Letters to the Editor

To the Editors:

First of all I would like to compliment you on publishing a brilliant magazine. My only regret is that it does not come to my home once a week instead of every two months.  

I would like to comment on the Freedom Of The Press article in the most recent edition of Russian Life [Jan/Feb 2007]. I was surprised to see that you did not include the Television Station RTVI in your list of sources of current information on Russia. RTVI is the sister station of Echo Moskvy and uses the slogan that they are the only source of Russian News on TV (Internet or otherwise) that does not have to pass Kremlin censorship. Many of the same journalists work for both Echo Moskvy and RTVI. I see that you did mention Gusinsky’s News.ru as being a valued web site, but the RTVI feed actually can be picked up from that site. RTVI has guests from Alexander Prokhanov to Yevgeny Kiselyov, exchanging views in an open and free manner. 

Just curious as to why RTVI did not make your list of ways to access Russian news and current events. 

Regards,

Rod Squires

St. John’s, Canada 

Mr. Squires:

That source of info just slipped through our net. Thanks for bringing it to our, and our readers’ attention.

Readers may also want to make a note of a new online service that sells digital access to Russian movies and tv: moe.tv

The Editors

To the Editors:

Your “Russian Calendar” story on Pushkin in the current issue [Jan/Feb 2007, p. 25] ends with a quotation from  Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poems to Pushkin” which absolutely distorts the meaning of the corresponding line in the original. Appearing in the context of “Marina Tsvetaeva, who loved Pushkin with all her heart”  (which IS true), the quotation from Tsvetaeva  – “Pushkin? He scared us!” – should sound very confusing to the readers who do not know these lines in Russian and thus are incapable of understanding the true message of Tsvetaeva’s poem.

I am using this opportunity to refer the readers to the book Tsvetaeva, by Victoria Schweitzer, published in English in 1992, pp. 299-307.

Sincerely,

Svetlana Elnitsky

Burlington, VT

To the Editors:

[According to your] article “The Loud American” [Sep/Oct. 2006] by Lev Berdnikov... Count Fyodor Tolstoy “got his curious nickname, ‘the American,’ after he was expelled from Ivan Kruzenstern’s around-the-world expedition on board the ship Nadezhda and forced to disembark in the Aleutian Islands of Russian America.” The article continues with a chronicle of the count’s life among the Aleuts that would put even Robinson Crusoe’s adventures to shame.

However, in his uncensored, personal diary/journal, The First Russian Voyage around the World, Hermann Ludwig von Lowenstern, officer and cartographer on the ship Nadezhda, recorded that in August, 1804, Rezanov included Count Tolstoy in “the number of people who will be staying behind [in Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka] and  will go overland to Petersburg...” He also wrote that “Rezanov has paid Count Tolstoy 1,500 rubles table money and his full pay in advance.” It strikes me as fairly lenient punishment for the hellion who, according to the same von Lowenstern, not only challenged Makar Ratmanov, the second-in-command on the Nadezhda, but “is crazy and is saying that he is going to kill Rezanov and then set fire to the Nadezhda.”

As for Tolstoy’s alleged “American” adventure? Well, the end notes of von Lowensterns’s journal give mention to the fact that “after returning home from Kamchatka, he [Tolstoy] maintained he had been left on an Aleutian island. He liked to wear what he claimed was Aleutian style clothing.”

Von Lowenstern’s account of events appears to me much more credible, hence historically valuable, than Count Tolstoy’s fibs that circulated in the haute monde of St. Petersburg. The aforesaid gives me the audacity to suggest a different title for Mr. Berdnikov’s article on Count Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy. A title like “The Russian Munchausen”
seems more appropriate and, most importantly, accurate.

Gregory Weissenberg

by email