235 Same footnote: Date of first Spanish combat of Soviet tanks—Gabriel Jackson, p. 319.
236 The departure of Madrid’s gold reserves—Martin Blinkhorn, ed., Spain in Conflict 1931-1939: Democracy and Its Enemies (London: SAGE Publications, 1986), pp. 228-29. This source gives the figure of 500 metric tons.
236 The liquidation of Andrés Nin—Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931-39), intro. by Les Evans (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), pp. 267-68 (no. 66: “The Murder of Andrés Nin by Agents of the GPU,” August 8, 1937). Trotsky writes: “He refused to cooperate with the GPU against the interests of the Soviet people. That was his only crime. And for this crime he paid with his life.”
237 “I must always be there, whenever fighting breaks out”—Konstantin Slavin, undated Soviet Exportkino book about Karmen, cover missing; in Budesarchiv, Berlin; p. 5.
Information on orders, medals, titles and honors of the USSR (Elena’s Order of the Red Star, Chuikov’s Order of Lenin, and the Medal for the Defense of Leningrad, which I describe in “Opus 110”)—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 9, p. 241; vol. 15, p. 629; vol. 18, pp. 516, 658. Many details of Karmen’s doings during the war years are based on his Über die zeit und über mich selbst: Erzählungen über mein Schaffen, trans. into German by Henschel Verlag, typescript, Bundesarchiv cat. no. 92 28 / 87, pp. 23-37. Very likely this is the same as his About Myself and the Times, published in 1968 by the Publicity Office of the Soviet Film Industry. I have not located a copy of this document. Thirty-six hundred words of Über die zeit were translated into English for me (17¢ per word; $613.19) by Elsmarie Hau and Tracy Bigelow. A number of my descriptions, attributions, colleagues and witnesses, etcetera, are entirely invented.
238 Karmen: “How precious this footage will be for all of us…”—Somewhat “retranslated” from Ibid., orig. p. 24; Hau-Bigelow, p. 1.
239 Akhmatova: “The Leningraders, my heart’s blood, march out even-ranked…” —Selected Poems, p. 72 (“Courage,” 1942), “retranslated” by WTV.
239 The plot of “Scout Pashkov”—Von Geldern and Stites, pp. 338-39.
240 Aspektverhältnis and zeichen—Thomas Melle to WTV: “‘Zeichen’ to me seems too general for a nonphilosophical grammarbook,” which was precisely my intention.
241 Karmen to Comrade Alexandrov: “Since everything in that court followed a strict consequential logic…”—Slightly abbreviated and “retranslated” from Über die zeit, orig. p. 37; Hau-Bigelow, p. 8.
242 V. I. Chuikov: Berlin “rained rivers of red-hot steel on us.”—Op. cit., p. 176 (“raining” in original).
242 The two extracts from the unhealthy old book in Berlin—The Nibelungenlied, trans. A. T. Hatto (New York: Penguin, 1969, repr. of 1965 ed.; original German ed. ca. 1200), pp. 23, 54 (chs. 3, 5), “retranslated” by WTV.
242 The non-appearance of Karmen in the credits to “Stalingrad”—Very occasionally we do find him listed—once even as codirector of “Stalingrad,” in Dr. Roger Manvell, gen. ed., The International Encyclopedia of Film (New York: Bonanza Books, 1975, repr. of 1972 Rainbird ed.), p. 174.
243 “A fellow traveller,” writing about “Stalingrad”: “Simple and heroic in the finest sense of the word”—Thomas Dickinson and Catherine De la Roche, Soviet Cinema (London: The Falcon Press, Ltd., 1948), p. 67 (De la Roche writing).
243 Karmen’s non-appearance in Wakeman’s compilation—John Wakeman, ed., World Film Directors, vol. 1: 1890-1945 (New York: The H. W. Wilson Co., 1987), pp. 1122-25.
244 The relationship of Roman Karmen and Elena Konstantinovskaya—Suppose that they had never married. In that case I imagine the following two episodes: (1a) For her birthday he once gave her a long folding screen comprised of still portraits he’d made of peasant women in Kara-Kum. M. Ia. Slutskii, with whom he codirected several documentaries, assured him that the faces were stunning. Of course it was a very large object, an egotistical thing, really, and he would have resented it if anybody gave him something that size and expected him to hang it on the wall; at four meters long, it would certainly dominate a room. So he showed it to Elena first. She told him that she thought it was beautiful. He asked her if she would like to have it. He assured her that if she didn’t want it, he wouldn’t be insulted; the only reason that he wanted to offer it to her was that he was very proud of it and he wanted to give her something he was proud of. She’d acted happy and overwhelmed; she hung it on the wall of her apartment. And then one day it wasn’t there. He didn’t say anything about it. The next time he visited, it still wasn’t there, and the next time she said casually that she was redoing the wall, and it would go back up eventually. But he knew that it never would. (1b) He truly believed that his images on the screen were beautiful. If they were mediocre, he didn’t know better. He only wanted to make Elena happy. Elena loved art. She always said so. She admired visual art especially, although she also enjoyed music; she had quite a few records, many of which he supposed that Shostakovich had given her, and she rarely failed to listen to Shostakovich’s latest on the radio. Sometimes that made him very jealous, but he never said anything. (2) Then there was the time he’d given her a print of an old Kalmuck woman, an image he was particularly proud of; and a month later he found it on the floor of her car, creased and with a footprint on it. She was running him over to Boris Makaseyev’s in the car, and he was just about to get out when he saw it. He handed it to her and said: Maybe this could be put in a better place. When she came back to pick him up two hours later it was still in the car, but in the back of the car. Makaseyev’s wife saw. She was a very sweet, rather shy woman who was fond of Karmen. She knew that he and Elena were having difficulties.—Why, what a lovely print! she said. May I see it?—Elena handed it to her and said: I feel a little guilty about the fact that it’s damaged, because Roman probably thinks I don’t care about it.—Karmen said nothing, and Makaseyeva took it in her hands and said: It’s beautiful. Elena, don’t ever treat his work that way again or I’ll slap your face.—Sorry, I was only joking, she quickly said when she saw Elena’s expression.
256 Information on the cast, credits, etc., of the movie “Zoya”—Vsesoyuznuii Gospudarstvennui Fond Kinofilmov, Sovyetksie Khudozhestvennuie Filmui: Annomiyobannui Kamaloy, vol. 2: “Zvukovuie filmui (1930-1957)” (Moscow: Gosudartvennose Isdatelstvo “Iskusstvo,” 1961), pp. 331-32. “Zoya” is item 1789. We find it defined as a drama, released by Soyuzdetfilm on 22 September 1944. Arnshtam listed first and third, Shostakovich listed fourth (as the composer, obviously), Karmen not at all. Zoya was G[alina] Vodyanischkaya; Zoya as a child Katya Skvortsova; V. Podgornui was the German officer; R. Plyatt was the German soldier. (There were far more Russians than Germans in the cast.) “Zoya” won a Stalin Prize in 1946. It got praised in Pravda on 22 September 1944, in Izvestiya and Komsomolskaya Pravda the following day; and two times more in Komsomolskaya Pravda; in Iskusstvo Kino in 1946, etc. The New York Times for its part concluded that Galina Vodianitskaya “plays the heroine elaborately” but that the movie was “tediously constructed”—too many newsreels intercut with too many flashbacks to Zoya’s sentimentalized childhood (The New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1968, vol. 3 [New York: The New York Times and Arno Press, 1970], p. 2058 [B. C. (Bosley Crowther?)], “Zoya,” April 16, 1945, 18:6).