MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Уважаемые читатели!  I’m really happy to say that my profile of director Timur Bekmambetov came out in the January issue of Snob (a magazine targeted at moderately but not excessively rich Russian people), in a beautiful Russian translation, with beautiful photography.  Unfortunately it isn’t available online, and I don’t even have a hard copy.  But there is a preview on their website—here is a screen shot, or part of one anyway:

You can’t tell from that picture but he was actually a really nice guy, and not accompanied by a floating man-sized pistol (or at least not always accompanied by a floating man-sized pistol). 

For English-reading readers, I’m putting up the first 1000 words.  For Russian-reading readers, that picture was worth 1000 words!  Спасибо, что пришли!

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Dear readers!  I am happy to relate that my piece called "The Murder of Leo Tolstoy: A Forensic Investigation" is in the February issue of Harper’s magazine, which subscribers can already read online—it has a really amazing piece of original artwork by Steven Dana which I will post here, if it turns out not to violate any copyright.  In the meantime, tiny, law-abiding people, like the ones who live in Lech Walesa’s mustache, might enjoy looking at a tiny, legal reproduction.  And also at a picture of home and its environs, back in the day.

"The Murder of Leo Tolstoy" is about how I went to an International Tolstoy Conference at Tolstoy’s house in Yasnaya Polyana, and tried to determine whether Tolstoy died of natural causes or was… MURDERED.  It has some interesting generic features, e.g. I originally wrote it in the form of a short story.  Then my editor was like, "But it all really happened, right?", and I was like, “Well, pretty much,” and, to make a long story short, it was put in the Miscellany section, as a literary memoir, and was even assigned a fact-checker—you know, to fact-check my memoir.

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Arghh, dear readers—I can’t keep up with you guys! I did finally reply to the comments. But I keep receiving such amazing additions to the beard bibliography! All Russian readers with an interest in beard semiotics are urged to consult Gregory Freidin’s 1993 article about his own beard, in the context of Gogol’s Overcoat, and the larger question of cultures and subcultures in Russia during the late ’80s and early ’90s (“Dve shineli, ili anekdot s borodoi,” Znamia 2 (1993)). The footnotes alone include many promising additions to the field of beardobibliography… I mention here only A. D. Leach’s “Magical Hair (Curl Bequest Prize Essay, 1957),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 80.2 (1958).

“My beard is a part of nature—and yet, it is also a sign,” writes Freidin, who grew a beard at the end of the ’60s, with the intention of embracing a Bohemian subculture. But there remained the problem of all the famous non-subcultural beards, like those of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Engels, Marx, the Academician Timiryazev, and nearly all the “classic” Russian writers. (“On the symbolic map crossed by the demarcation line between Russian and Soviet literature, the surname Tolstoy was an invariant sign, while the beard was a sign of differentiation”: Alexei Tolstoy has a zero-value beard, but Lev Tolstoy has a “beard approaching infinity.”)

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Dear readers! I’m taking a few moments from my busy schedule as a relatively obscure supervillain to respond to your kind and interesting comments to the post from 12/10.  To Evan of Duck Beater: I, too, find beards to be a more useful conceptual category than bells. In fact my original pitch to the New Yorker was for a piece about "Giant Russian Beards."  The many fine Web resources on this subject include: "The Russian Beard! What a History!!!"; the detailed note on beards in Pavel Florensky’s Essay in Orthodox Theodicy; and, for Russian readers, the beard sites Borodka.ru and Borodatyh.net.  As for the image of Gen.-Lt. A. I. Kosich (below), it’s from the Russian Wikipedia entry for beard.

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