Dear John,
I answered 27 of 30 questions correctly for a total score of 90%. I have to admid that I had to take some time to go through the questions. Some novels I read and some I didn't, but saw movies or documentries about the writers. My favorite Russian writers are
Dostoevsky and
Gogol. Nex to them I read
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Joseph Brodsky and
Vladimir Nabokov. The writers
Ivan Turgenev,
Anton Chekhov,
Alexander Pushkin and
Leo Tolstoy were in my fathers home library (translated into Dutch), but I prefered to read
Kafka, some translated works of Polish authors (in English and Dutch), and English and German authors because I had to read them for my highschool subjects English and German for my final exams, in which we had a literary part. Teachers overheard the books that were on your list. You had to answer questions and explain what the novels you read were about.
Most Westerners have a superficial knowledge of Russian literature and culture. I am influenced by Russian culture, due to the many movies with Dutch subtitles I saw in the Dutch cinema and on television. Part of that movies and plays are based on the novels and poetry of the authors and poets that are mentioned in
this Quiz. This was not an easy quiz at all. That is fine and good, because you learn from them.
The questions about
Anna Akhmatova and
Mikhail Bulgakov's '
The Master and Margarita,' I found very difficult, because I didn't read their work. I knew that
Anna Akhmatova was an important dissident Russian poet, but that knowledge didn't made the question easier. So that was one of the questions I answered wrongly. I guessed a lot in this quiz, and that proved to be a good guess. Russian language, Russian literature, Russian people, Russian music and especially Russian art have had their influence on my life, because they came into my childhood via the excellent Russian peoples music long play records my father played, the translated Russian literature in my parents home, the
Rachmaninov,
Prokofiev and
Tchaikovsky classical music that was in our home. Later the Russian Modern constuctivist art,
Kazimir Malevich (
Suprematism ) and
El Lissitzky's
PROUN played an important role in my artistic development as an art student. I saw a large Russian constructivist exhibition in
the Museum of Modern art in
Amsterdam in
1992, '
The Great Utopia- The Russian Avant-garde', which greatly influenced me. During my student years in
Amsterdam I had the privilege to meet and spend some time with the Russian expat and dissident community in Amsterdam of Russian students, intellectuals, artists (painters, drawers, sculpturists), musicians, poets and others. I went to their excentric parties, to their homes and to their bohemian gatherings in smooky Russian squat bars. After I left
Amsterdam I lost contact with '
the Russians' and only followed
Russian news, next to Polish news, like you do in the States. I saw Russian movies on tv and in the cinema and some Russian exhibitions, and that was it.
Next to that I saw the influence of the creative Russian expat community in
Berlin and heard Russian and saw the influence of
Russians in
New York when I visited
New York in
June 2008. The first language I heard when I landed on
J.F. Kennedy airport in
New York was
Russian. When I stood in line for my passport check at the customs
most people in the line were Russian. In
New York I heard a lot of
Russian,
Spanish,
French and
Hebrew next to
English and
the singing New York dialect. I also heard
Yiddish and
Polish in
New York.
Personally also the work of
Dmitri Shostakovich made a great impression on me. I got used to his work via the classical music branch of the family, the sister of my father, my aunt. Her son had a classical music cd company. And they traveled a lot to Central- and Eastern-Europe to record classical mussic, but also the work of duo's, trio's and little classical music orchestra in the Netherlands. I received a classical music cd of my aunt with
Shostakovich, inspired by American
BoogieWoogie music of the fourties.
Poster of the Amsterdam exhibition; The Great Utopia- The Russian Avant-garde, 1992, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam Museum of Modern Art)en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuprematismProunA Proun by Lissitzky, c.1925. Commenting on Proun in 1921, Lissitzky stated, "We brought the canvas into circles . . . and while we turn, we raise ourselves into the space."A Proun by Lissitzky, c.1925. Commenting on Proun in 1921, Lissitzky stated, "We brought the canvas into circles . . . and while we turn, we raise ourselves into the space."
During this period Lissitzky proceeded to develop a suprematist style of his own, a series of abstract, geometric paintings which he called Proun (pronounced "pro-oon"). The exact meaning of "Proun" was never fully revealed, with some suggesting that it is a contraction of proekt unovisa (designed by UNOVIS) or proekt utverzhdenya novogo (Design for the confirmation of the new). Later, Lissitzky defined them ambiguously as "the station where one changes from painting to architecture."
Proun was essentially Lissitzky's exploration of the visual language of suprematism with spatial elements, utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives; both uncommon ideas in suprematism. Suprematism at the time was conducted almost exclusively in flat, 2D forms and shapes, and Lissitzky, with a taste for architecture and other 3D concepts, tried to expand suprematism beyond this. His Proun works (known as Prounen) spanned over a half a decade and evolved from straightforward paintings and lithographs into fully three-dimensional installations. They would also lay the foundation for his later experiments in architecture and exhibition design. While the paintings were artistic in their own right, their use as a staging ground for his early architectonic ideas was significant. In these works, the basic elements of architecture – volume, mass, color, space and rhythm – were subjected to a fresh formulation in relation to the new suprematist ideals. Through his Prouns, utopian models for a new and better world were developed. This approach, in which the artist creates art with socially defined purpose, could aptly be summarized with his edict "das zielbewußte Schaffen" – "task oriented creation."
Jewish themes and symbols also sometimes made appearances in his Prounen, usually with Lissitzky using Hebrew letters as part of the typography or visual code. For the cover of the 1922 book Arba'ah Teyashim (Four Billy Goats; cover), he shows an arrangement of Hebrew letters as architectural elements in a dynamic design that mirrors his contemporary Proun typography.[8] This theme was extended into his illustrations for the Shifs-Karta (Passenger Ticket) book.
Cheers,
Pieter