Uncle Vanya Goes To Russia

'Uncle Vanya' is a play by Anton Chekhov. Chekhov is quite possibly the individual writer most responsible for destroying the standard previous norm of 'heroic morality tales' and stories with a resolution designed to render some sort of moral lesson or template from which to work out solutions to real life challenges and problems.

Of course, one can say that yes, writers must have been quite arrogant to think they knew what answers there were to the many problems people encounter in real life...

Frank Langella - played a rare book dealer and occultist,
Satanist, in fact, in The Ninth Gate. He's also played 'Uncle Vanya'
on the stage. A great actor.

However Chekhov is also the figure used by Russian intellectuals over the last hundred years, to talk about their ideas and feelings, of the frustration of people with government, bureaucrats, even other institutions like churches and politics (political parties and movements) and politicians and their financial backers. You see, Chekhov's stories often had no resolution and left things in a deliberately vague or unresolved, unsatisfying position.

The phrase 'Uncle Vanya' or 'our Uncle Vanya' also found a place with spies of the Cold War period, sometimes to talk about senior counterparts 'on the other side' and really, it didn't only mean on the Soviet Russian side. For instance, an MI6 agent could quite easily have spoken to a colleague about their 'Uncle Vanya' meaning some unorthodox cabinet minister at White Hall, or even, the senior man at the parallel agency, MI5. 

What it implied was the figure who was 'not necessarily one of us' but who was a bridge perhaps, 'between oil and water,' let's say - but also, inevitably, because of the practical impossibility of genuine harmonization, if we could put it that way, things were apt to end up always to be in some way or other 'unresolved.'

In Chekhov's story, Vanya creates a lot of difficulties, and destabilizes people's lives without any consideration at all. In one version of the story that Chekhov penned, he (Vanya) dies, in another, he almost dies but doesn't die...!

In both cases the main problems are not at all resolved.

...Now I'm posting this now and using the phrase 'Uncle Vanya' because we have an 'Uncle Vanya' who happens to be going to Moscow next week.

But our 'Uncle Vanya' is not a problematical guy and nor is anything he is likely to do or not do, going to leave anything unresolved.

You see there was another use of the phrase - namely, in the popular TV Series 'Man From U.N.C.L.E.'

These movies are fairly dated when you watch them now, but intelligent people such as we are, must allow for the context of the day in question. 

One of our friends here commented in the last article, about the occult Roman Polanski movie 'The Ninth Gate.' And I'm going to try and tie everything in to something I was already attempting to 'get across' as best I could - in many recent articles.

I take us all for borderline genuine, authentic intellectuals here... And so we don't need to worry about propaganda messages, when looking at ancient knowledge and ideas - but we do consider things from the best accurate sources, and look at what people were thinking from what we can utterly establish was what they said, and what the meanings in the language they used, really were.

Recently I told an American Evangelical Christian that there was no prayer 'Our Father who art in heaven' and of course he got quite angry. 

Well you see, there isn't! It's not what is said there...

What is said is 'Father of mine (which has a very special connotation), who a-livens (makes active and dynamic) all of the Space which contains everything material that exists...' That's indeed what it says and it uses highly technical Greek language.

And then it goes on to use a compound word, part of which we know and use today: 'aesthetic...' And we can also modify it and say 'ethos.'

And then, later on, it says - 'and restrain our blood from getting up, from the delusory enchantments of fairies.'

Oh yes. You heard me.

Somewhere along the line in the core source texts, it also says that 'doors will be opened' but only some will be able to see and go through those doors (IE 'gates'), but those and some others will be 'ek tereo;' watched over, as in safe-guarded. 

And then, it says some extremely bloody and blood-thirsty things about what is going to happen in the rest of the world.

So. The Ninth GATE.

Yes.

; )