Author: knari

Book: Igor Mozheiko “West Wind — Fair Weather”

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We often reproach Americans for supposedly knowing nothing about World War II, for thinking they “won it,” when without the Soviet Union Hitler wouldn’t have been defeated. Of course, that’s all true. But it’s just as true that we ourselves know very little about their side of the war.

What can most of us name off the top of our heads? The Normandy landings (which have been chewed over from every angle in movies and in dozens of games)… and then the meeting on the Elbe. Oh right — we might have heard something about Pearl Harbor, and that they fought the Japanese a little bit over there, and that the evil Americans dropped two nuclear bombs, and that was that.

As executive producers, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg decided to tell more of the war through American eyes. First, in 2001, they released Band of Brothers about combat in Europe. And nine years later, in 2010, they followed with The Pacific about a part of the war we barely know at all — because the Soviet Union didn’t take part in it, and so it simply wasn’t something people talked about. (And I very much recommend both series if you haven’t seen them.)

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Belarus Everyone Knows From the Movies. Part 1

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Belarus is a small country: a population of around 10 million people, an area of a little over 200 thousand square kilometers. For many years I understood that not everyone abroad even knows such a country; I used to have to explain that it’s between Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. (Surprisingly, Cypriots for some reason often do know the country — which genuinely caught me off guard.)

And yet our country sometimes pops up here and there in movies. Okay, Russia — it’s been a longtime supplier of villains with terrifying English accents, since it’s the old enemy. But Belarus? Still, quite well-known creators have slipped this country into their films. And that’s what we’ll talk about today — the examples I know.

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Book: “White-Red-White. Flag. Nation. Identity”

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The publication in 2024 of a book about the white-red-white flag — or, as it is often called, the BChB (from the Belarusian bel-chyrvona-bely) — is rather symbolic. Once again, numerous myths and layers of dirt are being thrown at it, just as has happened periodically throughout its existence.

As an introduction, it’s worth noting that the white-red-white flag was the official flag of the Republic of Belarus from 1991 to 1995, as was the coat of arms “Pahonia,” rendered in the same colors (since, according to the approved designs, the red of the flag was meant to match the red of the coat of arms). Moreover, to this day these symbols are not formally banned in Belarus. However, in present-day Belarus one can receive a very real prison sentence for displaying them — and even for something as accidental as a white-and-red color combination, whether it’s socks or an LG TV box left on a balcony.

The book “Bel-Chyrvona-Bely” (published in Belarusian) is arguably the first full-fledged scholarly study of the origins of both the flag and the coat of arms, as well as of the color combination itself, released in the form of a substantial volume. I wouldn’t call it popular science — it is genuinely a thoroughly researched work by an entire collective of authors (who, unfortunately or perhaps fortunately for themselves, remain unnamed in the book). It is rich with illustrations, and all conclusions are supported by an extensive array of references, as one would expect from serious academic research.

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Songs: AP$ENT

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After leaving Belarus, I stopped listening to the radio, and as a result I drifted away from the musical atmosphere of my home country. So until the recent wave of bans targeting the singer AP$ENT, I hadn’t even heard of him. But once his music started being blocked practically everywhere — reportedly even at the state level in Russia, as if it were somehow corrupting minds — I decided to find out what kind of artist could cause that kind of reaction.

It turns out that in Russia he came under fire because of the song “Can I Go With You,” which he wrote last summer. There’s nothing overtly controversial in the lyrics — at least not if you don’t know the realities of the musician’s own life. The song unexpectedly went viral on TikTok, spawning countless videos with cats asking to come live at your place and other cute edits. Judging by those clips, many of their creators have no idea what the song is actually about. There are whole compilations of such TikTok videos — and it was precisely thanks to that viral spread that everyone suddenly heard about the track.

In reality, though, the musician hid in the lyrics the bitterness of leaving Belarus, where his wife began facing persecution over her posts. It’s actually spelled out in the song — though woven subtly between the lines. And the author doesn’t deny it; on YouTube he even accompanied the video with the words: “Those who know even a little about what’s happening in my life will understand.”

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“Ten Little Indians”: On the Changing Titles of an Agatha Christie Novel

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Content note: This post examines the publication history of Agatha Christie’s novel and the evolution of its title and associated rhyme. To document that history accurately, it includes direct quotations of period wording that contains racial slurs. Such language is unacceptable in modern usage; it appears here only as part of quoted historical material, for context and analysis.

Today I’d like to talk a little about Agatha Christie — more precisely, about one of her most famous works, the novel “Ten Little Niggers“. In Russian, both the novel and the 1987 Soviet film adaptation by Stanislav Govorukhin are still known under the title Desyat negrityat (“Ten Little Negroes”). In Russian usage, the word negrityonok historically functioned as a neutral racial descriptor rather than a slur, which partly explains why the title remained unchanged in that cultural context.

I first encountered this work in childhood — not through the book, but through Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1987 film adaptation, released in Russian as Desyat negrityat (and often referred to in English as Ten Little Indians). I saw it a year later, while vacationing at the seaside with my parents. The film was being shown at the resort cinema, and if I remember correctly, my younger brother and I even went without our parents.

I remember how that closed-circle mystery (Christie specialized in exactly that kind of structure), combined with an excellent cast and the oppressive atmosphere of the production, made an indelible impression on me. It didn’t exactly frighten me, but it was impossible to look away as, over the course of the story, nearly all the main characters disappear one by one. And yet — what could an eleven-year-old boy, which is what I was at the time, really understand of it? Back then I looked like this (not exactly a heartthrob, of course, but still reasonably presentable):

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Steam: A Proper Family Library

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As the saying goes, it only took them twenty years — and Steam’s creators have finally realized what a monstrosity their Library Sharing was. Originally, it was meant as a way to let your family (or friends) play your games. But it was implemented in the most ass-backwards way imaginable. Sure, you could make your games available to your family, but the moment you started playing anything yourself, your entire library became unavailable to everyone else. So let’s say you’ve got 400 games in your personal library and you let your kids play them. Your son launches Game A and is happily playing, and then you come home from work and decide to play too — Game B. And suddenly your son gets kicked out of Game A because “the owner is back.” Even though you’re playing a different game. Why on earth can’t he just keep playing the first one?

Nobody ever understood why this feature was introduced in such a dumb way, because its value was extremely low. Mobile platforms introduced the idea of a family. Streaming services like Netflix let an entire household watch content under one family subscription. But game platforms held out until the bitter end.

And finally, on March 18, 2024, Steam launched proper Family Groups in beta. What does that mean? You can now create a family group and add up to five family members (six total: the creator plus five members). Everyone’s personal libraries are merged into a single shared family game library: no matter which family member owns a game, it becomes available to all members of the family group. Steam explained this feature in detail in an announcement and in answers to frequently asked questions. I’ll focus here on the most interesting points.

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Book: Nikolai Lyutomsky “I Was Lucky”

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My parents are both civil engineers by education, so from childhood I knew quite a bit about how construction works from the inside. My dad often took my brother and me to construction sites, and my mom, in my early years, worked as a design engineer. That’s when it stuck with me that there are architects, and there are designers. I can’t say for sure how exactly this was explained to me back then, but what settled in my mind was roughly this: architects are artists — they’re about making things beautiful — and designers are the ones who figure out how to make that “beautiful” actually happen with the resources available. Nikolai Lyutomsky’s book “I Was Lucky” is precisely a look at this industry through the eyes of an architect who was fortunate enough to work on many interesting projects. And I really wanted to hear from the other side of the fence, so to speak.

Nikolai Lyutomsky began his career as a state-employed architect in the USSR, and later founded his own architectural bureau, “Elis,” where at first he worked independently, and in recent years with strong support from his wife and son, developing landmark projects of very different kinds — from residential complexes to schools and theaters.

We rarely read books by people we don’t know. And I didn’t come across the book “I Was Lucky” by chance — I learned about it from the author’s page literally on the day it was released, because I was lucky (there’s a little pun on the title) to get to know Nikolai Vadimovich personally (even if not in person, but through correspondence). And I want to tell that story in this review, because it seems very important to me for understanding the author’s personality.

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“The Astrologer’s Song” or “The Song of the Stars”

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Alexey Rybnikov is a legendary composer who, in addition to several great rock operas, gave us unforgettable music and songs for many films we love. I adore all of his work, but as the first song set to his music, I decided to talk about “The Astrologer’s Song” (also known as “The Song of the Stars”) from the fairy-tale film Pro Krasnuyu Shapochku (About Little Red Riding Hood) by Leonid Nechayev, released by Belarusfilm in 1977. Besides the melody, the song also features wonderful lyrics written by Yuli Kim.

As usual, I’ll remind you of the song itself and also show a few of its most interesting performances. And for those who read the post to the end, there will be a small surprise waiting (I’m sure it will be a surprise for most of you).

So, the film itself is a musical fairy tale very loosely based on the well-known original. The wolves there are a whole family, led by a strong-willed she-wolf played by Galina Volchek; the wolves are not evil at all and even a bit clumsy; and there’s also a wonderful wolf cub played by Dmitry Iosifov, who two years earlier had played, for the same Nechayev, the most famous Buratino of the Soviet screen.

Besides the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf (or rather, the wolves), and the Grandmother, the film weaves in many other plotlines and colorful characters. And on top of that, it became famous for several songs set to music by that same Alexey Rybnikov. When I was a child, the song most often performed outside the film was Little Red Riding Hood’s own number — the one that goes, “Ah-ah-ah, in Africa the mountains are this high.” There was also a well-known conversational song with a spoiled child. But no less famous — and perhaps even more so — was “The Song of the Stars,” performed by the Grandmother (Rina Zelyonaya) and the Astrologer (Evgeniy Evstigneev). Both musically and lyrically, it’s far more lyrical than the film’s other songs. That’s probably why it became so beloved.

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Book: Timur Aslanov “I Know What to Tell Them”

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On the recommendation of a good acquaintance, Anton Vert, I read Timur Aslanov’s book I Know What to Tell Them. In the blurb, the author promises to explain how to deal with negative comments about you, your company, and your products online. To do this, he introduces the concepts of the “Light Knight” and the “Dark Knight.” The latter is ready to act tough, respond rudely, and wipe out comments he doesn’t like. However, the greatest benefit comes from the “Light Knight,” who constantly monitors his emotional intelligence and knows how to respond to the substance rather than the tone.

My direct work has never involved responding to user comments; more often I’ve been on the other side of the barricades — and I’ll admit that at times I can be overly emotional in voicing my criticisms. Still, I’ve always tried not to stoop to personal attacks or mudslinging just for the sake of it.

At the same time, I’m active on social media, I have my own blog, and sometimes my position or certain statements can provoke negativity — both from subscribers and from people who just happened to drop by. So I was curious what exactly Timur Aslanov might advise, especially after such a strong recommendation from someone I know.

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Book: Henry Lion Oldie “Invasion”

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About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Pavel Filatyev’s book, which was essentially an account of the first days of Russia’s war against Ukraine seen through the eyes of a Russian contract soldier. Even then, I wanted to believe that all this horror would soon be over.

But two years have already passed since Russia attacked Ukraine, and there’s still no end in sight. As a child, reading about the Great Patriotic War, I used to think that four years of that war was a whole lifetime. By that measure, Ukraine has already been at war for half a lifetime.

The initial shock has long since faded, and any hope of a quick ending is gone for good. And then a book came out by the remarkable Ukrainian authors Dmitry Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhensky, whom all fans of sci-fi know under the pen name Henry Lion Oldie.

Both authors are from Kharkiv — a city where, before the war, Russian was heard far more often than Ukrainian, even though its residents considered themselves Ukrainian. Before the war, Oldie were seen as purely Russian-language authors. They wrote in Russian, a language they command better than most Russians do.

But on February 24, 2022, war came to their home; Russian missiles and bombs began to fall on their city. And both of them, Dmitry and Oleg, started keeping a diary.

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