8-Part Film Adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina Is Free Online
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Such crisp, captivating film making from beginning to end. I do think the Soviet era is sort of mis-characterized in Western portrayals. Compare the Assa and the recent Chernobyl, both depicting about the same era.
Also "Assa" seems like a Soviet mirror image of how Blood Simple depcits the USA.
There were a lot of movies in the late 80s and the early-mid 90s about the life of lower-class people in the crumbling USSR/Russia of that time: from simple depressing realistic depictions to surrealistic transgressions, simply because all these kinds of expression became permissible. ‘Assa’ is essentially a fantasy about the zeitgeist. USSR functionaries weren't forgotten of course, but their portrayals flipped upside down—there isn't a single point of view on the Soviet time, and ‘Chernobyl’ likely just has a different perspective.
I'm gonna bet, though, that execs in ‘Chernobyl’ are close-ish to Krymov of ‘Assa’, at least as I will see them.
By the way, funny thing: in a podcast by Russian cinema critics on Western films about Russia, someone remarked that no matter how much effort the crew puts into researching details, something always gives away the fictional and foreign nature of the work. In ‘Chernobyl’, one such moment is when a woman goes against a committee of bureaucrats and tells them how wrong they are. (Again, IDK what actually happens in the scene.)
It all comes down to expecting that another society will obey one's own sensibilities.
George R. R. Martin has talked about how so many fantasy works based on medieval Europe have a scene in which the brave boy and spunky girl sassily talk back to the powerful lord. As Martin puts it, what really would have happened is that the boy would have been killed, and the girl would have been raped then killed.
Hopefully I can kill it with CSS via Stylish.
Ugh, no spoilers, you’ve ruined the movie for me now…
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears: https://youtu.be/NTWA_7-ld_U
This seems to vary a lot. I just checked and there were several Moscfilm films available (including Stalker) but I'm pretty sure I checked this about 6 months ago and there weren't many available - some were available for rent, but not free view.
Russian https://www.youtube.com/c/MosfilmRuOfficial
Global https://www.youtube.com/c/Mosfilm_eng
Usually both channels have subtitles but generally the global one is burnt-in while the russian one is selectable from the Youtube interface. Also the russian channel has much much more uploads.
And movies differ too to some extent. For example, Solaris is a single title in the global english channel (restored vesion) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ZhQPaw4rE
Whereas it's 2 part title as it was originally back then (2 reels)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-4KydP92ss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXa6XpaxBS0
Last but not least check geoblocking https://polsy.org.uk/stuff/ytrestrict.cgi For example Solaris is geoblocked in the US, both versions
https://polsy.org.uk/stuff/ytrestrict.cgi?ytid=https%3A%2F%2...
https://polsy.org.uk/stuff/ytrestrict.cgi?ytid=https%3A%2F%2...
If somebody is looking for a wonderful series, 17 Moments of Spring (Семнадцать мгновений весны) is an amazing series about the end of WW2 and the international tug-of-war largely between the USSR and USA to determine the fate of Germany, from the perspective of an individual who inside of Germany at the time. One of the few series I've watched multiple times.
The real beauty of the show is simply in the people and the dialog and discussions. It hits on issues that are timeless in such a concise and elegant way. This [2] is one of my favorite dialogues/scenes from the series. And it's that which makes it such a great series. The pacing is excellent, the story is great, and all of that. But the series just provides such amazing dialogues, even absent all context, over and over.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_M%C3%BCller_(Gestapo)
[2] - https://youtu.be/SfSW14ZVn8o?list=PLA6274B0CEF58CEB0&t=294
It's the pre-cut original version shown to the CCCP we'll never see. Had they approved it first pass we would have had a wildly different movie.
They cannot see how such a book could be one of the greatest of all time.
I think the analogy to music may be like: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is one of the greatest of all time. But it’s a really long and complex piece lasting over an hour. It can be hard to pay attention to the entire piece.
That said, the recommendation for reading Anna Karenina would be to read it fast or watch a good tv series on it. War and piece 2016 tv series was excellent for example.
I find timing plays a big part of my enjoyment of tougher classic novels. If I'm extremely busy or don't have time to dedicate to reading in decent chunks (an hour or more per day) then I find it hard to maintain motivation to read dense novels.
I somehow got through Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow but don't recommend anyone do that, I was just too stubborn to let it get the better of me :)
> I somehow got through Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow but don't recommend anyone do that, I was just too stubborn to let it get the better of me
Strangely I think everyone should do that. It’s an insanely fun book once you have accepted you are not supposed to get everything. Pynchon is probably my favourite author all things considered. Still I think starting with Inherent Vice, The Crying of Lot 49 or Vineland is probably a good idea.
On the other hand I recently gave Gravity's Rainbow a go right after slogging through David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and just couldn't do it. The premise seems interesting/odd enough, but I found the writing impossible to follow. I'm sure listening to it as an audiobook didn't help, but this was the first book I gave up on after 15 years of audiobooks. At some point I just thought to myself, why am I subjecting myself to something I neither comprehend nor enjoy...
I really like Pynchon style however. I think he perfectly nails the mix of serious and zany. Vineland is a good example. On the one hand, it’s a fairly serious book about the end of the counterculture and what the election of Nixon meant for the American dream but on the other hand it’s also a book in which a community of living-dead has its own radio station, one hundred pages in the middle of it concerns a woman training to be a lethal ninja and perfecting a delayed assassination technique and Godzilla makes a cameo and despite all of that the whole things feel coherent and properly jointed. I also really enjoy the rhythm of Pynchon sentences. I can definitely see why it wouldn’t work as an audiobook however. It’s writing you definitely have to read at your own pace.
Interestingly enough, I devoured Infinite Jest and loved the entire novel. Gravity's Rainbow was simply too confusing to me and I think I would have done better had I used a reading guide to support me through the novel.
A similar website exists for Infinite Jest: https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/in...
I think it is almost impossible to read Gravity's Rainbow exactly once. Either you give up halfway through it, or you finish it and re-read it. It makes more sense, I think, when re-reading it.
I read AK next and it was great. A customer at work saw me carrying AK and suggested I read BK, so I did. I too found BK to be my favorite of FD's novels. I also read most of his other novels, except I only got part-way through The Idiot. When I returned to school, I took a Russian Literature course, for which I reread W&P, AK, BK, and Crime and Punishment (instead of using the Cliff's Notes).
(My professor pointed out the humor at the end of AK, something I had failed to see in two readings: the narrator is talking to what's-his-name, who has a horrific toothache and therefore doesn't really care that the most beautiful woman in Russia ... oops, no spoiler here! It was kind of funny when he explained it and he was a zillion times more knowledgeable than me about FD and FD's writings.)
Again, I had youth on my side and, as you noted is important, I had the time to concentrate on the books. Decades later, a few years ago, I finally read The Idiot all the way through -- it was a long slog; it being a weird story anyway didn't help.
But I tried several times reading or listening to The Brothers Karamazov and I didn't manage to finish it, I felt out of touch with the characters, their little lives and foibles weren't interesting, the tone felt dry and didactic, and there was no "fun" mystery to keep me hooked.
This was weird because I did manage to finish and ultimately like Crime & Punishment several years earlier.
However like you said, this was back before I had my current job. I wouldn't be able to read any of them today, I think, I'd lose motivation.
Though it might be because I actually found his materialistic approach to history very interesting and his views an leadership extremely valuable. So I am one of the few that actually enjoyed all the rambling about how much Napoleon sucked.
It is one of the few books that made a lasting impression on my worldview. I wish more management type people would read it. It just so exhausting to work with people that see leadership as some ego trip. A good leader's job is to simply enable the people to do their job.
Funny enough I don't remember much about the actual characters. Really need to read it again some other time. AK was a bit more difficult for me as it is more story-driven and a bit more subtle with it themes.
> It just so exhausting to work with people that see leadership as some ego trip.
I think that my biggest surprised on reading a book by a Russian count was that he was a strong opponent of the Great Man theory of history.
I read the first four ASOIAF books in two weeks (before the TV show). I read the fifth one in two days straight after buying the ebook at midnight on release day.
I have repeatedly failed to read more than a few dozen pages of LotR.
After they reach Bree, the entire thing was a breeze for me
I enjoyed much more the "essay-like" parts than the actual novel, and they stuck with me unlike the rest of the details of War and Peace.
Have any of those critics tried reading a George R.R. Martin novel from the past 25 years or so?
Whereas I've read AK three times.
Perhaps a better example would be someone in the 60's choosing to listen to an old Andrew Sisters record, or purchase a new Bob Dylan LP. The Andrew Sisters (as fun and lovely as their music is) would not speak to that present moment in the same way that Bob Dylan would.
Many aspects of art and culture are timeless, but many are not. There will always be a demand for new works to respond to the current day.
The only thing that hasn't got better is speech clarity which is often terrible in modern films.
I'm generally a fairly well-read guy, so I would like to knock this classic out, but I am not sure how.
War and Peace was hard to start because of all the characters, but I got lost in it and it was really worth it. You don't have to pay a lot of attention to the chapters on the meaning of history unless it interests you. Anna Karenina I felt like I dived right into because it was a "smaller" story focused on really well defined characters. But I don't feel like it gripped me all the way through as much as War and Peace.
With books like that-- if you have the time to really sink into them-- you feel like you know the characters as people in the way you know your friends. They are like people you have known. The closest modern book to that I think is A Suitable Boy.
But if it isn't for you in terms of your time or your interest you shouldn't feel bad about it.
There were the perfect openings for laying down and just read until you forget to eat. In the end, there was some sort of sorrow of having to leave the characters behind.
It is very hard to get such openings today.
Don't force yourself to read a book you don't enjoy. Life is too short. There are so many books out there.
As many 19th century novels, the plot takes some time to get underway, but I was gripped by the characters and the language from the start. Perhaps you should think of it like a TV show which take a few episodes to establish the characters and universe, before the story gets underway.
Start with some easy Tolstoy, like Kholstomer, The Story of a Horse, or Master and Man. If you don't like those, maybe you're just not a Tolstoy reader. No problem there.
http://www.lrgaf.org/training/kholstomer.htm
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/986/986-h/986-h.htm (Master and Man)
I love 19th-century English literature, especially Hardy, and the same goes for the Russians Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and the Ukrainian/Russian Gogol, so maybe it's a patience for carefully described settings/characters, carefully developed plots, and a willingness to be dragged, slowly, methodically, and for me, magically into another world and time. Not sure. It's possible certain books only suit certain temperaments. Tolstoy, I'm almost certain, appeals to those who've wrestled with religious belief or doubt for decades, whether they've moved towards or away from belief. He himself scared the Russian elite greatly because of his strong desire to live a truly Christian life, and his apparent willingness to do so. A truly Christian life terrifies most folks, religious or not. Don't assume I'm in sympathy with Tolstoy on this topic. But his sincerity clearly bled through into his writing, and gives it a power few other authors exhibit.
There may be authors on a par with Tolstoy, but I'm hard pressed to come up with one I consider better. War and Peace? Best book I've ever read.
The classics are not a homework assignment to be suffered through.
First of all, this sounds like wanting to "having had read" a book to check a box rather than the desire for the intellectual growth that comes from reading it.
> If other minds that I find interesting tend to mention a particular book a lot, I want in. I want to get it, to understand it, to have what they're having.
That isn't a book chosen for intellectual growth, that's a book chosen out of mimetic desire.
> The notion that people should only read things they already 'enjoy' is modern anti-intellectual bullshit. Perhaps enjoy was not the best word for me to use.
My point being, there are more classic books and books which other intellectuals reccomend than there is time in the world to read. Rather than keep banging ones head against the wall because this particular book does work out, they may be better served by trying a different book (one of the other 1,000s).
This point was not at all clear from your parent comment, which was easy to interpret as “if it’s hard, why try?”.
You’ve clarified that this was not your point, but I understand why someone would interpret the original comment as anti-intellectual.
But rather than “if it’s hard, why try?”, what I meant by it is "you've tried several times and still don't like it. Why is it that you're trying in the first place".
It is not anti-intellectual to say that one should stop reading a book they don't enjoy and don't have a good reason to get through. There are many other books which will qualify as an intellectual pursuit that the person could enjoy.
Pulling this momentarily into the technical domain, there are hundreds of ways to learn about computing, and the underlying concepts that make it all work.
If one day, I decide I want to learn how operating systems work, there are a myriad of resources I can choose from.
I might choose one, and discover that something about it just doesn't help me learn the subject matter. Perhaps it's too dense, or assumes knowledge that I don't yet have, or is just not written very well.
My end goal is still to learn about operating systems. I can abandon this goal entirely (which is how one might read that original comment, and I think it's fair to ask whether it's imperative that I learn about operating systems), or I can find other resources that help me achieve the same goal, possibly through a very different learning process.
All I'm saying is: "If it's hard, why try?"
Is very different from: "If it's hard, consider looking for another starting point"
To the point that the 2nd sentence takes on an entirely different meaning and leads to a very different conclusion than the 1st.
> It is not anti-intellectual to say that one should stop reading a book they don't enjoy and don't have a good reason to get through
I agree with this statement, but this is not what the original comment stated. The original comment made no distinction about "a good reason to get through" the material.
I'd go a step further and say that if you don't have a good reason to get through the material, and you don't enjoy it, it's actively harmful to spend the time. At that point, you might as well fire up your favorite video game or Netflix series, which will at least give you some momentary enjoyment.
But even then, some uncertainty emerges when deciding which things are important to get through. It is often not easy to make that judgement without understanding the material, which you cannot do without getting through it. And so we look to others who we respect, who found profound meaning, and trust that there's something there.
I think the most important thing is forming some idea of what you hope to achieve (a new understanding of things, or some insight into a particular phenomena, or personal growth, etc), and then making decisions about which steps you take next based on whether or not you're achieving that goal.
One of those steps might be choosing to stop struggling through a particular book. Or one of those steps might be deciding the original goal isn't worth the effort. But I do think that choosing purely based on enjoyment or difficulty will lead to never growing.
Growth usually comes via the hardest stuff, and if growth is important to you, a different decision making framework is required.
Yes, but I never claimed the first. I said "I think it's worth reconsidering why you wish to read this book if you do not enjoy it."
My point being that the original comment sounded more like wishing to check a box of having read a classic book rather than wanting to approach the book for what was in it and growing from the experience: > I'm generally a fairly well-read guy, so I would like to knock this classic out, but I am not sure how.
> I'd go a step further and say that if you don't have a good reason to get through the material, and you don't enjoy it, it's actively harmful to spend the time.
Yes I broadly agree with that.
> And so we look to others who we respect, who found profound meaning, and trust that there's something there.
There being something there for others does not mean that we will get the same thing out of it, or even anything at all if we're not in the right place for it. Doubly so if we did not pick the book because we wanted to get out of it what those others have said they got out of it.
Sure, but it's reasonable to want to try, especially for a novel considered by some to be "the greatest work of literature ever written". That seems worthy of investigation at least. Giving up when things get tough is a pretty problematic approach if you want to grow. Whether my objection matters admittedly depends on whether the goal is to learn/grow, but I think there's a good case to be made that it is.
> My point being that the original comment sounded more like wishing to check a box of having read a classic book rather than wanting to approach the book for what was in it and growing from the experience
But the point of being well-read isn't just to complete a checklist. I think you are reading very deeply into something and drawing a potentially unwarranted conclusion.
Everyone I know who reads avidly, and who many would consider well-read, who are even aware of the existence of Anna Karenina read not for the sake of it, but to improve themselves, their knowledge and understanding of the world around them, etc.
I think that's where our differences in this thread are coming from. I'm assuming the whole point is the acquisition of knowledge/understanding, and you seem to be assuming a different motivation, although I'm not entirely sure what that motivation is (I don't think "checking a box just for the sake of it" is a warranted conclusion in context, and "checking a box" is just a rhetorical device to help us understand that this person has a gap in their reading that they haven't succeeded in filling yet). Perhaps they primarily value good literature, in which case having a list makes quite a lot of sense.
If someone expressed the same frustration about the Greek myths, a potentially more productive response would be to point someone to Stephen Fry's Mythos, Heroes and Troy, which he wrote exactly for the reason that this comment thread exists: some people find the original material difficult to get through, but the underlying message was important enough to re-tell.
In the case of Anna Karenina, perhaps exploring the various translations that exist and choosing one vs. the other would be the ideal next step.
I think this and the rest of our disagreements is how we view the original comment, and the kind of motivations we ascribe to the original comment.
I'm biased, perhaps unfairly, in that the people I've met who talk about books this way do so with the goal of being able to say that they've read X, that they can show themselves as the kind of person who has reads books like X.
Again perhaps unfair to the original comment given that I don't know where they're coming from.
Because we are the rest we are mostly in agreement about. I am the last person to argue that one should give up when and things get difficult.
But not all roads to the acquisition of knowledge lead to this book, or any one specific book.
And I agree that not all roads lead there. My position was founded entirely on the stated desire to read this book, and the implied desire to learn from it.
Maybe that time would have been better spent on books you found meaningful at the time and to come back to this one when you would find it meaningful.
I don't know if this is a "tip" or not, but what I found easy about AK was the descriptions of people's inner lives, and how much insight Tolstoy has on the human condition. He was a very religious man, but the characters don't so much think about Christianity as live it (or try to).
Anna's feelings about Karenin's stuffiness, and their inability to connect, are SO modern. You see how they treat their son, and contrast it with the way "modern" parents try to raise their kids. Vronsky's behavior with his fellow soldiers is a beautiful picture of male bonding before there was such a term.
Writers are exhorted to "show, don't tell" and Tolstoy doesn't tell you Anna felt guilty, he shows you.
Another perspective shift that makes it more enjoyable: it's a time machine. I wouldn't care for that level of detail in a modern American context or even a fantasy, but a distinct culture nearly 200 years ago? Sign me up.
Then again, if you don't dig it no shame in moving on. There are more books than there is time to read them.
after reading that if you feel like reading tolstoy is something you want to do a whole lot more of, then pick up Anna Karenina or War and Peace. I've read both, because i enjoy reading Tolstoy, but i would not recommend reading them if you do not enjoy the process. there are plenty of other great literary works out there (and most of them are shorter).
Endings are hard. I suspect one of the things that has enhanced Tom Hanks' acting career is making sure most of the stuff he did had a good solid ending, not a quick fade -- consider Saving Private Ryan, and Castaway. Killer endings. Tolstoy, unlike Chekov, does great endings.
Also war and peace is truly amazing in the same vein
I saw a dust jacket quote that said something like, "Dostoevsky writes about the unconscious as though it were conscious". When I started reading his books, I felt like he naturally reveals his character's psychology through dialogue (both inner and intrapersonal). They are surprisingly relatable. They have quirks and insecurities, can be hot-headed one minute and fearful the next. "Do you know what it means to demand when you are only in a position to implore?" asks one protagonist. They struggle with big questions, their motivations are laid bare, and they endear empathy as would a self-destructive family member. Dostoevsky may not write inspired literature, but he has something important to say, and he says it from his uniquely Russian soul.
Sometimes the movie can be better than the book, especially if the book is a dense classic.
Anecdote: War And Peace was so massive it broke my audiobook reader app. 400 pages in it just quit progressing.
In Russia, that is. Har har har.
Not sure what's going on here and who blocked whom, but when people propose boycotting this vid due to its provenance, I have trouble even counting the layers of irony. There are at least two, but then it gets confusing.
1. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10785295/Russian-TV...