[Eric]

Liam is quite right in #53. I was mixing up my Tarkovsky films, after all these years. I haven't seen any of them for donkey's. Jüri Järvet was indeed in Solaris, as Liam mentions, and a Lithuanian actor called Donatas Banionis was also in that film. But Stalker was definitely filmed in Tallinn. And because the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic was slightly more liberal than Russia, at the time, the first monograph book on Tarkovsky, by Tatiana Elmanovitš, appeared in the Estonian language in Estonia. I have a copy.

I think the problem with many post-Soviet states is that enforced Soviet puritanism has caused some authors to pour out violence and filth, now that the USSR is gone, and Glavlit has gone on holiday. It's a rather adolescent gesture, like first saying naughty words in front of one's parents at the age of fifteen. I hope Russian literature grows out of it. (Liam: I could have said "getting pissed on the train" for shock value.)

I really would like to read some more sober contemporary Russian literature that explains and describes Russia during the 2000s. But in English translation! I still think it is absurd, given the momentous events around 1991, that there aren't a few new novels available in English that give the flavour of Russia now, not only books about the Russia of princes, landowners and bureaucrats back in 1850.