http://volodya.blogsome.com Just another WordPress weblog Sat, 10 May 2008 13:56:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en   "I want to stress the point that the way Shakespeare is produced in all countries is not Shakespeare at all, but a garbled version flavored with this or that fad which is sometimes amusing as in the Russian theatre and sometimes nauseating as, for instance, in Piscator’s trashy concoctions. There ... http://volodya.blogsome.com/2008/05/10/on-how-to-produce-shakespeare/ Part I and part II. http://volodya.blogsome.com/2008/04/08/on-lolita/ "I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: ‘great books’). I am not ’sincere’, I am not ‘provocative’, I am not ’satirical’. I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art ... http://volodya.blogsome.com/2008/03/17/on-great-books/ "Anton Chekhov’s quiet and subtle humor pervades the grayness of the lives he creates. For the Russian philosophical or social-minded critic he was the unique exponent of a unique Russian type of character. It is rather difficult for me to explain what that type was or is, because it is ... http://volodya.blogsome.com/2008/01/22/on-chekhov/ "Literature is invention.  Fiction is fiction.  To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.   Every great writer is a great deceiver." http://volodya.blogsome.com/2007/08/30/on-literature/ "Of course, no matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. ‘To take upon us the mystery of things’—what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and for Cordelia—this ... http://volodya.blogsome.com/2007/08/14/on-the-metamorphosis/ http://volodya.blogsome.com/2007/08/10/on-raising-eyebrows-2/ "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All ... http://volodya.blogsome.com/2007/08/07/on-fiction/ "I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen ‘King Lear,’ never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, ... http://volodya.blogsome.com/2007/07/28/on-friends/   "I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life. I never use schoolboy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office or in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed ... http://volodya.blogsome.com/2007/07/20/volodya-on-volodya/