Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

On Saturday evening I attended Prime Cuts’ version of Black Milk, a play by Vassily Sigarev, receiving its Irish premiere at the Belfast Festival. Set in a desolate Urals’ backwater, at a crumbling train station, a trashy ‘New Russian’ couple from the city find themselves in a clash of culture and values with the rural poor. Lyovchick and his heavily pregnant wife are ‘shuttle traders’, hustling the locals to buy ‘super toasters’ for exorbitant prices. Apparently many of their customers believe the devices will enable them to bake bread. When Shura’s waters break she is taken in by kindly ‘Auntie Pasha’ who helps deliver the baby, and the chain smoking female lead, with a dissolute past, becomes seduced by the notion of living a simple, honest life in the countryside. Her abusive husband has different ideas and an intense and occasionally brutal final scene is played out, as Shura pleads with Lyovchick to embrace a new life and he attempts to wrench her back to the routine to which...

It is not just in Britain that governments like to indulge in a spot of identity navel gazing. In Russia a Kremlin sponsored competition has been taking place in order to establish the ‘Eemya Rossiya’ or ‘Name of Russia’. The premise was that one name, popularly chosen, should emerge which peculiarly embodies Russia’s culture and history. It is the type of initiative which you might expect Liam Byrne to endorse as part of ‘Britain Day’. The Russian competition has been attended by controversy. Stalin was included in the initial long list of 500 names , suggested by the organisers. Indeed the Soviet dictator would have finished second in the poll, had he not been stripped of one million votes due to alleged vote rigging on the internet. Whether this can be ascribed to genuine vigilance on the part of the pollsters, or an attempt to sanitise an embarrassing verdict by the Russian people, the Georgian eventually finished twelfth, which in itself exposes Russia’s ambivalent attitude...

In Russia a controversy is raging which rather encapsulates some of the contradictions and opposing trends which are currently at work in that enormous, diverse country. The American company Coca Cola has produced its own variety of the fermented rye bread drink, kvas. This brew, mildly alcoholic but consumed as a soft drink, is an archetypal and much loved Russian beverage, which has acquired a role in the resurgence of pride in Russian identity that has accompanied the country’s economic and international resurgence under Vladimir Putin. Kvas has become regarded as the patriotic alternative to imported Cola brands; tastier, authentically Russian and indeed healthier. There is therefore a certain frisson in inevitable attempts by Coca Cola and Pepsi to muscle in on the market place by introducing their own versions of the drink, albeit purportedly with traditional Russian ingredients. The comparison may be trite, but I did discern in the kvas debate, something redolent of wider i...

I have been reading Joseph Conrad ’s attempt at a 19th century revolutionary Russian novel, Under Western Eyes. The book is considered Conrad’s riposte to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and many of the devices and conclusions of that great novel are inverted and even satirised. Despite Conrad’s supposed detestation of Dostoevsky, however, I can’t help feeling that the two novelists perhaps had more in common than the Pole might acknowledged and their treatment of common themes in their novels may not have diverged as radically as he believed. Joseph Conrad was born in what is currently modern Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) into a passionately nationalist family of Polish aristocrats. Indeed his father was arrested by the Tsarist authorities for his involvement in the movement which would foment the 1863 January Uprising by citizens of the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth. His father’s arrest and exile, coupled with the subsequent premature deaths of both his parent...

My favourite novel is Crime and Punishment, so it is not without reservation that I greet the unveiling in Moscow of plans to make a rock opera based on Dostoevsky's masterpiece ! Dostoevsky's work has been adapted by composers on many occasions, but the rock opera medium is a first. Fans of the author will be worried to learn that this version abbreviates Razumikhin's role and excises Dunya altogether. Tim Rice is reportedly interested in bringing the show to English speaking audiences.

As another serial killer finds his exploits pored over by the public and the media, the self-perpetuating dynamic of such crimes is particularly evident. Convicted serial killer Alexander Pichushkin, or the Chessboard Murderer as he has been inevitably dubbed, is the classic example of a demented egotist whose self-delusions are being gratified by the storm of publicity and psychological analysis his case has created. Although particular responsibility might be laid with pathological consumers of the ghoulish industry of serial killer books, films and documentaries, we are all culpable to an extent for this phenomenon, simply through a completely reasonable fascination with the mentality and motivation of murderers. Pichushkin’s courtroom statements bear the patina of self-regard that suggests the killer is only too aware that he is speaking to a worldwide audience. They are comments from a man relishing his time in the limelight. He must be only too aware that when he claims that...

I am in the process of reading a remarkable an almost indescribable novel, Summer in Baden Baden by Leonid Tsypkin. Written in an unrushing train of prose it follows a narrating intellectual's journey between Moscow and Leningrad during Soviet times and entwines his reading of Anna Dostoevsky's diary. The effect is a startling and beautiful journey, accompanying both the narrator and the Dostoevskys as they travel to Baden Baden and the turbulent author deals with gambling addiction and crippling self-doubt. This book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Dostoevsky.