joanna: Thanks for the review. I will check it out.
I grew up on Soviet/Russian movies, and they were great.
In fact, let me go on a little rant here because I truly think that USSR/Russia has made enormous contributions to art: Tolstoy and Chekhov have not yet been matched. Filmmaking owes most of its art to Eisenstein. In dance they are, again, the masters, with the Ballets Russes basically defining the most radical and nuanced trends in twentieth century art. They are born poets....whether they apply it to filmmaking, dance, literature, computer games, etc...
I was somewhat irritated with their lick the western arse filmmaking of the eighties, but I have forgiven them.
End of rant.
Joanna
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Night Watch (the book) has just been translated into English, by the way:
The Moscow Times
Seize the Night
Sergei Lukyanenko's novel "Night Watch" was a favorite in Russia long before it became a blockbuster film. Now English speakers can finally judge the original for themselves.
By Jeff Parker Published: September 15, 2006
For longtime fans of Sergei Lukyanenko's "Night Watch" books, the much-hyped movie versions directed by Timur Bekmambetov likely came as a surprise. While the books might be described as a modern-day "Lord of the Rings" fantasy, the films -- two of which have been released in Russia so far -- took a different tack, somewhere between the cyberpunk of "The Matrix" and the patriarchal battle of good and evil in "Star Wars." The books, however, were already sci-fi classics in Russia before the film "Night Watch" hit U.S. screens earlier this year. Now Miramax Books has published the first book of the series in English translation.
For those unfamiliar with the basic plot, "Night Watch" is set in contemporary Moscow. Unbeknown to regular citizens, the city is policed by an ancient race of beings called Others, who choose to be either Light or Dark. According to an age-old truce, the Light Ones staff a Night Watch to patrol the night and to ensure that the Dark Ones don't overstep their bounds; one of the central points on which the novel turns is that the Night Watch allows registered Dark vampires and werewolves a certain number of human kills without interference. Conversely, the Dark Ones operate a Day Watch to patrol the day and to ensure that the Light Ones don't use their powers to alter the balance of good and evil in the world.
The book begins with the sudden promotion of Anton Gorodetsky, a low-level Night Watch analyst, to agent. Anton's first assignment is to hunt down a vampiress who is illegally pursuing a little boy named Egor. On the way, he encounters Svetlana, whose name fittingly means "light" in Russian and who may be the catalyst for the world's final fall into darkness. With the possible exception of Olga, an ancient sorceress who in punishment for past deeds has been transmogrified into a white owl, Anton, Svetlana and Egor are the only truly rounded characters, and the novel revolves around their moral contemplations on the nature of good and evil and on the problematic truce.
Giving "Night Watch" an immediate measure of credibility in its English launch is the sound delivery of Andrew Bromfield, the acclaimed translator of Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin. The material Bromfield chooses to translate has long had a certain commercial flavor, but he always preserves a palpable literary "something" that brings his authors alive in English. Take, for instance, his term for the multi-level alternate reality inhabited by the Others. The higher a character's level of power, the deeper into this blue, moss-covered space he or she can go. The word for the space, sumrak, has been translated variously as "the Darkness" in online chatter or, in subtitles to the film, as "the Gloom." Bromfield finds a better variant with "the Twilight," giving it a less sinister tone.
But if the Anglophone sci-fi fans eagerly awaiting the English version of Lukyanenko's book are expecting a novel corresponding to the film, my guess is they will be disappointed. This is perhaps to be expected when a film is hyped internationally, complete with liquid-filled Night Watch mouse pads swimming with little plastic bats, ahead of the book on which it was based. Yet the narrative in the book is much more rich and complex, stripped of the silly father-son dynamic between Anton and Egor that was the crux of the films. Less shabby and run-down in the novel, Anton is a genuinely tortured addition to the long cast of clerks and titular councilors in Russian fiction who ponder not so much their station in life as the condition of the moral infrastructure around them.
For Russian readers, these questions are familiar. But the book is also loaded with playful nods to the political peculiarities of contemporary Russia and to other more deeply held aspects of the Russian character. Just as real-life Russian policemen habitually stop people on the street and ask them to produce their papers, the Night Watch and Day Watch officers have the right to pull over Others and check their registration, which often results in little bargains and bribes such as one side trading the other the right to a low-level magical spell. In a similarly jaded comment on the media, newspapers that are read in the Twilight replace actual propaganda headlines with the truth. At one point, Olga acknowledges that the Light Ones were responsible for World War II and the Russian Revolution, among other world calamities. She explains that something on an equivalent scale is about to happen -- and it must, she says, happen in Russia. "The potential of Europe and North America has already been exhausted. Everything that was possible has already been tried there ... all those countries are already half asleep."
No less familiar to readers of Russian literature are the questions raised about superstition and fate -- questions on which the characters contradict themselves or through which fissures in the logic of Lukyanenko's mythical world begin to show. At first, Anton watches what he says about people, lest his words manifest themselves as an actual curse -- a small twister that Others can see spinning above the accursed's head. Simply uttering to another person "I hope you die, you bastard," or "Go to hell, will you?" and a little black whirlwind moves "across from the Dark Side, draining good fortune and sucking in energy." Traditional Russian culture is full of superstitions about what one can and cannot say if one wants to avoid casting the evil eye, and Lukyanenko's supernatural world hinges on that theme. But all too often, Anton readily dismisses fate: "Superstitions are dangerous," he says. "They give people false hope."
Anton is similarly mercurial about abusing his powers, though he knows that a misuse of Light power creates a dangerous opportunity for an equivalent use of power in service of the Dark. When he first notices Svetlana in the subway because of the voluminous tornado spinning above her head, he goes against his better instincts and uses his power to try to help her in an unauthorized way, a move which ultimately binds their fate. By the end, however, at a rather absurd Night Watch slumber party at a dacha, the agents zap mosquitoes with fireballs, and Anton begs them to cure his hangover using magic with no mention of the potential repercussions for such misuse.
If there is one uniting factor to how Anton's views shift and change, it is that he generally follows his own instincts rather than fate or the forces of Light and Dark. Even the all-knowing and all-powerful Others, Lukyanenko seems to be saying, are ruled by emotion in the end -- a conclusion that, though rather sappy, jibes with what less fantastical Russian writers have concluded about those of us who are all too human.
Jeff Parker is the Russia Program Director of the annual Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg. His first novel, "Ovenman," will be published next year.
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/09/15/107.html
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