Latest news with #Pushkin
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
The Baltics are rapidly becoming a cauldron of EU growth when other parts of Europe are stagnating
It's not every day you find yourself in the Orthodox church where Alexander Pushkin 's great-grandfather was baptised. There is something calming about these dark, ornate and often windowless churches. The great-grandfather of Pushkin – the man whom many regard as the epitome of Slavic genius – was from central Africa (modern day Cameroon), a fact that adds to Pushkin's image as a romantic outsider. His great-grandfather, captured as a child by the Ottomans and gifted to the Russian emperor, rose to the position of general in Peter the Great's all-conquering army and was baptised in an Orthodox church in the centre of Vilnius, Lithuania 's very Catholic capital city. As befits a country at the crossroads of Europe, through which Napoleon, Charles X of Sweden, Hitler's Wehrmacht and, of course, Stalin's Red Army trampled, Vilnius is a city of ghosts. Before the second World War, it was known as the Jerusalem of the North, home to 60,000 Jews, of whom fewer than 2,000 survived. Today it is the bustling capital of Lithuania, a country that was once the largest state in Europe when it was the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Those halcyon days are evident in the baroque, rococo and the later neoclassical architecture beloved of the Imperial Russians. After all, if you name your top man the Tsar, a Russified version of Caesar, it's not surprising that you'd have a weakness for Roman columns. The Russians were in Lithuania for a long time and, but for a brief period of independence from 1920 to 1941 and Nazi occupation during the war, the Russification of Lithuania continued uninterrupted from 1790 until independence in 1990. Hence Pushkin senior being baptised in Vilnius, where Orthodox churches are common and, for the older generation brought up in the Soviet Union, Russian is the default language. Somehow the Lithuanian language survived; today it is thriving. Yet Russia's presence is palpable, and with the invasion of Ukraine the sense of insecurity is heightened – as it is all throughout the three Baltic Republics of Lithuania and its two northern neighbours, Latvia and Estonia . READ MORE These three small maritime countries face the sea and have been connected with western Europe for centuries. In contrast, Russia is a land power. The Hanseatic influence, tied to Lubeck, Hamburg, London and Amsterdam by the Baltic and North Seas, give the Baltic Republics their Scandinavian feel, not to mention their Catholic and Protestant religion, which distinguishes them from the Orthodox Russians. Economically, these three countries are by far the most successful of post-Soviet Republics, anchoring themselves politically, commercially and militarily to the West, via the EU and Nato . I've yet to meet a person here who doesn't see Nato as a positive. The average person appears to see Nato as an necessary insurance policy, a shield from Russian aggression that the invasion of Ukraine evidenced so dramatically. There is little sympathy for the Kremlin, even or maybe particularly in Latvia which has the largest ethnic Russian minority of the three republics. The war in Ukraine makes their orientation to the West appear – to those I have spoken to at least – all the more logical. What does this shift to western Europe mean for this region economically? There seems to be a different attitude to tech, as I observed on an airBaltic flight between Riga and Vilnius this week: Elon Musk 's Starlink internet was free to all throughout the flight. If there is a technological solution, the Baltics use it and Musk's Starlink is an obvious network. Their view is that if it is good enough for the military, it is good enough for their citizens. Over the past two decades, the standout success of the Baltics has been this embracing of technological possibilities, leading to the creation and fostering of tech companies. Ireland has become home to a significant Baltic diaspora since the early 2000s. These neighbours are not from some backward former Soviet region, but from one of the most dynamic parts of modern Europe Since the founding of Skype in Estonia nearly 20 years ago, the Baltics have been punching far above their weight in tech and entrepreneurship. Dubbed the Silicon Valley of Europe , Estonia now has 10 tech unicorns (including Wise, Bolt, Pipedrive, Playtech, Zego, Veriff and others) in a nation of just 1.3 million . Estonia alone has the highest per capita concentration of billion-dollar tech companies in Europe (and among the highest in the world). Latvia and Lithuania are also nurturing big start-ups. Latvia produced its first unicorn, Printful (print-on-demand ecommerce), in 2021, and has other notable start-ups like airBaltic (an innovation-oriented airline) and fintech platforms. Lithuania, as well as being home to the banking multinational disrupter Revolut, is now home to two unicorns: Vinted (Europe's largest online used-fashion marketplace) and Nord Security (creator of NordVPN). Vilnius has become a fintech hub (hosting the EU's second-largest fintech cluster) and a centre for laser technology and life sciences. [ ECB cuts interest rates by quarter percentage point Opens in new window ] Estonia leads Europe in startups per capita, with 1,100 per million people (4–5 times the European average), and Baltic tech founders are celebrated for their global impact. The World Bank and the OECD often cite the Baltics as models for digital innovation and ease of doing business. As of 2023, ICT contributes around 6 per cent of Estonia's GDP, up from 3 per cent in 2012, and about 7 per cent of its workforce are ICT professionals, the highest share in the EU. Latvia and Lithuania follow close behind and well above the EU average. Around half of all private R&D in Estonia and Latvia is tech-related. As a percentage of European population, the Baltics should have about 1 per cent of EU tech unicorn start-ups; instead they have 12 per cent. Meanwhile, Lithuania leads the EU in the number of fintech licences issued and has thriving tech parks in Vilnius and Kaunas. Lithuania's ICT sector grew 50 per cent in employment over the past decade. They are not only deploying tech to create new companies, the way the government does business here is quite seamless because of mass digitalisation. The problems caused by one Irish hospital not having the medical details of a patient who is being treated in another Irish hospital would never happen here; the entire public sector is paperless. Every government computer speaks to every other one, and to your own laptop. The result of this world-leading e-governance ecosystem is that Estonians can start a company online in minutes and 99 per cent of government services are accessible from home. No queues, no forms, no 'missing in the post' appointments, because one ID card has all the information in one place. Consequently the cost of government bureaucracy has collapsed. This is the future. And yet the region is still captured by the past, most notably the threat of Moscow. [ What does the latest ECB cut mean for borrowers, savers and the broader economy? Opens in new window ] Ireland has become home to a significant Baltic diaspora since the early 2000s, with people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania now making up roughly 1 per cent of the population (based on the 2022 census and a population of 5.15 million). These neighbours are not from some backward former Soviet region, but from one of the most dynamic parts of modern Europe, the Baltic Sea, home to Poland, Europe's most vibrant large economy, Finland and of course Sweden, as well as the industrial north of Germany. Ireland should learn to use the skills, networks and languages of our new residents to cement relations with this part of the world because this is rapidly becoming a cauldron of EU growth at a time when other parts of Europe are stagnating.
Spectator
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Thrilling: Garsington's Queen of Spades reviewed
Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades is one of those operas that under-promises on paper but over-delivers on stage. It's hard to summarise the plot in a way that makes it sound theatrical, even if you've read Pushkin's novella, and I've never found a recording that really hits the spot. And yet, time and again, in the theatre: wham! It goes up like a petrol bomb. With a good production and performers, Tchaikovsky hurls you out at the far end feeling almost hungover – head swimming, and wondering where those three hours went. The cast and staging at Garsington are very, very good. True, you'd expect great things from any production that can afford to cast Roderick Williams (Yeletsky) and Robert Hayward (Tomsky) in what are essentially supporting roles, and the director is Jack Furness, who at his best (like his Garsington Rusalka in 2022) has been responsible for some of the most compelling British opera of the past decade. Furness is on top form here, delivering multilayered storytelling underpinned by subtle characterisation. He has an eye for spectacle, as well as the tiny details that speaks volumes. The Philharmonia is the orchestra, and while they haven't always brought their A-game to Garsington, they've typically responded well to the festival's artistic director Douglas Boyd. Good news: he's conducting The Queen of Spades, and from the first notes – the clarinet's question in the silence; that hot-breathed surge of string tone – it's as tense as a guilty conscience. Cue baleful brass chords, aching woodwinds and those quiet, nagging ostinatos which mean that like the opera's anti-hero Herman (Aaron Cawley), we never really get to relax.
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How ‘The Queen of Spades' Brought Two Tchaikovsky Brothers Together
In 1888, Modest Tchaikovsky wrote a letter to his brother Pyotr, the composer. Modest, a former law student and budding dramatist and critic, had recently been commissioned by the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Russia, to write his first opera libretto: an adaptation of Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades.' Modest revered his older brother's talent and international renown. He had already proposed potential collaborations to Pyotr twice, to no avail. He had a composer lined up for 'The Queen of Spades,' Nikolai Klenovsky, but he was disheartened that he and his brother would not be working on it together. Pyotr's response to the letter was measured but blunt. 'Forgive me, Modya, but I do not regret at all that I will not write 'The Queen of Spades,'' adding: 'I will write an opera only if a plot comes along that can deeply warm me up. A plot like 'The Queen of Spades' does not move me, and I could only write mediocrely.' Then Klenovsky dropped 'The Queen of Spades.' Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of the imperial theaters, asked Pyotr to take over. He agreed. And so 'The Queen of Spades,' which returns to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, became the first collaboration between the two Tchaikovsky brothers, men of different disciplines and artistic abilities, despite their closeness. This work was the culmination of nearly 40 years of Modest's attempt to escape the cool of Pyotr's shadow and bask in his light. The result, the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote, was the 'first and probably the greatest masterpiece of musical surrealism.' It's a testament to their camaraderie and fraternity, as well as their openness and intimacy. When stripped to its thematic core, Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades,' first published in 1834, has all the makings of spectacle — obsession, greed, madness, phantasmagoria — that you could also find in sentimental Italian operas of the 19th century. Pushkin was not just god of Russian letters, but the god, yet his writing wasn't easy to adapt into a libretto. His storytelling is anecdotal and ironic, lacking in empathy and tenderness for and between its characters. No one evolves, and there are no changes of heart. And 'The Queen of Spades' is short; Taruskin counts the text at 'barely 10,000 words.' If there was anyone for the job, it was Pyotr. About 10 years earlier, he pulled off adapting Pushkin with 'Eugene Onegin,' one of the most beloved works in all of Russian literature. And that was a case of spinning gold from straw: Pushkin's source material, while celebrated for its cynical commentary on high society and innovative use of prose, does not have a plot designed to necessarily sustain the attention of an opera audience. (For those reasons, Modest, when Pyotr shared his plans for 'Onegin' with him, was intensely critical. 'Let my opera be unstageable, let it have little action,' Pyotr retorted. 'I am enchanted by Pushkin's verse, and I write music to them because I am drawn to it. I am completely immersed in composing the opera.') Pyotr mostly adapted the text for 'Onegin' on his own. Any deficiencies in the libretto are compensated by his sonorous, impassioned score. You could say the same for 'The Queen of Spades.' Modest softened Pushkin's austerity without diluting the menace. Tchaikovsky's music, in turn, amplified the emotional stakes, drawing the listener into the characters' inner worlds. When Modest was brought on to write the libretto for 'The Queen of Spades,' recommended to Klenovsky by Vsevolozhsky, he was still in the process of paving his own artistic path. Unlike the prodigious Pyotr, Modest lacked tenacity and diligence, and often abandoned projects before finishing them. He tried his hand at law, fiction, criticism, translation and drama, with varying success. In his early career, Modest tried and failed to collaborate with Pyotr at least twice: once for the concert overture adapted from Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet' in 1874, and again three years later for an opera based on Charles Nodier's 1837 novel 'Inès de las Sierras.' Pyotr rejected both while encouraging his brother's literary talent. The brothers wrote to each other often. Pyotr looked forward to Modest's letters, in part because he 'wrote them with the grace of Sévigné.' He wrote to Modest in 1874: 'Seriously, you have a literary vein, and I would be very happy if it were to beat so strongly that you became a writer. Maybe at least there will be a decent libretto one day.' Eventually, that 'decent libretto' came along with 'The Queen of Spades.' When Pyotr was brought on, Modest had already been working on it for over a year, under Vsevolozhsky's and Klenovsky's guidance. The world premiere was just a year away. Pyotr would write the score for 'Queen of Spades' abroad. He had temporarily relocated to Florence, Italy, as a creative reset. Modest remained in Russia. His libretto was workable but would need to be altered significantly to meet the composer's and director's demands. Story lines had to be shifted, characters added, its timeline moved to the previous century, during the reign of Catherine the Great. Often motivated by deadlines, Pyotr created a working score in only 44 days in a fit of spectacular inspiration. Their different working modes were exacerbated by their distance. Pyotr arrived in Florence with only the first scene of text. When he finished a scene, he sent it back and eagerly awaited a new scene by mail. Modest could not keep up with his brother's speed. Pyotr made adjustments to nearly every scene to fit the score, and on several occasions, he was unhappy with Modest's verses and provided the text himself, including for Lisa's Act I arioso 'Otkuda eti slyozy' and Prince Yeletsky's Act II aria 'Ya vas lyublyu.' How 'The Queen of Spades' was created is less a reflection of the Tchaikovsky brothers' differences in artistic approach than their similarities and proclivities. Although Modest had a twin brother, Anatoly, it was recorded that Pyotr and Modest, too, had identical qualities. The actor Yuri Yuriev, who mentioned Modest several times in his memoirs, once described him as 'Pyotr's double.' 'He was so similar in everything to his older brother,' Yuriev wrote. 'I am convinced that they thought, felt and perceived life exactly the same. Even their voices, manner of speaking were similar.' At face value, this characterization of fraternal resemblance is innocuous, perhaps obvious. Pyotr, too, was aware of their likeness. 'I would like to find in you the absence of at least one bad trait of my individuality, but I cannot,' he once wrote to Modest, years before their eventual collaboration. 'You are too much like me, and when I am angry with you, I am, in fact, angry with myself, for you are always playing the role of a mirror in which I see the reflection of all my weaknesses.' But Yuriev's comments could also be interpreted as a euphemism that hints at secrets hiding in plain sight. It has been suggested that among the reasons Pyotr and Modest became so close as adults — closer to each another than to any of their other three brothers — is that they both had homosexual propensities. The scholar Alexander Poznansky, whose biographies on the Tchaikovskys uncover previously censored letters from open publication, has meticulously laid out the many correspondences Pyotr wrote to Modest about his many trysts and feelings of limerence with other men: prostitutes, conservatory students, coachmen, manservants. Few letters betray Pyotr's shame or guilt. If anything, they are strikingly contemporary. In a footnote to one letter, Pyotr refers to a male prostitute with feminine pronouns, a custom that still exists, and that Poznansky writes was a habit among 19th-century men who would be described as gay today. Poznansky and Taruskin theorize about Modest's queerness as well in their writings, based on examinations of his unpublished memoirs archived at the Tchaikovsky State House-Museum in Kiln, Russia. These documents are not available to the public, and few other people have studied them. One that Taruskin has cited includes Modest's reaction to learning about Pyotr's sexuality from his twin brother: 'I am not a freak, I am not alone in my strange desires. I may find sympathy not merely with the pariahs among my comrades, but with Pyotr! With this discovery everything became different.' Modest's earlier contempt for himself, he wrote, 'changed into self-satisfaction, and pride to belong among the 'chosen.'' It is apt that the brothers' first collaboration was creating an opera based on a tale about the hoarding of a secret, one shared with only those 'chosen' to know. Despite his initial reservations about the subject, Pyotr warmed up to it. Two months into the process, he wrote to Modest that 'either I am terribly, unforgivably mistaken — or 'The Queen of Spades' will really be my chef d'oeuvre.'
Telegraph
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Rejoice – the Choose Your Own Adventure books are back
The Choose Your Own Adventure books had a cult-like appeal in the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1979 and 1998, they sold 250 million copies, making them one of the bestselling children's series of all time. The novels were written by 30 different authors, but one of the names most keenly associated with the stories is RA Montgomery, a publisher from Vermont who was involved in the series's initial launch, and went on to contribute an astonishing 49 of the 184 titles. Journey Under the Sea (1979) was his first – and this new edition by Pushkin, one of six books in the series that the publisher is resurrecting, will make you wonder why these enthralling tales ever fell out of print. For the uninitiated: the appeal of the novels lies in their pioneering 'game book' format. Each story is narrated in the second person, with the reader – a seemingly gender-neutral 'YOU' – assuming the role of protagonist, and being required to make decisions that determine the outcome of the plot. 'You and YOU ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story,' we're warned on each book's opening page. 'The wrong decision could end in disaster – even death.' It sure can. Each book offers the reader 40-odd possible endings, and during the series we risk almost every conceivable form of catastrophe, from falling down mineshafts to being eaten by intergalactic meatpackers. In Journey Under the Sea, the stakes are predictably high. 'You are a deep-sea explorer searching for the famed lost city of Atlantis,' the book begins in a tone of motion-picture suspense. ''This is your most challenging and dangerous mission. Fear and excitement are now your companions.' The scenarios are not for the faint hearted. 'It's no use. The whirlpool has you in its grip. You feel your arms and legs being torn in every direction. There is no way out. Round and round you go' – this is the sort of fix in which we continually find ourselves. But Montgomery alloys suspense with understatement. The reader can either blast a hole in the whirlpool wall (turn to page 96) or 'continue to struggle' (turn to page 97). By the end, everyone will have achieved the ending they deserve, though fortune invariably favours the brave. Pity the reader who opts to 'rest a few days' after a near-death diving experience: 'You are all alive, but there are no replacements for the damaged equipment. The money has run out. The expedition to Atlantis is over. The End.' As with many of the Choose Your Own Adventures, elements of the story feel boldly derivative – in this case, the echoes of Jules Verne's 1870 masterpiece Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea are rather clear. Still, it's remarkable how fresh the Choose Your Own Adventure format still seems, nearly half a century after its initial success.
New Indian Express
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
'Art of no war': How Kerala artists are using their works as a call for peace
Curator Esaulov says the exhibition is 'a chorus of voices saying 'enough.' These artists come from different backgrounds, but they share a commitment to using creativity as a force against destruction.' Pushkin's works, part of his series 'Being Humane Is Modernity. Nothing Else', is in solidarity with the people of Palestine. His artistic statement opens with a stark quote from American writer Susan Sontag: 'War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates, war scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.' Yet amid the darkness, Pushkin incorporates botanical motifs, hinting at the potential for healing. 'War is one of the most profitable industries on this planet,' he says. 'Its buyers are the 'powers of nations,' and the result is the suffering of those who simply wish to live in peace.' Jalaja P S's 'Floating Space' offers a poetic reflection on resilience. 'We are like tiny boats, overloaded with the wreckage of wars, floating on turbulent waters,' she writes. 'But we continue to move forward, carrying fragments of what was lost.' At the centre of each of her works are Ambedkar, Sree Narayana Guru and Mahatma Gandhi. They are on a boat, sitting at the centre, people on either side rowing in opposite directions. In a more meditative tone, Shinod Akkaparambil's watercolour series 'Between Scars and Stars: A Journey Through Conflict and Hope' captures the dual nature of human experience — trauma and hope, despair and renewal. His abstract forms evoke emotional landscapes. Johns Mathew takes a critical look at the machinery behind the brutal battles with his digital artwork titled 'War'. 'War happens not because people hate each other — but because someone profits from it,' he writes. 'My work is a mirror held up to those motives.'
