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igenlodeI randomly listened to one of the chunks of the four-part "27 Years After" Soviet Musketeers documentary -- the programme that, as I now know, was uploaded to YouTube by Igor Starygin's widow, and that like almost(?) all the material she uploaded, has no automatic soundtrack captions whatsoever, either due to the early date (hence the division into short sections of video) or else the software she was using to record/upload them at the time. So not only no auto-translation, but no attempted Russian-language auto-transcription either, however bizarrely unhelpful the computerised efforts at word-recognition can be. The only possibilities on offer are basic human listening comprehension or nothing.
And I can definitely understand a lot more of it than I could when I first encountered it, which is encouraging -- although a good deal of that is due to knowing and recognising a lot more of the *context*, e.g. being able to pick out names (Valya, Efros) that originally meant nothing to me, and recognising the anecdote that Smekhov is telling about the premiere of the film thanks to having read his account of it in his book of anecdotes, "When I Was Athos"† ;-) But, for example, I definitely don't remember Boyarsky's story about how he and 'Valya' (Valentin Smirtnitsky -- Porthos) turned up for the four-and-a-half-hour premiere in Moscow, where the whole serial was run at a single screening, and promptly proceeded to fall soundly asleep almost as soon as they had taken their seats ;-D
† I was extremely excited to discover a couple of weeks ago that "When I Was Athos" was actually about to be republished in print form via a crowdfunding scheme, having, according to the funding blurb, only been available in 'samizdat' form -- I stumbled across it while chasing his Kino-horoscope back in June, via an unlinked reference on an old Livejournal blog entry about the making of the film, and by a massive coincidence had pretty much just finished reading my way with incredible slowness through the online version a couple of days before I heard the news. (Although since I started with the final chapter I haven't actually finished re-reading that; the slowness is not entirely due to the parlous state of my Russian and the amount of looking-up I have to do for every anecdote, but also to the fact that reading anything of any length online tends to take me months to finish if I can't get round to doing it in a single session...)
At any rate, I was very strongly tempted for a few days -- that being the length of time then remaining before the ending of the funding period -- to subscribe for one of the handful of remaining signed copies, before realising that the only two delivery options available were 'postage within the Russian Federation' and collection in person from the publishers in Moscow :-( (Understandable, given the low demand and presumable high cost and complication of shipping items abroad...)
https://planeta.ru/campaigns/atos
I then seriously considered contributing some money via the 'I don't want to receive a copy of the book, I just want to support the project' option, given that the suggested contribution was 200 roubles and the rouble is currently worth about 1p (ouch). I got as far as a very nerve-racking signing up to pay; financial transactions on a website you can barely read and where the options are mainly comprehensible only by analogy are not exactly something I feel comfortable about, given that I normally avoid making any payments online wherever possible and am not hardened to the concept even in English.
But the only available payment options were ones I didn't even recognise, and it dawned on me at that point that the last time I'd been involved in money transfer abroad -- on that occasion, trying to *receive* money by bank transfer for something I was selling -- my bank had slapped a foreign currency transaction fee on my account that had completely wiped out the value of the sum I was supposed to receive. I checked, and the current fee is £15... which is grossly disproportionate to the value of a donation of couple of hundred roubles, and the possibility of which scared me right off, if I hadn't been scared enough already :-(
(There are special conditions for transfers to the Eurozone, apparently, but Russia is of course not a member of the European currency union, or whatever they are calling it these days.)
So the book has come out, and I am not part of it. I do know that there are Russian expatriates interested in ordering copies, so there may potentially be an international option at some point. Un-autographed, presumably; I was entertained by the publisher's announcement that the autographed copies would be imminently forthcoming provided they could be delivered in time to intercept the author before he left on tour. I did add up all the various combinations of signed volumes that had successfully been pre-ordered, and it amounted to a requirement for several hundred signatures -- probably not the most welcome of duties to find yourself undertaking immediately before setting off abroad on a series of performances ;-)
(The apparent shortfall is misleading; the campaign is listed as only 66% funded, but in fact every option on offer had sold out with the exception of five of the 'single signed copy' tier books. The missing chunk is down to the offer of a special 'Sponsor' tier with two memberships at fifty thousand roubles that found no takers -- unsurprisingly, since so far as I can see all that was on offer was a personalised choice of signature text, as opposed to getting your name actually printed in the credits of the book as a sponsor, which was available for a twentieth of the price!)
[Edit: no, apparently this was for 'corporate sponsors' who would get their company's logo on the book, plus multiple copies with personalised inscriptions...]
And I can definitely understand a lot more of it than I could when I first encountered it, which is encouraging -- although a good deal of that is due to knowing and recognising a lot more of the *context*, e.g. being able to pick out names (Valya, Efros) that originally meant nothing to me, and recognising the anecdote that Smekhov is telling about the premiere of the film thanks to having read his account of it in his book of anecdotes, "When I Was Athos"† ;-) But, for example, I definitely don't remember Boyarsky's story about how he and 'Valya' (Valentin Smirtnitsky -- Porthos) turned up for the four-and-a-half-hour premiere in Moscow, where the whole serial was run at a single screening, and promptly proceeded to fall soundly asleep almost as soon as they had taken their seats ;-D
† I was extremely excited to discover a couple of weeks ago that "When I Was Athos" was actually about to be republished in print form via a crowdfunding scheme, having, according to the funding blurb, only been available in 'samizdat' form -- I stumbled across it while chasing his Kino-horoscope back in June, via an unlinked reference on an old Livejournal blog entry about the making of the film, and by a massive coincidence had pretty much just finished reading my way with incredible slowness through the online version a couple of days before I heard the news. (Although since I started with the final chapter I haven't actually finished re-reading that; the slowness is not entirely due to the parlous state of my Russian and the amount of looking-up I have to do for every anecdote, but also to the fact that reading anything of any length online tends to take me months to finish if I can't get round to doing it in a single session...)
At any rate, I was very strongly tempted for a few days -- that being the length of time then remaining before the ending of the funding period -- to subscribe for one of the handful of remaining signed copies, before realising that the only two delivery options available were 'postage within the Russian Federation' and collection in person from the publishers in Moscow :-( (Understandable, given the low demand and presumable high cost and complication of shipping items abroad...)
https://planeta.ru/campaigns/atos
I then seriously considered contributing some money via the 'I don't want to receive a copy of the book, I just want to support the project' option, given that the suggested contribution was 200 roubles and the rouble is currently worth about 1p (ouch). I got as far as a very nerve-racking signing up to pay; financial transactions on a website you can barely read and where the options are mainly comprehensible only by analogy are not exactly something I feel comfortable about, given that I normally avoid making any payments online wherever possible and am not hardened to the concept even in English.
But the only available payment options were ones I didn't even recognise, and it dawned on me at that point that the last time I'd been involved in money transfer abroad -- on that occasion, trying to *receive* money by bank transfer for something I was selling -- my bank had slapped a foreign currency transaction fee on my account that had completely wiped out the value of the sum I was supposed to receive. I checked, and the current fee is £15... which is grossly disproportionate to the value of a donation of couple of hundred roubles, and the possibility of which scared me right off, if I hadn't been scared enough already :-(
(There are special conditions for transfers to the Eurozone, apparently, but Russia is of course not a member of the European currency union, or whatever they are calling it these days.)
So the book has come out, and I am not part of it. I do know that there are Russian expatriates interested in ordering copies, so there may potentially be an international option at some point. Un-autographed, presumably; I was entertained by the publisher's announcement that the autographed copies would be imminently forthcoming provided they could be delivered in time to intercept the author before he left on tour. I did add up all the various combinations of signed volumes that had successfully been pre-ordered, and it amounted to a requirement for several hundred signatures -- probably not the most welcome of duties to find yourself undertaking immediately before setting off abroad on a series of performances ;-)
(The apparent shortfall is misleading; the campaign is listed as only 66% funded, but in fact every option on offer had sold out with the exception of five of the 'single signed copy' tier books. The missing chunk is down to the offer of a special 'Sponsor' tier with two memberships at fifty thousand roubles that found no takers -- unsurprisingly, since so far as I can see all that was on offer was a personalised choice of signature text, as opposed to getting your name actually printed in the credits of the book as a sponsor, which was available for a twentieth of the price!)
[Edit: no, apparently this was for 'corporate sponsors' who would get their company's logo on the book, plus multiple copies with personalised inscriptions...]