DEBORAH L. ARMSTRONG—Alexander Zavaly grew up in the Ukrainian Republic of the Soviet Union, in the town of Alexandria (Ukrainian: Oleksandriia), about an hour’s drive west of the Dnieper River and five hours’ drive southeast of Kiev. He lived there from the age of six, when his family first relocated there, far from the icy mining town of Vorkuta, above the arctic circle, where he had lived since his birth in 1955. As a child, he was gifted with the ability to draw, but had little opportunity to develop his budding talent. Alexandria was another mining town and his father worked the mines like most of the men in his family, who had no real connection to the world of art.
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P. GREANVILLE—The latest iteration of the saga of the cape crusader, an improbable, immature billionaire bent on vigilantism, is 100% typical of this crushingly tedious genre’s DNA: exploitative (but elaborately produced) action films based on comic strips once designed to entertain subteens but now widely marketed to much broader audiences. The latter sorry fact is itself proof of the deliberate infantilisation and depoliticization of the masses, which have become stupid enough to thirst for this kind of decadent and vacuous entertainment.
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John Oliver discusses some of the world’s most prestigious museums, why they contain so many stolen goods, the market that continues to illegally trade antiquities, and a pretty solid blueprint for revenge.
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The crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the finest works of late Soviet cinema. In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans set out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard-swept landscape of Nazi-occupied Belorussia. When they fall into the hands of German forces and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that lifts the film’s earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory.
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JAMILA WIGNOT—The accounts and photos, along with comments by contemporary historians, also help bring out the inhuman working conditions that led to the fire. The women worked 14-hour shifts on the 8th and 9th stories of a building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in lower Manhattan (while the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, Russian-born Jewish immigrants themselves, sat above them on the 10th floor) for $2 a day. Because it was a shirtwaist (women’s blouse) factory, rags and other highly flammable material littered the floor.
