#Andrey and Mikhail both look more like their father

[kikizoshi]

A short dialogue between Fyodor's younger siblings, Andrey and Vera. I won't post fanfiction with them for a long time, yet I find them more fun and easier than Fyodor and Nikolai lately, and I'd like to post this now, since they'll likely change between now and when they appear in a story.

  ***

“I’m going to kill him.”

  “Enough, Andryushka. He’ll arrive when he’ll arrive.”

  “And then what? What possible reason could he have this time? Fr Zossima kept him late? His studies were just oh so strenuous last night? Misha, sure, fine, he has plenty reason. But Fedya? At this point, I don’t give a damn if his entire apartment building collapsed! There’s no excuse to be this late.”

  Vera sighed. There was no point in arguing with Andrey; on this matter they would simply never agree, and that was that. It was better to let him air his grievances, she knew, and wished to let him, yet she found herself constantly lacking the strength to endure them, and often berated herself heavily later for this weakness in character. And yet it was as it was, and always turned out the same.

  “What time did you say the play starts?” Vera asked.

  “Twenty-one, so about a half hour. We should go in at least fifteen before to get settled, though.”

  Vera grimaced.

  “Are you able to stand much longer?”

  Vera nodded. “I’m not so weak today. It’s only the chill.” She huffed bemusedly. “I feel as though every mild breeze is blasting the North wind right through me.”

  Andrey frowned and went to remove his sweater, but Vera stopped him adamantly. “No, no, you musn’t,” she said. “I’m already wearing a shawl. If I take yours, you could catch cold.”

  “I won’t.”

  “But you could,” she insisted. “And I won’t; I’m wearing enough. Come, pull it back on.”

  Andrey stared at her with a concerned expression as he pointedly continued to remove his sweater. He handed it to her in the same manner. “It’s barely below sixteen,” he said. “Even you don’t get cold in this weather. If you need to go home--”

  “No, no,” Vera waved her hand negatively and took the sweater. “I’m alright. I wish very much to see Nikolai Bezfamilny in this role; it’s well worth fifteen minutes of discomfort.”

  Andrey still looked at her uneasily, evidently no more settled. It was clear in his face that he was thinking something along the lines of, ‘Fifteen more minutes, and all because a certain bastard couldn’t deign to show up on time,’ but he held off voicing these thoughts. He instead helped her pull her arms through the stretchy fabric. She shivered, rubbed her rouged cheeks vigorously against the soft sleeves, rocked and soaked up the warmth of the garment, and finally stilled.

  After a moment of peace, Vera sighed again. “How about this: if I don’t feel well, we can leave at intermission. But I want to experience this with you, and with Fedya, and I don’t want my accursed health to ruin yet another good thing in my life. I’m so sick of it!” Her eyes grew moist, and she cut off.

[wolf-nir]

The Members of the Decay of Angels

The Decay of Angels is a five-member terrorist organization. They specialize in being a “murder association”. Although few in number, all its members have powerful and threatening abilities.

So far has been presented two members of this organization, Fyodor Doystoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol. The other three members remain a mystery, however it is known that possibly all of them are infiltrated into the government and the Japanese police force.

From the two members hitherto presented, it is possible to deduce that the organization is probably formed by classical russian authors, since Asagiri likes to present groups and organizations with members having the same nationality. This is the case with the ADA, Port Mafia and The Guild.

However, I believe that only two of the remaining members can be russian authors, since Asagiri has been playing reference to one of the classic Japanese authors, Mishima Yukio, which would make sense for an organization with predictable base in Japan needing a Japanese connection.

Following this theory, we know that there are several classic russian authors, an example is the very organization commanded by Fyodor, who has mostly russian authors. However, because it is a tremendously dangerous organization, it is possible to deduce that the authors chosen by Asagiri are the best known and/or controversial in the history of russian literature, both IRL!Fyodor and IRL!Gogol being part of this list.

Among several choices I have separated five authors known for their fame and influence in literature. Since this is a theory, I will introduce some of the IRL! and their possible ability. Since I’m not Asagiri and I don’t have much knowledge about russian literature, I may be wrong on some points here and there, but I hope you enjoy it!

❝  Leo Tolstoy ❞

⌈ IRL! Facts ⌋

✓ Leo Tolstoy, born as Liev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is considered to be one of the greatest authors of all time. ✓ Born to an aristocratic russian family in 1828, he is best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. He first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852-1856), and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based upon his experiences in the Crimean War. ✓ In the 1870s Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction work A Confession (1882). His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist.

⌈ Ability ⌋

❝  Karenina ❞

✓ Anna Karenina is the tragic story of Countess Anna Karenina, a married noblewoman and socialite, and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. The story starts when she arrives in the midst of a family broken up by her brother's unbridled womanizing — something that prefigures her own later situation, though she would experience less tolerance by others. A bachelor, Vronsky is eager to marry Anna if she will agree to leave her husband Count Karenin, a senior government official, but she is vulnerable to the pressures of Russian social norms, the moral laws of the Russian Orthodox Church, her own insecurities, and Karenin's indecision. Although Vronsky and Anna go to Italy, where they can be together, they have trouble making friends. Back in Russia, she is shunned, becoming further isolated and anxious, while Vronsky pursues his social life. Despite Vronsky's reassurances, she grows increasingly possessive and paranoid about his imagined infidelity, fearing loss of control. ✓ Seen from a small perspective, Karenina is a novel focused on a toxic relationship because of Anna's mistrust and paranoia. (in fact I may be quite wrong, since I have never finished reading the book and probably never will -q) ✓ Thus, Tolstoy's possible ability could be something connected to causing paranoia/delusions in the victim or incubating the victim to betray his own allies. ✓ Seeing that Leo Tolstoy is probably also infiltrated in the Japanese government, it is quite possible that he is using his ability to cause discord among politicians, and if he finds himself infiltrated into another government or public force, his ability continues to be useful in conflict of national or international disposition.

❝ A Confession ❞

✓ The book is a brief autobiographical story of the author's struggle with a mid-life existential crisis. It describes his search for the answer to the ultimate philosophical question. “If God does not exist, since death is inevitable, what is the meaning of life?”. Without the answer to this, for him, life had become “impossible”. ✓ According to IRL!Tolstoy, in the face of the inevitability of death and assuming that God does not exist, the most intellectually honest response to the situation would be suicide. ✓ Thus, the ability of BSD!Tolstoy would also be manipulative in content, perhaps something close to the ability of Yumeno or Fyodor, in that by touch or any other kind of contact, Tolstoy could manipulate the victim's mind to commit suicide, perhaps by incubating existential doubts or personal insecurities that, in extreme circumstances, could lead the person to the suicide. Honestly, that would be the last ability I'd like Atsushi, Akutagawa or Dazai to face (even if Dazai can cancel the ability).

❝  Andrei Bely ❞

⌈ IRL! Facts ⌋

✓ Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, better known by the pen name Andrei Bely or Biely; 26 October [O.S. 14 October] 1880 – 8 January 1934), was a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, communist, and literary critic. ✓ His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century. ✓ Boris Bugaev was fascinated by probability and particularly by entropy, a notion to which he frequently refers in works such as Kotik Letaev. ✓ As a young man, Bely was strongly influenced by his acquaintance with the family of philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, especially Vladimir's younger brother Mikhail, described in his long autobiographical poem The First Encounter (1921); the title is a reflection of Vladimir Solovyov's Three Encounters. It was Mikhail Solovyov who gave Bugaev his pseudonym Andrei Bely. ✓ Bely's symbolist novel Petersburg (1916; 1922) is generally considered to be his masterpiece. The book employs a striking prose method in which sounds often evoke colors. The novel is set in the somewhat hysterical atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Petersburg and the Russian Revolution of 1905.

⌈ Ability ⌋

❝  Petersburg ❞

✓ To the extent that the book can be said to possess a plot, this can be summarized as the story of the hapless Nikolai Apollonovich, a ne'er-do-well who is caught up in revolutionary politics and assigned the task of assassinating a certain government official — his own father. At one point, Nikolai is pursued through the Petersburg mists by the ringing hooves of the famous bronze statue of Peter the Great. ✓ The main character of the book is known for wearing a strange red domino mask and cape. This visual is a way of “acting like a fool” in front of the woman who spent a lot of time courting and being rejected. ✓ The ability of BSD!Bely could be deceptive, illusory, very similar to that of Oguri. ✓ His ability could be to hypnotize the victim so that she was able to see and do catastrophic things as just “silly things”. An example would be to turn a bomb into a simple bouquet of flowers or something else that would make the victim cause chaos without actually realizing it.

❝  Mikhail Bulgakov ❞

⌈ IRL! Facts ⌋

✓ Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (15 May [O.S. 3 May] 1891 – 10 March 1940) was a russian writer, medical doctor and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. ✓ He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously, which has been called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. ✓ After illness Bulgakov abandoned his career as a doctor for that of a writer. In his autobiography, he recalled how he started writing: "Once in 1919 when I was traveling at night by train I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story". ✓ His first book was an almanac of feuilletons called Future Perspectives, written and published the same year.

⌈ Ability ⌋

❝  The Master and Margarita ❞

✓ The story concerns a visit by the devil to the officially atheistic Soviet Union. The Master and Margarita combines supernatural element with satirical dark comedy and Christian philosophy, defying a singular genre. ✓ The ability of the BSD!Mikhail is very similar to that of Lucy Montgomery, the only exception is that instead of a doll, Mikhail has the body of a dead woman as his marionette, he calls her Margarita. ✓ Margarita is described as a woman in a Russian style dress of the 19th century in a lush shade of red. His eyes are black and empty-looking. ✓ She is able to obey Mikhail's three specific orders. She “comes to life” during this process through the drinking ritual of Mikhail's blood. The more complicated Mikhail's desire, the more blood Margarita consumes.

❝  Heart of a Dog ❞

✓ The Heart of a Dog is a satirical work in which a doctor does an experiment on a dog rescued by him in which he transforms the animal into a human of personality and primitive aspects. (or at least that's what I understood, frankly I'm so confused with this book) ✓ The ability of BSD!Mikhail, in this case, would be quite simple: through physical contact, he is able to make a human being surrender to his most primitive and savage side, until that person becomes, in fact, a dog. ✓ Mikhail is able to control the duration of the transformation, meaning he is able to make someone turn quickly or slowly, depending on his intentions. Besides that, once the person is totally transformed, it is impossible to undo the transformation.

❝  Anton Chekhov ❞

⌈ IRL! Facts ⌋

✓ Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a russian playwright and short-story writer, who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. ✓ Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress." ✓ Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

⌈ Ability ⌋

❝  The Seagull ❞

✓  The Seagull is generally considered to be the first of his four major plays. It dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Tréplev. ✓ The ability is to "send" your fatal injuries to the body of other people. According to BSD!Anton, the people with whom he makes this exchange are his mere seagulls who used to live happily and ignorantly, but who know him only to be a tool to kill his boredom. ✓ For the exchange to take place Anton must have made a "contract" with the other person. For the most part, people are women who have previously been their lovers or who are in love with him.

❝  Maxim Gorky ❞

⌈ IRL! Facts ⌋

✓ Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky, was a russian and soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist. He was also a five-time nominee for theNobel Prize in Literature. ✓ Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl (1899), The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), My Childhood (1913-1914), Mother (1906), Summerfolk (1904) and Children of the Sun (1905). ✓ He had an association with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs.

⌈ Ability ⌋

❝  The Lower Depths ❞ 

✓ The play is centered on lower-class characters living in a shelter. Everyone has questionable ethical actions throughout the plot. ✓ Gorky's ability is based on people's lies. He is able to turn any and every lie that the person has already said into reality, most often causing the destruction - be it physical, mental or social - of the victim.

[kyukurator-blog]

DEFINITELY NOT DOWNTON ABBEY

For years now we’ve been suckers for costume drama (cue 1729 trumpet “Fanfare-Rondeau” by Moret –the Masterpiece Classic theme).  P&P, Sense & Sensibility, and yes, the endlessly foamy Downton.

But when somebody comes along with a wicked new twist on period drama, we love it even more.

  LADY MACBETH (2016)

Not Shakespeare – this is based on “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk” a novella by Dostoevsky contemporary Andrei Leskov.

Boris, a nasty but rich old man, buys young Katherine as a wife for his equally nasty son, Alexander, who lives at home.  On their wedding night Alexander reveals that he is both kinky and impotent.  Plus, they won’t let her leave the house.

But when father and son both leave town on business (bad idea) Katherine gets out and falls into passion with a stable hand named Sebastian.  The affair opens up depths of  passion and dark resolve in the heretofore meek Katherine; before long she has disposed of both the father and the son.    The film is reportedly a breakout for Florence Pugh (Catherine).  It’s also notable for breaking with costume drama conventions and casting of black actors in both the roles of Sebastian and Katherine’s maid.

    WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2011)

Casting an unknown black actor in the “Caribbean” role once occupied by Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes is only one of the breaks with convention that make Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights worth watching.  There are also the Heath, which is both less inviting and more

Arnold has won the Cannes Jury Award three times for pointedly contemporary stories.  Here she worked to strip away the buffer of literary awe and invent a sort of proto-Wuthering Heights.  Her Heath is a brutal place, but teeming with life – we see a microscopic child’s eye view of the bugs and undergrowth.  The connection between the young Cathy and Heathcliffe is primal and childlike too — it knows no other way and no other world.

Very exciting and freshening.  Maybe the movie begins to take its mission to re-invent too seriously, throwing in a few too many “fucks”, “cunts” and off-kilter angles.  You still come away with the feeling that you’ve seen a vision of the book that makes you want to read it again.

If you loved the 1939 classic, you may hate this.  But we do and didn’t.

        THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT (1991)

 In many ways the opposite of Arnold’s film, Greenaway’s first feature imposes a surreal formalism and arch eroticism on a period that happens to be ideally suited to such an approach.

Set in 1694, the contract of the title is a commission from a rich wife to draw her absent husband’s country estate in meticulous detail – the specialty of the handsome and cocky draughtsman.

But there’s a rider to the contract.  In addition to room, board, and a small payment, the draughtsman gets to enjoy the lady’s favors whenever he desires.  After a token protestation the lady says yes.

The film is as methodical and meticulous as the draughtsman – but peppered with tiny anachronisms and incongruities.   After a while the stilted dialogue and measured pace begin to wear you down.

But then the (also married) daughter points out that tiny clues are creeping into the rigidly composed scene, and suggests that the draughtsman may be being set up as a patsy for the absent father’s murder.  She blackmails the draughtsman – by demanding the same intimate favors that he requires from her mother.

     ANGELS AND INSECTS (1991)

This baroque delight was directed by sculptor Philip Haas and based on an A.S. Byatt novel. It seemed wonderfully perverse when it came out, but we just watched the trailer again and it comes off as so comically overwrought that now we need to revisit the film itself.

Roger Ebert (who liked it a lot) said it was the “dark underbelly of a Merchant-Ivory film”.

Yes, but — in an odd way, not really that dark.  What’s delightful about the film is that it takes the insect behaviors that entomologist William (Mark Rylance) has spent years studying in the Amazon, and overlays them on the hothouse manners of the aristocratic Victorian family of his patron.  Everything is brilliantly colored yet emotionally detached – until it’s punctuated by frenzied passion.

Which is exactly how blindingly blonde Eugenia Alabaster (Patsy Kensit) behaves toward William after she has astonished him by accepting his proposal.

But like Wuthering Heights it’s the brother you have to watch out for.  Douglas Henshall is Edgar Alabaster, as blond as his sister and enraged that a brunette Scotsman – penniless to boot – should lay fingers on her.  Kristen Scott Thomas is wonderful as the mousy maid whose drawings of ants eventually catch William’s eye.

  A YOUNG DOCTOR’S NOTEBOOK (2012-13)

We’re still waiting for an English-language version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s posthumous delight Master and Margarita (it’s been optioned!) but in the meantime there’s this semi-autobiographical series based on the author’s short stories.

It’s a dark, dark comedy, with Daniel Radcliffe playing a young doctor graduates from med school in 1917.  It’s the middle of the Russian Revolution and he lands in one of the most backward parts of Siberia, where superstition is more credible than science and practice of the medical arts require a strong arm and an even stronger stomach.

John Hamm plays the older, wiser doctor who is not just looking back on his youth, but actually interacting with his younger self – even as he’s desperately clinging to his profession despite a rampaging addiction to  morphine.

It’s a short series, two seasons of 4 episodes each, shot on a shoestring by UK’s Sky Arts.  It’s uneven, but the draw here is the stars, especially Hamm, and a chance to get another glimpse inside Bulgakov’s mind.

  CRIMSON PEAK (2015) 

As you would expect from Guillermo del Torro, this spooky romance out-gothics the gothics.

The movie starts in Buffalo, New York with Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowski) receiving a visit from her dead mother, with a warning “Beware Crimson Peak”.

Fourteen years later, Edith falls for British baronet Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and despite warnings from her father goes to England to live with him and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) in the family home, which is perched above a red clay mine.

When Edith’s father and childhood friend Alan (Charlie Hunnam) discover that Sharpe has been married and widowed three times before, Alan travels to England to save her.  By this time, Edith is seeing red ghosts and coughing up blood.  It’s then that Sharpe tells her the mansion is sometimes called Crimson Peak.

The movie is good, dark fun, brimming with dark symbolism, horror movie tropes, doomed romance, and allusions to previous gothic novelists and filmmakers.

                              DEFINITELY NOT DOWNTON ABBEY was originally published on FollowTheThread