Упражнение 58

1. Nonetheless, Official Prose tried to draw Village Writers into its ideological ranks and coerce them into joining in the fight with the West.

2. I remember that dramatic moment when poet after poet stepped up to the "first" open microphone in a Moscow literary club to recite their beloved liberal poems -written in great secret during the Brezhnev era.

3. There are also great video opportunities for people living in far flung corners of the country who want to catch up with cultural events in town.

4. I would like to believe that video is the last socio-cultural innovation of our time to catch us unprepared.

5. My heart starts bleeding at the sight of petty intrigues in our literary corridors: writers trying to bite and outbark each other in order to get into the limelight.

6. Search for the "enemy" is all the more horrible when it is of ethnic origin, -when people are harassed because of their genealogical roots and those who do this find sadistic pleasure trying to establish the original names of the mothers and fathers of their victims.

7. Censorship was a formative influence for this Liberal school. It fed an addiction among Liberal Writers to an obtrusive reliance on allusions. Similarly, readers grew addicted to a "treasure-hunt" for hints, to seeking out places where the writer had his tongue in cheek. The result was that writers got carried away with all this tongue-in-the-cheek parody and forgot how to think.

Упражнение 59

1. Taboo subjects included: Stalin, the determinants of the Russian na­tional character, the collectivization of agriculture and the dissident move­ment.

2. The grief brought by this torture could hardly serve to cement the Tower of Babel of Soviet belles lettres.

3. Some managed to adapt well, others sold out (neither the former, nor the latter were saved from the Russian roulette ofStalinist terror).

4. They must make sure that their employees have the incentive to do their job properly and to keep a finger on the pulse of future trends.

5. The Village Writers appear to reject "Soviet" values but their apoca­lyptic tone drowns out everything else, exhausting the reader with its total lack of taste.

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6. As the director of Video Film, Oleg Uralov explains: "That is how it should be. Let's say when "Heart of a Dog" (by Bulgakov) was premiered in Moscow, with all the media attention it got, we managed to film the fifth or sixth performance".

7. A catalogue of new films could better indicate, the number of films to be issued, just like publishing houses do, with the difference that it will cost Video Film far more dearly to get it wrong than it will any publisher.

8. When the tram was crowded the conductor could flip up his seat to carry on with his work standing up to make more room.

Упражнение 60

1. The central figure of this literature is the Pious Woman who despite all the hardships of Soviet life remains true to her religious instincts. She is to be found, for example, in Solzhenitsyn's short story "Matryona's House", one of the earliest works of Village Prose.

2. Others prefer a faster version of self-justification. They argue that they took part in the persecution of dissident writers on "orders" from above.

3. Village Prose arose in the post-Stalinist years. It described the horrific conditions in the Russian countryside after it had been subjected to ruthless collectivization and the miseries of WWIIand the post-war period.

4. If you don't have cassettes with films that are difficult to understand or commentaries by qualified experts, you will not be able to help serious viewers.

5. Village Prose is not so much a thematic school, but a way of viewing the world.

6. It was Igor Skvortsov who five years ago brought the old Bresh tram out of its place of retirement in the tram park and all this time had been driving it along a tourist route.

7. In order to survive, the video libraries and videotheques must listen carefully to what the customers want.

8. It is easier to have ordinary films on video cassette rather than send­ing them round the country in the traditional heavy round metal containers.