Tulpan: A Whole Lot Of Nothing In Kazakhstan

**

Lots of steppe in Kazakhstan, some sheep, a few yurts and nobody to marry.  That’s the problem facing demobilised sailor Asa who has come to live with his sister Samal and brother-in-law Ondas and hope for a flock of his own.  But Comrade Boss won’t let him have one until he gets himself a wife, but the only possible candidate within a day’s journey (called Tulpan) rejects him because his ears are too big.  In vain does he produce a picture of the ‘American Prince’ Charles to show that his ears aren’t so big…

Well I know what the Kazakh steppe looks like now, and also that Kazakh appears to be a Turkic language.  But I sympathise with the sheep that having been born there decided to die as fast as possible.  In fact, given the alarming propensity of Kazakhs, sheep and camels–all right, scrub the camels–to wander soulfully around the steppe without any water nearby, I’m surprised there weren’t more fatalities.  And I was worried by the possibility of a happy ending when Asa managed to find the stray ewe and help her give birth to a live lamb, having taken a bloody long time to find out the correct method (shove your foot against the sheep’s arse and pull hard).

Why did Samal and Asa talk to each other in Russian if they were Kazakhs?  Presumably they were raised somewhere else, since many Kazakh families were deported under Stalin.

So at the end Asa goes for a final confrontation with Tulpan, breaks down the door and finds…a goat (a better joke in Russian than in English).  Tulpan’s ma tells Asa she has gone to the city to get an education and a life.  In spite of this excellent example, Asa decides in the end not to rejoin civilisation but instead returns to Ondas in a sandstorm.

Sad.  Or as far as the film goes: boring.

A Christmas Carol Brockley Jack 16 December

****

There’s a story about Werner Pauli and George Gamow going to the zoo once and looking at the bears.  A large she-bear padded up to the door of her cage, fetched the lock a hefty swipe then looked sadly at the still-intact lock before sadly shaking her head and padding off.

–That bear reminds me of you, Gamow,–said the elder physicist.  She has the right idea, but she doesn’t follow it through.

That tends to be how I think of  Ebenezer Scrooge.  I also wondered what an adaptation by Neil Bartlett would be like–would there be many new parts for lightly-dressed young men?

In fact it was very well-done, the best thing I’ve seen in this theatre.  Instead of young men, this was a music-based version with the higher voices supplied by characters wearing male attire that bulged somewhat around the chest region, providing part of  a choir that sang the action:

–Scratch, scratch, scratch

–Tick, tick, tick

–Lock, lock, lock.

The adaptation was highly proficient and the economical staging (where, for instance, Scrooge’s bed served as the table for the Cratchits to eat their Christmas dinner off and the Ghost of Christmas Present pushed Scrooge around in a shopping trolley) was extremely effective.

I suppose in form the thing was like an early Aeschylean tragedy, where you had the protagonist (Scrooge) pitted against a chorus from which members would emerge from time to time to play a specific role.  Toby Eddington was very good as Scrooge–even though he didn’t get to sing–and while it would be invidious to single any of the ‘chorus’ out for special praise, Katie Scarfe was very lovely as some of the more romantic female characters.  (Whatever his other failings–such as not being able to write a grammatical sentence in his native language–Dickens could certainly do women.)

The whole was very incisively directed (and designed!) by Kate Bannister.

Well done everyone!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Henrici Wilhelmi Ludolfi Grammatica Russica

This is the first Grammar of Russian (as opposed to Church Slavonic) printed anywhere in the world–it was published in Oxford in 1696.  What I have is a facsimile reprint from OUP in 1959.  It’s quarto, so the pages are normal book size (fails to find ruler).

Here’s the frontispiece:

and here’s a page from what is probably the most interesting section, a ‘phrase book’ in Russian-Latin-German:

And here’s what I think it says in modern orthography, with obvious misprints corrected:

Глава 4

Между хосяина и слуги

Кормил ты лошадь

кормил, а еще не напоил

для чево ты не поране встал?

твое здоровье знает, когда ты вчерас домои приехал.

Хотья ты рано спат лежиш, однако ж де некогда прежде седмого часа тебя вижу.

в перед ленив не буду.

для чего ты не топил печь.

As Muckle says,  it has the air of truth.  Presumably ‘твое здоровье…ты..’ reflects a time before the Табель о рангах.  There’s a Russian Wikipedia article about Ludolf here, with links to some more interesting material (such as a .pdf Russian translation of the whole book).

A Serious Man

***

When I arrived (late) there was  some Vorspiel going on about a Jewish couple in Eastern Europe either entertaining a dybbuk who had wandered in from a snowstorm or stabbing an innocent rabbi, depending on which way you want to look at it.  And the husband sums it up by saying We are doomed now.

Then after the credits the film switched to following the life and misfortunes of Larry Gopnik, an assistant professor waiting on tenure at the local university.  We are apparently in the Mid-West in the late 1960s. Larry has a medical and his doctor (who smokes) tells the non-smoking Larry he in in fine physical shape.  His wife Judith say she wants to leave him for Cy Ableman, his son plays around, the mentally-disturbed brother living in his family home causes legal difficulties through illegal gambling and homosexual solicitation.  Everything is costing a lot of money and Larry has to pay for it all–a Korean student offers him money to improve his grade–Cy Ableman gets killed in a car accident and Judith wants Larry to pay for his funeral.

Things seem to be looking up when the local Jewish community (must be Orthodox, since they say HaShem for God) attend his son’s bar mitzvah and Larry’s professor says he has been granted tenure.  Then Larry looks at a legal bill for a long time and finally changes the Korean’s grade.  At which point the doctor rings him and says he must come urgently to review his X-rays (and he *must have* lung cancer following the smoking thing at the beginning).  So he’s been like Schrodinger’s Cat (which he lectures on at one point) all this time, and now his wavefunction has collapsed?  Cancer obeys classical mechanics, but in a film what it is depends upon seeing it…

So was this the Book of Job?  HaShem tests Larry and after he has acted righteously  (even failing to get off with Mrs Samsky) extends his grace in the form of tenure, and then condemns him to death after he takes the bribe?  When Larry and Cy Ableman are involved in simultaneous but separate traffic accidents Larry survives–he is actually engaged in rejecting Clive Park at the time–while Cy perishes, after he has lured Larry’s wife away and sent the university anonymous letters denouncing him.

So what’s with the Vorspiel then?  Deuternomy 14:something (14:12?) says that fathers shall not be executed for the sins of the sons, nor sons for the sins of the fathers.

There are three scenes where Larry goes to see rabbis of increasing seniority without receiving–Larry should look at things a different way; maybe HaShem couldn’t be understood; the rabbi was too busy (thinking).  Surely in real life a rabbi would want to see both husband and wife and emphasise the sanctity of family life, or indeed summon Judith for a disciplinary interview on this very topic.  In fact, this *must be* a joke like the ‘non-smoker/lung cancer’ one since from what I know Orthodox rabbis are notorious for their keenness to involve themselves in the family lives of their charges.

Or maybe the point is that everything’s just fucked up, as with the dentist who found Hebrew letters signifying Help me Save me on the inside of a patient’s teeth.

Or perhaps we need to draw practical lessons:  Larry should have immediately shoved the dubious approach from the Korean student up his management’s arse (which is what they’re there for), while Judith should have realised that she’d married an academic and of course he’d spend the evenings marking….

Wagner: Quite Nice Really

***

Sir Charles Mackerras, conductor
Christine Brewer, soprano
Philharmonia Orchestra

Royal Festival Hall, Thursday 10 December

Richard Wagner:

1.  Excerpts from ‘Tannhauser’ 2.  Prelude and Liebestod from ‘Tristan und Isolde’  3.  Excerpts from ‘Gotterdammerung’

To begin at the beginning:  Sir Charles Mackerras got a tremendous round of applause for still being alive, and the Philharmonia players (I was sitting in the front row) had the air of people placing entire trust in their commander.  And the Tannhauser extracts were good–Mackerras levered himself from his stool at the more…erect..moments.  Then we were into the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, where the Philharmonia played lustously and Christine Brewer sang nicely (but was sometimes downed by the orchestra), but I did wonder about having the very beginning and end without any of the middle–sometimes `in these performances the soprano can suggest all that has been omitted by her acting, but not here I think (think because I couldn’t see her from my position).

While waiting for the second half I noticed that all of the female players were wearing high heels, and in some cases pretty uncomfortable stilletoes.  We had Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, The Death of Siegfried, Siegfried’s Funeral March and Brunnhilde’s Immolation Scene and again without context it all lacked colour and meaning somehow.

So, that Wagner–quite nice and even a bit frisky in places, but nothing to get overly excited about…

Buying books in Russian

As with buying books in general, there are two possibilities here: online and in person.

Online

Again there are two possibilities: businesses in Russia and outside Russia. For online bookshops in Russia, you can usefully start with findbook , which will automatically search the catalogues of 27 online booksellers.  (But some will not send books outside their own city, never mind abroad.)

Of these, I normally end up using Ozon.ru out of inertia, though I’ve also used books.ru in the past.  I’ve not had any trouble with either of these, though it is interesting to note when someone has handwritten your address and a private return address and stuck on a load of stamps, presumably to make it look like something not worth stealing.

In general, I find that airmail postage and packing to the UK costs a bit more than the book itself.  All of these online stores have a lot of books in their catalogue that they turn out not to have at present on closer inspection, so you need to be a little bit careful.

Outside Russia, there are many shops that sell popular Russian books to the diaspora, but I don’t think I’ve used any that are still in existence.

If you want academic-type books, mippbooks can be very useful, especially since an awful lot of books are printed with very small print-runs so they disappear rather quickly.  I’ve used them with success.  There’s also PanRus, which appears to do the same kind of thing but more expensively, and Natasha Kozmenko–I’ve not used either of them.  Or if you want to search in mainstream booksellers as opposed to specialist Russian ones, you can brave the mysteries of differing systems of transliteration and try bookfinder .

Then there is Thornton’s–you can read about my unsuccessful experience with them here.  By way of contrast, that reminds me of Marijana Dworski Books, who are very helpful and often have interesting Russian or Russian-related books.

In person (starting from London, England)

The traditional place to start would be Grant & Cutler, where they have a variable selection of Russian books on offer (been looking rather tired recently).  And now there is also the Russkiy Mir place in Goodge Street which looks promising, but I’ve yet to find anything I wanted to buy there.  It’s located in a basement underneath a sex shop, and while I’m not saying that you have to go through the sex shop or anything–they’re completely separate businesses–you might wonder about the sheepish-looking men hanging around outside.  Then some large shops like Foyle’s will have a modest number of Russian books, while the Russian/Baltic groceries you find around the place have a few thrillers…

Conclusion

I usually do the following:

i)    look on findbook to see if the book I want is generally available;

ii)   if not, try mippbooks;

iii)  if that doesn’t work, transliterate it into bookfinder;

iv)  if that doesn’t work, try Google (both Cyrillic and transliterated).

There’s surely more to be said on this topic–comments will be welcome!

Moliere Finborough Theatre 3 December

**

Dull dull dull dull.  This play–which is supposed to represent Moliere’s status of endangered court favourite as a parallel to author Mikhail Bulgakov’s difficult position in relation to Stalin–completely failed to make any impression on me (but the audience members with loudly-expressed respiratory conditions did).

As Moliere, Justin Avoth was clearly the same age as the putative grand-daughter Armande (Antonia Kinlay) he was going to marry, even if he did limp a bit.  Nor was there any feeling of the demonic energy of  man who could do such a thing; and indeed write, rehearse and present a play in a fortnight.  And Gyuri Sarossy did not give any impression of an absolute monarch deigning to amuse himself with a dubiously-worthy subject for a moment or two.

A lot of care had been lavished on costumes and props, but the actors could or would not pronounce French titles properly, which made for a strange situation when King Louis expressed himself in the French of Stratford-atte-Bowe.

Ben Warwick was effective as the evil Archbishop, and so was Kett Turton as the disloyal Moirron.

*sigh*

The Sea Wall (Un barrage contre le Pacifique)

***

This adaptation of Un barrage contre le Pacifique by Marguerite Duras is probably easier to enjoy if you don’t know the original novel.  In the novel, which is set in French Indo-China of the 1930s, the emphasis is on the struggle between mother, daughter (as portrayed above) and a rich young Chinese man who wishes to have sex with the daughter to extract some advantage from each other.  And in this case (as I recall) it’s Monsieur Jo who ends up as the victim while in L’Amant it’s the daughter.

But here we don’t really get either the sexual obsession or the squalor of the impoverished colonialists’ life–everything looks very beautiful, as it tends to do in colour films (see above again).  So what’s the point of it all?  I suppose it’s a portrayal of the decadence of French colonialism–there are some disturbances among and reprisals upon the native population, while at the end we see ‘Les rizieres de la femme blanche’ being advantageously cultivated in 2007.  So the mother’s attempts to build a wall to keep out the sea instead of being disastrous and symbolic of her failure to keep (Indo-Chinese, sexual) reality at bay is now a successful piece of Dutch-style land reclamation.  Strange.

Apart from the beautiful pictures on screen, the main interest was Isabelle Huppert’s depiction of the mother slowly dying and losing her hold on reality.  As the daughter, Astrid Berges-Frisbey didn’t really suggest anything very much–I would write that she was neither pretty nor sexy enough, which is a very strange thing to write about an actress, especially a French one.  Of course, if she had been decidedly plain, that would have given some key to the weakness, softness and vulnerable uselessness of the Durasien Monsieur Jo, but here we was just a cipher:  If seducing the daughter won’t work, try buying up the land…

Orchestra of Situation Opera, St George’s Bloomsbury, 1 December

**

Picture from www.orchestraofsituationopera.org.uk

W.A. Mozart:
1.  Serenade No.10, ‘Gran Partita’, K361
2.  Requiem Mass in D minor, K626

On announcing my name and handing over my £12, I received a free programme, which was nice.  It did have colour photos of the four vocal soloists for the Requiem (except that one of them had since changed), but it was missing details of the movements for the two pieces; the words for the Requiem; and advertisements for private schools.

For me, the Gran Partita was swallowed up by the reverberant church acoustic–surely these wind serenades were originally meant to be played outdoors, in the most different acoustic circumstances you could imagine?

Then after the interval we had a very committed performance of the Requiem–modelled, according to the programme, after what could be deduced about the London premiere, with some jolly good (if slightly operatic) work by the soprano soloist, Iris Korfker.  But by this stage I was beginning to suffer from the cold, and to dream about my tea…Need to try these people again on some other (warmer) occasion!

Larisa/Ascension Pushkin House 26 November

****/**

This was a double-bill of films connected with Schnittke in the screening room of Pushkin House, which turned out to be in the basement.  And they were part of the Schnittke festival, since he did the music for Ascension, while Larisa Shepitko was the director and was killed in a car crash at the age of 41, so first of all there was a documentary about her.

Larisa

So I appreciated that–a very Russian combination of naked emotion and seeing the world as a clash of moral values.  As an embodiment of moral values, more like.

Ascension

Then we had ‘Ascension’, aka ‘The Ascent’ in English.  The film dealt with the fate of two members of a partisan brigade–Rybak (fisherman) and Sotnikov (~centurion): a fine pair of biblical names–are sent to get hold of some food and in general Sotnikov (who has ?bronchitis ??TB) is a liability while Rybak looks after him and gets things done.

Then they are captured and interrogated; Rybak tries to save his skin while Sotnikov undergoes torture and then emerges (looking very Christlike) as the spiritual force driving his cellmates (a peasant woman who sheltered them, a Jewish girl and the German-appointed village headman) to accept their fate and defy their persecutors.  Then they are hung, apart from Rybakov who has agreed to join the police and then tries to hang himself Judas-like in the shithouse.

But I wasn’t moved by this–the Christian iconography was all too blatant (though it would have been interesting if the Soviet period was still with us)–while Jesus did not preach undying hatred of one’s enemies.  In fact, I felt some sympathy with the Satanic (or Grand Inquisitorial) figure of Portnov:  Why won’t these people just be reasonable and see what’s in their best interests?

And at the end with the executions we had some highly dissonant and effective music from Schnittke.

I wasn’t distressed by the suffering and death of the positive characters since (on the one hand) they were too schematic and (on the other hand) they had all–even the little Jewish girl, who decided to hide and not say who had helped her–taken a conscious decision to struggle against absolute evil and knew what the price might well be.

And the film provoked me to think that the Biblical Satan had not done a very good job of tempting the Biblical Jesus.  The Kingdom of God has still not come after nearly 2000 years.  But there are these Christians who believe in and love you.  Now see what they are doing to your people, the Jews.  Give it up lad, give it up.