RUSSIAN WRITERS IN
ENGLISH
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia's story "At the Photographer's Studio: A Sketch."
by Karen Rosneck
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia
Russian Literature in English
2013/01/23
2010/10/21
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Found in Translation
By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Published: October 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03cunningham.html?scp=3&sq=michael%20cunningham&st=cse
AS the author of “Las Horas,” “Die Stunden” and “De Uren” — ostensibly the Spanish, German and Dutch translations of my book “The Hours," but actually unique works in their own right — I’ve come to understand that all literature is a product of translation. That is, translation is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well. “Translation” as a human act is, like so many human acts, a far more complicated proposition than it may initially seem to be.
Let’s take as an example one of the most famous lines in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” That, as I suspect you know, is the opening sentence of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” We still recognize that line, after more than 150 years.
Still. “Call me Ishmael.” Three simple words. What’s the big deal?
For one thing, they possess that most fundamental but elusive of all writerly qualities: authority. As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
It’s a little like waltzing with a new partner for the first time. Anyone who is able to waltz, or fox-trot, or tango, or perform any sort of dance that requires physical contact with a responsive partner, knows that there is a first moment, on the dance floor, when you assess, automatically, whether the new partner in question can dance at all — and if he or she can in fact dance, how well. You know almost instantly whether you have a novice on your hands, and that if you do, you’ll have to do a fair amount of work just to keep things moving.
Authority is a rather mysterious quality, and it’s almost impossible to parse it for its components. The translator’s first task, then, is to re-render a certain forcefulness that can’t quite be described or explained.
Although the words “Call me Ishmael” have force and confidence, force and confidence alone aren’t enough. “Idiot, read this” has force and confidence too, but is less likely to produce the desired effect. What else do Melville’s words possess that “Idiot, read this” lack?
They have music. Here’s where the job of translation gets more difficult. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. Ideally, a sentence read aloud, in a foreign language, should still sound like something, even if the listener has no idea what it is he or she is being told.
Let’s try to forget that the words “Call me Ishmael” mean anything, and think about how they sound.
Listen to the vowel sounds: ah, ee, soft i, aa. Four of them, each different, and each a soft, soothing note. Listen too to the way the line is bracketed by consonants. We open with the hard c, hit the l at the end of “call,” and then, in a lovely act of symmetry, hit the l at the end of “Ishmael.” “Call me Arthur” or “Call me Bob” are adequate but not, for musical reasons, as satisfying.
Most readers, of course, wouldn’t be able to tell you that they respond to those three words because they are soothing and symmetrical, but most readers register the fact unconsciously. You could probably say that meaning is the force we employ, and music is the seduction. It is the translator’s job to reproduce the force as well as the music.
“Chiamami Ismaele.”
That is the Italian version of Melville’s line, and the translator has done a nice job. I can tell you, as a reader who doesn’t speak Italian, that those two words do in fact sound like something, independent of their meaning. Although different from the English, we have a new, equally lovely progression of vowel sounds — ee-a, ah, ee, a, ee — and those three m’s, nicely spaced.
If you’re translating “Moby-Dick,” that’s one sentence down, approximately a million more to go.
I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper.
Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.
But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.
It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.
The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.
A translator is also translating a work in progress, one that has a beginning, middle and end but is not exactly finished, even though it’s being published. A novel, any novel, if it’s any good, is not only a slightly disappointing translation of the novelist’s grandest intentions, it is also the most finished draft he could come up with before he collapsed from exhaustion. It’s all I can do not to go from bookstore to bookstore with a pen, grabbing my books from the shelves, crossing out certain lines I’ve come to regret and inserting better ones. For many of us, there is not what you could call a “definitive text.”
This brings us to the question of the relationship between writers and their readers, where another act of translation occurs.
I teach writing, and one of the first questions I ask my students every semester is, who are you writing for? The answer, 9 times out of 10, is that they write for themselves. I tell them that I understand — that I go home every night, make an elaborate cake and eat it all by myself. By which I mean that cakes, and books, are meant to be presented to others. And further, that books (unlike cakes) are deep, elaborate interactions between writers and readers, albeit separated by time and space.
I remind them, as well, that no one wants to read their stories. There are a lot of other stories out there, and by now, in the 21st century, there’s been such an accumulation of literature that few of us will live long enough to read all the great stories and novels, never mind the pretty good ones. Not to mention the fact that we, as readers, are busy.
We have large and difficult lives. We have, variously, jobs to do, spouses and children to attend to, errands to run, friends to see; we need to keep up with current events; we have gophers in our gardens; we are taking extension courses in French or wine tasting or art appreciation; we are looking for evidence that our lovers are cheating on us; we are wondering why in the world we agreed to have 40 people over on Saturday night; we are worried about money and global warming; we are TiVo-ing five or six of our favorite TV shows.
What the writer is saying, essentially, is this: Make room in all that for this. Stop what you’re doing and read this. It had better be apparent, from the opening line, that we’re offering readers something worth their while.
I should admit that when I was as young as my students are now, I too thought of myself as writing either for myself, for some ghostly ideal reader, or, at my most grandiose moments, for future generations. My work suffered as a result.
It wasn’t until some years ago, when I was working in a restaurant bar in Laguna Beach, Calif., that I discovered a better method. One of the hostesses was a woman named Helen, who was in her mid-40s at the time and so seemed, to me, to be just slightly younger than the Ancient Mariner. Helen was a lovely, generous woman who had four children and who had been left, abruptly and without warning, by her husband. She had to work. And work and work. She worked in a bakery in the early mornings, typed manuscripts for writers in the afternoons, and seated diners at the restaurant nights.
Helen was an avid reader, and her great joy, at the end of her long, hard days, was to get into bed and read for an hour before she caught the short interlude of sleep that was granted her. She read widely and voraciously. She was, when we met, reading a trashy murder mystery, and I, as only the young and pretentious might do, suggested that she try Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” since she liked detective stories. She read it in less than a week. When she had finished it she told me, “That was wonderful.”
“Thought you’d like it,” I answered.
She added, “Dostoyevsky is much better than Ken Follett.”
“Yep.”
Then she paused. “But he’s not as good as Scott Turow.”
Although I didn’t necessarily agree with her about Dostoyevsky versus Turow, I did like, very much, that Helen had no school-inspired sense of what she was supposed to enjoy more, and what less. She simply needed what any good reader needs: absorption, emotion, momentum and the sense of being transported from the world in which she lived and transplanted into another one.
I began to think of myself as trying to write a book that would matter to Helen. And, I have to tell you, it changed my writing. I’d seen, rather suddenly, that writing is not only an exercise in self-expression, it is also, more important, a gift we as writers are trying to give to readers. Writing a book for Helen, or for someone like Helen, is a manageable goal.
It also helped me to realize that the reader represents the final step in a book’s life of translation.
One of the more remarkable aspects of writing and publishing is that no two readers ever read the same book. We will all feel differently about a movie or a play or a painting or a song, but we have all undeniably seen or heard the same movie, play, painting or song. They are physical entities. A painting by Velázquez is purely and simply itself, as is “Blue” by Joni Mitchell. If you walk into the appropriate gallery in the Prado Museum, or if someone puts a Joni Mitchell disc on, you will see the painting or hear the music. You have no choice.
WRITING, however, does not exist without an active, consenting reader. Writing requires a different level of participation. Words on paper are abstractions, and everyone who reads words on paper brings to them a different set of associations and images. I have vivid mental pictures of Don Quixote, Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn, but I feel confident they are not identical to the images carried in the mind of anyone else.
Helen was, clearly, not reading the same “Crime and Punishment” I was. She wasn’t looking for an existential work of genius. She was looking for a good mystery, and she read Dostoyevsky with that thought in mind. I don’t blame her for it. I like to imagine that Dostoyevsky wouldn’t, either.
What the reader is doing, then, is translating the words on the pages into his or her own private, imaginary lexicon, according to his or her interests and needs and levels of comprehension.
Here, then, is the full process of translation. At one point we have a writer in a room, struggling to approximate the impossible vision that hovers over his head. He finishes it, with misgivings. Some time later we have a translator struggling to approximate the vision, not to mention the particulars of language and voice, of the text that lies before him. He does the best he can, but is never satisfied. And then, finally, we have the reader. The reader is the least tortured of this trio, but the reader too may very well feel that he is missing something in the book, that through sheer ineptitude he is failing to be a proper vessel for the book’s overarching vision.
I don’t mean to suggest that writer, translator and reader are all engaged in a mass exercise in disappointment. How depressing would that be? And untrue.
And still. We, as a species, are always looking for cathedrals made of fire, and part of the thrill of reading a great book is the promise of another yet to come, a book that may move us even more deeply, raise us even higher. One of the consolations of writing books is the seemingly unquenchable conviction that the next book will be better, will be bigger and bolder and more comprehensive and truer to the lives we live. We exist in a condition of hope, we love the beauty and truth that come to us, and we do our best to tamp down our doubts and disappointments.
We are on a quest, and are not discouraged by our collective suspicion that the perfection we look for in art is about as likely to turn up as is the Holy Grail. That is one of the reasons we, I mean we humans, are not only the creators, translators and consumers of literature, but also its subjects.
Found in Translation
By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Published: October 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03cunningham.html?scp=3&sq=michael%20cunningham&st=cse
AS the author of “Las Horas,” “Die Stunden” and “De Uren” — ostensibly the Spanish, German and Dutch translations of my book “The Hours," but actually unique works in their own right — I’ve come to understand that all literature is a product of translation. That is, translation is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well. “Translation” as a human act is, like so many human acts, a far more complicated proposition than it may initially seem to be.
Let’s take as an example one of the most famous lines in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” That, as I suspect you know, is the opening sentence of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” We still recognize that line, after more than 150 years.
Still. “Call me Ishmael.” Three simple words. What’s the big deal?
For one thing, they possess that most fundamental but elusive of all writerly qualities: authority. As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
It’s a little like waltzing with a new partner for the first time. Anyone who is able to waltz, or fox-trot, or tango, or perform any sort of dance that requires physical contact with a responsive partner, knows that there is a first moment, on the dance floor, when you assess, automatically, whether the new partner in question can dance at all — and if he or she can in fact dance, how well. You know almost instantly whether you have a novice on your hands, and that if you do, you’ll have to do a fair amount of work just to keep things moving.
Authority is a rather mysterious quality, and it’s almost impossible to parse it for its components. The translator’s first task, then, is to re-render a certain forcefulness that can’t quite be described or explained.
Although the words “Call me Ishmael” have force and confidence, force and confidence alone aren’t enough. “Idiot, read this” has force and confidence too, but is less likely to produce the desired effect. What else do Melville’s words possess that “Idiot, read this” lack?
They have music. Here’s where the job of translation gets more difficult. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. Ideally, a sentence read aloud, in a foreign language, should still sound like something, even if the listener has no idea what it is he or she is being told.
Let’s try to forget that the words “Call me Ishmael” mean anything, and think about how they sound.
Listen to the vowel sounds: ah, ee, soft i, aa. Four of them, each different, and each a soft, soothing note. Listen too to the way the line is bracketed by consonants. We open with the hard c, hit the l at the end of “call,” and then, in a lovely act of symmetry, hit the l at the end of “Ishmael.” “Call me Arthur” or “Call me Bob” are adequate but not, for musical reasons, as satisfying.
Most readers, of course, wouldn’t be able to tell you that they respond to those three words because they are soothing and symmetrical, but most readers register the fact unconsciously. You could probably say that meaning is the force we employ, and music is the seduction. It is the translator’s job to reproduce the force as well as the music.
“Chiamami Ismaele.”
That is the Italian version of Melville’s line, and the translator has done a nice job. I can tell you, as a reader who doesn’t speak Italian, that those two words do in fact sound like something, independent of their meaning. Although different from the English, we have a new, equally lovely progression of vowel sounds — ee-a, ah, ee, a, ee — and those three m’s, nicely spaced.
If you’re translating “Moby-Dick,” that’s one sentence down, approximately a million more to go.
I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper.
Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.
But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.
It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.
The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.
A translator is also translating a work in progress, one that has a beginning, middle and end but is not exactly finished, even though it’s being published. A novel, any novel, if it’s any good, is not only a slightly disappointing translation of the novelist’s grandest intentions, it is also the most finished draft he could come up with before he collapsed from exhaustion. It’s all I can do not to go from bookstore to bookstore with a pen, grabbing my books from the shelves, crossing out certain lines I’ve come to regret and inserting better ones. For many of us, there is not what you could call a “definitive text.”
This brings us to the question of the relationship between writers and their readers, where another act of translation occurs.
I teach writing, and one of the first questions I ask my students every semester is, who are you writing for? The answer, 9 times out of 10, is that they write for themselves. I tell them that I understand — that I go home every night, make an elaborate cake and eat it all by myself. By which I mean that cakes, and books, are meant to be presented to others. And further, that books (unlike cakes) are deep, elaborate interactions between writers and readers, albeit separated by time and space.
I remind them, as well, that no one wants to read their stories. There are a lot of other stories out there, and by now, in the 21st century, there’s been such an accumulation of literature that few of us will live long enough to read all the great stories and novels, never mind the pretty good ones. Not to mention the fact that we, as readers, are busy.
We have large and difficult lives. We have, variously, jobs to do, spouses and children to attend to, errands to run, friends to see; we need to keep up with current events; we have gophers in our gardens; we are taking extension courses in French or wine tasting or art appreciation; we are looking for evidence that our lovers are cheating on us; we are wondering why in the world we agreed to have 40 people over on Saturday night; we are worried about money and global warming; we are TiVo-ing five or six of our favorite TV shows.
What the writer is saying, essentially, is this: Make room in all that for this. Stop what you’re doing and read this. It had better be apparent, from the opening line, that we’re offering readers something worth their while.
I should admit that when I was as young as my students are now, I too thought of myself as writing either for myself, for some ghostly ideal reader, or, at my most grandiose moments, for future generations. My work suffered as a result.
It wasn’t until some years ago, when I was working in a restaurant bar in Laguna Beach, Calif., that I discovered a better method. One of the hostesses was a woman named Helen, who was in her mid-40s at the time and so seemed, to me, to be just slightly younger than the Ancient Mariner. Helen was a lovely, generous woman who had four children and who had been left, abruptly and without warning, by her husband. She had to work. And work and work. She worked in a bakery in the early mornings, typed manuscripts for writers in the afternoons, and seated diners at the restaurant nights.
Helen was an avid reader, and her great joy, at the end of her long, hard days, was to get into bed and read for an hour before she caught the short interlude of sleep that was granted her. She read widely and voraciously. She was, when we met, reading a trashy murder mystery, and I, as only the young and pretentious might do, suggested that she try Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” since she liked detective stories. She read it in less than a week. When she had finished it she told me, “That was wonderful.”
“Thought you’d like it,” I answered.
She added, “Dostoyevsky is much better than Ken Follett.”
“Yep.”
Then she paused. “But he’s not as good as Scott Turow.”
Although I didn’t necessarily agree with her about Dostoyevsky versus Turow, I did like, very much, that Helen had no school-inspired sense of what she was supposed to enjoy more, and what less. She simply needed what any good reader needs: absorption, emotion, momentum and the sense of being transported from the world in which she lived and transplanted into another one.
I began to think of myself as trying to write a book that would matter to Helen. And, I have to tell you, it changed my writing. I’d seen, rather suddenly, that writing is not only an exercise in self-expression, it is also, more important, a gift we as writers are trying to give to readers. Writing a book for Helen, or for someone like Helen, is a manageable goal.
It also helped me to realize that the reader represents the final step in a book’s life of translation.
One of the more remarkable aspects of writing and publishing is that no two readers ever read the same book. We will all feel differently about a movie or a play or a painting or a song, but we have all undeniably seen or heard the same movie, play, painting or song. They are physical entities. A painting by Velázquez is purely and simply itself, as is “Blue” by Joni Mitchell. If you walk into the appropriate gallery in the Prado Museum, or if someone puts a Joni Mitchell disc on, you will see the painting or hear the music. You have no choice.
WRITING, however, does not exist without an active, consenting reader. Writing requires a different level of participation. Words on paper are abstractions, and everyone who reads words on paper brings to them a different set of associations and images. I have vivid mental pictures of Don Quixote, Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn, but I feel confident they are not identical to the images carried in the mind of anyone else.
Helen was, clearly, not reading the same “Crime and Punishment” I was. She wasn’t looking for an existential work of genius. She was looking for a good mystery, and she read Dostoyevsky with that thought in mind. I don’t blame her for it. I like to imagine that Dostoyevsky wouldn’t, either.
What the reader is doing, then, is translating the words on the pages into his or her own private, imaginary lexicon, according to his or her interests and needs and levels of comprehension.
Here, then, is the full process of translation. At one point we have a writer in a room, struggling to approximate the impossible vision that hovers over his head. He finishes it, with misgivings. Some time later we have a translator struggling to approximate the vision, not to mention the particulars of language and voice, of the text that lies before him. He does the best he can, but is never satisfied. And then, finally, we have the reader. The reader is the least tortured of this trio, but the reader too may very well feel that he is missing something in the book, that through sheer ineptitude he is failing to be a proper vessel for the book’s overarching vision.
I don’t mean to suggest that writer, translator and reader are all engaged in a mass exercise in disappointment. How depressing would that be? And untrue.
And still. We, as a species, are always looking for cathedrals made of fire, and part of the thrill of reading a great book is the promise of another yet to come, a book that may move us even more deeply, raise us even higher. One of the consolations of writing books is the seemingly unquenchable conviction that the next book will be better, will be bigger and bolder and more comprehensive and truer to the lives we live. We exist in a condition of hope, we love the beauty and truth that come to us, and we do our best to tamp down our doubts and disappointments.
We are on a quest, and are not discouraged by our collective suspicion that the perfection we look for in art is about as likely to turn up as is the Holy Grail. That is one of the reasons we, I mean we humans, are not only the creators, translators and consumers of literature, but also its subjects.
2009/10/31
2009/03/02
Watching
“THE GRADUATE”
“THE GRADUATE”
February 17 2009 (Tue)
Belova Oksana (gr.303)
Everybody of us makes a lot of mistakes during his life. It’s impossible to live without doing stupidities and making mistakes…Some of them are very silly. After a fall a man should stand up and move to his aims, not lose heart. It’s important not to allow anybody to break you and your life…
Seeing the film «The Graduate», I found how the main character, a shy and hesitating guy turned into a strong personality, fighting for his woman and happiness. Delicate humour left a deep impression on me, I remembered the «luggage» of Benjamin – his toothbrush and the dialogue with his father:
- I just want to say one word to you.
- Yes, sir.
- Are you listening?
- Yes, I’m.
- Plastics.
- Exactly, how do you mean?
- There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
- Yes, I will…
The music in this movie is wonderful. Most if all I liked the melody «Sounds of silence». I was even humming it during the whole evening after we had watched the film.
The key actor Dustin Hoffman starred in his role; it’s a powerful picture, an amusing and delightful comedy.
The movie was fairly nominated for a total of seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor ( Dustin Hoffman), Best Actress ( Anne Bancroft).
The producer’s work is enormous. He put his soul in the movie, the mixture of colourful costumes, delicate humour and a wonderful music and, of course, a cast of gifted actors and actresses have helped to create a real masterpiece.
I think «The Graduate» is a hit with the public nowadays, because the problem of man’s happiness and love WAS, IS and WILL be always actual.
2008/09/20
September 21 2008
DAY OF PEACE
Our Best Essays
FILMS: PATH TO WAR OR PATH TO PEACE
Groups 301 and 303
1.
Can you imagine life without television and films? Today we can watch television 24 hours a day; we can go to the cinema or put DVD into our computer when we want. We can ever make video films ourselves.
But imagine the surprise and the shock that people felt when they saw the first films in 1895! There was no sound, no colour and the films were very short: they lasted from 60 to 90 seconds! Besides, they didn’t tell a story. They were glimpses of real life: a military parade, a running horse, a boxing match, the ocean…One of the first films showed a train coming towards the camera. The audience panicked and ran away! The frightened people were sure that the train was coming into the theatre.
Gradually films became longer and started to tell stories. Edwin Porter was one of the first directors who made such a film in 1903. It was The Great Train Robbery, the first Western in the history of the cinema. This 11-minute film a sensation hit. Of course, first films were black-and-white…
But years and century passed, a technical progress didn’t come to a stand, and now we have DVD with our favourite films, which are very convenient and simple for their use and they don’t occupy many place on our shelves.
Why do we watch films? To be more informed and cultured? Films influence the way we see the world and shape our views.
It is true that the world today is full of dramatic events and most news seems to be bad news. But people aren’t interested in ordinary events. That is why there are so many films about natural disasters, plane crashes, wars, murders and robberies.
As George Mikes once said, TV and modern films teach us «how to kill, to rob, to shoot and to poison». I agree with this statement. Do you notice which films are made a hit with the public? It isn’t an amusing comedy like our favourite old pictures «Ivan Vasilyevich Changes his Profession», « A Brilliant Hand», « The Carnival»…Today people prefer watching crime films, in which men kill each other for their own profit, capture hostages, demanding money and property, begin to destroy their relatives, friends and their families to receive inheritance and riches. People forgot such words as «friendship», «mutual aid», «co-operation», «sincerity», «truth»…Isn’t it awful? There are so many cruelty, indifference, blood and violence in modern films. Can similar pictures teach us to be kind and set a good example? I don’t think so. Showing murders, violence and cruelty these films set a bad example for children, especially teenagers.
As I say, not all films are good. But many are made in good taste and with great professional skill. Remember our old wartime epics, such as «The Story about a Real Man», « There are calm reveilles here», «The Regiment s Son». The characters or these films sacrificed themselves, died hard, and died in the last ditch saving their friends and children, thinking about the Motherland. There aren’t like the invented Spider – Man who can fly from one place to another, there were no special effects in old pictures, they are simple for our perception, accessible for everybody. They teach us how to behave in difficult situations, not to lose a man s figure and not to betray. Our old films left a deep and lasting impression on me, especially the picture «There are calm reveilles here». I can not keep from crying when Liza Brichkina, Sonya Gurevich, Rita Osyanina, Zhenya Kamelykova and Galya Chetvertak died one after another. Can we compare these women with American characters Lara Croft or Lily from the picture «The fifth element» produced by L. Besson? It is out of the question! American ladies can not hold a candle to our woman.
Of course, I don’t have any right to criticize modern American films and their producers, but I can not deny that some of them are a run-of-the-mill films with obscure and complex ideas, which don’t teach us and our children to be real men and patriots. To add to all, there are no bad actors, there are only unsuccessful roles.
Nowadays our life is filled with good and bad news, but unfortunately pitiful events outweigh joyful ones…Every day during plane crashes, car accidents, explosions and other disasters people die…It is awful, isn’t it?
As W. Shakespeare says: «Our life is a cloth weaving by white and black cotton». Lets fill our life with pleasant events, there a white colour will be enough to cover all dark places and news, that’s why it is necessary to make films showing happiness, gladness, belief and peace, but not blood, violence and war.
2.
by Nastya MartynovaIt was once affirmed by the American president Ronald Reagan that only two things appear to be of great importance in the contemporary society, these are rackets and sport. To some extent he was certainly right. These things play a very important role, defining the position of the country in the modern world and its ability to protect its citizens. However it seems to be an indisputable fact, that Reygan forgot to take into consideration the existence of cinematography, which impact on hearts and minds of people is not a bit less than that of sport and rackets. Hundreds of people always chose idols to imitate among screen characters, fell in love with them, put them on pedestal. May be it’s one of the reasons why V. I. Lenin considered cinematography as one of the most crucially important arts of all times and epochs.
The main function of any art including cinematography is an aesthetic impact on the audience. Screen visual images may be by all means perceived as a true-to-life reflection of what happens in real life. It goes without saying that using different means of artistic expression, film creators are able to influence common people’s ideas and thoughts. Thus one may come to the conclusion that cinematography is capable to make people better from the point of view of morality, but at the same time may also have a negative ascendary on the audience.
To my mind, much depends not only on cinematographic art itself, but primarily on the people, who take part in the production of a certain film: the director, the script-writer and the producer.
The same may be related to any other art. Take literature for one. I’m deeply convinced that a person, who reads A. P. Chekhov’s collection of stories, will obligatorily become better. But if someone, especially unsteady in his moral convictions, comes across A. Hitler’s «My Fight», this may become a negatively-coloured turning point in his life. With cinema this problem is even more acute.
N. S. Michalkov’s film «The Twelve» provoked a number of disputes among critics. However one thing is evident to everybody: this movie makes people want to become better, kinder, undergo moral purification. It helps a person to take a detached view of himself and think whether his way of life is more or less righteous or not.
Unlike «The Twelve» the Russian cult film of the late 90-s «Brother» is even dangerous to some extent. A. Balabanov shot the movie, orientated to the audience, that is capable to see the distinction between the good and the evil. Unfortunately for many people the director’s subtle humour was left unnoticed or interpreted in the following way: the Russians are the masters of the universe because they are strong. Not kind or clever or inventive, but physically strong, and strength is the most omnipotent power in the world. Of course, such understanding of the film will never lead to peace, but to war only.
Speaking about documentary films, in which information is to be shown as it is, here even more depends on the director than in case with feature films. One and the same fact as for example the American bombardment of Belgrad is shown quite differently in different documentaries. In some of them the Americans are called «people of good will, who saved the nation from Milosevic’s rudimentary regime», while in the others they appear for good reason as «the warmongers».
Unfortunately one can’t but admit that nowadays everything is governed by the golden calf. In chase of profit many leading cinema studios flood the screen with blockbusters, horror films and comedies completely deprived of any sense, which do not arouse emotional response or make people think, but only cram the cinema-goers with the ideas of money worship, corruption, violence, with disturbing scenes and obscene language.
The palm in this area is of course retained by Hollywood. The image of a superhero, who is used to saving this coil world meanwhile having killed without a single remorse about a hundred both «bad guys » and completely innocent people, is certainly a most profitable and popular one. It has long ago become a hit with the public, which is so credulous that trusts all the ideas shown in such films implicitly, without realizing that mainly owing to the society’s approving of them, the cases of crimes, which make a human being’s flesh creep, the portion of aggression, hooliganism and drug-taking have recently greatly increased. Still, of course, I do not affirm that films are the root of all evils in contemporary society.
Many people are sure that movies full of sex and violence are capable to influence only those with unsteady psyche. Besides that a well-known formula exists: «never pay, if you do not like to», which means that nobody can make you do something, in our case watch a certain film, against your will. However it’s not as simple as that. Every psychologist will tell you that a human being’s brain has the capacity to absorb different information, which is persistently stuffed into it, like a sponge. Consequently, each time when watching films full of vice and violence, we subliminally absorb a certain part of what is being shown in it.
Isn’t it because of that American teenagers take tommy-guns and shoot down their classmates and teachers, and their fathers go hunting not foxes, but innocent passers-by? In addition to this, it’s a widely-known fact that many terrorists and criminals based their actions on popular blockbusters and crime films.
Still, it should be said that cinematography itself is a great creation of the mankind and of course appears to be a path to peace. However, it’s a real catastrophe if this powerful force falls into mean and unkind people’s hands. Our brilliant Soviet film «A man from Cappuccinos Boulevard» directed by A. Surikova reflects the truth of this statement in a most vivid and convincing way. Two diametrically opposing sides of the cinematographic art are shown in it: one of them - propagating the good, mercy and humanism, the other – the evil, violence and cruelty. However the message of this is he following: it is the man who is responsible for the way of cinematography’s development and only he can give the answer to the question whether films are a path to war or path to peace.
3.
by Ira ZeynalovaNobody needs the war
Nobody likes hostility.
(A.Smirnov)
Nobody likes hostility.
(A.Smirnov)
The theme of peace and war is actual today. A lot of new films have already been made and are being shooting now. The directors of these pictures want to show to the spectators the inhumanity of war, absurd ambitions of the leaders who cause death of peaceful people, chaos and break of families, meanness and treachery. On the other hand, we can see humanity and compassion, devotion to the native land and the honest fulfillment of the duty. On the screen we can also see the exploits of the simple soldiers and their commanders, who fight until they are dead, winning back every small piece of land.
In almost every film about peace and war we find episodes about unearthly love which teaches how to believe, to wait, to endure, to overcome all the difficulties and adversities of the war and to go towards your love. I can draw such examples of the films on this theme: ”The Dawns are Silent Here”, “War and Peace”, “The Cranes are Flying”, “The Star”, “The Ballad about a Soldier”, “The Fellow from Our Town”, “If Tomorrow is War”, “Anna Karenina”, “The Leopard”, “Doctor Zhivago”, “The Rider Named Death”, “Anastasia”, “Enemy at the Gates” etc. These films do not get old and we want to see them again and again. The film “If Tomorrow is War” shows the bravery and the power of the Red Army which wins a victory over the weak enemy. “The Fellow from Our Town” is the screen version of K.Smirnov’s play where the battles prove the war to be a hard and dangerous affair. The hero of the film is a simple man who is in places where his support and courage are necessary. Such a film encouraged those who indeed defended their country from the enemy. The plot is built in such a way that it does not tell us about the coming victories beforehand but it gives hope and confidence in it. In the final scene the spectator parts with the hero before the very battle, the end of which is so sheer. It is impossible to lose because you defend your relatives, children, and homeland. In Fadeev’s film “The Young Guards” the war is assimilated as counteraction of good and beauty to evil and disgrace. So, we see war in the films in its real expression- in blood, sufferings and death.
L.Tolstoy said: “The most difficult thing- but essential one- is to love life, to love even while one suffers, because life is all, life is god, and to love life means to love god”. It is impossible to argue with this saying and we are to choose: path to war or path to peace…
4.
by Svetlana Silaeva
Ask us this question 20 or 30 years ago the answer was only one –, of course, to peace. In the films of Soviet period villains were practically absent. But if they were then as a rule they were miserable and ridiculous. Nowadays the situation is quite the contrary. “Bad boys” began to become the idols for blind imitation. “Antikiller” is now preferred to “The Gentlemen of Fortune”.
During these years together with the changing of the social and political system in the world and especially in Russia there was a change which grown-ups didn’t pay any attention at. The inner world of children changed radically. If we want to understand to what modern films lead we can simply look at our young generation who was brought up on these “interesting” and, so to speak, wholesome ideas. For comparison I’d like to talk about the Soviet animated cartoons and films first of all.
Parents, grandfathers and grandmothers of our children came into the world when the world of childhood was the same as 100 and 200 years ago. The children got all love and were protected from the difficulties and problems of grown-up world. Parents told them kind fairy-tales and this world was so wonderful and amazing. They knew that policemen were kind and very tall. Everybody knew him. It was uncle Steppa. He would always come to your rescue. They knew that every profession was important and honourable. The life was so beautiful. In the world of cinema a hooligan was an absurd anomaly. To reeducate him was not worth the trouble. In the fantasy world villains were always punished and to imagine that films can be unkind was just impossible. Baba-Jaga and Kochei Immortal were silly, funny and helpless. They always lost meeting fearlessness, courage and true love and it was without the scenes with “dismemberment” and violence.
And suddenly grown-up uncles and aunts overthrew and profaned this marvelous world. Simultaneously different demons and villains rushed into it. All nice characters turned into beasts which gobble up each other. And, so, all kind films turned into a detailed description of different ways of murders. What the most terrible is that children, teenagers and adults don’t have any saving way-out of this situation because on all channels a lot of characters cry “I kill you” or something like that all time.
And these threats were not empty words…
The number of children who were killed by their contemporaries is increasing. Think about it. They were killed without any definite reason, just for fun! A lot of people don’t know that children under seven age cannot distinguish virtual and real worlds. They can’t understand that the action in films differs from the world outside the screen. The world of evil is awful but attractive. Children cannot tell good from evil and begin to act like the screen characters.
A girl of nine years old plunged a knife into her friend just because it looked interesting in the film. One more example – in Samara a daughter put out her father’s eyes because he forbade her to watch her favourite serial.
The observation under children shows that if a child under 7 spends watching criminal films with murders more than an hour a dominant from which practically nobody can save fixes in his subconsciousness. Finding himself in a situation like in the film such a child will kill without fail. The degree of mental affection depends on the time which a man spends watching scenes of violence. Adulter a man more chances to restore him to life.
People seeing violence on the screen try to protect themselves. But they can’t do it. The mind isn’t able to react to strong feeling of fear and it stops “to put a block” and react to fear. The mind grows stupid. People stops to be afraid of horrors and lose the capacity for worrying about other people. Very soon people will transform the world making it like their perception that is grim and primitive. Everything that hinder them will be eliminated.
We should understand that there is a necessity to clear the film production of cruelty. A famous scientific said: “This generation lives under influence of informational-defeating factor of fighting meaning”. Remember such films as “Wanted”, “Silent Hill”, “The Sin City” and other horrors and actions.
The cinema stopped to fulfill its function. It does not educate or introduce people into culture. The question which arises is why and what for we frighten and maim children and adults. A lot of psychiatrists think that the appearance of “skinheads” is connected with the massive influence on children and teenagers aggressive information through television and films.
Does it mean that we should refuse of watching films and television completely? Well, first of all it is just impossible. We live in the situation when most people are in, so to speak, dependence on visual information. Besides, we should be men of sense. We should buy films only of good quality and not empty of serious content and shouldn’t search for cheep fakes as they are always off-grade.
The aim of cinema production shouldn’t be profit as the films with good script are sometimes considered to be overruns and producers prefer to make global but vulgar films.
Fortunately nowadays a few people have understood that cinema should educate and encourage. Some of them even make films which help to relax using calming music and panorama. Of course, good films exist. The films with provocative ideas which lead to conflicts (sometimes between the nations) begin to decline. And I hope that kind films – films which arouse kind feelings in the people’s souls – will tap the deepest corners of people’s heart and make us just think what is good or not, what is real or only an image and that there are a lot of problems in our life which we should settle but in most cases don’t want to pay any attention to. For me an example of such a picture was the film “12” (by Nikita Michalkov).
During these years together with the changing of the social and political system in the world and especially in Russia there was a change which grown-ups didn’t pay any attention at. The inner world of children changed radically. If we want to understand to what modern films lead we can simply look at our young generation who was brought up on these “interesting” and, so to speak, wholesome ideas. For comparison I’d like to talk about the Soviet animated cartoons and films first of all.
Parents, grandfathers and grandmothers of our children came into the world when the world of childhood was the same as 100 and 200 years ago. The children got all love and were protected from the difficulties and problems of grown-up world. Parents told them kind fairy-tales and this world was so wonderful and amazing. They knew that policemen were kind and very tall. Everybody knew him. It was uncle Steppa. He would always come to your rescue. They knew that every profession was important and honourable. The life was so beautiful. In the world of cinema a hooligan was an absurd anomaly. To reeducate him was not worth the trouble. In the fantasy world villains were always punished and to imagine that films can be unkind was just impossible. Baba-Jaga and Kochei Immortal were silly, funny and helpless. They always lost meeting fearlessness, courage and true love and it was without the scenes with “dismemberment” and violence.
And suddenly grown-up uncles and aunts overthrew and profaned this marvelous world. Simultaneously different demons and villains rushed into it. All nice characters turned into beasts which gobble up each other. And, so, all kind films turned into a detailed description of different ways of murders. What the most terrible is that children, teenagers and adults don’t have any saving way-out of this situation because on all channels a lot of characters cry “I kill you” or something like that all time.
And these threats were not empty words…
The number of children who were killed by their contemporaries is increasing. Think about it. They were killed without any definite reason, just for fun! A lot of people don’t know that children under seven age cannot distinguish virtual and real worlds. They can’t understand that the action in films differs from the world outside the screen. The world of evil is awful but attractive. Children cannot tell good from evil and begin to act like the screen characters.
A girl of nine years old plunged a knife into her friend just because it looked interesting in the film. One more example – in Samara a daughter put out her father’s eyes because he forbade her to watch her favourite serial.
The observation under children shows that if a child under 7 spends watching criminal films with murders more than an hour a dominant from which practically nobody can save fixes in his subconsciousness. Finding himself in a situation like in the film such a child will kill without fail. The degree of mental affection depends on the time which a man spends watching scenes of violence. Adulter a man more chances to restore him to life.
People seeing violence on the screen try to protect themselves. But they can’t do it. The mind isn’t able to react to strong feeling of fear and it stops “to put a block” and react to fear. The mind grows stupid. People stops to be afraid of horrors and lose the capacity for worrying about other people. Very soon people will transform the world making it like their perception that is grim and primitive. Everything that hinder them will be eliminated.
We should understand that there is a necessity to clear the film production of cruelty. A famous scientific said: “This generation lives under influence of informational-defeating factor of fighting meaning”. Remember such films as “Wanted”, “Silent Hill”, “The Sin City” and other horrors and actions.
The cinema stopped to fulfill its function. It does not educate or introduce people into culture. The question which arises is why and what for we frighten and maim children and adults. A lot of psychiatrists think that the appearance of “skinheads” is connected with the massive influence on children and teenagers aggressive information through television and films.
Does it mean that we should refuse of watching films and television completely? Well, first of all it is just impossible. We live in the situation when most people are in, so to speak, dependence on visual information. Besides, we should be men of sense. We should buy films only of good quality and not empty of serious content and shouldn’t search for cheep fakes as they are always off-grade.
The aim of cinema production shouldn’t be profit as the films with good script are sometimes considered to be overruns and producers prefer to make global but vulgar films.
Fortunately nowadays a few people have understood that cinema should educate and encourage. Some of them even make films which help to relax using calming music and panorama. Of course, good films exist. The films with provocative ideas which lead to conflicts (sometimes between the nations) begin to decline. And I hope that kind films – films which arouse kind feelings in the people’s souls – will tap the deepest corners of people’s heart and make us just think what is good or not, what is real or only an image and that there are a lot of problems in our life which we should settle but in most cases don’t want to pay any attention to. For me an example of such a picture was the film “12” (by Nikita Michalkov).
2008/01/24
January 25
Russian Students Day
(Tatiana Day)
Russian Students Day
(Tatiana Day)
by Charles van Loo
January, 25 is memorial of Tatiana the great martyr which is a patroness of all Tatianas.
On January, 25 , back in 1755, Russian impress Elizabeth the Great founded the Moscow University.
Since that this day has become the most favorite and the merriest holiday of students.
See alsoen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatiana_Day
http://virginia.ru/newspaper/article.cgi?calendar&tatyana
http://www.answers.com/topic/tatiana-day
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