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 Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2004 9:33 pm Post subject: Highroller Rootskies |
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Highroller Rootskies Росси́йская Федера́ция:
The Russians have created an elegant, unparallelled mecca of high-stakes culture built on what lesser mortals have yobbishly mistaken for a friendly card game. Among such an embarrassment of riches is Pushkin's undisputed gambling classic:
The Queen of Spades
The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories
Papberback
By Alexander Pushkin
| Quote: | | Quote: | In the cold, rain, and sleet,
They together would meet
To play.
Lord, forgive them their sin:
Gambling, late to win
They'd stay.
They won and they lost,
And put down the cost in chalk.
So on cold autumn days
They wasted no time
In talk. |
| Quote: | They were playing cards a the house of Narumov, an officer in the Horse Guards. The long winter night passed imperceptibly; it was after four in the morning when they sat down to supper. Those who had won enjoyed their food; the others sat absent-mindedly with empty plates before them. But champagne appeared, the conversation grew livelier, and every one took part in it.
'How have you been doing, Surin?' Narumov asked.
'Losing, as usual. I must confess, I have no luck: I play cautiously, never get excited, never lose my head, and yet I go on losing.' (From the story's opening paragraphs) |
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Later, after hearing the story of the Countess's famous win at the card table:
| Quote: | | Hermann shuddered. The marvellous story came into his mind again. He walked up and down the street past the house, thinking of its owner and her wonderful faculty. It was late when he returned to his humble lodgings; he could not go to sleep for hours, and when at last sleep overpowered him he dreamt of cards, of a green-baize-covered table, bundles of notes, and piles of gold. He played card after card, resolutely turning down the corners and won all the time, raking in the gold and stuffing his pockets with notes. Waking up rather late, he sighed at the loss of his fantastic wealth, and, setting out once more to wander about the town, found himself opposite the Countess's house. It was as though some mysterious power drew him to it. He stopped and gazed at the windows. In one of them he saw a dark-haired girl's head, bent ov er a book or needlework. The head was raised. Hermann saw a rosy face and black eyes. That moment decided his fate. (From Chapter I, p. 130). |
| Quote: | Great Russian Short Stories
Audio Cassette
Our only quarrel with Penguin Audio Books is that there aren't enough of them. This one features some of the best voices in contemporary theatre but, unfortunately, good actors are usually too busy at some posh West End venue to take on a crap job like reading a book on tape. Too bad, maybe. |
| Quote: | The Queen of Spades
Opera and Ballet
Featuring music by Tchaikovsky, lyrics by
his brother - yes! - and even a performance
by the incomparable Bolshoi ballerina
Maya Plisetskaya, who followed an exquisite rendition
of the Dying Swan at age 46 by ripping the phone from
the wall of a plush suite at the Hotel Vancouver
during an interview when it wouldn't stop ringing.
VHS
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| Quote: | Natasha's Dance
A Cultural History of Russia
Hardcover
By Orlando Figes
| Quote: | Yet, for all his Western inclinations, Pushkin was a poet with a Russian voice. Neglected by his parents, he was practically brought up by his peasant nurse, whose tales and songs became a lifelong inspiration for his verse. He loved folk tales and he often went to country fairs to pick up peasant stories and turns of phrase which he then incorporated in his poetry. Like the officers of 1812, he felt that the landowner's obligation as the guardian of his serfs was more important than his duty to the state.
He felt this obligation as a writer, too, and looked to shape a written language that could speak to everyone. The Decembrists made this a central part of their philosophy. They called for laws to be written in a language 'that every citizen can understand.' They attempted to create a Russian lexicon of politics to replace imported words. Glinka called for a history of the war of 1812 to be written in a language that was 'plain and clear and comprehensible by people of all classes, because people of all classes took part in the liberation of our motherland.' The creation of a national language seemed to the veterans of 1812 a means of fostering the spirit of the battlefield and of forging a new nation with the common man. 'To know our people,' wrote the Decembrist poet Alexander Bestuzhev, 'one has to live with them and talk with them in their language, one has to eat with them and celebrate with them on their feast days, go bear-hunting with them in the woods, or travel to the market on a peasant cart.' Pushkin's verse was the first to make this link. It spoke to the widest readership, to the literate peasant and the prince, in a common Russian tongue. It was Pushkin's towering achievement to create this national language through his verse. (Children of 1812, pgs. 82-83) |
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| Posted: Thu Sep 02, 2004 5:07 pm Post subject: |
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Pushkin:
A Biography
Hardcover
By T.J. Binyon
A forensic accountant's examination of Russia's greatest poet, which yields what you might expect:
| Quote: | | To take only the first eight months of the present year: in February he paid Mikhail Sudienko 4,000 roubles which he had lost to him at the St. Petersburg tables; he still owed Ivan Yakovlev 6,000 -- but perhaps Yakovlev, being a millionaire and in Paris, would not press him for the money. In May Pletnev deducted a thousand roubles from his receipts from sales to par a card debt to Prince Nikolay Obolensky, a distant relative of the Pushkins and a well-known card-sharp. Between the fifteenth of that month and the beginning of June Pushkin wrote ten letters to Pogodin, begging, with ever-increasing urgency, for a loan of 5,000 roubles to pay a debt incurred at the gaming-table. In the end Pogodin lent him two thousand. And while in Moscow he lost 24,800 roubles to the professional gamester Vasily Ogon-Doganovsky. To pay off these debts and begin married life in solvency he required a capital sum: the only way of acquiring this would be to mortgage his 200 serfs. (-- p. 337) |
Ouch!
Natasha's Dance
A Cultural History of Russia
Hardcover
By Orlando Figes
| Quote: | Yet, for all his Western inclinations, Pushkin was a poet with a Russian voice. Neglected by his parents, he was practically brought up by his peasant nurse, whose tales and songs became a lifelong inspiration for his verse. He loved folk tales and he often went to country fairs to pick up peasant stories and turns of phrase which he then incorporated in his poetry. Like the officers of 1812, he felt that the landowner's obligation as the guardian of his serfs was more important than his duty to the state.
He felt this obligation as a writer, too, and looked to shape a written language that could speak to everyone. The Decembrists made this a central part of their philosophy. They called for laws to be written in a language 'that every citizen can understand.' They attempted to create a Russian lexicon of politics to replace imported words. Glinka called for a history of the war of 1812 to be written in a language that was 'plain and clear and comprehensible by people of all classes, because people of all classes took part in the liberation of our motherland.' The creation of a national language seemed to the veterans of 1812 a means of fostering the spirit of the battlefield and of forging a new nation with the common man. 'To know our people,' wrote the Decembrist poet Alexander Bestuzhev, 'one has to live with them and talk with them in their language, one has to eat with them and celebrate with them on their feast days, go bear-hunting with them in the woods, or travel to the market on a peasant cart.' Pushkin's verse was the first to make this link. It spoke to the widest readership, to the literate peasant and the prince, in a common Russian tongue. It was Pushkin's towering achievement to create this national language through his verse. ((Children of 1812, pgs. 82-83) |
More Pushkin, the people's poet.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2004 4:41 pm Post subject: |
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The Winter Queen
By Boris Akunin
Paperback
CD Audio
Narrated by Campbell Scott
Another in the top-drawer Erast Fandorin mystery series, which takes place in lush yet wintry Moscow and Petersburg in the 1870s, when a friendly round or two of Inbetween might have led to a duel with the city's greatest marksman - either that or a game of roulette using a gun of his choice. Here's an excerpt from Part Eight, In Which the Jack of Spades Turns Up Most Inopportunely:
| Quote: | | In the smoke-filled hall, the players were seated at six green card tables. There were also observers loitering beside each table. The largest crowd was standing around the table where a high-stakes game was taking place one against one. The host himself was dealing and a sweaty gentleman in a fashionable, overly-tight frock coat was punting. |
We can't say enough about the reader, Campbell Scott, son of Colleen Dewhurst and George C., who must have taught their offspring a thing or two about diction - listen! - and probably acting, too. The back cover says he's been following their tradition, appearing in movies and Broadway stagings of a few Eugene O'Neill plays just like dad but especially mom.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=1246#1246
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| Posted: Mon Oct 25, 2004 4:06 pm Post subject: |
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East/West
DVD
Click here for a synopsis of this gut-wrenching Russian pity story about a ship of ex-patriots who leave France, if you can imagine, on the foolish gamble that Stalin really meant it when he promised they'd be welcomed back like prodigal sons when they reached port at on no. 26 for a sizeable understatement as to how things go once they reach Vladivostok Владивосток. How we loved the throbbing piano music by composer/conductor Patrick Doyle in the swimming sequences and the shocking conclusion none of the film reviews we've seen seemed to catch:
| Quote: | | Thirty years later, the Soviet Union opened up under President Gorbachev. Alexei was permitted to come to France in 1987. |
What the reviewers failed to appreciate was that - gulp! - this is a true story!
| Quote: | East/West
Movie Soundtrack
Music by Patrick Doyle
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Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=1500#1500
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| Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2004 2:32 pm Post subject: |
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Koba the Dread
Laughter and the 20 million
Hardcover
By Martin Amis
| Quote: | | Editor's Note: This book, published in 2002, represents the darkest and most terrifying account of Stalinist Russia we've come upon so far. It's written in the first person by Brit wit Amis, who augments recollections of conversations between the famous old man and his legendary cronies back when Martin was still the privileged and youthfully unconsciousness whelp - back before all this - with exhaustive footnotes revealing a whacking great Russian history blog. |
| Quote: | | It was in the following summer of 1969, I think, that I sat for an hour in the multi-acre garden of the fascist mansion in southern Hertfordshire with Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest ... Kingsley and Bob (a.k.a. "Kingers" and "Conquers," just as Bob's future translatee, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, would be referred to as "Solzhers" - pronounced soldiers) ... In 1967 Kingsley had published the article called "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right." The ex-Communist was developing into a more reasonably active Labourite - before becoming (and remaining) a markedly noisy Tory. In 1968 Bob had published The Great Terror, his classic study of Stalin's purges of the 1930s, and was on the way to assembling a body of work that would earn him the title, bestowed at a plenum of the Central Committee in Moscow in 1990, of "anti-Sovietchik number one." Both Kingsley and Bob, in the 1960s, were frequently referred to as "fascists" in the general political debate. The accusation was only semi-serious (as indeed was the general political debate, it now seems. In my milieu, policemen and even parking wardens were called fascists). Kingers and Conquers referred to their own weekly meetings, at Bertorelli's in Charlotte Street as "the fascist lunch"; here they would chat and carouse with other fascists, among them the journalist Bernard Levin, the novelists Anthony Powell and John Braine (an infrequent and much-feared participant), and the defector historian Tibor Szamuely photo of his famous uncle speaking at a military parade in Red Square in 1919 . What united the fascist lunchers was well-informed anti-Communism. Tibor Szamuely knew what Communism was. He had known them: purge, arrest, gulag ... Tibor was an unusually late riser, and Kingsley once complained to Nina about it. She said that her husband sometimes needed to see the first signs of dawn before he could begin to contemplate sleep. Even in England. He needs, said Nina, "to be absolutely certain that they won't be coming for him that night." (From More Background, p. 9) |
| Quote: | | The trouble with Lenin was that he thought you could achieve things by coercion and terror and murder. "The dictatorship - and take this into account once and for all - means unrestricted power based on force, not on law" (January 1918). "It is a great mistake to think that the NEP put an end to terror. We shall return to terror and to economic terror" (March 1922). And so on - again, there are dozens of such statements. On his first day in office Lenin was looking the other way when the Second Congress of Soviets abolished the death penalty. "Nonsense," said Lenin: "how can you make a revolution without executions?" To think otherwise was "impermissible weakness," "pacifist illusion," and so on. You needed capital punishment, or it wouldn't be a "real" revolution - like the French Revolution (and unlike the English Revolution or the American Revolution or, indeed, the Russian Revolution of February 1917). Lenin wanted executions; he had his heart set on executions. And he got them. The possibility has been suggested that in the period 1917-24 more people were murdered by the secret police than were killed in all the battles of the Civil War. (-- p. 33) (footnotes omitted) |
| Quote: | It was on board the ships that the "politicals" - a.k.a. "the 58s" (after Article 58 of the Ciminal Codex), "the counters" (counter-revolutionaries), and "the fascists" - would usually receive their introduction to another integral feature of the archipelago: the urkas. Like so many elements in the story of the gulag, the urkas constituted a torment wthin a torment. Mrs. Ginzburg sits in the floating dungeon of the Dzhurma: "When it seemed as though there was no room left for even a kitten, down through the hatchway poured another few hundred human beings ... [a] half-naked, tattoed, apelike horde ..." And they were only the women. The urkas: this class, or caste, a highly developed underground culture, "had survived," writes Conquest, "with its own traditions and laws, since the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and had greatly increased in numbers by recruiting orphans and broken men of the revolutionary and collectivation periods." Individually grotesque, and, en masse, an utterly lethal force, the urkas were circus cutthroats, devoted to gambling, plunder, mulilation and rape.
In the gulag, as a matter of policy, the urkas were accorded the status of trusties, and they had complete power over the politicals, the fascists - always the most scornedand defenseless population in the camp system. The 58s were permanently exposed to the urkas on principle, to increase their pain. And one can see, also, that the policy looked good ideologically. It would be very Leninist to have one class exterminating another, higher class. How Lenin had longed for the poorer peasants to start lynching all the kulaks ...I mprisoned thieves were amnestied under Lenin, as part of his "loot the looters" campaign in the period of War Communism. As Solzhenitsyn says, the theft of state property became and remained a capital crime, while urka-bourgeois theft became and remained little more than a misdemeanor. Apart from the new privilegentsia and a few "hereditary proletarians," the urkas were the only class to benefit from Bolshevik policies. The urkas, who played cards for each other's eyes, who tattoed themselves with images of masturbating monkeys, who had their women assist them in their rapes of nuns and politicals. In Life and Fate Vasily Grossman writes almost casually of an urka "who had once knifed a family of six." The gulag officially designated the urkas as Socially Friendly Elements. (-- p. 67) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 12:29 pm Post subject: |
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The Gambler
Paperback
By Fyodor Dostoevsky
with the Diary of Polina Suslova
Translated by Victor Terras
Edited by Edward Wasiolek
| Quote: | "I have won two hundred thousand francs!" cried I as I pulled out my last sheaf of bank-notes. The pile of paper currency occupied the whole table. I could not withdraw my eyes from it. Consequently, for a moment or two Polina escaped my mind. Then I set myself to arrange the pile in order, and to sort the notes, and to mass the gold in a separate heap. That done, I left everything where it lay, and proceeded to pace the room with rapid strides as I lost myself in thought. Then I darted to the table once more, and began to recount the money; until all of a sudden, as though I had remembered something, I rushed to the door, and closed and double-locked it. Finally I came to a meditative halt before my little trunk.
"Shall I put the money there until to-morrow?" I asked, turning sharply round to Polina as the recollection of her returned to me.
She was still in her old place -- still making not a sound. Yet her eyes had followed every one of my movements. Somehow in her face there was a strange expression -- an expression which I did not like. I think that I shall not be wrong if I say that it indicated sheer hatred.
Impulsively I approached her.
"Polina," I said, "here are twenty thousand florins -- fifty thousand francs, or more. Take them, and to-morrow throw them in De Griers' face."
She returned no answer.
"Or if you should prefer," I continued, "let me take them to him myself to-morrow -- yes, early to-morrow morning. Shall I?"
Then all at once she burst out laughing, and laughed for a long while. With astonishment and a feeling of offence I gazed at her. Her laughter was too like the derisive merriment which she had so often indulged in of late -- merriment which had broken forth always at the time of my most passionate explanations. At length she ceased, and frowned at me from under her eyebrows.
"I am not going to take your money," she said contemptuously.
"Why not?" I cried. "Why not Polina?"
"Because I am not in the habit of receiving money for nothing."
"But I am offering it to you as a a friend. In the same way I would offer you my very life."
Upon this, she threw me a long, questioning glance, as though she were seeking to probe me to the depths.
"You are giving too much for me," she remarked with a smile. "The beloved of De Griers is not worth fifty thousand francs."
"Oh, Polina, how can you speak so?" I exclaimed reproachfully. "Am I De Griers?"
"You?" she cried with her eyes suddenly flashing. "Why, I hate you! Yes, yes, I hate you! I love you no more than I do De Griers." (From Chapter XV, p. 275) |
Sigh. There is just no pleasing some women. And yet:
| Quote: | | Aleksei comes to understand everything but what moves him, and what moves him are his feelings for Polina and his passion for gambling. He had confessed and professed his love for her again and again, but on the night she comes to his room to offer herself to him, he must first rush off to the gaming table, where he is phenomenally successful. He returns to his room, where Polina has been waiting for him, with his pockets bulging with gold and gulden. There he proceeds, as if it is a drama necessary before the act of love, to pour out the money on the table and floor. Aleksei believes he is paying tribute to his love, and by such tribute permitting Polina to regain her honor before de Grieux. Yet Polina sees something more than the impulse of the lover in his act. Aleksei narrates at this critical juncture: "'I wonder if I should put it in my suitcase until tomorrow,' I said, turning to Polina, as if I had suddenly remembered her. She was still sitting there without stirring, yet watching me intently. It was a strange expression she wore on her face; I did not like that expression! I would not be wrong if I said there was hatred in it." (From the Introduction) |
| Quote: | The Gambler
DVD
We were amazed at the vast number of critical reviews of this 1997 film our Google search yielded. How bad could it be with seasoned Irish vet Michael Gambon in the lead? We'll let you know. Please check back soon for updates. |
| Quote: | The Gambler by Sergei Prokofiev
Most of you can probably name at least a few operas that involve gambling. There's The Queen of Spades by Tchaikovsky, in which the hero is destroyed by gambling; there are Massenet's Manon and Verdi's La Traviata, both with key scenes in which a man goes to the the tables out of love for a woman and encounters disastrous results. Then, there's this week's opera, The Gambler, by Prokofiev. It actually has a whole cast full of gamblers -- and none of them has much luck.
The New Grove Dictionary of Opera
Hardcover
Edited by Stanley Sadie
And yet, while gambling is often seen in an opera, we don't think of it as something you'd find at the opera. That is, you don't expect to find slot machines and blackjack tables in the lobby at your local opera house. But that wasn't always the case. According to the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, gambling was an essential source of funding for opera from the early 1700's century right up until about 1814. There was a time when the Italian and Austrian governments swung back and forth between banning all games of chance and profitting from gambling by creating a monopoly on it. In the latter scenario, they'd farm out that monopoly to impresarios like Dominico Barbaia and Carlo Balochino, who sometimes divided their profits between the poor -- and the opera house.
Barbaia was a scullion in local cafes and bars around Milan, and Balochino was an ex-croupier. Both of them had a yen for gambling and opera, probably in that order. When Barbaia managed to put aside enough money from his more low-level enterprises to lease the gambling tables in the foyer of La Scala, Balochino became the house manager. An enormous amount of the gaming proceeds were then diverted into the opera budget. Of course, a considerable amount was probably diverted into their pockets as well. You know, "doing well by doing good," and all that.
Even so, Barbaia wound up playing an important role in the overall development of 19th-century opera. In 1809, he was appointed manager of the Royal Opera House in Naples, where he used the profits from his gambling tables to commission operas from composers like Gluck, Rossini, and Donizetti. He also had an ear for new singing talent. Productions at La Scala and Naples were acclaimed for the brilliance of their vocalists. Unlike most impresarios of the time, who were considered on the same level as pickpockets and confidence men, Barbaia apparently was content with his legitimate share of the gambling revenue, and felt no need to cheat anyone. In fact, he was held in such high esteem that his death in 1841 was mourned throughout Italy. The writer Emil Luka based the title character in his novel The Impresario on Barbaia; he also turns up as a character in Auber's opera, The Siren.
Barbaia's seasons at La Scala and Naples weren't the only times when opera and gambling had a successful mix. The Austrian Empress Maria Theresa authorized legal gambling in order to support opera houses in Prague, Trieste, and Milan. Later, opera companies in places like Baden-Baden and Monte Carlo benefited from the invention of the roulette wheel, and used the proceeds to commission operas by the likes of Massenet, Saint-Saens, Puccini, and Ravel.
Now, it's true that "gambling problems" have destroyed many upstanding invividuals, as today's opera makes clear. Still, think how much today's opera coffers might swell if we could just get a deal like the one Barbaia and Balochino got with their government back in the 1800's. If, say, the proceeds from the state lottery went to finance opera companies or to commission new works. They might even be used to produce a cautionary, anti-gaming opera -- like Prokofiev's The Gambler.
In fact, Prokofiev's drama could well serve as a stern warning -- a sort of operatic public service announcement -- but it's also much more than that. The Gambler is a fascinating and innovative opera by one of the 20th century's most popular composers. And it's based on a story by one of Russia's most heralded authors, Fyodor Dostoevsky. So, for more on The Gambler -- and chances are you haven't heard much about it before -- tune in this week's edition of At the Opera. Host Lou Santacroce will discuss the literary background of the piece with Dr. Julie Buckler of Harvard University, an expert on both Russian literature and Russian opera. Lou also talks with regular guest Michelle Krisel on why we don't hear more Prokoviev in the opera house. Then, conductor Scott Speck will fill us in on the unusual music you'll hear in The Gambler -- Prokofiev actually considered the piece more a "sung play" than an opera. It's all At the Opera, just 30 minutes before curtain-time at the Metropolitan, from NPR. (From NPR, At the Opera, 2001) |
Something for Nothing
Luck in America
Hardcover
By Jackson Lears
| Quote: | | From the modernizers' view, gambling was a relic of a decadent old regime -- a vice epitomized the European haut monde evoked by Dostoevsky in The Gambler (1866). Dostoevsky's Roulettenberg is a society powered by feverish, erotic obsession -- with money, status, romantic attachment. Whatever the object, what is crucial is the desire to be always in pursuit, on the edge, whether at the roulette tables or in a lady's chamber. The only constraints on this quest for intense experience are the remnants of a creaking caste tradition, a set of musty principles and rituals that easily can be counterfeited. In Roulettenburg, it is always an open question whether this marquis or that countess is the genuine article or not. In contrast, the revolutionary "new man" -- bourgeois or socialist -- was an icon of authenticity. (From Gambling for Grace at p. 2) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2005 12:10 pm Post subject: |
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Something for Nothing
Luck in America
Hardcover
By Jackson Lears
| Quote: | | From the modernizers' view, gambling was a relic of a decadent old regime -- a vice epitomized the European haut monde evoked by Dostoevsky in The Gambler (1866). Dostoevsky's Roulettenberg is a society powered by feverish, erotic obsession -- with money, status, romantic attachment. Whatever the object, what is crucial is the desire to be always in pursuit, on the edge, whether at the roulette tables or in a lady's chamber. The only constraints on this quest for intense experience are the remnants of a creaking caste tradition, a set of musty principles and rituals that easily can be counterfeited. In Roulettenburg, it is always an open question whether this marquis or that countess is the genuine article or not. In contrast, the revolutionary "new man" -- bourgeois or socialist -- was an icon of authenticity. (From Gambling for Grace at p. 2) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2005 12:45 pm Post subject: |
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Anna Karenina
Paperback
By Count Leo Tolstoy
Translation by Constance Garnett
The tragic story of a woman who bet on love and lost everything into the bargain.
| Quote: | | Yashvin, a gambler and a rake, a man not merely without moral principles, but of immoral principles, Yashvin was Vronsky's greatest friend in the regiment. Vronsky liked him both for his exceptional physical strength, which he showed for the most part by being able to drink like a fish, and do without sleep without being in the slightest degree affected by it; and for his great strength of character, which he showed in his relations with his comrades and superior officers, commanding both fear and respect, and also at cards, when he would play for tens of thousands and however much he might have drunk, always with such skill and decision that he was reckoned the best player in the English Club. Vronsky respected and liked Yashvin particularly because he felt Yashvin liked him, not for his name and his money, but for himself. And of all men he was the only one with whom Vronsky would have liked to speak of his love. He felt that Yashvin, in spite of his contempt for every sort of feeling, was the only man who could, so he fancied, comprehend the intense passion which now filled his whole life. Moreover, he felt certain that Yashvin, as it was, took no delight in gossip and scandal, and interpreted his feeling rightly, that is to say, knew and believed that this passion was not a jest, not a pastime, but something more serious and important. (-- p. 209) |
Anna Karenina
The Ballet
DVD
(Featuring Bolshoi stars
Maya Plisetskaya and a very
young Alexander Godunov
long before his defection to the U.S. and
subsequent Hollywood movie career, which
we thought was going rather well when,
having wisely gone off that actress -
Bissell or something, like the
carpet cleaner - he alas, drank himself
into eternity).
View a sample of Spaghetti Arms as
Anna.
View the legendary Russian capacity for
vodka portrayed in the famous Chair Dance
at YouTube.com.
See photo and more selections by these performers - Plisetskay Dances here (feel a dancer's pain through endless repetitions of the same four steps, the shame, the hot tears and finally the big pay-off, a set of heart-stopping kicks to the back of her own head as Kiri, the gypsy girl in Don Quixote) and a vulgar, quite appalling Carmen in a somewhat brief performance that also includes spaghetti-arms at her height and Communism's in the Dying Swan.
See more Russian dance selections at Kultur, an excellent, nicely annotated and searchable collection of arts movies, at Kultur arts movies.
| Quote: | Anna Karenina
DVD
With Greta Garbo
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| Quote: | Anna Karenina
DVD
With Vivien Leigh
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| Quote: | Natasha's Dance
A Cultural History of Russia
Hardcover
By Orlando Figes
| Quote: | | Before the eighteenth century Russia had no grand noble palaces. Most of the Tsar's servitors lived in wooden houses, not much bigger than peasant huts, with simple furniture and clay or wooden pots. According to Adam Olearius, the Duke Holstein's envoy to Muscovy during the 1630s, few Russian noblemen had feather beds; instead, 'they lie on benches covered with cushions, straw, mats, or clothes; in winter they sleep on flat-topped stoves...[lying]with their servants ... the chickens and the pigs'. The nobleman seldom visited his various estates. Despatched from one place to another in the Tsar's vast empier, he had neither the time nor the inclination to put down roots in one locality. He looked upon his estates as a source of revenue, to be readily exchanged or sold. The beautiful estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, for example, exchanged hands over twenty times during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was lost in games of cards, and drinking bouts, sold to different people at the same time, loaned and bartered, mortgaged and remortgaged, until after years of legal wrangling to settle all the questions of its ownership, it was bought by the Volkonsky family in the 1760s and eventually passed down through his mother to the novelist Tolstoy. Because of this constant state of flux there was little real investment by the nobles in the land, no general movement to develop estates or erect palaces, and none of what took place in Western Europe from medieval times: the gradual concentration of a family domain in one locality, with property passed down fronm one generation to the next, and ties built up with the community. (European Russia, pgs. 15-=16/ |
| Quote: | | In 1855 Tolstoy lost his favourite house in a game of cards. For two days and nights he played shtoss with his fellow officers in the Crimea, losing all the time, until at last he confessed to his diary 'the loss of everything - the Yasnaya Polyana house. I think there's no point writing - I'm so disgusted with myself that I'd like to forget about my existence.' Much of Tolstoy's life can be explained by that game of cards. This, after all, was no ordinary house, but the place where he was born, the home where he had spent his first nine years, and the sacred legacy of his beloved mother which had been passed down to him. Not that the old Volkonsky house was particularly impressive when Tolstoy, aged just nineteen, inherited the estate, with its 2,000 acres and 200 serfs, on his father's death in 1847. The paint on the house had begun to flake, there was a leaky roof and a rotten verandah, the paths were full of weeds and the English garden had long gone to seed. But all the same it was precious to Tolstoy. 'I wouldn't sell the house for anything,' he had written to his brother in 1852. 'It's the last thing I'd be prepared to part with. And yet now, to pay his gambling debts, Tolstoy was obliged to sell the house he was born in. He had tried to avoid the inevitable by selling all eleven of his other villages, together with their serfs, their timber stocks and horses, but the sum these had raised was not quite enough to get him into the black. The house was purchased by a local merchant and dismantled, to be sold in lots. (From The Peasant Marriage, pgs. 236-237) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 11:45 am Post subject: |
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The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories
Paperback
By Alexander Pushkin
Translated by Natalie Duddington
| Quote: | | In the evening I arrived at Simbirsk, where I was to spend the next day in order to buy the things I needed; Savelyitch was entrusted with the purchase of them. I put up at an inn. Savelyitch went out shopping early in the morning. Bored with looking out of the window into the dirty street, I wandered about the inn. Coming into the billiard-room I saw a tall man of about thirty-five, with a long black moustache, in a dressing-gown, a billiard-cue in his hand, and a pipe in his mouth. He was playing with the marker, who drank a glass of vodka on winning and crawled under the billiard-table on all fours when he lost. I watched their game. The longer it continued, the oftener the marker had to go on all fours, till at last he remained under the table altogether. The gentleman pronounced some expressive sentences by the way of a funeral oration and asked me to have a game. I refused saying I could not play. This seemed to strike him as strange...(--p. 7) |
Thus begins the education of young soldier Pyotr in another of Pushkin's roaring narratives. This seems to be a particularly good translation, too.
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2005 9:00 am Post subject: |
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Spy Handler
Memoir of a KGB Officer
The True Story of the Man
Who Recruited Robert Hanssen & Aldrich Ames
Hardcover
By Victor Cherkashin with Gregory Feiffer
| Quote: | | My mother spent weeks obtaining the documents necessary to prove our evacuee status and obtain some rationed food. To supplement that meager intake, she joined other evacuees walking through outlying suburban villages, begging for vegetables. For my part, I trailed behind carts trucking produce from local gardens to market -- carrots, potatoes, beets -- and dashed to snatch up any that fell out. As spring turned to summer, I'd often watch Kazakh children playing a game similar to marbles, using small pieces of meat bones. I couldn't take part because it was a betting game and I had no money. But after I explained that to a well-dressed Kazakh boy, he reached into his pocket to give me a couple of precious kopeks. I was flabbergasted, but his kindness reflected the generally good treatment Kazakhs showed us evacuees. (-- p. 39) |
An relief to learn that some Russians somewhere in that vast icefield enjoyed acts of kindness during the devastation of the Second World War.
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editor
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| Posted: Fri May 20, 2005 8:22 am Post subject: |
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First Love
and Other Stories
By Ivan Turgenev
| Quote: | The old princess, as she had promised, called on my mother who did not take to her. I was not present at their meeting, but at table my mother told my father that this Princess Zasyekin seemed to her 'une femme tres vulgaire, that she had found her very tiresome, with her requests to do something for her with Prince Sergey; that she seemed to have endless lawsuits and affairs, 'des vilaines affaires d'argent,' and that she must be a very troublesome woman. But my mother did add that she had asked her and her daughter to dinner next day (when I heard the words 'and her daughter' I buried my face in my plate) for she was, after all, a neighbour, and a tited one, too.
My father thereupon informed my mother that he now remembered who this lady was: that in his youth he had known the late Prince Saxyekin, a very well-bred, but empty and ridiculous man; he said that he was called 'le Parisien' in society because he had lived in Paris for a long time; that he had been very rich, but had gambled away all his property, and then, for no known reason -- it might even have been for money, though he might, even so, have chosen better, my father added with a cold smile -- he married the daughter of some minor official and, after his marriage, had begun to speculate in a large way, and had finally completely ruined himself.
'I only hope whe won't try to borrow money,' put in my mother. (From Part V at pgs. 16-17). |
A splendid little collection of stories by the great Turgenev, whose praises are sung most satisfactorily in the introduction by V.S. Pritchett. Excellent bibliography, too.
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2005 11:23 am Post subject: |
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Angels, Mobsters & Narco-Terrorists
The Rising Menace of Global Criminal Empires
Hardcover
By Antonio Nicaso & Lee Lamothe
| Quote: | ...The rules of the vory v zakone include the following:
. A vor must support another vor in any and all circumstances.
. A vor can only live on what he has stolen or conned from a "citizen" or has won while gambling.
. A vor lives above and beyond the rules of State law.
. A vor must never serve in the armed forces.
. A vor must never defend himself in court, if charged with a crime of which he is innocent.
. A vor must take from other prisoners while in custody.
. A vor must agitate against the State while in custody; whenever he can he should exploit the weaknesses of his captors.
. A vor must find and train new young criminals and, if they're suitable, arrange for their acceptance into the underworld.
. A vor must find and train new young criminals and, if they're suitable, arrange for their acceptance into the underworld.
. A vor must never marry before the State; semi-permanent relationships are permitted; and a marriage involving a vor is akin to a master-slave relationship.
. A vor must donate money from his activities to an obshchak, a fund for the assistance of the other Thieves.
. A vor mustn't gamble more than he has; all gambling debts must be settled. (Vory V Zakone at p. 138) |
A film we'd like to see:
Vor (The Thief)
DVD
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2006 5:49 pm Post subject: |
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The Orientalist
Solving the Mystery of a
Strange and Dangerous Life
Hardcover
By Tom Reiss
| Quote: | Russian influence swept into the region in the early nineteenth century, as the czar's armies conquered the Caucasus, and the Azeris broke with conservative Shiites of Iran and became "Europeans." Umm-El-Banu Asadullayeva, who left Baku in 1922 and wrote her memoirs in Paris under the name Banine, recalled that in her own "fanatic Muslim family," the women cared mainly for clothes and jewelry, furniture from Paris and Moscow, and gambling (her father, a farmer, became a millionaire when oil was found under his fields). Her aunts, "fat, bearded brunettes," smoked, gossiped all day long, and "played poker with a passion that was unequalled." She dryly summed up the atmosphere in the turn-of-the-century Baku of her childhood:
Gambling is forbidden in the Koran -- all of Baku played cards and huge sums of money changed hands. Strong alcoholic drinks, such as Vodka and Cognac, replaced wine, which was condemned by the Prophet, under the pretense that these beverages were not technically forbidden. The reproduction of the human face was likewise prohibited -- photographers were nevertheless swamped by customers. Musims allowed themselves to be photographed in profile, or from the front, standing before a painting of a park, or a draped curtain. (From the chapter, Revolution, at pgs. 10-11) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 2:04 pm Post subject: |
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Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Paperback
By Nicolai Gogol
Translated by the incomparable Ronald Wilks
| Quote: | | Her little dog wasn't quite quick enough to nip in after her and had to stay out in the street. I'd seen that dog before. She's called Medji. I hadn't been there more than a minute when I heard a faint little voice: 'Hello, Medji!' Well, I never! Who was that talking? I looked around and saw two ladies walking along under an umbrella: one was old, but her companion was quite young. They'd already gone past when I heard that voice again: 'Shame on you, Medji!' What was going on, for heaven's sake? Then I saw Medji sniffing round a little dog following the two ladies. 'Aha,' I said to myself, 'It can't be true, I must be drunk.' But I hardly ever drink. 'No Fidele, I told myself, 'you're quite mistaken.' With my own eyes I actually saw Medji mouth these words: 'I've been, bow wow, very ill, bow wow.' Ah, you nasty little dog! I must confess I was staggered to hear it speak just like a human being. But afterwards, when I'd time to think about it, my amazement wore off. In fact, several similar cases have already been reported. It's said that in England a fish swam to the surface and said two worlds in such a strange language the professors have been racking their brains for three years now to discover what it was, so far without success. What's more, I read somewhere in the papers about two cows going into a shop to ask for a pound of tea. Honestly, I was much more startled when I heard Medji say: 'I did write to you, Fidele. Polkan couldn't have delivered my letter.' I'd stake a month's salary that that was what the dog said. Never in my life have I heard of a dog that could write. Only noblemen know how to write correctly. Of course, you'll always find some traders or shopkeepers, even serfs, who can scribble away: but they write like machines - no commas or full stops, and simply no idea of style. (From Diary of a Madman, October 3rd, at p. 19) |
Wonderful comedy by the Ukrainian champion of tears. Don't miss the excellent introduction by Wilks, friend to freshmen, who ransack the shelving each fall for context. Here it is, brilliantly condensed.
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2006 9:43 am Post subject: |
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The Works of Anton Chekhov
One Volume Edition
Walter J. Black, Inc.
The Wager
Hardcover
Apparently a COLLECTOR'S EDITION
| Quote: | The discussion became very animated. The banker, who was younger then and more impulsive, suddenly lost control of himself, and striking the table, he turned to the young jurist and exclaimed:
"That is not true! I bet you two million roubles that you would not be able to stand solitary confinement in a cell for even five years."
"If you are serious," the jurist answered, "I will accept your wager. I bet that I will remain in solitary confinement not only five but fifteen years."
"Fifteen! I accept it," the banker cried. "Gentlemen, bear witness, I stake two millions."
"Done," said the jurist; "you stake millions and I stake my liberty." (-- p. 363) |
A short story by the master whose ending goes a long way in explaining the undaunted magnificence of the Russian spirit despite such a bloody, bloody history. Impatient visitors may e-mail us at legal@pokerpulse.com for the strange but perhaps not surprising ending.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2462#2462
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