February and March in History

FEBRUARY

1 Today, we mark the 60th birthday of ballerina Yekaterina Maximova, wife and longstanding dancing partner of Vladimir Vasiliev (pictured together above), current artistic director of the Bolshoi. Maximova was a favorite student of Galina Ulanova and was prima ballerina in such famous ballets as the Nutcracker, Gisele, Don Quixote, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet and Spartacus.

2 Two hundred and thirty years ago, Russia’s famous writer Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) was born. He was the founder of the fable genre in Russia. At the age of 20, Krylov began publishing a popular magazine, Pochta dukhov (The Mail of Spirits), which used science fiction and satire to expose acute social problems. He wrote his first fables in 1806. The scintillating wit and deep knowledge of Russian folklore and folk wisdom in his works soon won Russians’ hearts. Literary critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote that Pushkin himself would be incomplete without Krylov. Gogol called Krylov’s book of fables “the people’s book of wisdom.” His famous fables, including The Crow and the Fox, The Fox and the Grapes, and The Swan, The Crawfish and the Pike, have become staples in secondary schools and many of the idioms he coined are proverbial.

9 Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) was born 125 years ago on this day. One of the most controversial figures in 20th century Russian theater, Meyerhold was a pupil of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. He quit Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Moscow Art Theater in 1902, however, and sought out his own path. “I was an enemy of naturalism starting approximately from the year 1905, when I began writing articles and giving lectures,” he wrote. Meyerhold was the director of a number of Moscow and St. Petersburg theaters and from 1920-38 headed the Moscow State Theater (later named after Meyerhold). He was a talented teacher and director – the directors Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich and many well-known Russian and Soviet actors were all his students. When asked who in his view was the best Soviet director, his teacher Stanislavsky answered, “The only director I know of is Meyerhold.” But Meyerhold’s bright and talented performances stigmatizing social flaws were full of artistic formalism, a trend not welcome after Stalin imposed socialist realism. In 1938, the theater was closed. Two years later, Vsevolod Meyerhold died – he simply couldn’t live without theater.

10 215 years ago, the legendary fortress of Sevastopol – “the city of Russian glory” as Russians call it – was founded. Over two centuries, the city sustained many sieges and its defenders repeatedly demonstrated uncommon courage and heroism. And arguably the most difficult battles were during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Today, Sevastopol is in Ukrainian territory, yet Moscow Mayor (and presidential hopeful) Yuri Luzhkov, among others, claims Sevastopol as a Russian city. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, himself Ukrainian, gave the Crimean oblast (then part of the Russian Federation) to Ukraine in the 1950s, as a token of eternal friendship between the two peoples. At that time, the Soviet Union seemed indivisible.

12 170 years ago, Russia lost her great playwright and poet Alexander Griboyedov (1795-1829) whose comedy The Woes of Wit deeply marked Russia’s literary, social and political life. But, like the poet Fyodor Tyutchev, Griboyedov offered Russia much more than literature – his life is the subject of our story beginning on page 24.

22 Orthodox Lent begins on this day. Easter is celebrated April 11 this year.

23 Today is Army Day in Russia and is unofficially celebrated as Men’s Day.

MARCH

3 This day is the 100th birthday of Yuri Olesha (1899-1960) a Russian writer and playwright who was one of the literary Pleiades from Odessa (for more information, see our Literary Insert on page 46).

6 Another Russian literary giant, Fazil Iskander, celebrates his 70th birthday on this day. Born in Abkhazia, Iskander has written many humorous books, including Constellation of Kozlotur and Sandro from Chegem, which brim with romantic and lyric power. In the late 1980s, his hilarious short novel, Boas and Rabbits (Udavy I Kroliki) offered an unparalleled parody of the Soviet political system. In 1993, Iskander received the prestigious Pushkin Prize, established by Alfred Toepfer. Iskander’s most recent short work, The Conversation Between an American and a Russian, published in Znamya magazine, poked fun at the gargantuan incongruities of today’s Russian reality. In the story, a bewildered American is trying to find out what people in Russia are doing. To his dismay, he learns that most are busy just “thinking about Russia;” the rest are ... stealing (when they aren’t thinking about Russia as well). A story full of wit and wordplays, it is Iskander at his best.

8 Today is International Women’s Day. Russians use the day to honor their mothers and wives.

15 The writer Yuri Bondarev celebrates his 75th birthday on this day. Born in 1924, Bondarev belongs to the brotherhood of war veteran-writers who joined the army at a very young age and fought all the way until 1945. After the war, Bondarev focused his literary talents on chronicling Russians’ heroic deeds in the Great Patriotic War. Bondarev’s first novel, Battalions are Asking for Fire (1957), earned him wide recognition. Then followed the novel Hot Snow (1969), which also served as a script for a Russian movie of the same name, then The Shore (1975) and The Choice (1980) and others. But Bondarev found it hard to continue his writing in the New Russia and belongs to that group of Soviet intellectuals who did not accept the reforms brought about by Gorbachev’s perestroika. In the late 1980s, at a Communist Party Conference, he criticized Gorbachev and compared the country to a plane that “does not know where to land.” Looking back a decade later, one has to admit that he may have had a point.

16 1I5 years ago the science-fiction writer Alexander Belyaev (1884-1942) was born. His books have inspired Russian youth since the 1920s. His works are full of bold scientific predictions and far-reaching fantasy, but he also was a kind humanist. Belyaev’s novels – e.g. The Head of Professor Dowell, and especially the romantic novel The Amphibian Man – are still published. The latter is a story of love between the daughter of a poor pearl hunter and a young man suffering from a lung disease. The boy’s father, a scientist, saves him by making him an Amphibean. The novel was made into a – now legendary – movie in the late 1960s, starring the young beauty Anastasia Vertinskaya and the handsome Vladimir Korenev.

18 155 years ago, the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) was born. At the age of 12, Rimsky-Korsakov joined a military cadet school and began his career as a military naval officer. He served in St. Petersburg and made a two year foreign cruise. Yet his true vocation was music. He wrote 15 operas in different genres – from epics to fairy tales. His legacy includes such musical pearls as The Snow Maiden (1881), Sadko (1896), The Tsar’s Bride (1898) and, of course, his famous, oriental-style musical suite, Sheherazade (1888) where, to quote the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia, he “utilizes a mosaic-like structure in which basic musical motifs, incessantly varied, succeed one another in a dazzling display of orchestral and harmonic color.”

21 Five years before Rimsky-Korsakov, the composer Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881) was born. A representative of realism in Russian music, his operas Boris Godunov (1869) and Khovanshchina (1872-1880, completed by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1883) remain masterpieces of the art form; his piano composition Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) is one of the best-known works of classical music. Musorgsky was a highly inventive composer who introduced many radical innovations that were scorned in his day, but which received acceptance and further development in the 20th century; almost all 20th century composers have been influenced in some way by Musorgsky.

– Valentina Kolesnikova