From Moscow Central to Spying in Suburban USA

Having just finished listening to "The Complete Smiley" on BBC Radio 4, I'm naturally intrigued by the discovery of a Russian spy ring in suburban USA.

After initially denying all existence of the suburban spy ring, it now seems that Russia is offering a one for one exchange of people held over there for spying offences. How Very Cold War !

Nevertheless, it's all a very long way from the days of British Russian spies Burgess and Maclean, which is a shame because I so much enjoyed a recent showing of the 1983 screen play "An Englishman Abroad".

The Moscow scenes looked so authentic, although I believe they were shot in Glasgow and Dundee. Well, it can be cold there too !

Whispering Campaign of Orlando Figes

"The Whisperers" by Orlando Figes is a fine work of scholarship and a deeply moving account of private life in Stalin's Russia.

It is curious, therefore, that Figes or his wife and fellow academic - for the authorship is not quite clear - should choose to rubbish the work of other historians of Russia and the former Soviet Union through anonymous reviews.

However, academia has always been something of a cloak and dagger profession, as reflected in the murder mystery campus novel genre.

Incidentally, I'm sure that Stalin would have enjoyed the furore unleashed by the unmasking of Figes; and the episode reminds us that the darker side of the human psyche, with its rivalries and resentments, is never too far away.

To the Castle and Back

I've recently started reading Vaclav Harvel's memoir "To the Castle and Back", whose title naturally reminds me of fellow Czech writer Franz Kafka's book "The Castle". It is a testimony to the difference between the first part of the last century and its final decade that Havel secures a relatively long tenure at "the Castle", whilst the hero of Kafka's novel struggles to gain entry to a rather more surreal fortification. Nevertheless, Havel's own memoir finds him battling with external forces, as well as those internalised within himself, and its wryly ironic structure, or apparent lack of one, reflects this process.

I look forward to properly reviewing "To the Castle and Back" at a later date. In the meantime, readers may observe that the images have mysteriously disappeared from my previous post, and indeed from my other blogs too. Was some censor at work I wondered, given the political content of these blogs ? It seems, however, that this disappearance of photographs and other images is a technical problem of Blogger.com, and that the pictures can reappear, coming back, as it were, from some virtual castle themselves.

MOLOTOV'S LIBRARY

A new book by Rachel Polonsky called Molotov's Magic Lantern recounts the accidental discovery of a library belonging to a leading figure during the Stalinist era of Russian Soviet history.

Whilst renting an apartment in a building known as "The Fifth House of the Soviets", during the late 1990s, Polonsky discovers from an American banker and fellow tenant that Molotov's books and furniture are upstairs.

Amongst this library is Winston Churchill's History of the Second World War, in which Molotov is described as a "human being who perfectly resembles the modern description of a robot".

Polonsky herself describes Molotov as a "bureaucratic monster". He was author of the notorious death lists between 1937-8.

However, Molotov, like Stalin himself, was undoubtedly a literary man steeped in the "approved classics" and their "sufferings of little men".

This image of "The Rat Swallower" is taken from the contemporary Laterna Magica Galante (Magic Lantern Show)Show.

Timothy Garten Ashe's account of the 1989 revolutions across central and eastern Europe which brought about the collapse of the former Soviet Block is also called "The Magic Lantern".

"PEOPLE" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicles of the planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
And planet is dissimilar to planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.

If any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures.
Of whom, essentially,what did we know?

Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?

We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.

And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.

Russian Crafts

The website http://www.russian-crafts.com/ is well worth a visit. I mention this because it is through Russia's folk culture that we can access an artistic vibrancy which is both traditional and contemporary, and has a historical continuum which other aspects of Russian culture do not.

Dark Avenues by Ivan Bunin

Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was an emigre writer, whose masterpiece, "Dark Avenues", was written in Grasse during World War II. "Dark Avenues" is a collection of short stories which, according the One World Classics edition, is set "in the context of the Russian cultural and historical crises of the preceding decades". Bunin himself compared the book to Boccaccio's Decameron because it was created at the height of the Nazi regime "to escape to a different world, where there was no bloodshed and people were not burned alive" However, he also said of the stories in "Dark Avenues", : they are "only about love", but " its dark, and more often than not, gloomy and sinister avenues".