Andrei is, by his own admission, not really an idiot. “But neither was I not an idiot.” He is also not really Russian, and not really not Russian.
His family emigrated to the US from the USSR when he was six, and now he is a PhD postgrad in Russian literature, unable to find work. Which makes him open to his brother Dima’s request to go to Moscow on an open-ended stay, to look after their elderly grandmother.
Long separated from Russian reality, but well educated in Russian history and literature, and seemingly informed by western media, Andrei thinks he knows what to expect. But he soon finds that Russia is rather different from the inside looking in.
“Don’t stay in this country. It’s a terrible country,” his grandmother warns. “Good people become bad people, or bad things happen to them.”
While admitting her wisdom, Andrei has few options. So he tries to make friends, to have people to talk to, to fall in love, to get involved. The friends and characters he meets are a sampling of modern Russia, from disaffected socialists to rabid hockey players, from loathsome bankers and anti-Semitic pensioners, to struggling students and oversexed expats – and sometimes more than one of these things at the same time. Andrei finds a path, a way in, but of course it does not end anything like he hopes, for him or his friends.
Gessen makes Andrei’s a compelling journey of self-discovery through the “terrible freedom” that is modern Moscow – “a fortress set down in a hostile environment.” All the more so for Russophiles, as he sprinkles it with interesting bites of Russian culture – from Tsvetaeva to Autumn Marathon – like street food along way.
A Terrible Country is a moving novel of how outsiders struggle but never quite fit in, how emigrés never leave, and how language can make communication harder, if only because not everyone can agree what words are worth.
– PR
In the coming-of-age drama The Bolshoi, students at the Bolshoi Academy quickly learn there will be let-downs, betrayals and disqualifying deficiencies (too short, too busty, too bow-legged). Director Valery Todorovsky aims our attention at the relentless practicing and preparations. We can’t help appreciating the corps of young dancers that the hell-bent instructors are whipping into harnessing their remarkably agile and powerful bodies.
“I very quickly realized,” Todorovsky told The Moscow Times, “that traditional drama actors won’t be able to play these roles. However thin, slim and flexible they were, they wouldn’t be able to have an argument while raising their legs [up to their ears]. It’s just impossible.”
Todorovsky shows us the vigor and discipline that precedes any performance, and yet we see almost nothing that an actual Bolshoi audience would, and in turn it sees almost nothing that we see.
The plot is uninterestingly complicated and full of needless leaps from adulthood to childhood. The 12-year-old Yulya Olshanskaya (Ekaterina Samuilina) is discovered huckstering on the street by a disreputable, provincial strip-club owner and former Bolshoi star Potoskiy (Aleksandr Domogarov). Yulya knows nothing about ballet, but she can move with grace and wit! She so distracts the street-corner audiences that it gives her partner in crime, her little brother, the chance to pick pockets.
After Potoskiy gives her some basic instruction, he argues with her overwhelmed and impoverished parents to let him take her to Moscow, where he then has to plead with the aging, fierce, slightly dotty instructor Beletskaya (Alisa Freyndlikh) – with whom he, back in his glory days, used to partner – to give Yulya an audition.
The best dramatic scenes are between young Yulya and spectacled, bejeweled Beletskaya, who doesn’t mind the girl’s mouthing off, because the kid has the fire, the legs and the jump that she used to have. And, as she herself is starting to lose her bearings, she sees her hopes and her old self in unbridled Yulya.
The students, meanwhile, have been competing against and befriending one another, and they pass (or crushingly don’t) through adolescence to the graduation from the academy. Who will dance the graduation performance lead in Swan Lake? The temperamental dynamo Yulya or the rich and composed Karina (Anna Isayeva)?
What the budding Bolshoi ballet stars want are the roles and the resulting status. When Yulya’s teenaged drama is resolved, the movie churns on past where any European or American movie would go and on to the next chapter in their lives as professional Bolshoi Theater ballerinas.
Todorovsky’s continual switching between “then” and “now” highlights that the young Yulya steals the movie from the good but necessarily less sympathetic 17- to 21-year-old Yulya played by the ballerina Margarita Simonova.
The Bolshoi feels a little long for us impatient Americans, but it all ties together, and it’s all beautiful to look at. Sergey Mikhalchuk’s cinematography is luscious – as gorgeous as that in the renown Andrey Zvyagintsev’s movies, but Todorovsky is never solemn or shocking. While Zvyagintsev, the director of the Foreign Film Oscar nominees Leviathan and Loveless, is the great devastator, pressurizing life down to a tense standstill, Todorovsky means to enchant and amuse us, and most of the time he succeeds.
– BB
“If I were to describe my Soviet childhood in one word, that word would be normal.”
So begins Grechishkin’s memoir of his teen years growing up in Leningrad.
It is the 1980s. Old and new are racing for a showdown, and young Seryozha is coming of age. Things might have been “normal” in Grechishkin’s life, but Soviet normal was nothing like normal anywhere else, so his story is an invaluable, highly personal look at life as it was lived in the period of zastoy – “stagnation,” and then into perestroika. After school activities, samizdat, school field trips, and social stratification are all discussed with a detail and intimacy it would be hard to find in other sources, making this book very useful as social history.
And throughout Grechishkin relishes recounting his tales with humor – self-deprecating when it comes to his own youthful exploits, and rather darker when it comes to the activities of the repressive state into which he chanced to be born.
What if a gulag prisoner born in 1900 went to sleep, Rip Van Winkle-like, in the 1920s, only to wake in 1999? How would his life get woven back together? Who would he be?
When Innokenty Platonov wakes at the novel’s outset, he does not remember who or where he is. His doctor, not wanting to harm the patient’s recovery, knows the truth yet councils a slow re-awakening of memories, of their own accord, and tells Platonov to write down what he remembers in a journal. And so the book takes the form of that journal, jumping back and forth through time to unravel the mysteries of Platonov’s predicament, the murder that landed him in the camps, the longing of his life and loves left behind. And the suspense builds, as we come to discover that his new life may be in danger now, at the very end of the century in which his birth began.
Since this is Vodolazkin, the writing is of course beautiful, and the narrative structure is onion-like, revealing itself carefully and elegantly as the story progresses.
Without spoiling the plot for readers, there are striking parallels to be explored between Platonov’s and Russia’s lost decades, and there is a Bulgakovian vein in the fantastical experiments and absurdities that underlie the plot. There is also even a touch of Dostoyevsky in this powerful novel, whereby Vodolazkin telescopes a century’s horrors and dramas through the lives of a single Leningrad communal apartment’s residents, all the while broaching the greater philosophical questions of existence.
Highly recommended.
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