for example Four Stout Hearts (from Glas New Writing: Soviet Grotesque, 1991). This just defies description in the transgressiveness of its content.

One of sorokin’s installations on show at The Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

Nevertheless, in writing such material, Sorokin himself maintained that he exemplified an Art for Art's Sake approach. All that was to change, though, when the author reached fifty and published DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK in 2006.

In this short novel, Sorokin keeps his scatological and obscurist tendencies (whilst still present) in abeyance and the tale is both coherent and entertaining. It functions as a cautionary black comedy about the Holy Triumvirate of autocratic state, orthodox religion and narrow nationalism.

The novel was unveiled to the Anglophone world courtesy of the discerning American translator Jamey Gambrell. It is with much sadness that I need to report that this contributor to East-West cultural understanding passed away earlier this year, way too young, at the age of 65.

Fly on the wall.
The reader is privy to a busy Day in the Life of an Oprichnik (the name refers to a resurrected member of the secret police from Ivan the Terrible’s reign) and in Komiaga we are treated to a great villain-as-narrator creation to trival that of Partrick Bateman in American Psycho.

The year is unclear – the book jacket says 2028 -but, anyway, this is the near future and Imperial Russia is back with a vengeance. A Czar sits in the Kremlin, which has been painted white to expunge the red troubles. There are public floggings in the squares of Moscow and the nation is encircled by a wall. The elite brotherhood of the Oprichnik are out and about to keep all this running smoothly.

Komiaga, driven by a mawkish sentimentalism, puts his heart and soul into a defence of His Majesty, who in turn represents the Motherland. We follow his career of executions, rapes, shady dealings and consultations on cultural censorship in a plotless sequence of events. The commentary hurtles along and is decked out with bawdy songs and poetry, and patriotic hymns.

Like all Monarchical societies, this one thrives on Pomp and Circumstance, which Sorokin itemises. For example, The Mercedov that Komiaga drives has to be decorated on the front with a real dog’s head, a new one being chosen each morning. (Sorokin has always been interested in ritual. Here, however, it makes complete sense in terms of realism).

There are some of Sorokin’s trademark surreal touches too. Komiaga purchases an aquarium containing gold sterlets. It turns out that these can enter people’s bloodstreams and create shared hallucinations. He and his comrades indulge this, creating a phantasmagoric diversion in the story.

Likewise, this future world introduces some science-fictional creations, such as the transparents, virtual computer generated assistants which can interact with humans with their encyclopedic knowledge.

The Future Now.
DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK takes existing trends to their conclusion: Putin has extended his rule to a potential date of 2034 and the bishop Patriarch Kirill has a major influence on affairs of state.

In the story, the sole kickback to the jackbooted new order comes from independent radio stations which indulge in obscure intellectualism. These carry so little punch that our narrator enjoys listening to these to pass the time inbetween his state duties.

A reader of dystopias may well be reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) – with its protagonist who is a henchman of the repressive government -or Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962) – with its narrator who relishes in gang violence and uses his own argot to do so.

Character study.
Sorokin explores the psychology that lies behind this kind of society. He demonstrates how state sanctioned brutality is so often borne along by weepy romanticism.

Hypocrisy also plays a key role in this world and drives a lot of the (subtle) humour of the novel. For example, Komiaga implores his majesty to legalise certain drugs for the sole use of the Oprichniks so that they may buy them without hassle. His Majesty refuses this request on the grounds that everyone must be equal under the law – even though the Czar knows full well that his men are indugling in these drugs anyway!

This page turner is a hit, a palpable hit. It can take its place on the shelves alongside Zamyatin’s We and Voinovich’s Moscow 2042.

R.I.P Jamey Gambrell, 1954 – 2020. [amazon.com]

DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK by Vladimir Sorokin (translated by Jamey Gambrell) is out in Penguin Books/Random House, London, UK 2011.

Lead image: frommixcloud.com

MAKE IT NEW: MMOMA’S 2OTH ANNIVERSARY.

Opposite the building which houses the entrance to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) stands a sculpture depicting Kasmir Malevich presenting the viewer with his provocative Black Square composition.
Demonstrating his mission of creating a repository of Russian modern and contemporary Avant Garde works,this is one of Zurab Tsereteli’s distinctive sculptures. It is by the man who, as President of the Russian Academy of Arts, establlished the museum in December 1999.

Colliderscope.
The 20th Anniversary of this project – MMOMA 19/99 – could be significant and, so, bemasked and temperature checked, I found myself in the lobby of the place on a wet late July along with clusters of attentive young people.
The translated visitor’s guide promised a birthday party which would fiunction as a kind of mosaic where at the right moment strangers collide and find common language.

Three floors of white and black rooms were given over to the diplays. These had been hand-picked by invited curators, which included such names as Bernard Blistene, the curator of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Vladimir Sorokin, the important Russian novelist and… a footballer called Fedor Smolov, among others. They had grouped the exhibits into supposed unifying themes such as History, Perfumery, Gastronomy and so on.
Most of the names were Russian but some Western ones popped up, such as the American Keith Haring. The earliest work that I noticed was Bathing Boys by Natalia Goncharova from 1911 and this was alongside plenty of offerings from a hundred years or so later.

As always with my visits to MMOMA, I was prodded and entertained by much of what I beheld. The accent fell on neo-Modernism, primitivism, pop art and kinetic sculpture and a few mixed media installations. It was to the oil on canvas productions that I gravitated, with a degree of guilt. This riot of diversions defied a simple or immediate response: I found it much of it clever-clever, beautiful, jocular, irritating, predictable, mind-boggling, insipid, sinister, refreshing and cheeky.

Abstracts.
Some of the non-representative material on offer held immediate decorative appeal.The 31-year-old Sergei Lotsmanov’s Abstract Landscape (2004) – an oxymoronic title if there ever was one -was one such, with its bold colours and geometry.

Ivan Chuykov’s acryllic on hardboard Red Sea from 1989, with its scarlet surface offset by – what? a fragment of newspaper type? -had similar aesthetic impact on me.

The most memorable of the abstracts for me, however, was Mikhail Shvartsman’s Spring, from that same year.With its muted browns and pinks set in apparent three dimesnsions, this rewarded focused attention. This artist, who toiled in obscurity during the Soviet period, has left behind a posthumous treasure trove.

Metaphysics and sureality.
Then the circular oil on canvas compositions of the 76 year old Sergey Shablavin -Moscow (1989 – 1990) and The Intersection of Centuries transported me somewhere, with their sense of timelesness.

The Intersection of Centuries by Sergey Shablavin.

I also enjoyed the simple surealism of Flight of Birds Inside the Head by Leonid Tishkov from 1986 and, on similar lines, the gaudy bodily jumble of from thirty years ago, just called Composition by a reperesentative of the Moscow unofficial arts scene – Ernst Neizvestny.

Ideas.
Not all was dreamy impulsiveness, however: there were some points being made. The concept behind Arman’s The Mechanism of Time (1960) seems interesting enough. It exemplified the approach of the New Realism that he developed alongside Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely which involved using real world objects in opposition to abstractionism. However, the plexiglass and metal collage made up of the innards of watches does not seem to do this concept justice.

However, another take on man’s relation to mechanisms came through loud and clear to me in Ivan Sotnikov’s brutalist but comedic The Machine from 1988.

There were some quasi-political gestures too. In what I took to be a comment on the militarisation of everyday life in Russia the AES + F group created the Action Half Life Series (2005 – 2007) which, via digital printing on canvas, parades prepubesent children manipulating the latest military hardware before us. (Russia is a country where you can buy children’s balloons adorned with detailed pictures of military jets and missiles).

Light and shadow.
If there existed some darkness here – a room of coats with outstretched hands extending form them, a black room around which was projected fractured cityscapes -then this was alleviated with some levity.
One artist had revisited Malevich’s Black Square but these were set at wonky angles, almost as if about to fall off the canvases. There was a portrait of Brezhnev in cool shades and with the legend Alcohol. Andrei Monastyrski’s Cannon from 1975 bewildered us with a black rectangular box with protruding tube mounted on the wall which gave a harsh metallic ring when a switch was activated, as the viewer was invited to do.

I could discern no overididng theme to what I saw (and there was far more of it than I can do justice to here). There was a sense of it being Russian insofar as the remnants of Soviet culture were often being chewed over and there was a certain spirited resilience in evidence (which I have come to recognise as a national trait). What I did not see, and had hoped for, was anything like a direct engagement with the current Russian political establishment.

THE GLITTER VORTEX: the seductive diversion of the Russian Box.

How can I discuss television as a medium without sounding like a pseudo- Herbert Marcuse type figure sounding off about `psychoterror` and `constructed realities` and so on? The problem is that television is both superseded and powerful. The millenials are all on Tumbegrinder and Twitface anyway.

And yet – and yet we live in a television moulded world: both Trump and Johnson began as television stars before being voted in as leaders of their nations. Likewise, the Russian political establishment – from the Great Leaders New Year message onwards -owes much to broadcasting.

As much as I would like to sneer, I am a member of the televison generation myself. The first full novel that I read, aged about eight, was a novelisation of The Tomorrow People – a children’s science fiction show. Later, the arts programme The South Bank Show would introduce me to authors that I would later read and music shows like The Tube to the popular music which was out there. All of this has shaped what I am.

Bread and circuses.

It seems fitting that the Ostankino radio tower provides one of the most conspicuous sights in all of Moscow. This illuminated edifice, the tallest of its kind in Europe, represents the capital as much as Red Square does.

Television constitutes the most popular medium of the Russian Federation. No licence is needed for it, and should you not have one in your flat there is one in your local cafe or bar – a one-eyed monster with a cathode ray gun aimed at your head.

Russia boasts 3300 channels with Channel One, Russia 1 and NTV1 being sent out all across the nation. The government owns, or has a controlling interest in, many of these stations as does Bank Rosiya, Gazprom, the Russian Orthodox Church, the military and the Moscow City Administration (CIA World Factbook).

An independent channel exists too. Dozhd (`Rain`) – `The Optimistic channel` – has of late been slapped by a police raid and subsequent tax audit (Moscow Times, 1/8/19) – all of which has nothing at all to do with the fact that their journalists covered the rallies for free elections that took place last year.

I have spoken to many middle-class Russians who deny ever watching television. They must be untypical because a poll conducted by the Levada centre between 26th and 27th May last year found that 79% of Russians take in serials or films on television every week as opposed to 28% who read some literary fiction.In fact, 55% claimed to only read one book a year and the same proportion of people never attend museums or theatres. Those who never turn up to concerts make up 64% of the population. (Moscow Times, 1/6/19). However, the same polling station discovered that a 25% drop in trust in the TV news over the last ten years. (Moscow Times, 1/8/19).

BBC Russia was pushed off the airways in 2007.Dubbed Western shows that can be found here, however, include Poirot, the IT Crowd,The Simpsons and American Dad. Otherwise Russia is content to produce their own variants of Western hits with a car show called First Gear, with a ballsy female presenter and a talent show called The Voice.

Televisor Ga-ga.

Russian television transmissions feel sleek and sophisticated but also brusque. There are no continuity announcers and commercials flash up without interlude or warning. Speech is quickfire and shouty and the colours are all gaudy purples and yellows.

Contemporary crime drama forms the most prominent type of show. These appear all more or less interchangeable: parades of tough guys and lots of armaments. The more cerebral detective end of this can sometimes spawn promising results as we have seen with Freud’s Method, I See, I know and Akademia.One that seems to be on back to back on Channel five these days is Slyed (`Tracks`), an uptown version of Akademia.

At the other end of the spectrum we have the endless sherbert fountain of Russian pop. RU TV functions as the Russian MTV and it stretches the vacuousness of the genre to snapping point. A manic cult of the nubile young woman is much in evidence with many a scantily clad doll warbling in some hot beachy locale, to the strains of milk -and-water pop/hip-hop dance fusion, posing betwern a Lamborghini and a yacht. The talented Georgian crooner Valerie Meladzhe might liven things up by appearing in a blatant S and M themed video to go with his much polished ballads.

Диск277. Концертный зал CROCUS CITY HALL. 8-я Русская музыкальная премия телеканала RU.TV 2018. На снимке: певица, телеведущая Ольга Бузова

[kp.ru]

Over on the Mooz channel we ge some live music. Here the more established acts – Oilka, Sveta and Via Gra –cavort through their routines before the massed ranks. Here, at least, is a cheery crowd with no pretentions other than to indulge in some healthy fun.

Tears and laughter.

In Russia, `melodrama` is a distinct genre. It resembles a soap opera condensed down into one or two episodes. The protagonist will be a young woman beset by tragedies from which she emerges at length with the help of a wise old granny, a sassy female friend and and unexpected male suitor. The laboured plots play out in a paralell universe where there are few real money concerns, well resourced hospitals, jobs galore and everyone lives in swish apartments.

They are done rather well and their emotional punch draws one in. Many of them have been made available to the Anglophone world by Star Media who have put them on Youtube with subtitles. (I have linked one of my chersished ones below – Dark Labyrinths of the Past, a borderline psychological thriller).

Russian television comedy strikes me as quite broad. Much of it consists of boisterous skits on modern Russian life, but there is also the comedy of recognition via various stand up shows.

Shysest Kadrov (`Six Cadres`) – with its quickfire assembly line of satirical sketches – seems less ubiquitous than it was a few years ago. Pappini Dochi – Dad’s Daughter’s, on the other hand, seems to play on a perpetual loop. (This tale of a divorced and failed relationship counsellor struggling to raise a clutch of young women is one of the few Russian shows to have been replicated abroad – the German’s have their own tribute to it).

Subrealities.

There are lower rungs of the broadcasting hell yet. If you wish to elicit an agonised grimace from an educated Russian – just say the words Dom 2.

This reality show has, since 2004, been inviting us to gawk at leather trousered aspirants as they mumble inconsequential words to their bottle blonde inmates as they try to build a house which they then have to compete to live in.

Let us not forget the commercials (not that we could!) Should television be believed, Russia is a nation of dyspeptics. Viewers are peppered with a string of adverts offering solutions to stomach complaints complete with graphic images of colons and bladders.

Advertising alcohol has been disallowed so breweries have carried on by touting zero per cent alcohol beer – though their usual brew carries the same name and is as well known. (This same kind of pointless censoriousness extends to pop videos where, for example, should someone be puffing on a fag or holding a drink, this will be pixellated out!)

Saving graces?

In some areas Russian television does shine. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson ( 1979-1986) is well established as a classic adaptation of the Conan-Doyle canon. Less well known gems on the same lines include Kapatin Nemo (1975), inspired by the Captain Nemo tales of Jules Verne, which boasts a sumptuous score and an atmosphere which transcends the period-piece special effects. Moreover, the 1987 rendering of Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity (Konets Vechnosti) is well worth a watch.

A promotional poster for the TV series `Kapatin Nemo`[vovmar.livejournal.com]

Not all of these minor breakthroughs belong to the Soviet period either. Chernobyl Zona Otchuzhdeniya -Chernobyl: Danger Zone (TNT/TV3 -2011 -2014) is another television drama that may well be remembered in years to come.

As though making up for lost time, travel shows in Russia are approached with marked gusto. Mir Naiznankoo – World Inside Out -is overseen by a young male Russian everyman, a Dmitry Something, who hurls himself into exotic encounters with abandon,whether it is tucking into fried insects with the Thais or or gutting large fruits with African ladies. It is all quite apart from the cautious and ironic distance that his British counterparts would project.

The Russian small screen can deliver other positive messages too. A recent TV serial Tolya Robot (2019) had a man born with no arms and legs as its inspirational hero. Wedding and Divorces, from the same year, included a gay man as one of its players as well as portrayed his rejection by mainstream Russian society.

Even the easy-to-revile world of pop is can be a welcome space for those on the outskirts of Russian society. Rap music, for example, provides a voice for young men from Muslim backgrounds.

Rose tinted spectacle.

There is one adjective to describe Russian television : brash. It is also diabolical. A new opium of the people is what it all boils down to and should you try to use it as a guide to the Russian life of today you will be wasting your time. Just to give one example: I dwell in a downmarket, but not untypical Moscow apartment. I have yet to see a domestic interior even close to anything like my own in any Russian television drama.

And how does it compare to the old silver screen? During the quarantine period the Ruskoye Kino TV 1000 channel gifted us with some films had seen first at the cinema: Rassvet, Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest and – a particular favourite – Selfie. These seemed diminished when taken out of the dark and loud cavern of the cinema – and spliced with those stomach complaint commercials.

DARK LABYRINTHS OF THE PAST:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS4K4WOc44M

Lead image:votpusk.ru

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Missives from the Mosh-pit, 2015.

For obvious reasons, there is not a whole lot going on in live music in Russia right now. So, from the more carefree time of five years ago, here are two reviews of prominent Russian alt rock exponents – STIGMATA and TRAKTOR BOWLING – who played live at the Red Club in central Moscow in the winter of 2015. (I only wrote these for a very low circulation school newsletter – so I am not regurgitating anything too much by posting them here)

STIGMATA, AT RED, 21^ST NOVEMBER.

Burly, and bored, the security men manning the gates of Red nightclub seemed reluctant the let the crowd in. We had been hanging about in the dank November evening for too long, pacing around the arty boutiques and fancy restaurants, and it was past seven already. Most of the fans were buying their tickets –for the Stigmata Legion Tour – on the night. I had claimed mine a month or so earlier, and had needed to write the band’s name in both English and Russian before the sellers in the kiosk understood what I was asking for. (This is clearly a cult band therefore). Then, when the gatekeepers gave us the all-clear, they squinted at my ticket for some time as though they were worried that it might be for Elton John or something.

Young following.

Maybe they had a point: the three hundred or so Stigmata devotees must have still been in their cots when the band was launched at the turn of the century. Fresh-faced and flushed with expectation as they were, I caught myself hoping that the show would be good for them, as for some it may have been their first rock gig.

In the still chilly darkness of the club, the fans, anonymous in their indifferent denims and checked shirts, just kept on coming. We all stood about for a good hour gazing at the stylised `S` logo on the stage. Next to me a lanky guy in a Papa Roach t-shirt sucked on some kind of scented E-cigarette while a circle of baseball capped boys, their leader in a `666` sweatshirt, passed the time in the manner of ice-hockey team supporters by calling out the band’s name.

When the backstage screen lit up with Stigmata in black and white and they materialised, the walls and floor vibrated and the crowd began to jab the air with their fingers to the beat of the grinding noise.

Doomsayers from St Petersburg.

A five piece string and drum combo, Stigmata emerged from the rival town of St Petersburg. This fact, along with their occult laden moniker, would suggest a dark-wave Gothic type of music. Their actual sound though is a fast-paced and impassioned one: the sort that encourages a section of the audience to coalesce into a rugby-type scrum as the night progresses. You have to take a look at their translated lyrics to see the darker picture behind it all. What follows is lifted at random from some verses in – brace yourself- Psalms of Conscious Martyrdom (2010):

`Shield your skin for it shall peel/see the hungry jackals come and tear you limb by limb/ burn the day, darkened light`

(Er, no thanks! I’ve got a dentists appointment at five!)

Efficient.

Artyom Lotskih, the goatee bearded and paunchy lead singer, has one leg in a caste but gets on with the job without tiring. He belts out a bass growl and a rasp – signature clichés of the metal core genre which critics bracket the band in. Sometimes he sings melodies, and when he does he has a rather pleasant quavering voice. The person however, who introduces the songs and addresses the crowd is the rhythm guitarist, Taras Umansky.

Vladimir Zinovyev’s energetic drumming holds the whole performance together and the band, knowing this, have set him up on a raised platform. Then the guitarists provide some needed spectacle by goofing about: the bassist Denis Kichenko boasts a fret board with lights along it and the lead guitarist, who calls himself Duke, headbangs over a triangular guitar with his well-kept shoulder-length locks splayed about him. You get the impression that he rather wishes he were a member of the band Europe or something. Both twirl about like dervishes in the red and blue spotlights with their cordless instruments.

The songs came and went without much to distinguish them. Some were given a pensive aspect, such as the well-known Sentyabr by being introduced by a recorded piano motif. Then half way through their two hour set they incorporated some techno style interludes to their pieces which worked quite well.

This was a workman-like set from Stigmata. They left, without observing the convention of having introduced the band members, but after having their picture taken in front of the crowd – the same crowd who earlier had caught the bottles of half drunk water they tossed to them as though it were holy.

As we took our leave, I was pleased to see a lady, perhaps in her sixties, threading her way through the clusters of teens. `Whoa! ` I thought. `That’s cool! Someone here older than me! `

That was before I realised that she was most likely someone’s grandmother, here to pick one of the fans up and drive them home.

Tracktor Bowling – at Red, October 3^rd.

The bells of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour chimed just as I darted out of Kropotkinskaya metro exit into a crisp early October evening.

I was headed to altogether different type of sonic distraction: no sooner had I clapped eyes on the poster in the metro – advertising a visit by Tracktor Bowling to showcase their new Byezkonechnost album -than I had snapped up a ticket.

Having appeared on a compilation CD of numetal legends from Russia, which also boasted the likes of Stigmata and Amatory, they were already known to me. Besides, I tell myself, seeing Russian rock acts keeps me in touch with the world some of my students inhabit – and, since the genre has remained in stasis since the nineties, does so without making me feel too much like an ancient interloper.

Enduring.

Tracktor Bowling themselves are hardly a baby band: by this time next year they will have been rocking for two decades – a fact alluded to in the title of their new album (which means, something like, `never ending`). Wikipedia has even dubbed the group `the leaders of Moscow alternative rock`. Indeed, for a comparison you would need to look at the British Skunk Anansie or the German band Guano Apes, although they lack the balls of the first band and the originality of the latter.

What pushed them ahead, however, was the addition of Louise Gevorkyan as the lead singer in the nearly noughties. This thirty two year old Kaplan born Armenian, whose photogenic aquiline looks are one of the band’s unique selling points, studied music and teaches singing herself. A busy woman, she divides her time between Traktoring and fronting another outfit called Louna who, with their punkish socially conscious stance, have been making waves in America.

The gathering.

A mixed sex stream of black t-shirt and hooded topped twenty-somethings began to fill up the Red club at Yakmanskaya Nab on the riverside. Anonymous thrash rock played in the background and people’s trainers glowed in the ultraviolet light and I was relieved to see that, among them, there were also some older, nondescript types who had turned up to see what all the fuss was about.

There was a stampede to the front as the lights dimmed and the band’s logo flashed up on the screen behind it. Then, as the fans chanted `Track-tor track-tor` a siren sounded and we were then treated to a slick series of slides showing the band through the ages: a sort of early anniversary celebration. Then: there they were.

Rock chick.

Lousine now sports-bottle blonde hair and cuts a chunky figure in her cut off black jeans and Rage Against The Machine T-shirt. The men –Mult, Vil and Prof, all tattoos and short hair, looked like the seasoned musicians they are, but did not muster the same kind of attention as the singer.

For all their `alternative` trappings what Tracktor Bowling trade in is Power Metal: hearty ballads which sometimes sit alongside more shouted numbers. They only sing in Russian and among the few songs I recognised was `Cherta` (`The Edge`) and another one which translates as `Walking on Glass`. The crowd, though, not only knew the songs but where belting out their own duets to them. Loiusine, with the engaging manner of a tomboy skater, knows her audience well. Her pogoing and the later slam dunking enlivened a self-punishing two and a half hour set. After the encore they did not wait to commune with their followers but disappeared as – and this custom is unique to Russian rock gigs – some of them called out `Spa-si-ba! Spa-s-ba! `. Soon the besuited security men set about shepherding us from the building. I walked out of the club infected with the energy of it all, and with the sense that I had witnessed something of a phenomenon.

THE EXCESS FIVE GO ASTRAY IN RUSSIA.

A Fresh look at the Superfluous Men of Nineteenth Century Fiction – and what they can tell us today.

`Nature clearly did not intend on me putting in an appearance, and as a result has always treated me as an unexpected and uninvited guest` (The Diary of a Superfluous Man, p-10).

Plough through any of the writings of the Golden Age of Russian literature and, within its pages, you will bump into a recurring archetype. This consists of a man in his twenties or thirties, highborn (but often in reduced circumstances), influenced by European cultures, unlucky in love and in general at odds with the social mores around him.
Meet the Superfluous Man. Sometimes translated as the Excess man, this term was propelled into Russian conversation of the mid- to late Nineteenth century by Ivan Turgenev in his The Diary of a Superfluous Man from 1850.
The label, then slapped fictional characters from earlier in that century, might be seen as a Russified cousin of the Byronic hero that existed in European culture at that time. On the other hand, the Russian one is less of a personality type and more of a sociological study – and literary trope.
The Bradford born translator of The Diary of a Superfluous Man, Michael Pursglove, traces the type as far back as 1831 with the play by Alexander Griboyedov called Wit from Woe which features a acerbic idealist called Chatsky.
In any case, it was in 1859 that the influential critic Dobrolyubov nailed the Superfluous Man to the mast by listing them in an article called What is Oblomovism? (This being an allusion to Oblomov – the lethargic landowner in Goncharev’s 1859 novel of the same name).

I set myself the task of re-acquainting myself with five translated paperbacks which feature Superfluous Men. I aimed to cut through the barbed wire of literary criticism which surrounds these works and emerge with their still palpitating hearts…

Tragic lovers.
Exhibit A constitute the doomed romancers. Let us beging at the beginning. A novella, first published in censored form when Turgenev was 32, The Diary of a Superfluous Man takes the form of the memoirs of a young man in the throes of an unspecified sickness. Written in the first person and spiced with autobiographical references, the events occur in and around Oryol, Turgenev;s own birthplace (some 368 kilometeres south-west of Moscow).
Chulkaturin is a respectable but socialy awkward civil servant who finds himself drawn to a young girl residing in the estate of a wealthy family that he visits.
It is not long, however, before the girl’s head is turned by the sudden arrival on the scene of the charismatic and high-ranking Prince N.
The battle for her affections can only be setttled, Chulkaturin comes to believe, by the inevitable duel.
The duel goes ahead and leaves Prince N. with a small wound. It also leaves him with a moral victory and the ability to appear magnanimous in defeat, whereas Chulkaturin gets cast in the role of a petty, spiteful man on the eyes of Oryol high society.
Chulkaturin rages against the hostile and insurmountable obstacle between him and his feelings and thoughts(P-10).
What happens next is that Prince N. lets the object of his affections down, however, upsetting her a great deal. Even so, Chulkaturin seems unable to profit from this turn of events. Another man, a colourless minor character up to this point, offers his sympathy to the young lady and wins her hand in marriage. The protagonist’s role in the whole affair has been that of an uneeded and discarded extra.
Ferocious in its intropection, this deathbed confession offers a very desolate picture. Indeed, the novella could be a caricature of all one might expect Russian literature to be like.

Ralph Fiennes as Onegin in a decent film adaptation of `Eugene Onegin` from 1999 [de.fanpop.com]

Eugene Onegin could not be more different. Penned by Alexander Pushkin a decade earlier, this first saw print in serialised form between 1825 and 1832.
Most Western people’s knowledge of it comes about, I suspect, via Tchiakovsky’s weighty opera adaptation of it from 1879. In Russia, meanwhile, it is a set text in state schools and the kids are expected to learn sections of it by rote.

Having read some bits and pieces of Pushkin’s before and being unmoved by them, I put Pushkin in a box marked Doesn't tranlate so well.
It was during a winter holiday trip to St Petersburg that I chanced on Eugene Onegin, left by a traveller at a hostel. I scanned the opening lines where Onegin makes cheeky remarks about the slowness of the death of his uncle and I was hooked. Meeting up with the actual Eugene Onegin is like expecting to drink a cup of bitter espresso coffee and finding, instead, that is is cocoa – with a marshmallow in it.

The tale, told in sing-song verse, catalogues in episodes, the life and times of a St Petersburg fop. (This might well be a self-projection of Pushkin himself, but the narrator is supposed to be a friend of Onegin’s and one with different views and habits).
Still in his twenties, Onegin inherits his uncle’s country estate and transforms into a country gent but is nagged by ennui throughout:
His passion soon abated/ Hateful the world became and His malady whose cause I mean/It now to investigate is time/Was nothing more than British spleen/Transported to a Russian clime (p-27-28)
In short, is Byron’s Childe Harold in Russified form. Indeed Vissarion Belinsky, the Russian critic, dubbed the poem an encyclopedia of Russian life
Throughout this frothy romp – in which Onegin will alienate his lover Natasha, slay his bosom pal in a hasty duel, have a change of heart about Natasha and fail to win her back – there is something for everyone: romantic transcendence, bawdy archness, jocular japes, Gothic terrors and brooding reflections and all within the commonplace environs of St Petersburg, Moscow and rural Russia, but described with vividness.

The Wandering Prophets.
I call Exhibit B the wandering prophets, not because they too do not have failed love affairs too, but because these excess men are peripatetic and given to soliloquising.

Scene from a Russian TV adaptation of `A Hero Of Our Time` [filmprov,ru]

The provocative phrase A Hero of Our Time forms the title of the poet Mikhail Lermontov’s sole novel. The protagonist, Grigory Aleksandrovich Pechorin, is another Byronic typepar excellence.Cynical, self-interested and consumed by boredom, he has few virtues, except for an ability to philosophise:

Passions are nothing more than ideas at the first stage of their development. They belong to the heart's youth, and he is foolish who thinks they will stir him all his life(p-182)
Other observations have quite a contemporary ring to them:

I saw that fame nor happiness depended on it [learning] in the slightest, for the happiest people were the most ignorant and fame was a matter of luck, to achieve which you only had to be clever (p-61).

The narrative is episodic, with much of it being related via Pechorin’s own journal in racy prose. What is more, unlike the previous two novels the setting is exotic. The events occur in the misty peaks of the Ossetian mountains, and Lermontov squeezes every ounce of romance from this.

We follow Pechorin as he claims a young Ossetian girl as his own, thus coming into conflict with the elders of her community, stumbles across a bizarre smuggling exercixe on the coast, is almost drowned by a femme fatale and witnesses a Russian roulette challenge. What stops all this from being just a tale of derring-do is the character study at the core of it.
The novel attempts to place Pechorin alongside a whole generation who came of age in the 1840s. An older acquaintance of his, when asked about Pechorin, responds: there were many who speak the same way, and that most likely some are speaking the truth (p-163).

Turgenev’s Rudin (1857) functions as a more developed revisiting of his earlier novella. Of all these novels, in fact, this is the one with the most sophisticated plot.
We are back in country estate territory. Rudin is introduced to it by dint of being the messenger who has to apologise to the hosts for the non-arrival of a long awaited guest.
Thus he is a stand-in, but however, his smooth intelligence soon charms the wealthy socialite who owns the house and her circle of acquaintances, so he becomes a long term resident there and shares the story with a witty misanthrope and a conventional landowner type, with whom he is compared and contrasted.
In true Superfluous Man style, he embarks on an affair with the young daughter of the Lady of The House. When she discovers this, she expels him.
Rudin is revealed to be a victim of his own eloquence: his love for the girl was all theatrical talk. However, those around him now characterise him as a chancer and a sponger, which is less true.
Rudin tries to explain himself by letter to his disappointed young lover (My fate is a strange one, almost a comic one. I give myself comnpletely, heartily, fully - and yet I am unable to give myself p113). She is unimpressed by this.
When Rudin goes off back to his wandering life, one of his opponents has a change of heart and says this of the man He posseses enthusiasm and...this is the most precious quality in our time (p-125).
Later on, we meet Rudin again. Now he has become an insurrectionist in the 1848 June uprising in France. Here he meets his end – as a hero, of sorts.

The Malcontent.
Chekhov’s short story The Duel, from 1891, is separated from the others by some decades.This fact is reflected in the self-conscious portrayal of the material. The Superfluous Man here calls himself such and makes reference to some of the works mentioned here.
We are back in an exotic locale: this time it is the Black sea off the coast of Southern Russia.
Layevsky, however longs to return to what he sees as the civilised North, feeling that his relationship with a beautiful but flighty young woman is stifling him. He attempts to borrow the money to do so from a good-hearted doctor friend but it opposed by an earnest zoologist influenced by Darwinist notions. This latter, Von Koren, has this to say about Layevsky:
I told him off, asked him why he drank so much...his sole reply to all my questions was to smile bitterly and say I'm a superfluous man...or he'll spin a whole yarn about Onegin, Pechorin, Byron's Cain, Bazarov, calling them our fathers in spirit and flesh (p-268).

This enmity to what he sees as a self-justifying weakling leads to yet another duel. This one, however, turns out to be a seriocomic travesty and there are no victors (and is later followed by a kind of reconciliation).
Chekhov’s character – Exhinbit C-the malcontent -is the least likeable one in this parade but he is well served by the author. There is a reason why Chekhov is revered as a master storyteller and here you do see why.

Echoes down the century.

Danila Kozlovsky as Max in the film`Dyxless` from 2012[timeout.ru]

When you strip away th historical paraphenalia, you feel struck by the freshness of these novels, and their ongoing relevance.
The Superfluous Maan never really left us: he just went global and more downmarket. Ernest Hemingway was known to be a devotee of Turgenev’s. In The Sun Also Rises (1926) we meet a post First World War Superfluous Man in the form of Jake who is impotent as a result of that war.
Nor has contemporary Russia abandoned the Superfluous Man. What about the redundant advertising compywriter turned mass killer in Headcrusher (2002) or the messianic adolescent in Sense (2012)?
In film, Max in Dyxless (2012) owes something to Onegin, albeit one projected onto the Moscow playboy milieu of the early noughties.
In this age of the redundant male perhaps we are all a bit Superfluous these days!
For myself, I just want to shout out a loud spasiba balshoye to these eminent Men of Letters for putting these relatable misfits onto a marble dias for us all to see.
Every dog has his day!

Sources:
Chekhov, Anton The Steppe and other Stories, 1887 -1891 (Penguin Group, London, 2001) Translated by Ronald Wilks
Lermontov, Mikhail A Hero of Our Time (Karo, St Petersburg, 2017) Translated by Martin Parker.
Turgenev, Ivan The Diary of a Superfluous Man and other novellas (Alma Classics, Surrey, UK: 2019) Translator: Michael Pursglove.
Turgenev, Ivan Rudin (Alma Classics, Surrey, UK :2012) Translator: Dora O’Brien.
Pushkin, Aleksander Eugene Onegin (Karo, St Petersburg,2017) Translator: Henry Spalding.

Lukyanenko’s Last Hurrah: The novel THE SIXTH WATCH.

Is this a farewell to the Watch Saga?

Invoke the name of Sergei Lukyanenko and the following picture may well pop into your mind: An uber-Russian-Muscovite who catapulted to fame through a string of hard edged and scary fantasy novels commencing with The Nightwatch.

Think again. The real Lukyanenko hails from Karatau in South Kazakhstan. He only arrived in Moscow, at the age of 28, in 1996. By that time he had already published quite a few novels in the space opera genre and which were influenced by the American writer Robert Heinlen.

As for `hard-edged` and so on, his prose is distinguished by its philosophical humour, occasional sentimentality and its promotion of the need for compromise in a world where there are no absolute truths. Packaging aside, he is not a horror writer as such. The gist is somewhere between the decided grimness of Dmitry Glukhovsky and the light touch of Boris Akunin – in fact more the latter.

I first encountered his books over a decade ago. They were huge in Russia and easy to find in translation and I read them as a duty, despite not being all that keen on mythical magic-based fiction. The main tning that I got from them was an introduction to life on the Moscow of today.

Urban fantasy pioneer.

This time I reached for The Sixth Watch in preparation for the lockdown to come. Also I felt that it would be interesting to find out how the creator brings his iconic series to a close.

Lukyanenko likes to think of hinself as a successor to the Strugatsky brothers and his first novel, Knights of the Forty Islands (1990) was a science fiction one, (and remains untranslated).

The Nightwatch (1998) was the tale that would vanish off the shelves, however. It introduced the world to the Others – supernatural beings such as vampires and magicians, werewolves and prophets who walk amongst us in human guise and are locked into a Cold War style detente between the forces of Light and Darkness. This is mediated by the nether world known as the Twilight (which the film version translates, rather better, into The Gloom).

It was a fellow Kazakh and director Timur Bekmambetov who was the first to recognise the cinematic qualities of this world and so in 2004 a bit of Russian cultural history was made. The film version of Nightwatch entered cinemas and was followed two yeats later with Daywatch. These represent a soft power breakthrough for Russia, with few critics having a bad word to say about them.

Scene from `Nightwatch (2004) [Slashfilm.com]`

Thr films also functioned as starmakers with Anton Khabensky, Anna Slyu, Sergei Trofimov and the band Gorod 312 all making their names here.

Lukyanenko has been credited, via his brand of urban fantasy, with taking fantasy to a wider age group and, indeed, many a `paranormal romance` potboiler, starting with Stephanie Myer’s Twilight series, owes something to him.

The portly dreamweaver has thus become something of an ambassador of Russia, much as Henning Mankell is for Sweden.

Some commentators have taken to badmouthing him for his `chauvinism`, in particular in connection with his stance on the Ukraine issue. This, however, despite being expressed in a theatrical way, is not so different from the mainstream one throughout much of Russia.

Anton returns.

Anton Gorodetsky, the Higher Light Magician remains our narrator and protagonist in The Sixth Watch. He seems happy in his marriage and has a daughter who is an Enchantress. He continues to work as a Nightwatch agent. It is in this role that he finds himself hunting down an errant vampiress on the loose on the streets of Moscow. This creature, furthermore, seems to be waging some sort of vendetta against Gorodetsky, but turns out, in fact, to be warning him. There is an oncoming apocalypse, he learns.

Cover from the Russian version of `The Sixth Watch or Shyestoi Dozor` [ozon.ru]

The plot, after the manner of the whole series, soon starts to resemble the serpentine digressions of an espionage thriller as an ancient Demon-God called The Two in One returns to reassert its dominion.To forestall the destruction of all life on Earth, even the Others, Gorodetsky has to gather together a convocation of of the heads of all the vampires, witches,prophets, shapeshifters and magicians. This then is the Sixth Watch: a sort of Seven Samurai -like defence league.

I stifled yawns through some of the portentous details about rituals and incantations and so on and so lost the thread at times. The fresh and vivid rendering of being at a witches rally and a vampire conference brought a smile to my face though.

Lukyanenko’s wining trick is to merge his world of paranormal events with quotidian domesticity.

As Gorodetsky prepares an omelette for his spunky fifteen year old daughter, who is also a prime target for the dark forces at play, he reminds her that putting too much salt in it would be bad for her health.

Lukyanenko also offers a nice line in ironic humour as shown in the following exchange with a doctor called Ivan:

`I once met a man who mixed petals into his tea, said Ivan, pouring the strong brew before diluting it with hot water.`It was disgusting muck. And what is more tose petals were slowly poisoning him`

`So how did it all end?` I asked.

`He died`, the healer said shrugging. `Knocked down by a car. `

What gives Lukyanenko’s writng its idiosyncratic flavour are the jaundiced observations on the urban life of today which always make you sit up even if they appear curmudgeonly. There is, too, the refreshing fact that in this novel we get a hero who is not a detached brainbox nor an alcoholic divorcee, but a family man.

The fairytle like climax put me in mind of Nikolai Gogol’s Viy (1835) and made any tedium I had thus far tolerated seem worth it. Also it did seem to make any further resurrection of the series well-nigh impossible.

Andrew Bromfied, that busy and ubuiquitous Yorkshireman who also brought the mini-classic Headcrusher to an Anglophone readership, seems to have engaged with Lukyanenko’s intentions quite well here. One or two moments of wooden dialogue aside, you would be unaware that you are reading a translation most of the time.

Mixed reception.

How are the Western fanboys and girls taking the shutters coming down on their cherished series?

Not so well.

On Youtube Polyanna’s Bookclub opines: `You can’t just end it like that – there’s got to be something next!` Over in Goodreads an Esteban Siravegna is more forthright:

`It feels as if Lukyanenko got fed up with the saga and decided to end it for once and for all, or that he needed the money`.

Man at a crossroads.

But Lukyanenko, as his folksy website makes clear, has other frogs legs and spider’s webs on the boil. He has made a foray into alternate world fantasy with Rough Draft (Chernovik) which was filmed, to muted reviews, in 2018. He is also a fixture on the video games in industry.However, if he were to conjure up a new Watch novel a few moons hence, I would not be so surprised. Seven is a magical number, after all.

The Sixth Watch' is published by Arrow Books, London (2016)

The main image is from twitter.com

THE WICKED WITCH ISN’T DEAD: The film BABA YAGA: TERROR OF THE DARK FOREST.

An age old folk demon is after the kids of a prosperous housing development in Podgaevsky’s latest dark fantasy. My kids are safe. Are YOURS?

How we longed, this year, for that promised big freeze with its white cityscape. But winter never came.

Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest/Baba Yaga: Koshmar Temnova Lesa felt a bit the same. The internet hype first informed me that it would get its release on October 31st of last year. This then was moved forward to the following January. In the event it was in the theatres on 27th February, a deadzone for new films. (The only opposition came from Kalashnikov – a disgraceful biopic of a man who designed mechanisms to kill people with. Jesus wept!)

The irony was that on the day that I saw it, a mini-snow blizzard appeared in the city, as though winter too had made a desperate late showing!
The wait was worth it if only to see how this fifth supernatural tale from the emerging new voice in Russian film craft, the 37-year-old Muscovite Svyatoslav Podgaevsky would shape up.

Not only did he co-direct it (with Natalia Hencker) and co-write the film (alongside Natalya Dubovaya and Ivan Kapitonov) but he co-produced it for Non-Stop films.

As with The Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite (2016) and The Bride (2017) and, in particular, last year’s Rusalka: Lake of the Dead this project offers an idiosyncratic kind of muscular folk horror using East European folk tales as a backdrop.

The superb promotional poster for this film did much to cement its reputation long before it hit the screens. [Yello.com]

The cast includes the 37-year-old beauty from Severodvinsk, Svetlana Ustinova, who plays the nanny. Lending the film some needed gravitas Igor Khripunov also partakes. His craggy looks have graced four of Podgaevsky’s previous films, making him a sort of Russian Ralph Bates.

New Moscow.
The location constitutes one of the brand new sleeper dorms that are springing up outside Moscow to cater for wealthy young families( with the metro being expanded in order to accommodate them). Far from exuding the spooky ambience of your traditional horror setting, this locale feels aspirational and septic.

Nevertheless, it functions as an outpost. When the new buildings thin out we run into a dense and expansive area of forest. As the action unfolds the New Town and the Encircling Forest start to feel like players in the story.

Boy-saviour.
Egor, a fourteen year old boy (Oleg Chuginov) forms the film’s protagonist (making a change from the young women common to this genre). His life involves walking to his nearby school, dealing with hoodlums, making approaches to his sweetheart (Glafira Golubeva). and helping to care for his newborn kid sister.

His mother, played by Maryana Spivak (Loveless, 2017) and father, Denis Shvedov (The Mayor, 2013) seem distracted by career demands and hire a nanny to attend to their offspring….

So far we have a slice-of-Russian-middle-class-life. Then Egor starts to notice a presence menacing the baby….
Noticing a shadowy form on the baby’s video monitor, the boy creeps into the room only to be confronted with a menacing female apparition from which he flees….

He will later go deep into the dark forest with his sweetheart and former bully (Artyom Zhigulin) and team up with a hut dwelling hobo called Mrachnny (Khripunov) who has been watching children disappear from the locality and confirms this to be the work of Baba Yaga. The story then becomes a mission to save the baby, and thereby the family.

A Yaga for our times.
Yaga, a long-nosed wicked witch from Slavic folklore often gets depicted as living in a hut held aloft by chicken legs. She flies around on a mortar and displays a penchant for young children. She can, however, play a helpful role when so inclined.

Not so in this film’s updated version! A shape shifter, she she is a femme-fatale as a nanny but later manifests as a sort of peg-legged female Phantom of the Opera. Later on again she appears as an animated mass of red knitting wool.

The tense and humourless action is enlivened with some hallucinatory episodes and we enter a parallel time stream where the baby has become airbrushed out of existence and the now satanic parents are without memory of her. The plot, having begun as a ghost story accelerates into a rollicking dark fantasy romp.

Genre trappings.
For all the originality of the setting, the film falls back on many witchy hokum standbys. There are the kids against the corrupted elders. A bad nanny. Demonic possessions (complete with people’s eyes rolling up to the whites), baby dolls aplenty and people getting hurled about by occult powers.
The shock jumps are lined up like billiard balls and beging to pall after a while.
A portentous and numinous score by Nick Skachkov (On the Edge, 2019) helps to bind it all together.

Breaking new ground.
It feels a bold move to have used as the monster figure as well known to Russians as Jack and the Beanstalk is to Western Europeans. This was all of apiece with Podgaevsky’s earlier films. The last one reinvigorated Rusalka in the same fashion (a water nymph that gets mistranslated into mermaid in English).
Whether this will beget lasting screen idols to equal the vampires and werewolves of the last century remains to be seen. This represents a quiet innovation, however.

Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest sets the suburban modernity of the Russia of now on a collision course with a Slavic demon from very old Russia which lives in a forest next door.

There is plenty for a Jungian style psychoanalyst to chew over here. All of Podgaevsky’s recent movies have introduced us to wrathful female demons, for example. Then what is the significance of the red ball of wool that makes its appearance throughout this film?

Circus.
As with The Bride and Rusalka: Lake of the Dead I felt dazzled by the first hour of the film as the situation was being set up. Then when it all turned into a romp I became ever more detached and restless. Some of the supernatural elements stretched my credulity so much that I felt that anything could happen and the scariness of it got a bit lost.

Likewise, as much as young Egor makes for a valiant hero, he and his tweeny chums gave me the impression that I was sitting through something that might have been better aimed at a much younger demographic. (It is interesting to note that Podgaevsky cut his directorial teeth on a long established comedy T.V show called Jumble which features young kids and their daft ways).

That said this constitutes Podgaevsky’s least derivative and most assured work to date. The film is due to reach audiences in the Baltic States, South East Asia, Latin America and The USA.The director, who is working on a new film (Privorot/Dark Spell), is bound to become recognised on the international stage soon.

The featured image is from K.G Portal.

The trailer (dubbed into English):

BOYFRIENDS COME IN BOXES: The film (NOT) IDEAL MAN.

Does this satire on modern man-woman relations dig deep enough?

I was once acquainted with a professional Russian model who asked me one day if I could be her friend (and she did just mean friend). I doubt I need to explain why I was quick to talk my way out of that one…

This must be a common experience for desirable women in Russia, as well as elsewhere. Such female loneliness forms the starting point of the sex comedy-cum-romantic comedy (Not) Perfect Man (Nye Idealni Mushina). But what does it have to say about Russian men?

From a light entertainment troupe.
If you want the truth, I had gone to the cinema with the aim of seeing the science fiction epic Koma , which would have been much closer to my comfort zone. However, in the event I felt drawn to something altogether lighter. This was the evening of January 31st, and I am a British citizen. I just wanted to wrap my frenzied brain in candy floss and to forget the unfolding events at home.
A wrong call….

(Not ) Perfect Man constitutes a 12+certificate 90 minute long comedy - romance directed by Marius Balchunas. In the blurb for the film, this 48 year old wunderkind is described as the enfant terrible of cinema. This makes him sound like some sort of Pedro Almodovar like figure but in fact Balchunas, who studied TV Cinema in Southern California, is the culprit behind such vacuous fare as Naughty Grandmother (2017) and Naughty Grandmother 2 (2019).

The film’s protagonist is provided by the 37 year old Muscovite and stalwart of such comedies, Yulia Aleksandrova and the 25-year-old R&B crooner Egor Creed forms the love interest – by, more or less, playing himself.

Other major players include Artyem Suchkov (Gogol: The Terrible Revenge, 2018) and Roman Kurstyn (Pain Threshold, 2019).
No doubt it is pure coincidence that Zhora Kryzhovnikov – who along with Evgenia Khripkova worked on the script and was behind a TV series called Call Di Caprio last year – is the spouse of the leading lady.

Living ornaments.
Robots seem a hot topic in Russia right now. Andrey Junkovsky’s dystopian science fiction series Better Than Us (Lushi Chem Lyudi, 2018), which features a future containing human-like androids, has made waves on Netflix of late and the mini-series Tolya Robot, written by Aleksey Nuzhny for T.N.T, concerns a disabled man whose life is changed by bionic technology.

Likewise, if you just look at the premise of (Not) Perfect Man one could imagine it to have been adapted from one of Isaac Asimov’s more serio-comic robot short stories. In this near-future scenario human-like androids are on sale to the public and each one operates within the parameters of a given persona.These programmed personas might comprise an ideal Chef, an ideal Secretary, Security Guard…or Friend.

Sveta (Aleksandrova) is employed by a company which deals in these very items. Her job is to activate them and see to it that they are placed on display for shoppers. We learn, meanwhile, that she has caught her bodybuilding jock of a boyfriend (Kurtsyn) cheating on her. She is ready for a new romance….

Among the androids is a handsome and sensitive Friend (Creed) who soon gets snapped up by a middle-aged socialite. Later she returns him, however, in a state of exasperated fury. Tests show that there exists a fault in the robot’s programming and the company is ready to dispose of him. This is when Sveta, beguiled by his charm, comes to the rescue and takes him home with her as his new owner.

At first the robotic Friend seems like a Russian take on the fabled New Man of the 1980s in the West: kind, intimate and domesticated.

Complications ensue, however when this programmed people-pleaser becomes the best buddy of her ex-boyfriend. Then he obliges with some – not so 12 certicate friendly – physical solace to a distraught girfriend of Sveta’s. This results in a skirmish in which his face becomes broken.

With assistance from a nerdish colleague (Suchkov) – who has been falling for her all the while – she fixes his face and the fault in his programming. Or does she?

Sveta and her roboman soon become a poster couple for female -to-machine couplings. They arrange a lavish wedding on Krymsky Most. However, during the wedding vows the bride flirts with the woman who is leading the ceremony….

Salted popcorn.
Those who had entered the cinema to catch a science fiction movie would have left without stars in their eyes: the tomorrow’s world in which the story takes place is lacking in background exposition. The only concession to any technical detail occurs when we see Sveta animating the robots. Otherwise this could all be taking place in the Moscow of today.

(Not ) Perfect Man feels like your standard gossip-over-the-fence chick flick replete with emotive facial close ups, a quasiclassical score and a location which flits between a disinfected office, a swish nightclub and an imaculate apartment interior.

Nevertheless, the ending stears clear of the usual hugging-and-learning. In fact, it is cynical enough to suggest that some women will opt for illusory affection even when they know it to be so. Thus there was some unpredicted sadness at the core of the film.

One Dimensional Men.
The young couple sat next to me in the underpopulated cinema chuckled in the right places, but I did wonder if they would still have laughed if the genders had been reversed in the story.

I mean, the real – that is non-mechanical – men in this film offer a parade of messed up dullards and daffy meatheads. Even the alternative love interest, in the form of the colleague who really does care for our heroine, is a botannik (a wonk) and not so glamorous. They all get upstaged by a robot – a robot whose most woman-friendly qualities arise from a malfunction!

It seems that Russian men- growing up in a culture that smothers them with excess mother-love then packs them off to the army, where they may well be bullied by homophobes (even if straight) – are not encouraged to express themselves in a way which their female counterparts would appreciate.

Prove You’re Not a Robot.
Man/woman stuff aside, this film does have one simple premise working behind it (and that is something which both comedy and science fiction needs). It is that people are being commodified and subsumed into their work roles. The robots in this film all have pre- programmed work and social functions and can be distingiushed by the bar codes on their necks.

Had this film been slanted a bit more to the science-fiction end of things it could have been freer to explore the implications of this idea. It might well have even have been funnier in doing so. As it is, we are left with just as much a people-pleaser as Creed’s robot was and the film never rises above its own trivial level.

The trailer:

Main image: Yandex.com