In Soviet Times
Welcome back to Culture Club, the recurring feature where David and I discuss our preoccupations—what we’ve been thinking about, reading, watching or playing—for premium subscribers. This week: a dip into Soviet cartoons.
There’s a strange creature that lives in old Russian Claymation whose name is Cheburashka. He’s adorable—big jug ears and a tiny-kid voice—and he hangs out with a crocodile named Krokodil Gena. I’ve been having a gloomy winter weekend (rainy weather inside and outside my head) and I thought about the Russian birthday song, which is amazingly lugubrious, and comes from the Soviet-era Cheburashka cartoons. Krokodil Gena, who plays the accordion and sings songs like Blue Train Car (“although we are a little sorry for the past…/everyone believes in something better”) and also sings the song featured at nearly every birthday party in the former Soviet sphere. It’s sorrowful and charming, and it goes like this (my rough translation):
Let the clumsy pedestrians
Run from puddle to puddle
And the water—is a river on the asphalt.
And it’s unclear to passersby
Why on this blustery day
I am so full of joy.
I play my accordion
In full view of passersby
What a shame that
Birthdays
Come only once a year.
The crocodile is wearing a hat and serenading a depressed-looking mailman. Cue cake and candles. Once upon a time, I saw the Flying Dutchman in St. Petersburg, at the Mariinsky Theater. Once, I dug up pottery shards on an archaeology dig, upriver on the Don. Now I’m almost thirty-five…
Of course, the adventures of Cheburashka and Krokodil Gena are just one in a vast spectacle of Soviet-era animation (mult’film, it’s called). Some are great, some terrifying, most are a bit of both.
The Soviet Winnie the Pooh ("Vinni-Pukh") definitely falls in the terrifying category. I love him. He is a small raccoon-like bear-beast who runs through the forest shouting his own name, perpetually looking angry and confused. Relatable.
The other classic, mystical and touched with unearthly strangeness, is "Yozhik v Tumane"—"Hedgehog in the Fog"—and isn’t Yozhik a lovely name for a hedgehog? -ik is the Russian masculine diminutive (-ka the feminine) and it can be added to anything; Sashik for Sasha, avtobusik is a little bus, zaichik is a little rabbit, a term of endearment. Our yozhik bravely goes to meet his friend for tea and encounters a majestic fog-horse.
Then there’s "Nu, Pogodi!"—"Hey, Wait Up!"—featuring a bass-voice smoking wolf doing a Wile E. Coyote-and-Road-Runner eternal-chase situation with an androgynous hare, which started in the 1960s. Early adventures features a tractor-based chase. There’s a lot of singing, and the aforementioned smoking. According to Wikipedia, the wolf’s “appearance was inspired by a person the director Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin saw on the street, specifically a man with long hair, a protruding belly, and a thick cigarette between his lips.”
It’s majestic. You can find the entire series here, which is about twelve hours’ worth of good, clean, carnivorous hooliganism:
That’s about it for this week! Sorry for the brevity. I want the sun to come out. Don’t you? Failing that, I want to astound passersby with my joy and accordion.
Love,
Talia