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QUOTE FOR THE DAY
"What a great thing is a police station! The place where I have my rendezvous with the State."--Velimir Khlebnikov.
DIFFERENT QUESTIONS
Some lines end with something like a fish hook—a “question mark” refers to a question.
Me? I wonder about five questions. Why did Zina’s daddy say that his eyes “popped out of his head”? They haven’t gone anywhere. Why does he say such nonsense? I crept up to the cupboard, sat in front of the mirror, and bulged my eyes out as far as they could go. Woof! My eyes didn’t go anywhere either—They stayed right in place.
Are there any fox terriers living on the moon? What do they eat? And do they howl at the earth like I sometimes do at the moon? And where do they disappear to when the moon goes out of sight for many days? Micky, Micky, someday you will drive yourself crazy!
Why do fish swim into an empty net when it is clearly a trap? Since you’re not able to live above water, just sit quietly in your pond, I say. I really pity them! In the morning, they blow bubbles up to the surface, and in the evening they are digested in a dark human stomach. Or worse! The mean cat takes them away.
Why was Zina’s nanny a brunette yesterday, but today her hair looks like golden straw? Zina giggled, but I was frightened and thought, “Well, Micky, thank God you are a dog.” Who would marry such a parrot? Black on Tuesday, orange on Wednesday, and on Thursday—blue with green stripes. Woof! The temperature has gone up.
How come when I act badly, they put a muzzle on me, but when the gardener gets drunk as a mad bull twice a week they do nothing about it? Zina’s uncle says that the gardener is “shell-shocked,” so we have to indulge him. By all means! I’ll learn what “shell-shocked” means, and then I, too, will become shell-shocked. Then they’ll have to indulge me. I’m going to go chomp on a bone (I buried it earlier. Where? I will never tell!), then I’ll write some more.
--By Sasha Chernyi, from Micky the Fox Terrier's Diary (1927), a children's book translated by me.
LITTLE ADULTS
Disturbing. Anna Skladmann on her series of photographs:
The series “Little Adults” explores what it feels like to be a privileged child living in Russia, a country where its radical history and social hierarchy still rules their daily lives. It is the exploration of the recently growning society of the “Nouveau-Riche” in which little children have been raised to become the “Elite” and behave like little adults.
[Spaceeba, Siberian Light!]
IVAN & THE MASTER AT STRAVINSKY'S CLINIC
An illustration by Irina Shipovskaia at the always fun Master and Margarita pages
DOWN WITH BLOOD!
I love this painting, "Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan, November 16, 1581," by Ilya Repin--but I love its history even more.
Supposedly, when Repin's painting was first exhibited in the Itinerant exhibition of 1885, its bloody representation of royal murder shocked Russian society, causing women to faint and men to lose their minds. A leitmotif of the response was the assertion that, above and beyond the "obsenity" of the subject matter, the painting simply depicted far too much blood--a sort of Scarface or The Godfather of its day. In fact, the Imperial Academy of Arts invited a professor of anatomy to give a lecture in which he claimed that impossibility that so much blood could result from such a wound delivered by Ivan the Terrible upon his son, also Ivan. Defenders of the painting ridiculed this "anatomical" critique and argued that its subject was in fact the tsar's repentance and self-castigation following his act of passionate violence--"a morally edifying theme that was intensified by its dramatic depiction," if you will. Nonwithstanding, Tsar Alexander III prohibited the public display of the work. However, in subseqent decades the public furor surrounding the painting died down, giving way to a celebration of Repin as a Russian artistic genius and the painting in question as one of his finest masterpieces.
But there's more!
IN YOUR WORLD, I AM A PASSERBY
'Tis not the first time that, dreaming of freedom, we build a new prison." -- poet Maximilian Voloshin.
Later, Voloshin would be accused of the worst sin in the Soviet ideologue's book: keeping aloof from the political struggle between Reds and Whites. In fact, he did not for he protected the Whites from the Reds and the Reds from the Whites. His house, today a museum, still has a clandestine niche in which he hid people whose lives were in danger.
Books
Poems from Children's Island by Sasha Chernyi
(Lightful Press)
