| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
 Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 2:02 pm Post subject: |
 |
|
King, Queen, Knave
Hardcover
By Vladimir Nabokov
| Quote: | | Finally, the question of the title. Those three court cards, all hearts, I have retained, while discarding a small pair. The two new cards dealt me may justify the gamble, for I have always had an ivory thumb in this game. Tightly, narrowly, closely, through the smart of tobacco smoke, one edge is squeezed out. *Frog's heart - as they say in Russian Gulch. And Jingle Bells! I can only hope that my good old partners, replete with full houses and straights, will think I am bluffing. (From the introduction to the revised edition of Nabokov's second Russian novel first published in 1927, dated March 28, 1967, Montreux) |
| Quote: | * A note from Listserv 14.4 from January, 2003:
| Quote: | I'm curious about the ending of the foreword to King, Queen, Knave and its Russian translation. "Frog's heart -- as they say in Russian Gulch. And Jingle Bells!" The translation by Gennady Barabtarlo and Vera Nabokov reads "Serdechko liagushki" - kak govoriat v russkoi igre v "P'ianitsu." A vot i bubenchiki na kolpake Dzokera!
The translators have done readers a service in providing a gloss in the process of translating. They seem to be taking an obsolete word for drunkard (gulch) and making "Russian gulch" into "russkaia igra v P'ianitsu".
Question -. Is pianitsa an actual card game? What sort? Is "serdechko liagushki" an ace of hearts in Russian slang? If so, how widespread? Does the game "pianitsa" appear elsewhere in Russian literature? |
|
| Quote: | According to the reply posted in February, 2003:
| Quote: | Yes, "pianitsa" is a real card game in Russia. It's the most primitive one that simply makes the "bigger" card acquire the "smaller" one (each player, as I remember, pulls blindly one card from the other player's hand, then the other does the same, and the bigger card wins the smaller). The game is so primitive that as soon as a player (say, 4-5 year old child) learns the values of the cards s/he moves to the next level.
No, I've never heard "Serdechko liagushki" applied to any card. |
|
| Quote: | Yes and this from a blog called Katya's Journal:
| Quote: | Monday, January 30, 2006
When the rain stopped for a while, Katya went to Alton Baker park to walk and play. She walked unsupported there too.
Anya and Lizka taught Katya to play war, a popular children's card game. Today she was playing it with Zhenya for two hours and was very excited to learn the Russian name of the game, pianitsa (drunkard) and the folksy slang of Russian card players. |
|
| Quote: | | Note: We would be delighted to post more detailed answers. Submissions may be made to legal@pokerpulse.com. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2502#2502
Last edited by editor on Sun Jan 06, 2008 4:19 pm; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2006 4:19 pm Post subject: |
|
|
The First World War - The Complete Series
DVD
Revolution - 1917
Disc 3, Episode 8
While Lenin travels by train from Switzerland to Russia via Germany:
| Quote: | "The Kaiser is paying for the journey," jeered rival Russian Socialists. "He'll be hanged as a German spy."
Lenin stood listening and smiled. "Hiss as much as you like," he said. "We Bolsheviks will shuffle your cards and spoil your game." |
Poor editing mars this series but rare footage makes it nevertheless worthwhile.
A superior authority on the First World War, in our view:
| Quote: | Testament of Youth
BBC Miniseries
VHS only!
| Quote: | | Not for the feint of heart, this excellent series based on Vera Brittain's eloquent autobiography provides a rich historical monument to the tragedy of that war, including the devastating effects of mustard gas. |
|
Should be required listening in government offices worldwide:
| Quote: | Lest We Forget
A collection of poetry & music dedicated
to the memory of those who fell in two
world wars
Audio CD
Featuring Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud and the
BBC Symphony Orchestra
| Quote: | Pomp & circumstance: March no. 4 in G major / Elgar -- Lines from For the fallen / Binyon -- On the idle hill of summer / Housman -- In time of the breaking nations / Hardy -- Salut d'amour / Elgar -- The autumn of the world / Read -- The planets: Mars, the bringer of war / Holst -- Attack ; The general / Sassoon -- For the fallen / Binyon -- In memoriam / Thomas -- The dead (IV) / Brooker -- Returning, we hear the larks / Rosenberg -- Everyone sing / Sassoon -- Chanson de matin / Elgar -- On the dead in Gallipoli / Maserfield -- Elegy / Elgar -- Before action / Hodgson -- The soldier / Brooke -- Futility / Owen -- In Flanders Fields / McCree -- Chanson de nuit / Elgar -- The hand that signed the paper / Thomas -- Summer night on the river / Delius -- To a conscript of 1940 / Read -- Watching post / Lewis -- Naming of parts / Reed -- All day it has rained / Lewis -- Peter Grimes: Dawn / Britten -- Song of the dying gunner / Causley -- For Johnny / Pudney -- Planets: Venus, the bringer of peace / Holst -- Midnight, May 7th, 1945 / Dickinson -- Will it be so again? / Lewis -- At the British war cemetery, Bayeux / Causley -- Enigma Variations: Nimrod / Elgar -- And death shall have no dominion / Thomas -- Pomp & circumstance: March no 1 in D major / Elgar -- Lines from For the fallen / Binyon.
Elgard, Edward, 1857-1934.
Holst, Gustav, 1874-1934.
Delius, Frederick, 1862-1934.
Calvert, Phyllis.
Gielgud, John, Sir, 1904-
Orr, Peter.
Jacobi, Derek.
Davis, Andrew, 1944-
BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Includes readings of poetry by Laurence Binyon; A.E. Housman; Thomas Hardy; Herbert Read; Edward Thomas; Rupert Brooke and others.
Should be required listening by governments everywhere contemplating the unoriginal and uncreative decision to go to war. Beautifully edited and executed, this CD must have been a labor of love for all concerned. |
|
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2593#2593
Last edited by editor on Sun Jan 06, 2008 5:09 pm; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 9:37 am Post subject: |
|
|
House of Meetings
Hardcover
By Martin Amis
| Quote: | Our reunions, which became fairly regular, soon assumed a pattern - something like a childish feud of assertion and rebuttal. Usually they came to us, but the laws of hospitality demanded that we occasionally went to them. Lev was very different in Kazan. He dominated. We would meet, not at the hotel where Kitty and I put up, but on a street corner in the industrial district - the zinc fogs of Zarechye. Then would then be a longish walk, with visitors falling into step behind the two hooded duffelcoats, the two pairs of squeaking plastic boots. "Ah, here we are. How nice," he would say, levering open the sodden door of a hostel canteen or a subsidized cafeteria. While we pushed the food around our plates, he questioned us about its quality. Is the horsemeat ? When that was over, we'd get a glass of spuddy vodka in some roiling taproom or pothouse. And Lev and Zoya would squelching back to the bus station at half past eight.
These outings, of course were clearly, almost openly, punitive. Kitty didn't much mind, and I found it quite funny in a nerve-racking way. It was Zoya who suffered. Fanning herself, she held her head at a prideful angle, taking deep breaths through her rigid nostrils. Her blushes lasted for half an hour, and the great shaft of her throat was like an aquarium of shifting blues and crimsons. In Moscow I naturally retaliated, taking them to modernist black-economy steakhouses, and on to traditionalist black-economy casinos. The tuxed waiter served us green Chartreuse, and I drank to Zoya's thirtieth birthday, raising my chalice under spangleballs and twirling mirrorspheres. (From 2. Marrying the Mole at p. 153) |
Read the loyal review by fellow New Yorker contributor Joan Acocella.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2710#2710
Last edited by editor on Sun Jan 06, 2008 5:20 pm; edited 2 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 12:15 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Ballets Russes
DVD
Top Drawer Documentary by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller
| Quote: | | Narrator: As 1933 drew to a close, Colonel de Basil and co. set sail for America and into the arms of an ambitious and wiley impressario named Sol Hurok. Hurok was the most powerful theatrical promoter in the States. He was also a Ukrainian emigre who held a special place in his heart for Russian ballet. And so although nearly 20 years had passed since Diaghilev's Ballet Russe had toured the States - although an entire generation of Americans could not tell a tutu from a pirouette - Hurok placed an enormous bet on the new Ballet Russe: he bankrolled their first American tour. |
| Quote: | | Frederic Franklin (still dancing character roles at 90+): Now, we were at Drury Lane in London, and they're at Covent Garden. The fans are going back and forth, looking at all the new dancers. Well, Hurok came and saw us, and he saw them. And this - this is the season Hurok decided...there was Massine and Danilova. They were the only two names. Markova, me, Slavenska - no one had ever heard of them in America. And he made a gamble. And we had a contract. Massine and Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Hurok represented both in the U.S. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2889#2889
Last edited by editor on Wed Oct 21, 2009 4:03 pm; edited 7 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 12:07 pm Post subject: |
|
|
The Economist
Magazine Subscription
The warlord and the spook
Russia's wars in Chechnya, which the
Kremlin says are over, have shaped
the country that Russians and the world
are now living with
June 2/07
| Quote: | Like a high-end barmitzvah, only with more weapons, the inauguration of Ramzan Kadyrov was held in a giant white marquee, in the grounds of one of his palaces, near the Chechen city of Gudermes. The guests - Russian officers who were once his enemies, rival warlords squirming in dress uniforms, muftis in lamskin hats - brought sycophantic portraits, cars and other gifts fit for a Caucasian potentate. As his pet lions gnawed on their bones outside, Chechnya's new president made a speech, as short and nervous as a schoolboy's, in which he vowed to continue the reconstruction of his wretched semi-autonomous Russian republic.
...As with all wars, the starkest toll of Chechnya's are the dead, who as well as the slaughtered Chechens officially include around 10,000 federal troops, and unofficially many more. Then there are the tens of thousands of injured, such as Dima, who lives with his parents in a grotty apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. In December 1999, Dima was shot in the chest in the village of Alkhan-Yurt. He heard the air rushing out of his lungs; then he was wounded again. He lay bleeding, eating snow, and preparing to die, but lived after a doctor bet his colleagues two bottles of vodka that he could be saved. Two pieces of shrapnel stayed in his back. "I lost my health forever when I was 20," says Dima, who was incapacitated for two years; terrible years, says his mother. Alkhan-Yurt, meanwhile, became infamous for the butchery and rape commnitted there by the Russians soon afterwards.
Still Dima, now at college, is relatively lucky. Many of the 1m-plus Chechnya veterans came back alcoholic, unemployable and anti-social, suffering what soon became known as "the Chechen syndrome." This widespread experience of army mistreatment and no-limits warfare has contributed to Russia's extraordinary level of violent crime: the murder rate is 20 times western Europe's. But the cruelty is also reproducing itself in a less well-known and more organised way.
As well as the army, thousands of policemen across Russia have served in Chechnya. Many return with disciplinary and psychological problems, says Tanya Lokshina of Demos, a human-rights group. They also bring back extreme tactics that they proceed to apply at home, such as the sorts of cordons and mass detentions deployed against peaceful protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg in April. Torture, concluded a recent report by Amnesty Internati.onal, is endemic among Russian police. It is often used to extract confessions, but not always: a survey by Russian researchers found that most victims of police violence thought it had been perpetrated for fun. (-- pgs. 55-57) |
More on 'no-frills' Chechnya at the guardian unlimited.com.
More Gambling Warriors.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2893#2893 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 12:44 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Stalin
The Court of the Red Tsar
Hardcover
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
| Quote: | | Kaganovich met Khrushchev during the February 1917 Revolution in the Ukrainian mining town of Yuzovka. Despite a flirtation with Trotskyism, Khrushchev's patrons were unbeatable: 'Kaganovich liked me very much,' he recalled. So did both Nadya ('my lottery ticket,' said Khrushchev) and Stalin himself. Resembling a cannonball more than a whirlwind, Khrushchev's bright porcine eyes, chunky physique and toothy smile with its golden teeth, exuded primitive coarseness and Promethean energy but camouflaged his cunning. As the capital's First Secretary, he drove the transofrmation of 'Stalinist-Moscow'; by a huge building programme, the destruction of old churches, and the creation of the Metro, he entered the elite. Already a regular at o, this pitiless, ambitious believer regarded himself as Stalin's 'son'. Born in 1894, son of a peasant miner, this meteoric bumpkin became Stalin's 'pet'. (From Chapter 14, The Dwarf Rises; Casanova Falls, pgs. 172-173) |
| Quote: | | Europe in early 1939 was, in Stalin's own words, a 'poker game' with three players, in which each hoped to persuade the other two to destroy one another and leave the third to take the winnings. The three players were the Fascists of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, the Capitalists of Neville Chamberlain's Britain allied with Daladier's France - and the Bolsheviks. Though the Georgian admired the flamboyant brutality of the Austrian, he appreciated the danger of a resurgent Germany militarily, and the hostility of Fascism. (From The Great Game: Hitler and Stalin, 1939-1941, p. 308) |
| Quote: | 'You'll have to agree, Rokossovsky,' added Molotov. 'Agree - that's all there is to it!' The general was summoned back into the study:
'So which is better?' asked Stalin.
'Two,' answered Rokossovsky. Silence descended until Stalin asked:
'Can it be that two blows are really better?' Stalin accepted Rokossovsky's plan. On 23 June, the offensive shattered the German forces. Minsk and then Lvov were recaptured. On 8 July, Zhukov found Stalin at Kuntsevo in 'great gaiety'. As he ordered the advance on the Vistula, Stalin was determined to impose his own government on Poland so that it ould never again threaten Russia: on 22 July, he established a Polish Committee under Boleslaw Bierut to form the new government.
'Hitler's like a gambler staking his last coin!' exulted Stalin.
'Germany will try to make peace with Churchill and Roosevelt.,' said Molotov.
'Right,' said Stalin, 'but Roosevelt and Churchill won't agree.' Then the Poles threw a spanner into the works of the Grand Alliance. (From War: The Triumphant Genius, 1942-1945, p. 484) |
| Quote: | ... In the limousine out to Kuntsevo, the Chinese interpreter invited Stalin to visit Mao.
'Swallow your words!' Mao hissed in Chinese to the interpreter. 'Don't invite him!' Neither of the titans spoke for the entire thirty-minute drive. When Stalin invited Mao to dance to his gramophone, a singular honour for a visiting leader, he refused. It did not matter: the game of poker was over. While reserving for himself the supreme priesthood of international Communism, Stalin allowed Mao a leading role in Asia.
... No sooner had he arrived to rest than disaster struck in the faraway peninsula. Stalin had withdrawn from the UN to protest against its refusal to recognize Mao's China instead of Taiwan as the legitimate government but President Truman called Stalin's bluff by convening the Security Council to approve UN intervention against North Korea. The Soviet Union could have avoided this but Stalin wrongly inisted on boycotting the session, against Gromyko's advice. 'Stalin for once was guided by emotion,' remembered Gromyko. In September, the powerful US counter-attack at Inchon, under the UN flag, trapped Kim's North Koreans in the south and then shattered their army. Once again, Stalin's testing of American resolve had backfired badly - but the old man simply sighed to Khrushchev that if Kim was defeated, 'So what. Let it be. Let the Americans be our neighbors.' If he did not get what he wanted, Russia would still not intervene. (From The Lame Tiger, 1949-1953, pgs. 620-622) |
The NEW biography we're waiting for:
Young Stalin
Hardcover
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
Read an excerpt posted at the
Times Online May 6/07.
Gripping stuff, especially as more and more of the archives are literally unearthed and revealed.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3046#3046
Last edited by editor on Tue Oct 06, 2009 9:02 am; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 2:25 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Beaumarchais in Seville
An Intermezzo
Hardcover
By Hugh Thomas, who seems to know his Spanish onions.
| Quote: | Buturlin had been in his youth a soldier, like so many diplomats at that time. His father had reached the summit of the Russian political ladder as a field marshal, as agovernor of the Ukraine, and then as a count. His second wife, the ambassador's mother, was a Princess Kuratin, from one of the main political dynasties of old Russia. The younger Buturlin had a pretty wife, Maria Romanovna, Countess Vorontsova, a sister of Princess Catherine Dashkova, the best friend of the Empress Catherine and, at least according to her own exciting account, the motor of Catherine's dramatic coup d'etat in 1762 against her husband Tsar Peter III. (The empress and the 20-year-old Princess Dashkova, dressed as guards officersers and riding astride their horses, rallied the guard against Peter with astonishing panache). Another sister, Elizabeth Vorontsova, afterwards Madame Paliansky, had been Tsar Peter's ugly mistress. Princess Dashkova would later write a famous memoir.
Russians give a touch of class to any gambling table, and there was nothing to prevent a diplomat gambling all night if he so wished. The ambassador's wife, Maria, had, according to her sister's memoir, been "very early distinguished by the favour of the empress [Elizabeth] and even when still a child had been appointed a maid of honour." This was the age when for the first time Russia was beginning to count as a major European power: "sprung from those Huns and Gepides who destroyed the empire of the East," Frederick the Great would in 1769 write to this brother Henry, "they could well break into the empire of the West before long." One had to take Russian diplomats seriously. (From Chapter Nine, At the Tables and to the Theatre, pgs. 128-129) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3252#3252 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2007 2:56 pm Post subject: |
|
|
The Immortal Game
A History of Chess
or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated
Our Understanding of War, Art, Science, and the
Human Brain
Hardcover
By David Shenk
| Quote: | Гарри Кимович Каспаров (Garry Kasparov) v. Deep Junior
January 26, 2003
New York
Game I
7. g4
(White Pawn to g4)
This was a terrific gamble and could have backfired. "In order to expose [the computer's weak spot]," said Kasparov after the game, "you have to have a lot of courage. All morning I was saying, 'Should I play g4 or should I not play g4?'" The strength - and weakness - of this move was in its unpredictability and counterintuitiveness. It left his entrire position surprisingly vulnerable on both the Kingside and the Queenside. (Notice how disconnected the White Pawns are across the entire board; disconnected Pawns cannot defend one another.) But that was also precisely the advantage of the move as well. From his practice experience with the Deep Junior program, Kasparov knew that this unusual move, 7. g4, was not included in Junior's opening database (its "opening book"), and would thus force the computer to start thinking on its own earlier than expected. Every computer has to come "out of book" at some point during the opening. Kasparov knew that it was advantageous to trigger this early, and in an unexpected way.
... Against Deep Junior, Kasparov was signaling something new. He was not employing classic anticomputer chess. Rather, he played it as he would play another human grandmaster. It was the highest compliment he could pay to Junior's programmers: they had developed a machine with true strategic ability. They had developed a machine that appeared to be thinking. (From We Are Sharing Our World with Another Species, pgs. 203-204) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3345#3345 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:39 pm Post subject: |
|
|
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) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3348#3348 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 12:58 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Cannibal Island
Death in a Siberian Gulag
Hardcover
By Nicolas Werth
| Quote: | | What did the notion of "social dangerousness" mean in Bolshevist political culture? The term began to appear explicityly in 1924, when a secret resolution passed on March 24 of that year by the Soviet state's highest authority, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, authorized a special jurisdiction, the OGPU's Special Conference, to ban, exile, expel outside the country, or put in a concentration camp for a maximum term of three years any "socially dangerous" individuals. Such persons were defined as those who had been found guilty or suspected of "crimes of state" ("counterrevolutionary activies," larceny, counterfeiting); certain individuals "without fixed occupation and not engaged in productive work," such as "professional gamblers," "wheeler-dealers," pimps, drug dealers, "hardened speculators"; and all individuals who were "socially dangerous because of their past activities, that is, who had at least twice been found guilty of crimes or who had been arrested at least four times because of their suspected involvement in crimes against goods or persons." (footnote omitted) This text is remarkable in several respects, not only because of its very elastic definition of "social dangerousness," which went beyond the well-known amalgamation - carried out at the beginnings of the regime - of "political offenders" and "nonpolitical offenders," but also because of its deterministic vision of "social dangerousness," as situated in the past and present history of "hardened" recidivists "connected with the crime world," a vision very different from the utopian approach fashionable in certain judicial and pedagogical circles that preached the "redemption of the criminal through labor." (From Chapter I, A "grandiose plan," p. 16) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3387#3387 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 2:48 pm Post subject: |
|
|
A Short History of
Tractors in Ukrainian
Paperback
By Marina Lewycka
| Quote: | My father goes to Nottingham for Valentina's appeal after all. How does she persuade him? Does she threaten to tell the bureaucrazia about oralsex? Does she cradle his bony skull between her twin warheads and whisper sweet nothings into his hearing aid? My father is silent about this, but he has a cunning plan.
... When it is my father's turn to speak, he asks in a quiet voice whether he may go into a separate room. There is some discussion amongh the Immigration panel, but their conclusion is that, no, he must speak in the front of everybody.
"I will speak under duress," he says. They take him through the same series of questions, and his replies are just the same as Valentina's. At the end, when he has finished, he says, "Thank you. Now I want you to record that all I have said is spooken under duress."
He is taking a gamble on her lack of English.
There is a flurry of note taking, but not one of the panel members looks up for a moment or meets my father's eye. Valentina raises one eyebrow a fraction, but maintains her fixed smile.
"What it mean, this dooh-ress word?" she asks him, as they are waiting for the train to take them home.
"It means love," my father says. "Like the French, tendresse."
"Ah, holubchik. My little pigeon." She beams, and gives him another peck on the cheek. (From Chapter Eleven, under duress, pgs. 118-119) |
| Quote: | "Vera said something about a correction block?"
"Aha, this was an unfortunate episode. Caused entirely by cigarettes. I have told you, I think, that I owe my life to cigarettes. Yes? But I have not told you also that I almost lost my life through cigarettes. Through Vera's adventure with cigarettes. Lucky that war ended then. British came just in time - rescued us from correction block. Otherwise we surely would not have survived."
"Why? What ... ? How long ... ?"
He coughs for a moment, avoiding my eyes.
"Lucky also that at liberation we were in British zone. Another piece of luck was Ludmilla's birthplace, Novaya Aleksandria."
"Why was that lucky?"
"Lucky because Galicia was formerly part of Poland, and Poles were allowed to stay in West. Under Churchill-Stalin agreement, Poles could stay in England, Ukrainians sent back. Most sent to Siberia - most perished. Lucky that Millochka still had birth certificate, showed she was born in former Poland. Lucky I had some German work papers. Said I came from Dashev. Germans changed Cyrillic to Roman script. Dashev, Daszewo. Word sounds like same, but Daszewo is in Poland; Dashev is in Ukraina. Ha ha. Lucky immigration officer believed. So much luck in such a short time - enough to last a lifetime." (From Chapter Thirty, two journeys, p. 283) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3446#3446 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 4:50 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Omens and Lucky Charms:
Art & Love
An Illustrated Anthology
of Love Poetry
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | EVERYTHING PROMISED HIM TO ME
Everything promised him to me:
the fading amber edge of the sky,
and the sweet dreams of Christmas,
and the wind at Easter, loud with bells,
and the red shoots of the grapevine,
and waterfalls in the park,
and two large dragonflies
on the rusty iron fencepost.
And I could only believe
that he would be mine
as I walked along the high slopes,
the path of burning stones.
А́нна Ахма́това Anna Akhmatova, Russian. 1889-1966
(-- p. 61, adjacent to Across the Room. Edmund C. Tarbell, American,
1862-1938. Oil on canvas, ca. 1899. |
PokerPulse favorite Akhmatova translation:
Twenty Poems
Anna Akhmatova
Translated from the Russian
by U.S. poet Jane Kenyon with
Vera Sanomirsky Dunham
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3520#3520 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 12:17 pm Post subject: |
|
|
The Chess Artist
Genius, Obsession and the World's Oldest Game
Hardcover
By J.C. Hallman
| Quote: | | (Bobby) Fischer might have p-layed for the world championship in the '60s if it werent' for his own eccentricity and Soviet collusion against him. His run through the turn of the decade is probably the best performance chess has ever known, repeatedly dominating and sometimes blanking world-class opponents. His '72 World Championship match in Reykjavik, Iceland, received more press than any chess match in history, mainly because its struggle seemed to describe the Cold War. Chess metaphors had been used for the Cold War for some time, and a sentiment that was supposed to have run through the echelons of U.S. international relations said, "We play poker, they play chess." With Fisher, the United States played chess, too. The symbolic meaning of the '72 match would have been far more significant in the Soviet Union than in the United States, and chess interest in the United States leapt dramatically - Fischer was on the cover of Life, chess was suddenly on television, and eventually a Broadway musical was based on the contest. The first of many books of the match sold two hundred thousand copies. Negotiations almost prevented it from happening at all, and Henry Kissinger is said to have intervened when Fischer threatened not to play. Fischer won convincingly, even though the match was marred by paranoia from both sides: One of the players' chairs was x-rayed for insidious devices, and a careful examination of suspicious lighting fixtures turned up two dead flies. Since 1927, virtually all the world champions have come from within Russia, but for three years in the early '70s the title was held by a man so demanding and bizarre that he frequently drove away those closest to him. The Soviet Union was forced to explain why the combined resources powering their subsidized pastime could not prevent one crazy American from unseating them all. (From Chapter 4, Theory of Commodes, pgs. 46-47) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3536#3536 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 10:45 am Post subject: |
|
|
From Losing Streak:
Postwar
A History of Europe Since 1945
Hardcover
By Tony Judt
| Quote: | ... if east Europeans paid less attention in retrospect to the plight of the Jews, it was not just because they were indifferent at the time or preoccupied with their own survival. It is because the Communists imposed enough suffering and injustice of their own to forge a whole new layer of resentments and memories.
Between 1945 and 1989 the accumulation of deportations, imprisonments, show trials and 'normalizations' made almost everyone in the Soviet Union either a loser or else complicit in someone else's loss. Apartments, shops and other property that had been appropriated from dead Jews or expelled Germans were all too often re-expropriated a few years later in the name of Socialism - with the result that after 1989 the question of compensation for past losses became hopelessly tangled in dates. Should people be recompensed for what they lost when the Communists seized power? And if such restitution were made, to whom should it go? To those who had come into possession of it after the war, in 1945, only to lose it a few years later? Or should restitution be made to their heirs of those from whom businesses and apartments had been seized or stolen at some point between 1938 and 1945? Which point? 1938? 1939? 1941? On each date there hung politically sensitive definitions of national or ethnic legitimacy as well as moral precedence. (Footnote: When the Czechoslovak parliament voted in 1991 to restitute property seized after the war it explicityly limited the benefits to those expropriated after 1948 - so as to exclude Sudeten Germans expelled in 1945-46, before the Communists seized power). (From Epilogue, p. 823) |
For all its tireless research, an immensely readable text - enjoyably so - though it suffers from the same myopia the author criticizes in European nations still struggling with their complicity with the Nazi regime - that is, an offensive, wilfully blind view that Jews were they ONLY ethnic group Nazis targeted. And we also look forward to subsequent chapters on Israel and its treatment of aboriginal Palestinians since Shoah. Painful lessons from the Nazis on isolating and containing certain others behind a wall were well learned, it seems.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3585#3585 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
|
| Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 1:54 pm Post subject: |
|
|
From Impossible Odds:
The War Symphonies
Shostakovich Against Stalin
First-rate multinational collaboration
Directed by Harvey Weinstein
Featuring the excellent Radio Filharmonisch Orkest
Netherlands Radio Philarmonic
conducted by Valery Gergiev
DVD
| Quote: | 7th Symphony - 1941
Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian people's celebrated composer: My 7th Symphony was inspired by the tragic events of 1941. To our struggle against Fascism, to our future victory over the enemy and to native city of Leningrad, I dedicate this piece.
Ksenia Matus (oboeist): I grabbed my instrument and when I opened the case it also turned out to have dystrophy. All the pads had turned green. The oboe wouldn't play but I took it as it was. And when I got to the hall, I became frightened. Those I had known before the war were so emaciated. Some were covered in soot, their faces blackened with smoke. They were hungry, and all dressed in I don't know what. But they came. Eliasberg stood up at the podium. He lifted his hands and they were trembling and to my imagination, he was a wounded bird, whose wings are hurt, and is about to fall. But he didn't fall.
Tatiana Vasilyeva (Leningrad Siege survivor): I came for the 7th Symphony, and I had this same seat. When I entered the hall, tears came to my eyes because there were many people, all elated. We listened with such emotion because we had lived for this moment, to come and hear this music. This was a real symphony which we lived. This was our symphony, Leningrad's.
Dmitri Tolstoy (composer): They performed in the Philarmonic, and outside bombs and shells were exploding. It was incredible! This proved that the spirit prevails over matter. The spirit is more important than matter.
Tatiana: It was so meaningful for all of us. We realized that the concert might be the last thing we'd do in our lives.
Ksenia: Music was everything. Never mind the kasha, or that we were hungry. No one could feed us, but music inspired us and brought us back to life. In this way, this day was our feast. |
Perhaps even more incredible, Shostakovich survived Stalin's purges. He died of lung cancer in 1975.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3778#3778 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
FAQ 
Search 
Memberlist 
Usergroups
Profile 
Log in to check your private messages 
Log in 
