Chekhov's Gun

Interesting to see that Elem Klimov's Come and See topped the list of Time Out's 50 greatest WWII movies.  It is one of my favorites as well as Klimov gives the viewer a very visceral account of the battle lines in Belarus during the war.  This side of the Soviet-German war was rarely mentioned at the height of the Soviet Union, and I don't think Klimov would have gotten the movie made if not for Perestroika. Surprisingly, the only other Soviet film to make the Top 50 was Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying .  Notable omissions include Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent .  Shepitko was married to Klimov. However, I would say that the seeming simplicity of Ivan's Childhood is deceiving.  As I noted before, I'm not convinced the war scenes were real, but that Tarkovsky was using the standard war film conventions to tell a much more compelling story that prefigured such works as The Stalker , which ostensibly was

It's been awhile.  I haven't forgotten about this blog, just focused on other topics the past month.  I had started reading Rowan Williams' book on Dostoevsky and the matter of faith in his novels.  It is quite good, as Williams offers his interpretations of how Fyodor addressed the subject, drawing from Dostoevsky's own notes on the books, which are available in print.  Williams also heavily references Bakhtin, who wrote a study on Dostoevsky's poetics, which is also available in print . From the accounts I've read, Dostoevsky was very faithful to his Orthodox religion.  Perhaps the most explicit of his novels is The Devils  where one of his characters categorically states that there is no Pan-Slavism without religion.  This is what unites the Russian people.  Dostoevsky was always quite harsh on the budding socialist movement in the country and the nihilism so often expressed in the youth.  He even poked fun at other author's literary characters lik