Unexampled shocking experiment on the Russian classical literature

11:02 PM / Posted by Linda McGregory / comments (0)

American publishing house "Harper Collins" is going to publish a new "adapted" version of "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy. The original version of 4 volumes will be shortened to about 900 pages. The editors suppose to address this book to the students studying creative work of Leo Tolstoy and other Russian classical writers. They think that it will be also interested to those who consider the original version to to be too long and difficult for reading. Thus, the parts of the book concerning battle scenes, philosophic speculations and lyrical descriptions of the nature will be cut off. "Harper Collins" says that these changes will be made according to the old original version of the book which has been found by them in archival manuscript copies written by the hand of Tolstoy and which has never been published before.

Together with it, the end of the book will be changed. The dramatic orientation of the book loses its significance. The book is going to present a typical Hollywood "happy end": the prince Andrey Bolkonsky will not die of his wounds, he got during the battle of Borodino, Peter Bezukhov will be alive and young. Thanks God, Natasha Rostova will have time to marry him...


First "War and Peace" was published by Leo Tolstoy from 1865 to 1869 in "Russki Vestnik" and told the story of Russia society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy's two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world's greatest novels. Indeed, in January 2007, Time magazine placed it third in their list of The 10 Greatest Books of All Time. Anna Karenina topped the list.
War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, age and marriage. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy's time did not consider it as such. It was Tolstoy who translated this book first into French. In 1885 Clara Bell translated it from French into English.


The professor of the Russian language and literature Anthony Briggs published his English translation of "War and Peace" in 2005. He responded to this news in a critical way. "To say that it's an original is a nonsense. It's a Hollywood happy-end version, accented on the sales. Frankly speaking, it is scandalous! Don't try to cheat us", he says.


The question is who will be the next. It's not bad to leave Juliet and Romeo alive. Why not change "American Tragedy" to "American Comedy"? It's unfair, isn't it?

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The most favourite New Year film

12:01 AM / Posted by Linda McGregory / comments (2)

The essential part of New Year in Russia is a film «Irony of Fate» directed by Eldar Ryazanov. It was shot in 1975 and is shown every single New Year's Eve. Many phrases from the film have become catch phrases in Russian. The term «Irony of Fate» relates to the analogy of gods playing with the mortals. The second title that adds with an "or", "S lyokhkim parom!" (literally something like "I congratulate you for the light steam") is an idiomatical phrase to compliment somebody who has just come out of the shower, the banya or the bathtub ("lyokhkij par" translates to "light steam"). The plot is closely connected with the peculiarity of Brezhnev era architecture. The matter is that the buildings being built in this period were identical and a man could easily mix up his own flat with his neighbour's one.
The story is very interesting, unusual and comic. At first it seems to the audience that it's just a show and nothing more but if you imagine Russia of those years you can easily realize that the story could really happen:
Some friends meet at a Moscow's banya to celebrate New Year's Eve (we call it Novy God). All of them get very drunk, and two of them, including the main character, Zhenya pass out. The others forget which of their unconscious friends was meant to be catching a plane to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and so Zhenya is put on the plane by accident instead of his friend. He wakes up at Leningrad airport, believing he is still in Moscow. He gets into a taxi and gives the driver his address. It turns out that there exists a street in Leningrad with the same name, and a building which looks exactly like Zhenya's. The key fits in the door of the apartment, and even the layout of the apartment is the same. Zhenya is too drunk to notice any difference, and goes to sleep. Later, Nadya, who lives in the apartment, comes home and finds a man she's never met before asleep in her bed. To make things worse, Nadya's fiance Ippolit, arrives before Nadya can convince Zhenya to wake up and leave. Zhenya desperately tries to get back to Moscow in time to spend New Year's Eve with his fiance Galya, and Nadya wants to get him out as fast as possible, but unfortunately there are no flights to Moscow for some time. The plot starts out as a comedy, but becomes more dramatic as it evolves around the relationship of Nadya and Zhenya, along with their relationships with their fiancees. Initially Nadya and Zhenya dislike each other intensely, but they eventually fall in love during the course of the movie. An important note about the coincidence with the addresses: many street names are/were common to Soviet and now Russian cities (for example, Sotsialisticheskaya, Lenin Street, etc.). Many houses look identical, and even apartments look very much the same from the inside. Thus, e.g. nobody has to ask for directions to the toilet, because the toilet is always next to the kitchen, and knives are always in the same drawer in the same cupboard that was built in all apartments of a certain type. The matching key is probably a joke by the film makers, though many Soviet locks look very much the same. The epoch distinguished by the shortage of goods, that's why you could always see the same glasses, the same furniture in every flat.
It's difficult to believe but you don't get tired of seeing this film again and again. I can't imagine the typical day of December 31st without it. There are films that are eternal. «Irony of Fate» is one of them.
(wikipedia.com, lenta.ru)

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