Russian Literature

I could not have invented my life better than it invented itself.... All I had to do was take possession of it to write about it." So says Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Laureate who has lived the terrible hardships of his landmark novels. In this gripping program, key figures such as Andrei Vassilievsky, the editor of Novy Mir; Nikita Struve, the first publisher of The Gulag Archipelago; and Solzhenitsyn himself, in a rare interview, discuss the events that have both stimulated and shaped a perilous lifetime of writing. Extracts from Archipelago and The Oak and the Calf drive home the harsh realities of life in the U.S.S.R. during the Stalin and Brezhnev regimes. (49 minutes)"

Arguably Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin established a literary tradition that was fully European yet distinctively Russian in character. This program tells the tale of a brief life that was itself worthy of fiction. Incorporating footage of Pushkin's lodgings, accoutrements, and environs as well as period artwork and architecture, it follows Pushkin from the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, where his literary career began, to the field of honor where, in a duel at age 38, it was cut short. A fine introduction to the author of Ruslan and Ludmila, Eugene Onegin, and Boris Godunov. (26 minutes)

The life of Boris Pasternak-crowned by a Nobel Prize he dared not accept-is a story of success soured by political oppression. Drawing on previously unavailable footage, this program parts what was the Iron Curtain to profile the renowned author, from his early achievements as an upcoming avant-garde poet to the humiliations and threats heaped upon him, late in life, as a result of writing the internationally acclaimed novel Dr. Zhivago. Archival interviews with contemporaries and film clips of Pasternak himself provide insights into the world of a talented writer stifled by Socialist Realism and nearly destroyed by his own masterpiece. (25 minutes)

A superb Russian film documentary of the life and loves, the thoughts and works, the great themes and the little individual lights and shadows that made Chekhov the man and the artist. Set in Moscow in 1914-ten years after Chekhov's death, long enough to provide some perspective on his greatness, close enough for memories to have remained fresh-the program gives us Chekhov through the eyes of those who worked with him and loved him, using superb Russian documentary footage to make both the playwright and his time come to vivid life. (Russian with English subtitles, 53 minutes)

Until recently, the serious works of Russian avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms-his absurdist pieces, the ones laced with irony and steeped in trenchant wit-were known only to the Soviet Union's literary underground. This production, reset in modern-day America, is the first film adaptation of Kharms' novella The Old Woman, a dark comedy about a man trying to get rid of a dead body. (62 minutes, b&w and color)

Considered the first modern novel, Crime and Punishment is both a compelling psychodrama and an unrelenting examination of modern humankind. This program skillfully interweaves riveting dramatizations of Fyodor Dostoevsky's masterpiece with Notes from the Underground and the autobiographical Memoirs from the House of the Dead. Penetrating observations are provided by Professor John Jones, of Oxford University, who scrutinizes the merciless introspection inherent in these works. (59 minutes)