GAGARIN’S GRANDSON
Andrei Panin & Tamara Vladimirtseva
2007
“Being Russian is not the color of your [beep!],” says the impulsive protagonist of Andrei Panin’s and Tamara Vladimirtseva’s Gagarin’s Grandson, “being Russian is the state of your soul.”
This unexpected “black” comedy gleefuly undercuts the nastiest of racial slurs and some of the most cherished national myths, building up to a climax that is as equivocal as it is cathartic. One of the best cinematic works to emerge from the new old country, this trenchant feature is so riveting and inventive, that the cosmonaut’s daughters nearly succeeded in suing it out of existence. The verdict? Beg, borrow or steal, but get hold of the unaltered, original, cut (which can be downloaded online; see the Russian Life website for a link).
– Stanislav Shvabrin
Keeping score
PBS, October
(check local listings)
The third episode of this wonderful series (airs October 29 on PBS; check your local listings) looks at Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, which the composer finished in record time, with Stalin’s sword hanging over his head.
Condemned in 1936 for making “muddle instead of music,” specifically for his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which Stalin ominously walked out of, Shosta-kovich rushed his Fifth Symphony through to completion. Superficially in keeping with the Soviet canon, it brought him back into official favor and may have saved his life. Ever since, musicologists have disputed whether Shostakovich included hidden messages inside his Fifth.
This beautiful series (with great archive photos and film), hosted by Michael Tilson Thomas (of the San Francisco Symphony), dissects the symphony and gracefully guides the non-musician through an understanding of Shostakovich, his times (and pressures), and his music in a way that is at once edifying and entertaining. A particular highlight are the interviews with Russian-born members of the San Francisco Symphony.
As if that is not enough, the companion website (keepingscore.org) gives further detail on the lives and works of all the composers covered in this series, now in its second season.
– Paul E. Richardson
The Lost Spy
Andrew Meier
WW Norton $18.95
In 1947, Stalin had an American in his employ, Isaiah “Cy” Oggins, murdered by lethal injection just as he was finishing his eight-year sentence at the notorious Norilsk labor camp.
Oggins had, along with his wife, been a Soviet spy since the 1920s, traveling the world, spying on exiled Romanovs, Germans and Japanese. Clearly, he knew too much, and it is a wonder that Stalin let him survive so long.
The thread of Oggin’s case was first publicly revealed in 1992, when then President Boris Yeltsin handed over a previously secret file to the U.S., in a flourish of post-Cold War good feeling. Author Andrew Meier seized on this thread and unraveled a fascinating tale of pre-war espionage. It is a story Meier tells extremely well, particularly by weaving it together with an account of his investigative work, so that you feel as if you are uncovering the tale for the first time along with him. In the end, one almost comes to understand these fervent intellectuals, who joined the communist cause to root out injustice, but ended up participating in murders and sabotage, corrupted and blinded by their idealism. Almost.
Spymaster
Oleg Kalugin
Basic Books ($18.95)
It could be said that Oleg Kalugin’s tale picks up where Andrew Meier’s leaves off, at least chronologically: Kalugin began his spying career in the 1950s, participating in the very first exchange of students in 1958 (half the participants were spies like him, Kalugin asserts).
Kalugin masqueraded as a journalist, climbed the KGB ladder for two decades, became the youngest general in its history (in 1974) and reached its pinnacle as head of foreign counterintelligence (overseeing, among other things, the assassination of Bulgarian writer Georgy Markov), only to be railroaded by careerists and dullards (one of whom, Vladimir Kryuchkov, was a leader in the failed 1991 coup). He retired early from the KGB (in 1990) and joined the democratic movement, even getting elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies on an anti-KGB stance.
Kalugin’s book (originally published in 1994), has been reissued with a rather lackluster Epilogue (explaining his final break with the Kremlin and winning of US asylum, when, in 2002, the Putin government tried him for treason in absentia), yet the book itself is an engrossing chronicle of Soviet spycraft and intelligence gathering in the 1960s to 1980s.
Noted in Brief
Two wonderful new translations of fiction classics crossed our transom this summer. The first was Everything Flows, by Vasily Grossman (Robert Chandler, trans.; NYRB, $15.95), one of the most under-appreciated writers of the 20th century. The second was the 19th century classic, A Hero of our Time, by Mikhail Lermontov (Natasha Randall, trans.; Penguin, $14). Both translations hew true to the original, making these important works accessible and enjoyable to English audiences. Both translators have been repeatedly honored for their work—justly so, these novels demonstrate.
For something completely different, October will see the appearance of a new graphic novel by Rick Geary, Trotsky. It is a dispassionate and even-handed account, complete with pick-axe finale (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.95).
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
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