The death of Alexey Navalny in prison still hasn’t left the news feeds for a second week now—alongside the war in Ukraine and the fighting in Israel. First, Leonid Kaganov wrote a set of deeply piercing verses. And then Vasya Oblomov set them to music, and that’s how the song was born. Very sad (as a lot of Vasya’s work is), but at the same time honest—and somehow, it even gives me a new kind of hope.
The song is in Russian, but on YouTube you can turn on auto-generated English subtitles—they do a decent job of conveying the meaning overall.
Vasya Oblomov (music) / Leonid Kaganov (lyrics) — “Now Far Away from Here”
Stanisław Lem is a classic of Polish science fiction, hugely popular among Russian-speaking readers since the Soviet era, when we weren’t exactly spoiled for science fiction. Apparently that very status is what kept me from writing a review of Solaris for so long—because, shame on me, I only read it recently.
If Lem himself is a star, then Solaris is probably one of his most famous works—yet most people who know it do so through its screen adaptations. The best known is the 1972 film by Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Soviet actors Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk. In 2002 the Americans made their own version too: Soderbergh cast none other than George Clooney in the lead. And there was also an earlier TV adaptation with Vasily Lanovoy, released four years before Tarkovsky’s version.
It’s worth noting that Lem himself treated the adaptations of this novel rather coolly, because, first, he couldn’t imagine how it could be filmed at all—and second, he really disliked the way directors chose to reinterpret his idea. He even quarreled with Tarkovsky, calling him a fool, and later said that instead of Solaris, Tarkovsky had made “Crime and Punishment in space.”
