Pyat vecherov

Van Cliburn

Jan 252010

I’m trying to figure out if this footage of Van Cliburn shown on the TV in Pyat Vecherov is really from his famous 1958 visit to Russia for the Tchaikowsky Competition, or if it’s from some later visit in the 1960s. Nothing in the movie or the clip says outright that it is from 1958, but 1958 is a year that would fit the setting of the film.

Here is a YouTube clip that contains some footage from 1958.

Here is some from 1962.

At first it seemed to me that the TV in the movie showed an older Van Cliburn than the 1958 one. It seemed he had bigger hair in 1958. But it’s hard to say for sure.

I like to have my memories calibrated accurately about these things. We didn’t have TV in our house until 1958, though everyone else of my age (that I knew of) had one in the home long before that. We did have a phonograph, though, with a 45rpm and a 78 rpm turntable. We didn’t have 33rpm records at our house until 1963. I thought I had remembered that even before 1958 we had a recording on 45rpm records with Van Cliburn playing some Rachmaninoff. I called my father tonight to ask. He remembered those records (which he no longer has) but said that pianist was Arthur Rubenstein. But I did hear talk about Van Cliburn back then.

On the TV he is trying to speak in Russian. Was he just just reciting those words for the occasion, I wonder? Or was he really trying to learn some Russian? So far Google hasn’t helped me find an answer.

Do the workers like you?

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Jan 042010

To American ears, it’s a bit strange for Tamara Vasilyevna (played by Ludmila Gerchenko) to be asking the question, “Do the workers like you?” It’s not a strange thing to wonder about, but it’s a strange thing to be asking an old boyfriend about, or to be asking almost anyone. If an American did get asked that question, the answer that Aleksandr Petrovich Ilyin (played by Stanislav Lyubshin) gave would be a likely response.

Although slightly strange, I didn’t think much about it until I got to the latest part of a book I’ve been reading, “Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization : Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-war Russia” by David Priestland (2007).

In the late 1920s, when Stalin decided it was time to shut down the NEP, he was moving to a “populist revivalist” rhetoric and policy. (“Populist revivalist” is Priestland’s term for one of the various currents of thinking in Russia at the time. I don’t know if the term has been used or adopted by anyone other than Priestland, but it does seem appropriately descriptive.)

On page 186 I read that at the end of 1927, Stalin’s man Sergo Ordzhonikidze wrote a report for the fifteenth party congress.

While [Ordzhonikidze] rejected the left’s charge that the state apparatus was ‘alien’ to the working class, he was highly critical of officials, not merely for their inefficiency but also for their poor treatment of workers. Officials’ ‘treatment of people’ had to change, he declared. A cheap and efficient apparatus as existed in Germany was not enough: the apparatus had to be closely ‘linked’ with the masses and had to work together with the workers and peasant rather than to ‘command’ them. … Those officials who behaved arrogantly to workers and peasants were, the congress declared, guilty of ‘sabotage’ (pages 186-187)

In the next chapter we see how this concern for the relationship between workers and supervisors should not be taken at face value, but neither was Stalin just cynically making it up to hide his true intentions.

I think I can see how it’s leading to the purges of 1937, but I haven’t read a lot further than this point yet.

It’s a complicated story and I’m not going to try to summarize it here. All I’m saying is that given this context, it became less odd to me that a movie made in the 1970s, portraying the period of the 1950s, would have someone asking the question, “Do the workers like you?” Stalin had tapped into a populist sentiment that was current long before the late 1920s, and isn’t surprising that it would have persisted. It’s not completely different from the currents of populism that have existed in the United States, but it’s a slightly different flavor.

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Dec 192009

It was at this point in Five Evenings, before I got a good look at his face, that I suspected I had seen this guy before. It was the way he stood with his back straight, hands in his pockets, weight not quite balanced on both legs. It’s a younger version of the same guy who had played Uncle Vova in Kin-Dza-Dza!

I had to look up his name again. It’s Stanislav Lyubshin.

I didn’t recognize Lyudmila Gurchenko from her posture, though. It was not until she showed this facial expression that I recognized her.

I do try to read the film credits at the beginning, but I somehow missed these names. I would have recognized Gurchenko if I had read the subtitles, but I try to read the Russian instead, and am slow enough at it that I rarely have time to check the English. I’m getting better at it, but still can’t read them all as fast as they roll by.

I did catch Nikita Mikhalkov’s name in the credits, though. It’s OK. Just because I don’t like him doesn’t mean he hasn’t done some very good work Actually, his work as a director has usually been quite good, with a few exceptions like 1612: Chronicles of the Dark Times. His work as an actor is often not so good, though there are exceptions, like the role he gave himself in Unfinished Piece for Player Piano. His politics these days are not good, and sometimes his movies have a repressive political agenda – as in Twelve. Well, maybe that’s the only one. I suppose some people may see a foreign policy agenda in 1612, but if he took advantage of the opportunity (e.g. in the Russian attitude toward Poland) it was in nuances I was not able to detect even though I was looking for them.

We’ve only watched the first three YouTube segments of Five Evenings so far, but are looking forward to the rest. Myra and I enjoy watching movies about the 50s, even if it’s about countries where the 1950s were different than in the American midwest where we grew up. Or maybe especially if it’s about the 1950s in other countries.

We’re starting to get used to the idea of life in communal apartments, too. (Just the idea. We have no intention of looking for an opportunity to try it out ourselves.)