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By Olga Bobrova
This summer a Pushkin calendar will be released as part of the celebrations of the poet's anniversary due next June. This richly illustrated album features Pushkin's opinions about many of the great personalities of world and Russian culture, poetic lines devoted to them, other observations and opinions. The calendar also portrays Pushkin through the eyes of outstanding figures of world culture. The calendar consists of 365 days, starting with June 6, Pushkin's birthday, and ending with February 10, the day of his death. Its every day features the day of birth or death of a personality Pushkin mentioned. Some of the pages are devoted to the major events in the poet's life, others just feature things he liked or his hobbies.
The Pushkin Calendar is the result of nearly 10 years of the work of physicist researcher Vladimir Chepkunov and poetess Nadezhda Kondakova, both born devotees of Pushkin.
Fyodor Dostoevsky said once that Pushkin possessed the gift for being able to respond to every event in the world. "It's striking," says Vladimir Chepkunov, "that there is no great name or landmark in world history that would have failed to attract Pushkin's attention. He embraced Ovid, Vergil, Dante, Rafael, Moliere, Rousseau, Voltaire and Mozart. There was no limit to Pushkin's ability to respond. The calendar contains names ranging from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to Russian late 20th century writers Soloukhin and Okudzhava. Within these limits lies the whole history of world culture. Pushkin's opinions were always brief and divinely precise. Pushkin's drive for knowledge and constant perfection was extraordinary. He could never resist the temptation to buy a book, whatever its cost. After his death he left behind a huge debt for books. His library contained practically all books related to world and Russian culture. Pushkin's character and soul were so rich, his intellect so great, that in his work he could identify himself with an Englishman, Frenchman or Spaniard. Meanwhile, he never left Russia. He absorbed other people's cultures through literature with the help of the divine spark he had in himself and the work of his intellect."
Brought up in the French tradition of the Russian gentry, Pushkin knew French, as many Frenchmen admitted, better than many native speakers. And, of course, he was in his own element with French literature. Thinking of the writer's craftsmanship, the poet said: "Precision and brevity are the primary virtues of prose. It requires thought and more thought…" He found the best specimens of such prose in Voltaire. France was the first to recognize Pushkin as a figure on the European scene. Prosper Merimee became the first translator of Pushkin's poem "Gypsies" and short novel "The Queen of Spades". He called Pushkin Europe's first poet.
In English literature Pushkin's idols were Byron, who, as he put it, drove him crazy, and Shakespeare, whom he called the father of drama writing.
Pushkin's interests included the East. He went in for the Arab tales "A Thousand and One Nights", poetry by Hafiz and Saadi. Pushkin took a line from Saadi as an epigraph to his poem "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai" (1822-23).
Pushkin left us his thoughts about the holy book of the Muslims."Many ethical truths are related in the Koran in a strong poetic way." The poet began reading the Koran during the hard period of 1824, when he was exiled in the settlement of Mikhailovskoye. He wrote a cycle of verse "In Imitation of the Koran".
The February pages feature the Italian operatic composer Rossini, mentioned by Pushkin in his novel in verse "Eugene Onegin", as "Europe's spoilt child" and Orpheus. The French writer Victor Hugo, in Pushkin's description, was "nervous and rude" and his novels were "filled with dirt and fire". Also mentioned in the calendar are the English painter George Dow, who was invited to Russia to paint the portraits of the Russian heroes of the Patriotic War of 1812, the German philosopher Emmanuel Kant, and the Italian genius Michelangelo. Remembering the legend that the great master allegedly killed a model so as to know how to portray the dying Christ with more precision, Pushkin gave much thought to the problem of compatibility of genius and evil in his tragedy "Mozart and Salieri".
The February page also features the 20th century Russian poet Boris Pasternak, born on February 10, on the day of Pushkin's death, and the classic film director Sergei Eisenstein, who devoted to his idol a section in a book and believed Pushkin's poetry was all meant for cinema. Also on the February pages are two women - Anna Kern and Carolina Sobanskaya, the poet's muses. One of these two women, who deeply touched the poet's heart, Sobanskaya was an angel with a dark soul, a secret police agent, who reported on Pushkin, the other, Anna Kern, remained his good friend until his death. Anna was immortalized in the famous poem "I Remember the Wonderful Moment" .
 
 


CHALLENGING ONESELF

Marking the 125th Birth Anniversary of Stage Director V. Meyerhold

By Olga Rusanova
"He built a production as they build a house. And we were happy to be even a door knob in this house", so the actors, who knew him, used to say about the outstanding Russian stage producer Vsevolod Meyerhold. On February 9, we marked his 125th birth anniversary, a remarkable date for the Russian and world stage. At the turn of the century Meyerhold was among the pioneers who created a new, avant-garde theater, a theater that survives to this day. Much from the master's heritage will undoubtedly be taken along to the 21st century. Meyerhold died almost 60 years ago, in 1940, disappearing in one of the Stalin labor camps. At first the totalitarian regime elevated the innovative stage producer, who, in a sense, became a spokesman of the revolution, and then destroyed him without mercy. Yet Meyerhold was famous in his lifetime and had a theater bearing his name, which existed for 15 years, from 1923 through 1938.
At first Meyerhold's revolutionary pathos and rebellious spirit appealed to the regime. But his artistic individuality, bright, free and unpredictable, caused mistrust and began to be feared. This provided sufficient reason for arrest. And Meyerhold disappeared in the camps. His art too was long absent from the Russian stage. Not until the 1960s, the years of the so-called ideological thaw, was his name mentioned anew and his art began to be revived.
Unfortunately, we can get acquainted with Meyerhold's style of staging only from memoirs. Mikhail Chekhov, a nephew of the famous playwright, actor and stage director, who taught many of the Hollywood stars the art of acting, once wrote to Meyerhold: "You know what a tight grip I have on your art. I feel I must imitate you in many ways!" And the Nobel Prize winner, poet Boris Pasternak: "When I came to You, I knew that this was the first and only time that I had come to the theater. I realized what it means and believed in the reality of such art... You are a dramatist no lesser than You are a stage director, and also an amazing historian… I can't say how much I've received from Your "Government Inspector" and "Woe" (Woe to Wit)".
The range of Meyerhold as director was enormous. He embraced the Russian and western classics, including Moliere, Dumas fils, Ibsen, Pushkin, Lermontov, Ostrovsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy… and the contemporary dramatists Maeterlinck, Bernard Shaw, Mayakovsky, Olesha, Blok. He also produced the operas "Tristan and Isolde" by Wagner, 'The Queen of Spades" by Tchaikovsky, and "Orpheus" by Gluck.
On stage and in life he was nervous, passionate, hot-hearted, and this attracted people to him. He had contacts with a great number of outstanding contemporaries, including Tolstoy, Chekhov, Prokofiev, Shagal, Tairov, Benois, Bakst, Apollinaire. His company boasted such celebrities of the Russian stage as Garin, Babanova, Iliinsky, Zharov, Okhlopkov, Martinson.
Meyerhold was dubbed a theater magician, but more often people called him Master. The pupil of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, he argued with them and moved farther from their school in a search for new forms and means of expression. Yet he always thought of them with respect and admiration. What was Meyerhold's own manner of staging? The leader of the Meyerhold Creative Center Valery Fokin has this to say about it: " He always sought to create a sensual theater… an emotional theater… He loved the classics but never bent the knees to it. True, he had some experience of transforming famous plays. But finally he realized that one should be free when dealing with any writer, even feeling great love and respect for this writer, trying to speak with him as equals. That's what appeals to me in this figure. More important is that his every production was a debut. We have a cliched idea of him as an innovator, a rebel who destroyed everything. We forget that his every work was new to himself, that every new work was a challenge."
"The biography of a true artist is that of a person beset with self discontent," Meyerhold used to say. "The life of an artist is the rejoicing on one day, when the last touch is thrown onto the canvas, and the greatest suffering on another day, when the artist sees all his blunders. Only an amateur is free from doubt and is always content with himself. Master is always very strict to himself." Indeed, Vsevolod Meyerhold was a Master .
 
 

 
 
 
 

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