Edward Crabtree

PROVODNIK (SOUL CONDUCTOR).

This blood-and-thunder paranormal thriller provides a showcase for Russia’s new poster girl.

Katya may look like any ordinary city gal but she has a very busy life. She is an empath who consorts with the dead and becomes plagued by ominous visions. She is still dealing with the trauma of her parent’s death by car crash when she was a child. She gets drawn to a spooky mansion where she once witnessed a demonic rite play out. Her dead twin sister returns to her to warn her that her own killer – a serial killer – is still on the loose. Turning to the police for help she finds they fail to believe her. Well, would you?

Provodnik – the title just means `conductor` but is translated into Soul Conductor in English promotions – is a 16+ certificate hour and a half long blend of Dark Fantasy and Psycho-thriller. From `the Russian offices of Twentieth Century Fox` (whatever that means), the film was overseen by 48-year-old Ilya Markov who has a background in television, as do the writing duo of Anna Kurbatova and Alexandr Torpuria.

A baggy green parka modelling the latest Alexandra Bortich look.
[filmpro.ru]

Evgeny Tsyganov (Peter FM) plays the weary criminal investigator with conviction but the camera’s gaze is forever set on one Alexandra Nikolaevna Bortich. With her cornfield coloured hair, ice blue eyes and catwalk friendly physique, Bortich functions as a `Russian rose` (in fact she hails from the Gomel region of Belorussia).The woman of the moment, she looks out from the front covers of women’s magazines and is playing the lead in a TV show in Russia called An Ordinary Woman and, last year, provided the heroine for a popular romcom called I’m Losing Weight.The good ship Sasha Bortich has been well and truly launched.

The film’s tagline – `Who Can You Trust When You Can’t Even Trust Yourself?` and the producer’s claim that it `explores the fine line between reality and imagination` should give you some hint of the tale’s paranoid and even sometimes feverish ethos. Nevertheless, the word `lavish` kept springing to my mind when I considered the film’s production values.

The action – and there is enough plot material here for at least three separate films -begins from the word go and never slackens. The director juggles with a lot of cobweb covered scary movie tropes such as a decrepid old mansion in the woods, bodies floating in the air, a malevolent boy-child, a wild pack of dogs , blood and fires. Dennis Surov’s effective epic score underlines the intensity of it all meanwhile.

The breathless roller-coaster ride leaves Bortich with little to do except clutch at her temples in agonised discombobulation, ensconced all the while in a capacious green parker. (She is far from the bold temptress that she so well portrayed in Duhless 2).

Not that she is alone. She sometimes has an entourage. This consists of Departed Helpers, who prop themselves up on her furniture, visible only to her (a la Wings of Desire).

The autumnal outdoor shots and the downbeat but homely apartment interiors, together with the swigging of vodka (there is an alarming drink-driving sequence involving Tsyganov’s cop, but even Katya has a hip flask on the ready) gives a real whiff of Russianness to the whole enterprise, whatever other Hollywood cliches it may employ.

At best I was put in mind of the great Jacob’s Ladder (1990) but at times I felt I was undergoing a rerun of Nightwatch. That `first Russian blockbuster` from fourteen years back has cast a long shadow over subsequent Russian horror filmcraft.

The bombastic aspect of that fantasia is evident in the superfluous use of theatrical shock effects, including sudden fires, blood rippling over a person’s face, and people being chucked about by invisible forces. Whilst it is creditworthy that they did not use special effects to do all this, none of it seemed to either forward the plot or add to the atmosphere. The best bits in Provodnik were simple and moving: for example, Katya battering the windows of the car her parents were driving to their deaths in, to no avail.

Practitioners of Russian cinematic chillers would do well to get acquainted with the `less-is-more` principle.This applies more to the horror genre than to other things. Konvert (The Envelope) and Diggeri (Diggers) were both more satisfying for applying a certain minimalist constraint.

I, however, am not the target market for this product. This, I presume, would be young Russian women. Nevertheless, apart from a nervous whispering couple behind me, I sat alone in a central cinema on a sunday evening to watch this. Robin Good, as the Russians call it, was getting all the bums on seats.

Trailer.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (ZAVODNOI APPELSIN) at the Theatre of Nations, Moscow November 20th

O my brothers! I viddied a bezoomny horrorshow about a malenky bit of the old ultraviolence!

The play calling itself `A Clockwork Orange` (`Zavodnoi Appelsin`) seems to have become a permanent fixture in the schedules of Moscow’s Theatre of Nations. My previous attempts to get tickets for it had failed and this evening, courtesy of a whole load of thirty-somethings, was a full house.
I need to say at the outset that what I saw was very much a conceptual spin-off from Anthony Burgess’s sensational novel of 1962 and by no means an adaptation of it, or even of Stanley Kubrick’s much vaunted 1971 screen rendering of the same. Instead this functioned as an original idea by the writers Yuriy Klavdiev and Ilia Kukharenko with the director Fillip Grigoryan. After all, the novel is unstageable (as I can testify having sat through a lame attempt to do do by drama students many years ago). The drama really concerns the genesis of the novel A Clockwork Orange and in that it resembles Ken Russel’s film Gothic (1986) which tells of how Frankenstein came to be written.
As much as this fact disconcerted me, I never got bored throughout this 1 hour 50 minute (without intermissions) production, and that is despite my less than perfect Russian language skills. Rather, I left the theatre feeling perplexed and remain so now. My only disappointment lay in not being shown the sinister glitter of a brave new world that the novel offers. The play glances back to the past.

The Moscow Connection.
Still, if you live in Moscow you already inhabit the world of A Clockwork Orange: the blocks of flats whose windows are illuminated by the flickering light of TV sets, the bars with names like `The Duke of New York`, the superannuated murals glorifying labour, the vast public video screens – not all of these are in Burgess’s story, but might as well have been.
There exists a deeper link to Russia’s capital too. Malcolm McDowell (the iconic Alex in Kubrick’s film) told of how Burgess, before writing the novel, had been on an exchange visit to Moscow. He was sitting in a coffee bar one warm evening when a group of learing thugs pressed their faces against the window (Newspunch.com, February 4th 2016). This vignette provided a catalyst for Burgess’s story and also its telling via `nadstat`, the teenage slang full of Russian loan words.

Burgess’s demon.
There was another inspiration to the novel however, and this play zooms in on it. What happened was that Burgess’s wife was assaulted, in Burgess’s absence, by American G.I’s. Many critics have hypothesised that A Clockwork Orange represented Burgess’s attempt to come to terms with the trauma that this terrible event wrought on him.
The main protagonist of the play is a Burgess-like `writer` (characterised as a beret wearing member of the intelligentsia). The incident is represented – borrowing a sequence from the novel -by the rape of his wife in a country house setting.
It is an ordinary miscreant who ends up behind bars who conjures up the demon of the `imaginary Alex` by throwing the writer into helpless introspective guilt.
Otherwise the play features the stand-off between Youth and Age (but fails to explore this in the sociological way that Burgess attempted) and there is a bit of rumination on popular culture (sixties pop music plays a big role in this production).
As for the nadstat: I had been eager to see how a Russian language production would deal with this but drew a blank. In the stage notes to the play there is an intriguing suggestion that the script used Google translate to create the feel of an artificial language, but this was lost on this Russian learner.
Sixties retro.

The set comprises a moderne country house, the inside of which we view from the garden, courtesy of a wall length sliding window. There is some attention to the detail of sixties Britain with the wife, for example, being clad in one of the flowing skirts of the period (I was reminded of the recent British play Home, I’m Darling where a couple try to recreate late fifties domesticity). We also encounter a Britishism in the form of a garden gnome. How stunned we are when this comes to life and begins to address the audience!
You would expect a bit of the old ultraviolence to get a look in too. It does. The rape sequence is prolonged and distasteful, but not cheapened with any attempt at eroticism. The most disturbing scene, however, is the grievous bodily harm committed on Alex by his elders. (It appears that theatre censorship in Russia is not as stringent as all that).

Fresh take.
There is little point in trying to give you the `plot` of this play. This is an expressionistic trip through vaudevillian sequences held together by a Strindbergian dream logic. Or to put it another way it is a bit like what you might have got if Andrei Tarkovsky rather than Kubrick had directed a film version of the novel.
In fact, the only Kubrick influence in the play comes via his film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) in the use of a Ligeti like score as the plays opening. The only iconic reference to the film occurs when Alex is given a drink of moloko (milk) by his parents.
Also we get an extended dumb show in which the writer’s wife, masked by sinister facial bandages, mimes to a sixties ballad and a surreal scene where the `imaginary Alex` turns up to the house in the form of a cyborg Black Knight – only to morph into the couple’s querulous teenage son. Later there is also a home video where Alex’s parents torture him.
Throughout there is a determination not to feel predictable or to fall into clichés. Even when Beethoven gets an airing, it is the gentler Beethoven of `The Moonlight Sonata` and not the more rousing works associated with the Kubrick film. (As I often bewail the derivative or stodgy nature of much modern Russian culture I cannot really complain about this!)
In any case, this play may be iconoclastic but it is not at all irreverent. The writers have demonstrated much concern here for the life and times of Anthony Burgess. Nor have they made the theme of violence a titillating one.
You might even see this play as something of a black comedy, although the fact that the audience did not so much as titter might owe to the fact that, like me, they would need some time to mull the whole thing over.
If you imagine that modern Russian theatre is all revivals of The Cherry Orchard then wake up and nyuhakh the kofye!

Theatre of Nations site (English).

LOUNA: Live at the Adrenaline Stadium, Moscow 17th November.

A state-of-the-art stadium metal act…fronted by an Armenian woman with oppositional views.

The Adrenaline Club, in the Northwest of Moscow, whilst not quite Earls Court Arena, drew a queue outside it which must have numbered well into the thousands, making this the biggest gig I have yet been to. Shivering in the first snow of the year we all looked – a few painted face fanatics aside – a bit the same, donned as we were in the same post-rock uniforms that almost everyone goes about in these days: black jeans, hoodies, desert boots, khaki and so on.

As we reached the massed ranks of door security awaiting us at the entrance to the stadium, they advised my Glaswegian colleague-cum-press-photographer that, as he had no press pass, he would have to leave his top of the range camera in their safe hands. At this my helpmate spat on the floor and rejoined the mid-November frost.

Having lost my hope of any decent visuals (sorry about that!) and a rare chance to bond with a fellow expat, I tried not to let this setback put a pall on the whole entertainment and consoled myself with a few overpriced Budweisers in the voluminous darkened auditorium.

Here’s what they REALLY look like!
[spb.gdechego.ru]

Nothing here but us.

At around quarter to Nine some members of the audience invaded the stage, or rather Louna appeared, for it seemed like the same thing. Tonight, showcasing their new offering `Polyoosa` (Poles) with the sponsorship of the sterling Russian rock outlet Nashe Radio, they were on their home turf and their sense of comfort seemed palpable.

Louna came about ten years back, whereas Lousine Gervorkyan, a 35 year old Kapan born Armenian who studied music and teaches singing, has been a vocalist for over twenty years. In a previous life she headed Traktor Bowling (and sometimes still does) before her bassist Vitaly Demidenko and her made a bid for a new band with a bolder sociopolitical thrust. With this aim they head hunted two guitarists – Ruben Kazariyan and Segei Ponkratiev and the rhythm wizard Leonid Kinzbursky. Enter Louna.

This outspoken band have been prepared to put their money where their mouth is too, having been involved in fundraising for Pussy Riot (a fact which may have explained why they came to be pulled from an MTV documentary called `Rebel Rock` following pressure from unknown Russian sources).

Set piece.

Gervorkyan, with her dark angular looks, trademark long hair shaven at the sides and jeans torn at the knees, is more of a tomboy skater icon than a sex siren and the many women in the crowd were the most excited to see her. (Her stage presence was lost on me a bit, stuck as I was behind a forest of raised mobiles and having to watch the TV screen to get a proper view).

Throughout their industrious two-hour long set the band must have taken us through every hard rock trend of the past thirty years – a bit of ska punk here, a bit of thrash there, then a bit of pomp rock…and so on. This was all mixed with care and not so ear-splitting that you were unable to appreciate, for example, the well coordinated interplay of the two lead guitarists. Louna constitute a song based act, however, and the vocals were placed at the forefront. For a comparison the most obvious choice would be Sandra Nasic and the Guano Apes (minus the inventive range of that singer and band) but Gervorkyan’s more baleful and operatic moments, however, put this old New Waver in mind of Hazel O’ Connor at times.

Louna are accomplished chant-along merchants and Russians in particular are always all to eager to oblige when it comes to joining in with the performance. I am not sure how that many of them shared the finer points of the band’s philosophy, however, even if they had memorised the lyrics well. The message of the medium – from the confetti and smoke being disgorged into the air, the lit mobiles and paper hearts held aloft for the slower numbers, to the tomfoolery with a huge balloon, and the onstage man on rollers filming it all this – might have been a set by the rather more conservative dad rockers Aria.

Reality check.

There remains one performance, however, that will stay with me after I have forgotten all that standardised pageantry. They did not treat us to their classic single `Divny Novi Mir` (`Brave New World`) – although I did recognise some numbers from the same titled album from which it comes. What they did do though was to play a tribute to another dystopian classic: 1984. With the rally like format of the show, and the way in which the chorus read out the numbers in the year as a list as they flashed on the display behind the band (`Adin! Devyat! Voysem! Chetyre!`) created a very poignant and eerie impact.

So while the downsides of impersonal stadium gigs hardly require to be itemised (I caught Traktor Bowling in the smaller Red Club a few years ago and could relate to it all a lot more) there were times when the medium and the message worked as one. `Adin! Devyat! Voysem! Chetyre!`….shudder.

1984 by Louna

`Freud’s Method`: A Russian small screen sleuth.

This standard cop thriller hardly breaks any new ground, but does at least ooze a Muscovite ambience.

A `universal palliative equal to tea, aspirins and the wireless`, said George Orwell of the British and their detective stories. In Russia the situation seems little different.

From Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) through to the Soviet era where Vil Lipatov introduced us to Captain Prokhorov, a Perry Mason for the Brezhnev period, and the T.V classic The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1979 – 1986), whose Vasily Ivanov was honoured with an M.B.E for his portrayal of Holmes, and which surprised Holmes fans worldwide with its devotion to the legend, Russians have clasped mysteries to their breasts.Then we even have a rock band named Agata Kristie! In the Russian language the name for a detective novel is simply `detektiv` – no need for any other elaboration.

The mean streets of Moscow.

Whilst the Russian/Ukrainian success story The Sniffer, with its high production values, may yet do for the Slavic input to the crime genre that Wallander did for Scandinavian noir, Freud’s Method (Metod Freyda) – not to be confused with Sreda’s more recent The Method (a riff on Dexter) -is a more modest and domestic affair. The creation of Star Media (better known for their sunny `melodramas`) and running since 2012, Freud’s Method occurs against the backdrop of an identifiable Moscow and its premise is altogether less absurd than the better known product.

Mikhail Vaynberg was behind the clapboard for the first Season with Vladimir Dyachenko and Aleksei Krasovsky tapping out the scripts. From 2014 a second series – Freud’s Method 2 –was born and a fresh newcomer – Ivan Stakhnakov took over directing duties and a whole team of writers worked on the stories. Both had 12 episodes of 50 minutes in length.

Enigmatic lead.

The anti-hero sleuth at the core of it all is one Roman Freydin (Ivan Okhlobstyn). A former professional poker player and globe-trotter turned psychologist, Freydin now finds himself employed as a `special consultant` to the Prosecutor’s Office. The eponymous `method` represents his ability to use mind games the better to draw out suspects into self-confession.

In many ways a Holmesian figure – aloof, seeming to lack feeling, arrogant and sometimes supercilious, there are nevertheless hints that he is lonely man. Moreover, Okhlobstyn, himself 52, plays the detective as a youthful dandy in yellow sweaters and socks, and one not above having liaisons with his suspects. Nevertheless,his speech is often provocative: upon encountering the corpses of a murdered young married couple he comments: `They’ll not be squabbling in slippers`. Otherwise he tends towards Wildean aphorisms: `Happy lovers always tell lies,unhappy lovers always tell the truth`, For instance, or `A woman’s secret is like a baby. It needs to stay inside for some time`. We also learn that Freydin has picked up some quasi-special powers during his sojourns abroad. From shamans he has mastered the art of mimicking his own death and it appears that he was the mystery saviour who saved his own boss from a helicopter accident in the Himalayas.

The merry band.

The cops Freydin works with function as a kind of surrogate family to him as they seek to crack unusual homicide cases on the icy boulevards of Moscow. We encounter an elegant and no-nonsense investigator played by the prolific actress Natalia Antonova (for whom Freydin nurses a forever unrequited longing). Then we have the dour jobbing plainclothes policeman (Aleksei Grishkin) whose unobtrusiveness contrasts with the persona of Freydin. It is inevitable that we also need two perky young male and female officers too who function as eye-candies and who drive a soap opera – type `will they/won’t they?` romantic suspense sub-plot. In the first season these consist of Pavel Priluchniy and Elena Nikoleava and in the second Roman Polyanski and the striking Olga Dibsteva. Presiding over them all is Artur Vaha playing the sort of stout, uniformed paterfamilias so beloved of Russian dramas.

Some episodes do tackle some specific issues, and not such comfortable ones to a Russian television audience. One story in Season one (Series 4) concerns the murder of an immigrant by a vengeful father who believes that he has raped her daughter…and yet we discover that the truth is rather more tangled than that. With its closing message that Illegal Immigrants Have Rights Too, this is one gold nugget of an episode. (I have linked this below).

Still escapism.

For all this murky social realism, however, there is a comedic element to it all. This is true in particular of Season 2 where the pace speeds up. (There is, for example a running gag where Freydin is forever being pestered by unsolicited phone calls from pizza deliverers). In fact the lives of our crime busters might be seen to be quite enviable: all breezy philosophising in the staff room, then gadding about the city with time for flirting and dating, all the while managing to look chic. Many an episode closes over a contemplative glass of cognac. So, like many a western crime drama, Freud’s Method fosters an impression that it offers a slice of modern life but wraps it all up in comforting stylishness.

Beguiled.

Seldom a watcher of equivalent detective shows in the West, I came to Freud’s Method at first in seek of a Russian language learning aid. To the show itself I needed to be won over, but won over I was. The involvement of the talented Mr Okhlobstyn sets up a stumbling block. Alas, this former Orthodox priest has gained notoriety on account of his quasi-fascistic standpoints on nationalism and minority sexualities. This troubles me, but the character he plays does not reflect the real life actor, far from it in fact. The franchise seems to have its heart in the right forward-looking place and does so, furthermore, whilst exuding the somehow cosy spirit of Moscow.

Episode from Season 1 (English subtitles).

The Orwell quotation comes from `The Detective Story, 1943 ` Seeing things As They Are’, Pengiun Modern Classics, 2016

In the pipeline….

A review of Freud's Method the Russian detective drama.
A review of a staged version of `A Clockwork Orange` in Moscow.
`Louna` the famed Russian alt-metal band live.
The horror films of Svyatoslav Podgaevsky.
….and much else!

Generation P: the one-stop space for all things interesting from the Russia of NOW.

Roaring Boy: the personal and political in Arslan Khasavov’s `Sense`.

Did a Central Asian immigrant write a Catcher in the Rye for the Moscow millenial generation?

I hate cheesy boys and pert, pretty girls who smell of expensive perfumes and drive around in large cars with tainted windows. With wads of money in their designer label bags to satisfy every whim, they have all they need: money, girls, shooters, nice gear…In their world everything matters except your heart.

I once had the acquaintance of a precocious fifteen year old student (now studying Literature at Moscow State University) who had some literary aspirations. He would tell me of the Golden and Silver Ages of Russian writing but never about anything current, until one day I said to him: `You need to get into something a bit more up to the minute, something with people like you in`.

I urged him to read Sense by Arslan Khasavov, a representative tirade from which is given above (pages 44 to 43).

Sense is the first novel (and a calling card) by Arslan Khasavov who is now just reaching thirty. When he authored this mini-masterpiece he was just twenty and, in it, he set down the Moscow of `here-and-now`, at least as it was in 2008. Whilst Khasavov is a Kumyk by birth –an ethnic group found for the most part in Dagestan-he resides in, and has undertaken his studies in the capital of Russia.

Dream come true.

Sense was shortlisted from one of the 50,000 works sent in to the Debut Prize (which gives annual awards to new Russian writers). Arch Tait PEN literature awarded translator (best known for making Anna Politkovskaya’s journalism available in English), took note of the novel and translated it into English. As he is also the UK editor of the Glas new Writing series, this lead to Sense being published by Glas in 2012. Thus it took its place alongside the other 170 authors who have been published by Glas since 1991.

True to life.

Sense is not so much a story as a slice-of-life as seen through the eyes of Artur Kara, a club-footed twenty-year old student who is the first in his family to study at a university. A self-described `day-dreaming slob` he belongs to the post-Soviet Muscovite tribe. Disdainful of the banal lives of his factory working father and mother, he derives inspiration from literature, information from the internet and TV, and his student life allows him the time to mull over it all.

He feels himself to be ranged against those born in the 60’s and 70’s who have presided over the `death of idealism` (p-151). To vault himself above the kind of people he thinks are `unaware that a stupid life has no value` (p-20) he goes in search of greatness. To this end he turns up to meetings, and gets to know the supporters and, in particular the writers, of the youth movements of his time. So we get a journalistic roll call of many of the (real life) hopeful reformers, would-be revolutionaries and militant Islamists who were around in 2008. Kara, however, finds that none of these outfits answer to his need for romance. Then, prompted by some feverish visions that come to him, he creates his own movement which forms the title of the novel – Sense.

Even when cruel reality intervenes in the form of the death of his father, he is only put off his stride for a short while before teetering on the brink of madness….

Intimate.

To read the novel – and I did so in one sitting – is a bit like being collared by a voluble twenty-year old who insists on pouring his heart out to you. This effect gets achieved through intense and sometimes florid prose which is, nevertheless, conversational. Some passages are didactic, but Khasavov has enough distance from his anti-hero to be able to present him in a satirical way (rather as Thomas Mann does with Felix Krull in Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man).

So we are treated to an edgy, but not too hard edged confessional: and it is refreshing to find that it does not concern the Second World War, rural life, or Soviet dissidents and the tone is upbeat. The events all occur in the radius of the Tverskaya area.

In the Moscow of 2008 the economy was still doing quite well and there were more political opposition activities than there are now. Even so, Artur cannot see how he can improve his position within society. His place is at the opposite end of the spectrum as that depicted in Minaev’s bestseller Soulless (2006). Well he knows this too:

I was handsome, strong and talented, and nobody wanted to know. Nobody cared. Was it my fault I wasn’t born into a wealthy family but instead was the son of an ordinary mechanic? Did I stand condemned for that? (P-127).

Critical reader.

My millennial friend came back having read the novel. He shrugged his shoulders.

`I got the bit about him rowing with his parents and all, but it’s not original, is it? And, anyway, it’s written by an immigrant`.

That was his verdict. Perhaps, I wondered to myself that, being still in his teens he was a little too young to really relate to it. What about you though?

If you are in your twenties then I can guarantee that this will contain some words that will speak to you, even if not for you. For those of you who are older it will remind you of what it felt like to be that age.

Sense (translated by Arch Tait) is published by Glas Publishers, Moscow, 2012.

My interview with Khasavov for Moskvaer.

Featured image from Fenbook.ml (Cover picture courtesy Sever Publishing House).

New article on UFOs over Moscow.

Alleged UFO shot over the Zhubelino district of Moscow, 2016
[Picture: proofalien.com]

The good people at Unexplained-Mysteries.com have published an article of mine on the (not often covered) topic of contemporary UFO sightings in and around Moscow:

Moscow’s mysterious lights.

The phenomenon of UFOs does exist, and it must be treated seriously

Mikhail Gorbachev.

What do you think? Let me know in Comments below.

Kamchatka beer bar, Moscow.

The locale of many a lost weekend.

Should you get that craving for sweet relief from the harpy-screech of the Metro ringing in your skull, from the pompous 4-by 4 drivers honking at pedestrians and the lonely crowded thoroughfares – from Moscow in short –then there is a cubby-hole you can head for. This appears in an unlikely setting.

Fancy meeting you here.

Along the upmarket shopping street of Kuznetsky Most you will meet the red neon sign of Kamchatka Pivbar. Named in tribute to Russia’s wild and volcanic peninsula, and part of a chain that also takes in St Petersburg, Kamchatka bar resembles (with apologies to John Osborne) a real, if decayed tooth in a mouthful of gold filings. The café-bar is nestled between Vogue café on the one side and an Asian restaurant known as Mr Lee on the other: both salubrious joints of which I can tell you nothing. Not only that, but the place is bang opposite an entrance to the lordly State Department Store, GUM. Thus may a cat look at a king and seedy hipsters be the neighbours of the tweed-and pearl set.

Cosy dive.

Opening from a pedestrianised street, Kamchatka boasts two floors, one of them a basement. As we enter we encounter an orange brown interior lit by industrial globe shaped lamps. The seats have desks with inverted Heinz ketchup dispensers on them and these are surrounded by a motley assortment of bric-a-brac and retro cool. Above the exposed brickwork big old-looking signs hang from the ceilings promoting outdated looking wares. On the walls, and on the beer mats you can appreciate the saucy kitsch commercial art of Valeriy Baroikin. His idyllic vignettes illustrate `Beer For Cultural Relaxation` on behalf of Zhiguli brewers.

Zhiguli promotional by Valeriy Baroikin.
[Illustrators.ru]

Totter down to the basement hall and you pass a bicycle fixed to the stair railings. Down there parties of people lounge about on small armchairs and halved oil drums with cushions in. You will be needing the spacious male and female toilets there too.

`Better a light beer, than a Bright Future`.

The main attractions are the Zhiguli beers, the cheapest of which – their Barnoye – will relieve you of just 150 Roubles. Served to you by hyperactive student waitresses, this soapy ale delivers the right kind of chillaxing buzz without making you go cross-eyed and singing Rule Britannia. The beer though is gassy – gassier than a gas explosion in a gas factory in Gazigazgorod. So you might have to resign yourself to being a Viz Comic character for the next day.

With a dash of Slavic irony the establishment also offer two FREE bottles of champagne to any customers between 3 and 5 in the morning. This seems rather generous of them until you think it over.

Foodwise there are a number of unmedicinal stomach fillers on offer. Hardy boys at a furnace near the entrance can hammer out a shaurma with chicken, and a number of burgers (which I am told are edible). Soviet style soohariki (dark dried bread) is sold in paper cones at the bar.

The soundtrack constitutes an appropriate mix of technoed-up pop songs by Bratya Grim and Grigory Leps plus the worst of Retro FM. This creates the right kind of nightclub-like expectancy without forcing you to shout at the top of your lungs.

A Bunch of Sweeties.

The clientelle come and go announced by blasts of cold air at the front door. Their average age is 25 and there are two kinds: those en route to something more active and those at the end of a sentimental drinks journey, who are crawling on their lips. In spite of this, I have yet to be enlisted in a fracas here, although I have heard tell of such.

The not-so-elfin doormen are concerned for the most part that you do not bring in anything vegetable, mineral or liquid that would compete with Kamchatka’s sumptuous repasts. They are quite serious about this: I have lost vast banquets of food from the fact that, on the way out, I am too refreshed to reclaim my confiscated items or because the security staff have switched over, or some combination thereof.

Cheer and cheapful.

Kamchatka beer bar hosts an affordable drinking experience in a convivial and unpretentious environment. Even with the rise of micro-breweries, less and less venues in the capital can offer the same.

To get there, come out of Kuznetsky Metro station and…just follow the in-crowd. Or leap into a taxi and ask for `Kamchatka`(although if your drive proves to be a long one you might just be in for a spot of volcano watching).

Kamchatka beer bar on Instagram.

Which Russia would YOU choose?

Chernovik (Rough Draft) : a colourful blockbuster based on the modish premise of alternate histories.

`Which world would you choose? ` was the tag-line which appeared on the promotional posters in the metro about a month before this film’s release on 27^th May this year. Best known for his dark fantasies Night Watch and Day Watch, (2004 and 2006 respectively) the fifty year old former doctor Sergey Lukyanenko has now seen his untranslated novel – Chernovik – from 13 years back also adapted for the screen.

This parallel worlds yarn has a 12+ certificate this time, but otherwise seems to be aiming at the same young adult audience.

Kirill, an ordinary young Muscovite (Nikita Volkov) who works for a computer games company, receives the shock of his life when he discovers one day that his whole identity has been erased from his known reality. A fellow gaming geek (Yevgeny Tkachuk) seems to be the only one to recognise him. Then, however a mysterious woman called Renata Ivanova welcomes him into a new role. He is now to be the curator of a way station straddling alternate variations of Moscow. His customers enter the water tower in which he resides and, should they show the right documents and pay, can exit out of another door straight in to a whole new version of reality. We glimpse a sun-soaked Moscow complete with palm trees along the river, a Moscow with steam punk airships crossing the skies, a variant of unreformed Stalinism, a sleek futuristic Chinese run Moscow, and so on.

Within all this kaleidoscopic adventure we are given a conventional romantic sub-plot as Kirrill pursues the same woman in different guises throughout switching between worlds. However, his friendship with the loyal and goofy coloured-shade- wearing fellow gamer packs much more impact.

The director Sergey Mokritsky made his name with the much more earthy Dyen Uchitelya (Teacher’s Day) (2012) but here he delivers the kind of glittery grandeur you would expect from a Lukyanenko product. It all gets very J.K. Rowling-meets-Bulgakov: in particular when there is a climatic showdown between the ruling `functionals`.

Apart from the giant killer matrioshka dolls – which are straight out of the sillier end of Doctor Who – the other most memorable thing in this flashy movie is that it graces the stately Lithuanian actress Severija Janusauskaite (last seen in a support role in satisfying psychological thriller Selfie) with a rather more fitting part as a superhuman supervisor.

Trailer here

The Scary Fairy Tales of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

The Grand Old Lady of Russian letters has some weird tales to tell.

Nina had always been a disorganised person who let things go; thus her leave from the newspaper to go `freelance` and the apparent total unravelling of her life…. She ate, she drank…and they didn’t need any money, since every day the young fisherman would bring the fruits of the sea home to them.

`Who is he? ` I asked, and Nina, without any hesitation answered that he was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, that he could breathe underwater, that he brought home literally everything from there….

For all the reputation for `chauvinism` that still sticks to Russian society, the fact remains that one of its most revered authors is a woman, an elderly woman at that. Moreover, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is neither a veteran critic of Soviet repression like a Solhenitzyn, nor someone exulting in the shiny new capitalism like a Sergey Minaev. As such, this writer, playwright and novelist can offer the Western reader a fresh take on how a great many Russians really think and feel.

Amongst the nation’s best-known contemporary writers, Petrushevskaya cuts a figure of a sort of literary godmother. From her thirties this Muscovite has been producing stories and plays and following a long period of being disregarded came to prominence in the 1980s when her dramas – compared by some to Harold Pinter’s -were seen as fit to be performed. Then as she reached fifty her first book of short stories saw print in Russia.

Now these tales have been translated into English by two Americans, Ann Summers – a Slavic literature academic – and the Moscow born Keith Gessen, founder of `n+1` magazine. Penguin Modern classics have collected them under the title There Once Was A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby which hit the shelves in 2009.

This collection is made up of 19 short tales grouped into four categories: Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories, Requiems and Fairy Tales. They defy easy categorisation but the tag `magical realism` is a hard one to avoid. Readers who have encountered Vladimir Sorokin might also be reminded of him, but her work relies less on shock tactics.

To a British reader they offer not such a great challenge as similar developments occurred in British fiction in the same general period. I am thinking of The Cement Garden period Ian Mc Ewan (or `Ian Macabre` as he was then sometimes dubbed) as well as the Gothic fantasias of Angela Carter.

Petrushevskaya tells us of women, married couples and families who undergo strange life and death situations. Some of these invoke the supernatural, others can be accounted for in terms of psychology but in all cases individual experience is paramount. Whilst Petrushevskaya avoids local and historical references it is clear that it is the seedy apartments of the Russia of the Eighties to the present day that she is showing us.

Two of her stories – `Hygiene` and the infamous `The New Robinson Crusoes: A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century` function as sketches of dystopian catastrophe. In the former, for example, a man who has recovered from a mystery plague knocks on the door of a family apartment to warn them of the coming social collapse. This does indeed occur but the family survives through robbery, although end up having to quarantine their own daughter.

Others such as `The God Poseidon` (quoted from above) and `The Black Coat` can be enjoyed as supernatural chillers. It would not be difficult to imagine them being anthologised in the more thoughtful type of Horror collection sandwiched between Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell. (Indeed Petrushevskaya won a World Fantasy award for this book in 2009).

`There is Someone in the House` however, suggests a study in morbid psychology whereas `Marllena`s Secret` is a bold fantasia and `My Love` an extended exercise in tragic pathos.

Her prose is spare but with enough observant detail to bring some reality to her fables. The fast paced narrative is told by an earthy and unsentimental voice, which is matter-of-fact, and without overt humour. The resulting effect – pithy and sensational- resonates in the West as much as it does in Russia. She has been on the New York Times bestseller list.

Petrushevskaya casts a flamboyant figure, dressing like a grand dame and singing cabaret. From not being able to get published in her own country at all she has become its national treasure, an icon of survival.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers is published by the Penguin Group (London: 2009)

(The above quotation is from p-85, `The God Poseidon`).