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173_0 | The Votadini, also known as the Uotadini, Wotādīni, Votādīni or Otadini, were a Brittonic people of the Iron Age in Great Britain. Their territory was in what is now south-east Scotland and north-east England, extending from the Firth of Forth and around modern Stirling to the River Tyne, including at its peak what are now the Falkirk, Lothian and Borders regions and Northumberland. This area was briefly part of the Roman province of Britannia. The earliest known capital of the Votadini appears to have been the Traprain Law hill fort in East Lothian, until that was abandoned in the early 5th century. They afterwards moved to Din Eidyn (Edinburgh).
The name is recorded as Votadini in classical sources. Their descendants were the early medieval kingdom known in Old Welsh as Guotodin, and in later Welsh as Gododdin . |
173_1 | One of the oldest known pieces of British literature is a poem called Y Gododdin, written in Old Welsh, having previously been passed down via the oral traditions of the Brythonic speaking Britons. This poem celebrates the bravery of the soldiers from what was later referred to by the Britons as Yr Hen Ogledd – The Old North; a reference to the fact that this land was lost in battle to an invading force at Catraeth (modern day Catterick).
Prehistory
The area was settled as early as 3000 BC, and offerings of that period imported from Cumbria and Wales left on the sacred hilltop at Cairnpapple Hill, West Lothian, show that by then there was a link with these areas. By around 1500 BC Traprain Law in East Lothian was already a place of burial, with evidence of occupation and signs of ramparts after 1000 BC. Excavation at Edinburgh Castle found late Bronze Age material from about 850 BC. |
173_2 | Brythonic Celtic culture and language spread into the area at some time after the 8th century BC, possibly through cultural contact rather than mass invasion, and systems of kingdoms developed. Numerous hillforts and settlements support the image of quarrelsome tribes and petty kingdoms recorded by the Romans, though evidence that at times occupants neglected the defences might suggest that symbolic power was sometimes as significant as warfare. |
173_3 | The Roman period
In the 1st century the Romans recorded the Votadini as a British tribe. Between 138–162 they came under direct Roman military rule as occupants of the region between Hadrian's and the Antonine Walls. Then when the Romans drew back to Hadrian's Wall the Votadini became a friendly buffer state, getting the rewards of alliance with Rome without being under its rule, until about 400 when the Romans withdrew from southern Great Britain. Quantities of Roman goods found at Traprain Law, East Lothian might suggest that this proved profitable, though this is open to speculation.
Since the 3rd century, Britannia had been divided into four provinces. In a late reorganisation a province called Valentia was created, which may have been a new province, perhaps including the Votadini territory, but is more likely to have been one of the four existing provinces renamed. |
173_4 | Excavations in Votadini territory, especially around Traprain Law, have unearthed silver Roman items, including several Gallic Roman coins, indicating some level of trade with the continent. It is unknown, however, whether the other items were traded for, or given to them by the Romans as an appeasement.
The post-Roman period
After the Roman withdrawal in the early 5th century, the lands of the Votadini became part of the area known as the Hen Ogledd (the "Old North").
By about 470, a new kingdom of Gododdin had emerged covering most of the original Votadini territory, while the southern part between the Tweed and the Tyne formed its own separate kingdom called Brynaich. Cunedda, legendary founder of the Kingdom of Gwynedd in north Wales, is said to have been a Gododdin chieftain who migrated south-west about this time. |
173_5 | Both kingdoms warred with the Angles of Bernicia; it is this warfare that is commemorated in Aneirin's late 6th/early 7th century poem-cycle Y Gododdin. However Gwynedd where Cunedda established a militaristic dynasty remained undefeated until the 13th century.
Modern references
The name has been taken by the Votadini Motorcycle Club, based in the North East of England.
The tribe features in author Anthony Riches' Empire series as part of the failed uprising by Calgus, a fictional Selgovae king, who later betrays them and leaves them at the mercy of the Romans. After a brief battle between the Romans and a depleted Votadini host, Martos, the leader of the Votadini, allies himself with the Romans for vengeance against the Selgovae. Martos later militarily attaches himself and a substantial number of his men to the lead character, Marcus Valerius Aquila, and thus sees action in Germania & Dacia when the lead's exploits take him there. |
173_6 | See also
Dere Street
History of Northumberland
History of Scotland
Yeavering Bell
References
Cited references
General references
Scotland Before History – Stuart Piggott, Edinburgh University Press 1982,
Scotland's Hidden History – Ian Armit, Tempus (in association with Historic Scotland) 1998,
"Votadini and Traprain Law." - Caledonians, Picts and Romans. Education Scotland. Web. 27 Oct. 2015.
External links
Ancient Lothian – Histories – the romano-british era (use the search function for "Votadini" to find the article)
The History Files: Post-Roman Celtic Kingdoms: Goutodin
BBC – History – The Gododdin 590
BBC – History – Tribes of Britain
A Very Rough Guide To the Main DNA Sources of the Counties of the British Isles John Eckersley, Katherine Hope Borges, 12 June 2006. Retrieved 5 September 2006. |
173_7 | Celtic Britons
Scotland in the Roman era
History of Northumberland
Roman buffer states
Tribes of ancient Scotland
Historical Celtic peoples
Tribes mentioned by Ptolemy
Roman client kingdoms in Britain |
174_0 | Tales of the Riverbank, sometimes called Hammy Hamster and Once Upon a Hamster for the Canadian version, is a British children's television show developed from a Canadian pilot. The original series was later broadcast on Canadian and U.S. television, dubbed by Canadian and American actors for the markets they were to be broadcast in.
The pilot was created by David Ellison and Paul Sutherland, CBC film editors, in 1959. After completing the pilot programme, CBC turned down the production and so Dave Ellison travelled to the BBC in London to show it. The BBC initially commissioned thirteen episodes, but extended this later. A second series was made in colour in the 1970s, narrated by Johnny Morris.
The show also aired on the Animal Planet during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
A later remake was produced by YTV and Channel 4 in 1995 which ran for three years, and a feature-length film was made in 2008 using puppets rather than live animals. |
174_1 | Format
The programme had human voices in sync with the actions of the live animals, to give the impression that the creatures were performing activities. They lived in a place called "The Riverbank" and operated various artefacts including toy sailboats, cars, and even a diving bell. Various techniques were used to persuade the animals to do what was required, including smearing jam on the objects they were to handle. The voices were selected to reflect the personalities of the animals. Each episode ended with the narrator alluding to an event involving the characters, but refusing to elaborate, saying "But that is another story."
The original black and white Tales of the Riverbank series was first shown by the BBC on 3 July 1960 at 4:50 pm. It was originally narrated by Paul Sutherland, but the BBC did not want Canadian accents and so for the BBC showings, all the voices were provided by Johnny Morris. The series was eventually sold to 34 countries around the world. |
174_2 | UK VHS releases
UK DVD releases
US DVD releases
Further episodes
After the original thirteen episodes, 39 further episodes were made in black and white. The majority were written by David Ellison, Charles Fullman, Paul Sutherland and Cliff Braggins. The episodes of Tales of the Riverbank purchased by the BBC were adapted by staff writer Peggy Miller. Much of the filming was done on location at Wootton Creek on the Isle of Wight.
A later series with 26 episodes was filmed in colour in the 1970s, retitled Hammy Hamster (full title: Hammy Hamster's Adventures On the Riverbank) launched in 1972. The BBC had introduced a policy of not using human voices for live animals and so this series was shown in the UK by ITV. In Australia the show aired on ABC TV through the '70s as Adventures on the River Bank. |
174_3 | The last series, Further Tales of the Riverbank, made from 1991 to 1992, was produced for WTTV and Channel 4; 26 episodes of that series were made. It is ranked 79th in Channel 4's 2001 poll of the 100 Greatest Kids' TV shows. This series was the only one to have been released on DVD, in a set of three DVDs published in-house by Hammytime Productions UK.
In the United States, Once Upon A Hamster was broadcast in a late-night slot, which helped the programme transcend its intended audience and develop a cult status among American viewers.
The late Dave Ellison launched his own website to regularly update information about Hammy Hamster and his friends. He was also involved with optimising the TV series, last shown on Channel 4, for release on DVD.
Three children's books were published by Scholastic Publications Ltd in 1993 based on the series and illustrated by Pauline Hazelwood. |
174_4 | Main characters
In the later series the list of characters was expanded from the original first three listed below.
Feature film
A feature-length film, also titled Tales of the Riverbank, was released in September 2008 directly to DVD. It used a mix of puppets, live action, and special effects. Directed by John Henderson, produced by Handmade Pictures and starring Stephen Fry as Owl, Ardal O'Hanlon as Hammy, Steve Coogan as Roderick and Jim Broadbent as G. P., the story follows three friends who live in a riverbank. After being swept away from their homes by a storm, they embark on an adventure to find their home and save it from the danger of the Fat Cats' factory. |
174_5 | US news broadcast accidental reference
A publicity image by David Ellison of Hammy Hamster holding a clapperboard made an unexpected appearance on a January 2009 news broadcast regarding the disappearance of a young girl named Molly Bish. During a report regarding the questioning of a potential suspect eight years after the girl's disappearance, an error resulted in the image of Hammy Hamster being shown instead of a photo of the potential suspect.
See also
Anthropomorphism
Notes
References
External links
Andante in C by Giuliani
The Official website of the series 'Further Tales of the Riverbank' Dave Ellison and Hammy Hamster |
174_6 | BBC children's television shows
British children's television series
Channel 4 original programming
ITV children's television shows
Television series about mammals
Television series by Corus Entertainment
Television shows filmed in Toronto
1960s British children's television series
1970s British children's television series
1990s British children's television series
1959 Canadian television series debuts
1972 Canadian television series debuts
1995 Canadian television series debuts
1997 Canadian television series debuts
1950s Canadian children's television series
1960s Canadian children's television series
1970s Canadian children's television series
1990s Canadian children's television series
Black-and-white British television shows
Black-and-white Canadian television shows
Fictional cavies
Fictional hamsters
English-language television shows |
175_0 | Molotschna Colony or Molochna Colony was a Russian Mennonite settlement in what is now Zaporizhzhia Oblast in Ukraine. Today, the central village, known as Molochansk, has a population less than 10,000. The settlement is named after the Molochna River which forms its western boundary. The land falls mostly within the Tokmatskyi and Chernihivskyi Raions. The nearest large city is Melitopol, southwest of Molochansk. |
175_1 | Initially called Halbstadt (Half-city), Molotschna was founded in 1804 by Mennonite settlers from West Prussia and consisted of 57 villages. Known as the New Colony, it was the second and largest Mennonite settlement in the Russian Empire. In the late 19th century, hundreds of people left this colony to settle in North America. Colonies there had groups that later relocated to Latin America, where Mennonites settled in several countries. After many Mennonites left or were deported during and after the last days of World War II, this area became populated largely by Ukrainians.
History |
175_2 | After the first Mennonite colony within the Russian Empire, Chortitza, was founded in 1789, Mennonite visitors found the freedoms and free land of Southern Ukraine an attractive alternative in view of restrictions placed on them in West Prussia. The imperial Russian government wanted more settlers with the valuable agricultural and craft skills of the Mennonites. In 1800, Paul I of Russia enacted a Privilegium (official privileges) for Mennonites, granting them exemption from military service "for all time". In West Prussia, King Frederick William III was making it difficult for Mennonites to acquire land, because of their refusal to serve in the military due to their pacifist religious beliefs. Another reason to immigrate was fear of the changes brought about by the French Revolution. Refuge in Russia was seen as a more secure alternative. |
175_3 | The first settlers, 162 families, emigrated in 1803 to the existing Chortitza settlement and spent the winter there. They founded the first new villages near the Molochna River in 1804. The central Russian government set aside a tract of land for the settlers along the Molochna River in the Taurida Governorate. The next year, an additional group of about the same size arrived. Each family received of land. In contrast to the settlement of Chortitza, wealthy Mennonites also immigrated to Molotschna. They sold their farms in Germany, paid a 10% emigration tax, and brought the remainder into the Russian Empire. Arriving with superior farming skills and more wealth, they developed new farms and businesses more easily than had been the case for early settlers in Chortitza. The seaport city of Taganrog provided a convenient market for their dairy products in the early years. Wheat later became the predominant commodity crop. |
175_4 | Between 1803 and 1806, 365 families came to Molotschna. Further immigration was prevented during the Napoleonic Wars. Another 254 families came from 1819-20. After 1835 immigration to Molotschna ended, with about 1200 families, totaling some 6000 people, having moved from Prussia. The settlement consisted of of land with 46 villages and total population of about 10,000. A part of this was not divided but reserved for future generations, to care for the growing number of families. As the population outgrew the available land, daughter colonies such as Neu Samara Colony were formed. |
175_5 | The settlement was located near the Russian Empire's southern frontier. It was subject to raids by nomadic Crimean Tatars, who had been deported from the Molotschna Valley by the Russian government. After four Mennonites were killed by a raiding party, the imperial government banned the Tatars' spiked and weighted pole weapon which they frequently used on hunting expeditions. Later Mennonites and their neighbors coexisted peacefully.
Local government
Mennonite colonies were self-governing with little intervention from the central authorities in Moscow. The village, the basic unit of government, was headed by an elected magistrate who oversaw village affairs. Each village controlled its own school, roads and cared for the poor. Male landowners decided local matters at village assemblies. |
175_6 | Villages were grouped into districts. Molotschna was divided into two districts: Halbstadt and Gnadenfeld. A district superintendent headed a regional bureau that could administer corporal punishment and handle other matters affecting the villages in common. Insurance and fire protection were handled at the regional level, as well as dealing with delinquents and other social problems. The Mennonite colonies functioned as a democratic state, enjoying freedoms beyond those of ordinary Ukrainian peasants living in Southern Ukraine.
Education
At a time when compulsory education was unknown in Europe, the Mennonite colonies formed an elementary school in each village. Students learned practical skills such as reading and writing German (Plautdietsch dialect), and arithmetic. Religion was included, as was singing in many schools. The teacher was typically a craftsperson or herder, untrained in teaching, who fit class time around his main work. |
175_7 | In 1820, the Molotschna colony started a secondary school at Ohrloff, bringing a trained teacher from Prussia. A school of commerce was started in Halbstadt, employing a faculty with full graduate education. Those who wanted to pursue post-secondary education attended universities in Switzerland, Germany, as well as the Russian Empire.
Johann Cornies
Johann Cornies was perhaps Molotschna's most noted resident. His large estate, Jushanlee, was considered a model farm and showplace of Southern Ukraine. Crown princes of Russia, Alexander I and Alexander II, as well as other government officials visited the estate. His holdings were expanded by gifts from the government for his services and totaled at his death. He owned a large herd of thoroughbred cattle, 8000 merino sheep and four hundred horses. |
175_8 | Daughter colonies
As the population of the colony grew and land became scarce, new areas for resettlement were sought. Starting in 1862 settlers from Molotschna formed daughter settlements in the peninsula of Crimea. By 1926 this colony had 25 villages with a total population of 5000. In 1871 the Molotschna colony purchased to form the Zagradovka colony in Kherson Oblast. By 1918 Zagradovka was made up of 16 villages with 6000 residents.
In the 1870s, the population pressure was eased somewhat when a significant portion of the colony migrated to North America, with many settling in Saskatchewan, Canada. The next daughter colony was formed at Memrik in the Dnipropetrovsk region in 1885. By 1926, this settlement had a population of about 3500, occupying . |
175_9 | Selbstschutz units |
175_10 | Through influence of the short German occupation of Ukraine in 1918, the young men of Molotschna formed a self-defense group (Selbstschutz) for protection of the villages. German soldiers provided training and left weapons and ammunition behind when they retreated. Together with a neighboring Lutheran colony, the Mennonites formed twenty companies totaling 2700 infantry and 300 cavalry, which held back the forces of the Ukrainian anarchist-communist leader Makhno until March 1919. When the Russian communist Red Army combined with Makhno, the self-defense group was forced to retreat to Halbstadt and disband. This attempt to defend the villages departed from the Mennonites' traditional teaching of nonresistance, and many colonists disapproved of it. However, in the absence of effective governmental authority and when faced with the horrific atrocities committed by anarchist partisans, many others came to believe in the necessity of self-defense. Later church conferences and delegations |
175_11 | officially condemned this action as a "grave mistake". |
175_12 | Famine
Mennonites of Molotschna sent a commission to North America in the summer of 1920 to alert American Mennonites of the dire conditions of war-torn Ukraine. Their plight succeeded in uniting various branches of Mennonites to form the Mennonite Central Committee in an effort to coordinate aid.
The new organization planned to provide aid to Mennonites in Ukraine via existing Mennonite relief work in Istanbul. The Istanbul group, mainly Goshen College graduates, produced three volunteers, who at great risk entered Ukraine during the ongoing Ukrainian Civil War. They arrived in the Mennonite village of Halbstadt just as General Wrangel of the Russian Imperial White Army was retreating. Two of the volunteers withdrew with the Wrangel army, while Clayton Kratz, who remained in Halbstadt as it was overrun by the Red Army, was never heard from again. |
175_13 | A year passed before the Soviet government gave official permission for the international Mennonites to conduct relief work among the villages of Ukraine. Kitchens provided 25,000 people a day with rations over a period of three years beginning in 1922, with a peak of 40,000 servings during August of that year. Fifty Fordson tractor and plow combinations were sent to Mennonite villages to replace horses that had been stolen and confiscated during the war. The cost of this relief effort was $1.2 million.
Evacuation
The residents of Molotschna shared the fate of the Chortitza settlers. They were evacuated to Nazi Reichsgau Wartheland in 1943, and from there marched into Germany, under its national government plans to reunite ethnic Germans. When the Red Army entered Germany, it forcibly repatriated these people to the Soviet Union. They were considered politically suspect and exiled to primitive camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan.
Villages
About 57 villages were founded: |
175_14 | Notable residents
Helmut Oberlander (1924–2021), Ukrainian former Canadian who was conscripted, aged 17, into the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II
Jakob Reimer (1918–2005), Trawniki camp guard born in Friedensdorf, who later emigrated to the United States
See also
Askania Nova
Baptists in Ukraine
History of Christianity in Ukraine
Protestantism in Ukraine
Goessel, Kansas in United States (first known as Gnadenfeld village)
Alexanderwohl Mennonite Church near Goessel, Kansas in United States
Notes
References
External links
Molotschna Mennonite Settlement (Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine) in Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online
Russian Mennonite Genealogical Resources
Mennonitism in Ukraine
Geography of Zaporizhzhia Oblast
Populated places established in 1804
1804 establishments in the Russian Empire
1804 establishments in Ukraine
Ukrainian culture
Russian and Soviet-German people
Former German settlements in Zaporizhzhia Oblast |
176_0 | In cryptography, a one-way compression function is a function that transforms two fixed-length inputs into a fixed-length output. The transformation is "one-way", meaning that it is difficult given a particular output to compute inputs which compress to that output. One-way compression functions are not related to conventional data compression algorithms, which instead can be inverted exactly (lossless compression) or approximately (lossy compression) to the original data.
One-way compression functions are for instance used in the Merkle–Damgård construction inside cryptographic hash functions. |
176_1 | One-way compression functions are often built from block ciphers.
Some methods to turn any normal block cipher into a one-way compression function are Davies–Meyer, Matyas–Meyer–Oseas, Miyaguchi–Preneel (single-block-length compression functions) and MDC-2/Meyer–Schilling, MDC-4, Hirose (double-block-length compression functions). These methods are described in detail further down. (MDC-2 is also the name of a hash function patented by IBM.)
Compression
A compression function mixes two fixed length inputs and produces a single fixed length output of the same size as one of the inputs. This can also be seen as that the compression function transforms one large fixed-length input into a shorter, fixed-length output.
For instance, input A might be 128 bits, input B 128 bits and they are compressed together to a single output of 128 bits. This is equivalent to having a single 256-bit input compressed to a single output of 128 bits. |
176_2 | Some compression functions do not compress by half, but instead by some other factor. For example, input A might be 256 bits, and input B 128 bits, which are compressed to a single output of 128 bits. That is, a total of 384 input bits are compressed together to 128 output bits.
The mixing is done in such a way that full avalanche effect is achieved. That is, every output bit depends on every input bit.
One-way
A one-way function is a function that is easy to compute but hard to invert. A one-way compression function (also called hash function) should have the following properties: |
176_3 | Easy to compute: If you have some input(s), it is easy to calculate the output.
Preimage-resistance: If an attacker only knows the output it should be infeasible to calculate an input. In other words, given an output , it should be unfeasible to calculate an input such that .
Second preimage-resistance: Given an input whose output is , it should be infeasible to find another input that has the same output , i.e. .
Collision-resistance: It should be hard to find any two different inputs that compress to the same output i.e. an attacker should not be able to find a pair of messages such that . Due to the birthday paradox (see also birthday attack) there is a 50% chance a collision can be found in time of about where is the number of bits in the hash function's output. An attack on the hash function thus should not be able to find a collision with less than about work. |
176_4 | Ideally one would like the "infeasibility" in preimage-resistance and second preimage-resistance to mean a work of about where is the number of bits in the hash function's output. However, particularly for second preimage-resistance this is a difficult problem.
The Merkle–Damgård construction
A common use of one-way compression functions is in the Merkle–Damgård construction inside cryptographic hash functions. Most widely used hash functions, including MD5, SHA-1 (which is deprecated) and SHA-2 use this construction.
A hash function must be able to process an arbitrary-length message into a fixed-length output. This can be achieved by breaking the input up into a series of equal-sized blocks, and operating on them in sequence using a one-way compression function. The compression function can either be specially designed for hashing or be built from a block cipher. |
176_5 | The last block processed should also be length padded, this is crucial to the security of this construction. This construction is called the Merkle–Damgård construction. Most widely used hash functions, including SHA-1 and MD5, take this form.
When length padding (also called MD-strengthening) is applied, attacks cannot find collisions faster than the birthday paradox (, being the block size in bits) if the used function is collision-resistant. Hence, the Merkle–Damgård hash construction reduces the problem of finding a proper hash function to finding a proper compression function.
A second preimage attack (given a message an attacker finds another message to satisfy can be done according to Kelsey and Schneier for a -message-block message in time . Note that the complexity of this attack reaches a minimum of for long messages when and approaches when messages are short.
Construction from block ciphers
One-way compression functions are often built from block ciphers. |
176_6 | Block ciphers take (like one-way compression functions) two fixed size inputs (the key and the plaintext) and return one single output (the ciphertext) which is the same size as the input plaintext.
However, modern block ciphers are only partially one-way. That is, given a plaintext and a ciphertext it is infeasible to find a key that encrypts the plaintext to the ciphertext. But, given a ciphertext and a key a matching plaintext can be found simply by using the block cipher's decryption function. Thus, to turn a block cipher into a one-way compression function some extra operations have to be added.
Some methods to turn any normal block cipher into a one-way compression function are Davies–Meyer, Matyas–Meyer–Oseas, Miyaguchi–Preneel (single-block-length compression functions) and MDC-2, MDC-4, Hirose (double-block-length compressions functions). |
176_7 | Single-block-length compression functions output the same number of bits as processed by the underlying block cipher. Consequently, double-block-length compression functions output twice the number of bits.
If a block cipher has a block size of say 128 bits single-block-length methods create a hash function that has the block size of 128 bits and produces a hash of 128 bits. Double-block-length methods make hashes with double the hash size compared to the block size of the block cipher used. So a 128-bit block cipher can be turned into a 256-bit hash function.
These methods are then used inside the Merkle–Damgård construction to build the actual hash function. These methods are described in detail further down. |
176_8 | Using a block cipher to build the one-way compression function for a hash function is usually somewhat slower than using a specially designed one-way compression function in the hash function. This is because all known secure constructions do the key scheduling for each block of the message. Black, Cochran and Shrimpton have shown that it is impossible to construct a one-way compression function that makes only one call to a block cipher with a fixed key. In practice reasonable speeds are achieved provided the key scheduling of the selected block cipher is not a too heavy operation.
But, in some cases it is easier because a single implementation of a block cipher can be used for both a block cipher and a hash function. It can also save code space in very tiny embedded systems like for instance smart cards or nodes in cars or other machines. |
176_9 | Therefore, the hash-rate or rate gives a glimpse of the efficiency of a hash function based on a certain compression function. The rate of an iterated hash function outlines the ratio between the number of block cipher operations and the output. More precisely, the rate represents the ratio between the number of processed bits of input , the output bit-length of the block cipher, and the necessary block cipher operations to produce these output bits. Generally, the usage of fewer block cipher operations results in a better overall performance of the entire hash function, but it also leads to a smaller hash-value which could be undesirable. The rate is expressed by the formula: |
176_10 | The hash function can only be considered secure if at least the following conditions are met:
The block cipher has no special properties that distinguish it from ideal ciphers, such as weak keys or keys that lead to identical or related encryptions (fixed points or key-collisions).
The resulting hash size is big enough. According to the birthday attack a security level of 280 (generally assumed to be infeasible to compute today) is desirable thus the hash size should be at least 160 bits.
The last block is properly length padded prior to the hashing. (See Merkle–Damgård construction.) Length padding is normally implemented and handled internally in specialised hash functions like SHA-1 etc. |
176_11 | The constructions presented below: Davies–Meyer, Matyas–Meyer–Oseas, Miyaguchi–Preneel and Hirose have been shown to be secure under the black-box analysis. The goal is to show that any attack that can be found is at most as efficient as the birthday attack under certain assumptions. The black-box model assumes that a block cipher is used that is randomly chosen from a set containing all appropriate block ciphers. In this model an attacker may freely encrypt and decrypt any blocks, but does not have access to an implementation of the block cipher. The encryption and decryption function are represented by oracles that receive a pair of either a plaintext and a key or a ciphertext and a key. The oracles then respond with a randomly chosen plaintext or ciphertext, if the pair was asked for the first time. They both share a table for these triplets, a pair from the query and corresponding response, and return the record, if a query was received for the second time. For the proof there is |
176_12 | a collision finding algorithm that makes randomly chosen queries to the oracles. The algorithm returns 1, if two responses result in a collision involving the hash function that is built from a compression function applying this block cipher (0 else). The probability that the algorithm returns 1 is dependent on the number of queries which determine the security level. |
176_13 | Davies–Meyer
The Davies–Meyer single-block-length compression function feeds each block of the message () as the key to a block cipher. It feeds the previous hash value () as the plaintext to be encrypted. The output ciphertext is then also XORed (⊕) with the previous hash value () to produce the next hash value (). In the first round when there is no previous hash value it uses a constant pre-specified initial value ().
In mathematical notation Davies–Meyer can be described as:
The scheme has the rate (k is the keysize):
If the block cipher uses for instance 256-bit keys then each message block () is a 256-bit chunk of the message. If the same block cipher uses a block size of 128 bits then the input and output hash values in each round is 128 bits.
Variations of this method replace XOR with any other group operation, such as addition on 32-bit unsigned integers. |
176_14 | A notable property of the Davies–Meyer construction is that even if the underlying block cipher is totally secure, it is possible to compute fixed points for the construction: for any , one can find a value of such that : one just has to set . This is a property that random functions certainly do not have. So far, no practical attack has been based on this property, but one should be aware of this "feature". The fixed-points can be used in a second preimage attack (given a message , attacker finds another message to satisfy of Kelsey and Schneier for a -message-block message in time . If the construction does not allow easy creation of fixed points (like Matyas–Meyer–Oseas or Miyaguchi–Preneel) then this attack can be done in time. Note that in both cases the complexity is above but below when messages are long and that when messages get shorter the complexity of the attack approaches . |
176_15 | The security of the Davies–Meyer construction in the Ideal Cipher Model was first proven by R. Winternitz.
Matyas–Meyer–Oseas
The Matyas–Meyer–Oseas single-block-length one-way compression function can be considered the dual (the opposite) of Davies–Meyer.
It feeds each block of the message () as the plaintext to be encrypted. The output ciphertext is then also XORed (⊕) with the same message block () to produce the next hash value (). The previous hash value () is fed as the key to the block cipher. In the first round when there is no previous hash value it uses a constant pre-specified initial value ().
If the block cipher has different block and key sizes the hash value () will have the wrong size for use as the key. The cipher might also have other special requirements on the key. Then the hash value is first fed through the function to be converted/padded to fit as key for the cipher.
In mathematical notation Matyas–Meyer–Oseas can be described as: |
176_16 | The scheme has the rate:
A second preimage attack (given a message an attacker finds another message to satisfy ) can be done according to Kelsey and Schneier for a -message-block message in time . Note that the complexity is above but below when messages are long, and that when messages get shorter the complexity of the attack approaches .
Miyaguchi–Preneel
The Miyaguchi–Preneel single-block-length one-way compression function is an extended variant of Matyas–Meyer–Oseas. It was independently proposed by Shoji Miyaguchi and Bart Preneel.
It feeds each block of the message () as the plaintext to be encrypted. The output ciphertext is then XORed (⊕) with the same message block () and then also XORed with the previous hash value () to produce the next hash value (). The previous hash value () is fed as the key to the block cipher. In the first round when there is no previous hash value it uses a constant pre-specified initial value (). |
176_17 | If the block cipher has different block and key sizes the hash value () will have the wrong size for use as the key. The cipher might also have other special requirements on the key. Then the hash value is first fed through the function to be converted/padded to fit as key for the cipher.
In mathematical notation Miyaguchi–Preneel can be described as:
The scheme has the rate:
The roles of and may be switched, so that is encrypted under the key , thus making this method an extension of Davies–Meyer instead.
A second preimage attack (given a message an attacker finds another message to satisfy ) can be done according to Kelsey and Schneier for a -message-block message in time . Note that the complexity is above but below when messages are long, and that when messages get shorter the complexity of the attack approaches .
Hirose |
176_18 | The Hirose double-block-length one-way compression function consists of a block cipher plus a permutation . It was proposed by Shoichi Hirose in 2006 and is based on a work by Mridul Nandi.
It uses a block cipher whose key length is larger than the block length , and produces a hash of size . For example, any of the AES candidates with a 192- or 256-bit key (and 128-bit block).
Each round accepts a portion of the message that is bits long, and uses it to update two -bit state values and .
First, is concatenated with to produce a key . Then the two feedback values are updated according to:
is an arbitrary fixed-point-free permutation on an -bit value, typically defined as for an arbitrary non-zero constant (all ones may be a convenient choice). |
176_19 | Each encryption resembles the standard Davies–Meyer construction. The advantage of this scheme over other proposed double-block-length schemes is that both encryptions use the same key, and thus key scheduling effort may be shared.
The final output is . The scheme has the rate relative to encrypting the message with the cipher.
Hirose also provides a proof in the Ideal Cipher Model.
Sponge construction
The sponge construction can be used to build one-way compression functions.
See also
Whirlpool A cryptographic hash function built using the Miyaguchi–Preneel construction and a block cipher similar to Square and AES.
CBC-MAC, OMAC, and PMAC Methods to turn block ciphers into message authentication codes (MACs).
References
Citations
Sources
Cryptographic hash functions
Cryptographic primitives |
177_0 | Alexander Nikolayevich Vertinsky (, — 21 May 1957) was Russian and Soviet artist, poet, singer, composer, cabaret artist and actor who exerted seminal influence on the Russian tradition of artistic singing.
Early years
Alexander Vertinsky and his elder sister Nadezhda were born in Kiev (modern-day Ukraine) out of wedlock: their parents couldn't marry since his father's first wife ("Varvara, an elderly, evil and unattractive woman") refused a divorce, so he had to adopt his own children. Both parents belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church. His father Nikolai Petrovich Vertinsky (1845—1894) came from a railwayman's family. He was a well-known lawyer – according to Alexander, especially popular among poor people, because he defended them for free and even helped financially, — and an occasional journalist (he published feuilletons under a pen name Graf Niver). |
177_1 | While Alexander considered himself Russian in general, he assumed that he had some Polish blood too: "I never met people with my surname in Russia, but in Poland it is met more or less often... one of my great-grandfathers was probably a Pole". He also recognised that he had some Ukrainian ancestry and Ukrainian as one of his native languages. In his letters Vertinsky recalled a time when he was working at Dovzhenko Film Studios and Ukrainian actress Natalia Uzhviy was surprised to hear his Ukrainian accent. |
177_2 | Alexander's mother Eugenia Stepanovna Skolatskaya came from a noble family, but the parents rejected her after she had given birth to illegitimate children. She died when Alexander was only three years old from sepsis after an unsuccessful surgery, and in two years his father also died from tuberculosis. As Alexander described it, Nikolai Vertinsky couldn't accept his wife's death, spent a lot of time at the cemetery and at one point was found unconscious near her tomb, which led to his illness and quick death. |
177_3 | Vertinsky was brought up by his mother's sister Maria Stepanovna, while Nadezhda was raised by her other sister, Lidia Stepanovna. They didn't want siblings to meet, to the point that Alexander was told that his sister had died, and vice versa; only years later he saw her name in a theatrical magazine and contacted her. In 1898 he entered the First Kiev Gymnasium meant for children of aristocracy. He was expelled from the second grade and moved to the less prestigious 4th Kiev Gymnasium. In 1905 he was expelled once again, this time from the fifth grade. Vertinsky didn't enjoy studying, blaming his aunt who "knew nothing about raising children". |
177_4 | He tried various jobs before starting to earn his living by contributing short stories to the Kievan periodicals. In 1912 Vertinsky and his sister moved to Moscow, where he failed in his ambition to join Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre. During that time, he became addicted to cocaine, a habit that would claim the life of his sister. From 1914 to 1916 he took part in the World War I by serving aboard a hospital train organized by the Morozovs. He treated only heavily wounded soldiers and dressed a total of 35000 wounds.
By 1916, Vertinsky started to employ a scenic figure of Pierrot, with powdered face, singing miniature novellas-in-song known as ariettas, or "Pierrot's doleful ditties". Each song contained a prologue, exposition, culmination, and a tragic finale. The novice performer was christened the "Russian Pierrot", gained renown, became an object of imitation, admiration, vilified in the press and lionized by the audiences. |
177_5 | Simultaneously with his booming singing career, he played screen bit parts in Aleksandr Khanzhonkov's silent movies. From that time stems a lifelong friendship with Ivan Mozzhukhin. His famous piece "Vashi paltsy pakhnut ladanom" ("Your Fingers Smell of Frankincense") was dedicated to another film star, Vera Kholodnaya. Shortly before the October Revolution Vertinsky devised a stage persona of Black Pierrot and started to tour Russia and Ukraine performing decadent elegies with a touch of cosmopolitan chic, such as "Kokainetka" and Tango "Magnolia" ("V bananovo-limonnom Singapure"). In the words of the American historian Richard Stites, "Vertinsky bathed his verses in images of palm trees, tropical birds, foreign ports, plush lobbies, ceiling fans, and "daybreak on the pink-tinted sea" — precisely those things which the war-time audience craved for. |
177_6 | Career abroad
By November 1920, Vertinsky decided to leave Russia with the bulk of his clientele. He performed in Constantinople and toured Romanian Bessarabia, where he was declared a Soviet agent. In 1923, he performed in Poland and Germany, then moved to Paris, where he would perform before the Russian émigré clientele at Montmartre cabarets for nine years.
In 1926, Vertinsky made one of the earliest recordings of the song "Dorogoi dlinnoyu" ("Дорогой длинною" or "Endless Road"), written by Boris Fomin (1900–1948) with words by the poet Konstantin Podrevskii, which, with English lyrics by Gene Raskin, was a major hit for Mary Hopkin in 1968 as "Those Were the Days". |
177_7 | After several successful tours in the Middle East, Vertinsky followed the majority of well-to-do Russians to the United States, where he debuted before the audience which included Rachmaninoff, Chaliapin, and Marlene Dietrich. The Great Depression forced him to join the community of Shanghai Russians. It was in China that he met his wife and the oldest daughter, Marianna, was born.
Final years
In 1943 the Soviet government allowed Vertinsky to return to Russia. Despite lack of media coverage, he performed about two thousand concerts in the USSR, touring from Sakhalin to Kaliningrad. To feed his family, he also appeared in Soviet films, often playing pre-revolutionary aristocrats, as in the screen version of Chekhov's "Anna on the Neck" (1955). His role of an anti-Communist cardinal in "The Doomed Conspiracy" even won him the Stalin Prize for 1951. |
177_8 | The artist died on 21 May 1957 of heart failure at the Hotel Astoria in Leningrad after giving his last performance. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Vertinsky is still influential in Russian musical culture, and has been covered by the likes of Vladimir Vysotsky and Boris Grebenshchikov. There is even an album of electronic lounge covers, by the Cosmos Sound Club.
Family
Between 1923 and 1941 Vertinsky was married to Irina Vladimirovna Vertidis. While he doesn't mention her in his memoirs, her name could be found in the divorce certificate. From 1942 and till his death Vertinsky was married to the actress and artist Lidiya Vertinskaya (née Tsirgvava, 1923—2013). They had two daughters: Marianna Vertinskaya (born 1943) and Anastasiya Vertinskaya (born 1944), both successful actresses. |
177_9 | Marianna was married three times; she has a daughter Alexandra from her first marriage to the Soviet architect Ilya Bylinkin and a daughter Daria from her second marriage to the actor Boris Khmelnitsky. Anastasiya was married to the film director Nikita Mikhalkov from 1966 to 1969 and gave birth to their son Stepan Mikhalkov, also an actor and restaurateur. According to the singer-composer Alexander Gradsky, he was married to Vertinskaya from 1976 to 1978, yet she denied they were ever officially married. She also had a long-lasting relationship (around 20 years) with the theatre director Oleg Yefremov.
Legacy
A minor planet 3669 Vertinskij, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina in 1982 is named after him.
Discography (Official LPs and CDs) |
177_10 | 1969 Александр Вертинский (Мелодия, Д 026773-4 | Soviet Union)
1989 Александр Вертинский (Мелодия, М60 48689 001; М60 48691 001 | Soviet Union)
1994 То, что я должен сказать (Мелодия, MEL CD 60 00621 | Russia)
1995 Songs of love, Песни любви (RDM, CDRDM 506089; Boheme Music, CDBMR 908089 | Russia)
1996 Vertinski (Le Chant du Monde, LDX 274939-40 | France)
1999 Легенда века (Boheme Music, CDBMR 908090 | Russia)
2000 Vertinski (Boheme Music, CDBMR 007143 | Russia)
2003 Selected songs (Russia), Disk 1, Disk 2, Disk 3, Disk 4
Selected filmography
Secrets of the Orient (1928)
See also
Vera Kholodnaya
Aleksandr Khanzhonkov
Ivan Mozzhukhin
References
External links
Online Vertinsky shrine
Another website where you can listen some songs.
Another Alexander Vertinsky's Biography
Alexander Vertinsky on softpanorama |
177_11 | 1889 births
1957 deaths
20th-century composers
20th-century Russian male actors
20th-century Russian poets
20th-century Russian singers
Burials at Novodevichy Cemetery
Musicians from Kyiv
Russian and Soviet emigrants to China
Russian emigrants to France
Russian male composers
Russian male film actors
Russian male poets
Russian male silent film actors
Russian male singer-songwriters
Russian male stage actors
Russian memoirists
Russian people of World War I
Soviet male composers
Soviet male film actors
Soviet male singer-songwriters
Soviet male poets
Soviet poets
Stalin Prize winners
20th-century memoirists
20th-century Russian male singers |
178_0 | The Sphere (officially Große Kugelkaryatide N.Y., also known as Sphere at Plaza Fountain, WTC Sphere or Koenig Sphere) is a monumental cast bronze sculpture by German artist Fritz Koenig (1924–2017).
The world's largest bronze sculpture of modern times stood between the twin towers on the Austin J. Tobin Plaza of the World Trade Center in New York City from 1971 until the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The work, weighing more than 20 tons, was the only remaining work of art to be recovered largely intact from the ruins of the collapsed twin towers after the attacks. After being dismantled and stored near a hangar at John F. Kennedy International Airport, the sculpture was the subject of the 2001 documentary Koenig's Sphere. Since then, the bronze sphere, primarily known in the United States as The Sphere, has been transformed into a symbolic memorial to commemorate 9/11. |
178_1 | After the spherical caryatid found a temporary location in New York's Battery Park between 2002 and 2017, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey moved it back close to its original location. Having become a major tourist attraction, the unrestored sculpture was rededicated on August 16, 2017, by the Port Authority at a permanent location in Liberty Park overlooking the September 11 Memorial and its original location.
Artwork |
178_2 | The creation of the originally titled Große Kugelkaryatide N.Y. / Great Caryatid Sphere N.Y. (catalogue raisonné Sk 416) dates to the 1960s and early 1970s. At that time Fritz Koenig was established as an artist in the United States. After the World Trade Center's architect Minoru Yamasaki had seen the work of the German sculptor in the George W. Staempfli Gallery in New York, he asked Koenig for creating a sculpture including a fountain for the space between the World Trade Center's twin towers, which were then under construction. In 1967, Koenig was awarded the contract by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as the client and property owner of the development. |
178_3 | The Sphere falls into Koenig's creative phase of various caryatids, in which Koenig stages a struggle with constricting or burdensome geometrizing masses. With his sculpture Koenig wanted to mark a formal contrast to the skyscrapers. Mounted on a porphyry disk measuring high, with a diameter of , the sphere rotated once around its axis within 15 minutes. One hundred and sixty gallons of water (600 liters) per second flowed out of the nozzles of the associated Plaza Fountain. The well water was sprayed in a ring running around the sphere onto a flat surface adjacent to the sphere. This should give the impression that the spherical caryatid rises out of the water. The highly complex technology of the system was designed at the Institute for Hydrology and River Basin Management at the Technical University of Munich, where Koenig had been a lecturer since 1964. The largest bronze sculpture of modern times weighs over twenty tons, is high and has a diameter of . Koenig called it his |
178_4 | "biggest child". |
178_5 | The sculpture was made between late 1968/early 1969 to the end of 1971 in Ganslberg near Landshut, where Fritz Koenig lived. The work on the plaster model in its original size required the construction of a new workshop hall near Koenig's homestead and actual studio. Koenig was supported in the production of his work of art by his long-time assistant Hugo Jahn and the Tyrolean sculptor Josef Plankenheimer. From 1969 the plaster elements of the sphere, dismantled into 67 individual parts, were cast in bronze in the Munich art foundry Hans Mayr. Then the individual bronze segments with a total combined weight of seventeen tons were brought to the workshop in Ganslberg and assembled there. |
178_6 | After four years of planning and manufacturing, the finished sculpture was dismantled again and transported to the port of Bremen with low loaders and trucks. The bronze elements of the sphere and the base were put together again on site so that Koenig's sculpture as a whole could set off by sea across the Atlantic to New York in a specially made, oversized wooden transport box. In 1971, The Sphere finally installed on the World Trade Center's plaza and ceremoniously unveiled a little later. The sculpture, including the fountain, marked the center of the development and was a popular meeting place for New Yorkers. The work of art was dedicated to "world peace through trade". The original name "Große Kugelkaryatide N.Y." did not catch on with the New Yorkers. They called the spherical sculpture "Koenig Sphere" or simply "The Sphere".
Location history
Immediately after 9/11 |
178_7 | After the September 11 attacks, upon recovery from the rubble pile the sculpture was dismantled and sent to storage near John F. Kennedy International Airport. Its extraction had been widely covered in local news media in the New York metropolitan area. As it was a memorable feature of the Twin Towers site, there was much discussion about using it in a memorial, especially since it seemed to have survived the attacks relatively intact.
German film director Percy Adlon, who had twice previously devoted films to Koenig, made Koenigs Kugel (Koenig's Sphere) at a time when the sculpture's fate was still uncertain. In the film, the artist and the director visit Ground Zero five weeks after the attacks as the former retells the story of its creation. At first, Koenig opposed reinstalling The Sphere, considering it "a beautiful corpse".
Relocation to Battery Park |
178_8 | The sculpture was eventually returned to Manhattan, and on March 11, 2002, six months to the day after the attacks, it was re-erected in Battery Park, near the Hope Garden, several blocks away from where it once stood. Koenig himself supervised the work; it took four engineers and 15 ironworkers to create a new base. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, his predecessor Rudy Giuliani and other local officials spoke at a ceremony rededicating it as a memorial to the victims. "It was a sculpture, now it's a monument", Koenig said, noting how the relatively fragile metal globe had mostly survived the cataclysm. "It now has a different beauty, one I could never imagine. It has its own life – different from the one I gave to it."
A plaque alongside The Sphere read as follows:
Relocation to Liberty Park |
178_9 | According to NYC Parks spokeswoman Vickie Karp, the city was looking to relocate The Sphere in summer 2012, when construction began to restore Battery Park's lawn, requiring the sculpture to be moved. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), which owns The Sphere, considered placing the sculpture in Liberty Park, located between the 90 West Street building and the World Trade Center Memorial site. Liberty Park would not be constructed until at least 2014, so a temporary location was needed to place The Sphere. By February 2011, PANYNJ had not made an official final decision on where to place the sculpture once Battery Park construction commenced, requiring the sculpture to be moved, possibly into storage. |
178_10 | An online petition created by 9/11 families demanding the return of The Sphere to the 9/11 Memorial gained more than 7,123 signatures . Officials from the 9/11 Memorial stated that they did not want any 9/11 artifacts cluttering the 8-acre memorial plaza. On June 28, 2012, PANYNJ expressed support for the effort to move The Sphere to the plaza of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. After a public comment by Michael Burke during a meeting of the Board of Commissioners, Executive Director Patrick J. Foye stated: |
178_11 | When Liberty Park opened in June 2016, the question had not been resolved. On July 22, 2016, the Port Authority voted to move the sculpture to Liberty Park, and in August 2017, PANYNJ relocated the sculpture to Liberty Park. On September 6, 2017, the Sphere was unveiled in its permanent home in Liberty Park, overlooking the World Trade Center site. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey held a ceremony at Liberty Park on November 29, 2017, to mark its return to the World Trade Center site. |
178_12 | Documentary
The German director Percy Adlon shows in his documentary "Koenigs Kugel - der deutsche Bildhauer Fritz Koenig im Trümmerfeld von Ground Zero" (English title "Koenig's Sphere") from 2001/2002 the re-encounter of Koenig with his badly damaged work of art a few days after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the installation as a memorial. In it, the artist remembers the origin of the ball caryatid and talks about transience and the transformation of art in the face of this human tragedy:
Book
The book THE SPHERE - Vom Kunstwerk zum Mahnmal / THE SPHERE - From Artwork to Memorial was published in a limited edition in June 2021. The occasion of the publication by the editors of the Freundeskreis Fritz Koenig e.V. was the 50th anniversary of the installation of the Great Caryatid Sphere N.Y. at the original location on the plaza of the World Trade Center in 1971. |
178_13 | Media
Holger A. Klein: From Ganslberg to Manhattan Fritz Koenig’s Great Caryatid Sphere N.Y. (1967–1972)
Fritz Koenigs Kugel - Der Bildhauer und der 11. September
See also
Plop art
Artwork damaged or destroyed in the September 11 attacks
Notes
References
External links
1971 sculptures
Artwork in the World Trade Center
Bronze sculptures in Manhattan
Memorials for the September 11 attacks
Monuments and memorials in Manhattan
Outdoor sculptures in Manhattan
Relocated buildings and structures in New York City |
179_0 | Serhii Parajanov (; ; ; ; sometimes spelled Paradzhanov or Paradjanov; January 9, 1924 – July 20, 1990) was a Soviet Armenian film director, screenwriter and artist who made seminal contribution to world cinema with his films Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Color of Pomegranates. Parajanov is regarded by film critics, film historians, and filmmakers to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in cinema history.
He invented his own cinematic style, which was out of step with the guiding principles of socialist realism; the only sanctioned art style in the USSR. This, combined with his lifestyle and behaviour, led Soviet authorities to repeatedly persecute and imprison him, and suppress his films. Despite this, Parajanov was named one of the 20 Film Directors of the Future by the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and his films were ranked among the greatest films of all time by the British Film Institute's magazine Sight & Sound. |
179_1 | Although he started professional film-making in 1954, Parajanov later disowned all the films he made before 1965 as "garbage". After directing Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (renamed Wild Horses of Fire for most foreign distributions) Parajanov became something of an international celebrity and simultaneously a target of attacks from the USSR. Nearly all of his film projects and plans from 1965 to 1973 were banned, scrapped or closed by the Soviet film administrations, both local (in Kyiv and Yerevan) and federal (Goskino), almost without discussion, until he was finally arrested in late 1973 on false charges of rape, homosexuality and bribery. He was imprisoned until 1977, despite pleas for pardon from various artists. Even after his release (he was arrested for the third and last time in 1982) he was a persona non grata in Soviet cinema. It was not until the mid-1980s, when the political climate started to relax, that he could resume directing. Still, it required the help of |
179_2 | influential Georgian actor Dodo Abashidze and other friends to have his last feature films greenlighted. His health seriously weakened after four years in labor camps and nine months in prison in Tbilisi. Parajanov died of lung cancer in 1990, at a time when, after almost 20 years of suppression, his films were being featured at foreign film festivals. In a 1988 interview he stated that, "Everyone knows that I have three Motherlands. I was born in Georgia, worked in Ukraine and I'm going to die in Armenia." Parajanov is buried at Komitas Pantheon in Yerevan. |
179_3 | Parajanov's films won prizes at Mar del Plata Film Festival, Istanbul International Film Festival, Nika Awards, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Sitges - Catalan International Film Festival, São Paulo International Film Festival and others. A comprehensive retrospective in the UK took place in 2010 at BFI Southbank. The retrospective was curated by Layla Alexander-Garrett and Parajanov specialist Elisabetta Fabrizi who commissioned a Parajanov-inspired new commission in the BFI Gallery by contemporary artist Matt Collishaw ('Retrospectre'). A symposium was dedicated to Paradjanov's work bringing together experts to discuss and celebrate the director's contribution to cinema and art.
Early life and films |
179_4 | Parajanov was born Sarkis Hovsepi Parajaniants (Սարգիս Հովսեփի Փարաջանյանց) to artistically-gifted Armenian parents, Iosif Paradjanov and Siranush Bejanova, in Tbilisi, Georgia; however, the family name of Parajaniants is attested by a surviving historical document at the Serhii Parajanov Museum in Yerevan. He gained access to art from an early age. In 1945, he traveled to Moscow, enrolled in the directing department at the VGIK, one of the oldest and highly respected film schools in Europe, and studied under the tutelage of directors Igor Savchenko and Oleksandr Dovzhenko. |
179_5 | In 1948 he was convicted of homosexual acts (which were illegal at the time in the Soviet Union) with an MGB officer named Nikolai Mikava in Tbilisi. These charges were later proven false. He was sentenced to five years in prison, but was released under an amnesty after three months. In video interviews, friends and relatives contest the truthfulness of anything he was charged with. They speculate the punishment may have been a form of political retaliation for his rebellious views. |
179_6 | In 1950 Parajanov married his first wife, Nigyar Kerimova, in Moscow. She came from a Muslim Tatar family and converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity to marry Parajanov. She was later murdered by her relatives because of her conversion. After her murder Parajanov left Russia for Kyiv, Ukraine, where he produced a few documentaries (Dumka, Golden Hands, Natalia Uzhvy) and a handful of narrative films: Andriesh (based on a fairy tale by the Moldovan writer Emilian Bukov), The Top Guy (a kolkhoz musical), Ukrainian Rhapsody (a wartime melodrama), and Flower on the Stone (about a religious cult infiltrating a mining town in the Donets Basin). He became fluent in Ukrainian and married his second wife, Svitlana Ivanivna Shcherbatiuk (1938-2020), also known as Svetlana Sherbatiuk or Svetlana Parajanova, in 1956. Shcherbatiuk gave birth to a son, Suren, in 1958. The couple eventually divorced and she and Suren relocated to Kyiv, Ukraine.
Break from Soviet Realism |
179_7 | Andrey Tarkovsky's first film Ivan's Childhood had an enormous impact on Parajanov's self-discovery as a filmmaker. Later the influence became mutual, and he and Tarkovsky became close friends. Another influence was Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who Parajanov would later describe as "like a God" to him and a director of "majestic style". In 1965 Parajanov abandoned socialist realism and directed the poetic Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, his first film over which he had complete creative control. It won numerous international awards and, unlike the subsequent The Color of Pomegranates, was relatively well received by the Soviet authorities. The Script Editorial Board at Goskino of Ukraine praised the film for "conveying the poetic quality and philosophical depth of M. Kotsiubynsky’s tale through the language of cinema," and called it "a brilliant creative success of the Dovzhenko studio." Moscow also agreed to Goskino of Ukraine's request to release the film with its original |
179_8 | Ukrainian soundtrack intact, rather than redub the dialogue into Russian for Soviet-wide release, in order to preserve its Ukrainian flavor. (Russian dubbing was standard practice at that time for non-Russian Soviet films when they were distributed outside the republic of origin.) |
179_9 | Parajanov departed Kyiv shortly afterwards for his ancestors' homeland, Armenia. In 1969, he embarked on Sayat Nova, a film that many consider to be his crowning achievement, though it was shot under relatively poor conditions and had a very small budget. Soviet censors intervened and banned Sayat Nova for its allegedly inflammatory content. Parajanov re-edited his footage and renamed the film The Color of Pomegranates. Actor Alexei Korotyukov remarked: "Paradjanov made films not about how things are, but how they would have been had he been God." Mikhail Vartanov wrote in 1969 that "Besides the film language suggested by Griffith and Eisenstein, the world cinema has not discovered anything revolutionarily new until The Color of Pomegranates ...".
Imprisonment and later work |
179_10 | By December 1973, the Soviet authorities had grown increasingly suspicious of Parajanov's perceived subversive proclivities, particularly his bisexuality, and sentenced him to five years in a hard labor camp for "a rape of a Communist Party member, and the propagation of pornography." Three days before Parajanov was sentenced, Andrei Tarkovsky wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, asserting that "In the last ten years Sergei Paradjanov has made only two films: Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors and The Colour of Pomegranates. They have influenced cinema first in Ukraine, second in this country as a whole, and third in the world at large. Artistically, there are few people in the entire world who could replace Paradjanov. He is guilty – guilty of his solitude. We are guilty of not thinking of him daily and of failing to discover the significance of a master." An eclectic group of artists, actors, filmmakers and activists protested on behalf of |
179_11 | Parajanov, calling for his immediate release. Among them were Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Leonid Gaidai, Eldar Ryazanov, Yves Saint Laurent, Marcello Mastroianni, Françoise Sagan, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky and Mikhail Vartanov. |
179_12 | Parajanov served four years out of his five-year sentence, and later credited his early release to the efforts of the French Surrealist poet and novelist Louis Aragon, the Russian poet Elsa Triolet (Aragon's wife), and the American writer John Updike. His early release was authorized by Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, presumably as a consequence of Brezhnev's chance meeting with Aragon and Triolet at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. When asked by Brezhnev if he could be of any assistance, Aragon requested the release of Parajanov, which was effected by December 1977. |
179_13 | While he was incarcerated, Parajanov produced a large number of miniature doll-like sculptures (some of which were lost) and some 800 drawings and collages, many of which were later displayed in Yerevan, where the Serhii Parajanov Museum is now permanently located. (The museum, opened in 1991, a year after Parajanov's death, hosts more than 200 works as well as furnishings from his home in Tbilisi.) His efforts in the camp were repeatedly compromised by prison guards, who deprived him of materials and called him mad, their cruelty only subsiding after a statement from Moscow admitted that "the director is very talented." |
179_14 | After his return from prison to Tbilisi, the close watch of Soviet censors prevented Parajanov from continuing his cinematic pursuits and steered him towards the artistic outlets he had nurtured during his time in prison. He crafted extraordinarily intricate collages, created a large collection of abstract drawings and pursued numerous other avenues of non-cinematic art, sewing more dolls and some whimsical suits.
In February 1982 Parajanov was once again imprisoned, on charges of bribery, which happened to coincide with his return to Moscow for the premiere of a play commemorating Vladimir Vysotsky at the Taganka Theatre, and was effected with some degree of trickery. Despite another stiff sentence, he was freed in less than a year, with his health seriously weakened. |
179_15 | In 1985, the slow thaw within the Soviet Union spurred Parajanov to resume his passion for cinema. With the encouragement of various Georgian intellectuals, he created the multi-award-winning film The Legend of Suram Fortress, based on a novella by Daniel Chonkadze, his first return to cinema since Sayat Nova fifteen years earlier. In 1988, Parajanov made another multi-award-winning film, Ashik Kerib, based on a story by Mikhail Lermontov. It is the story of a wandering minstrel, set in the Azerbaijani culture. Parajanov dedicated the film to his close friend Andrei Tarkovsky and "to all the children of the world". |
179_16 | Death
Parajanov then attempted to complete his final project. He died of cancer in Yerevan, Armenia on July 20, 1990, aged 66, leaving this final work, The Confession, unfinished. It survives in its original negative as Parajanov: The Last Spring, assembled by his close friend Mikhail Vartanov in 1992. Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Francesco Rosi, Alberto Moravia, Giulietta Masina, Marcello Mastroianni and Bernardo Bertolucci were among those who publicly mourned his death. They sent a telegram to Russia with the following statement: "The world of cinema has lost a magician".
Influences and legacy
Despite having studied film at the VGIK, Parajanov discovered his artistic path only after seeing Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky's dreamlike first film Ivan's Childhood. |
179_17 | Parajanov was highly appreciated by Tarkovsky himself in the biographical film "Voyage in Time" ("Always with huge gratitude and pleasure I remember the films of Serhii Parajanov which I love very much. His way of thinking, his paradoxical, poetical... ability to love the beauty and the ability to be absolutely free within his own vision"). In the same film Tarkovsky stated that Parajanov is one of his favorite filmmakers. |
179_18 | Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni stated that (“The Color of Pomegranates by Parajanov, in my opinion one of the best contemporary film directors, strikes with its perfection of beauty.”). Parajanov was also admired by American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. French film director Jean-Luc Godard also stated that ("In the temple of cinema, there are images, light, and reality. Sergei Parajanov was the master of that temple"). Soviet documentary filmmaker Mikhail Vartanov said that ("Probably, besides the film language suggested by Griffith and Eisenstein, the world cinema has not discovered anything revolutionary new until Paradjanov's The Color of Pomegranates.”). After Parjanov’s death, Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Giulietta Masina, Francesco Rosi, Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Marcello Mastroianni together sent a letter to The Soviet Union stating (“With the death of Parajanov, cinema lost one of its magicians. Parajanov’s fantasy will forever fascinate and |
179_19 | bring joy to the people of the world…”). |
179_20 | Despite having many admirers of his art, his vision did not attract many followers. "Whoever tries to imitate me is lost", he reportedly said. However, directors such as Theo Angelopoulos, Béla Tarr and Mohsen Makhmalbaf share Parajanov's approach to film as a primarily visual medium rather than as a narrative tool.
The Parajanov-Vartanov Institute was established in Hollywood in 2010 to study, preserve and promote the artistic legacies of Sergei Parajanov and Mikhail Vartanov.
Filmography
Screenplays |
179_21 | Produced and partially produced screenplays
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Тіні забутих предків, 1965, co-written with Ivan Chendei, based on the novelette by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky)
Kyiv Frescoes (Київські фрески, 1965)
Sayat Nova (Саят-Нова, 1969, production screenplay of The Color of Pomegranates)
The Confession (сповідь, 1969–1989)
Studies About Vrubel (Этюды о Врубеле, 1989, depiction of Mikhail Vrubel's Kyiv period, co-written and directed by Leonid Osyka)
Swan Lake: The Zone (Лебедине озеро. Зона, 1989, filmed in 1990, directed by Yuriy Illienko, cinematographer of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) |
179_22 | Unproduced screenplays and projects
The Dormant Palace (Дремлющий дворец, 1969, based on Pushkin's poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray)
Intermezzo (1972, based on Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's short story)
Icarus (Икар, 1972)
The Golden Edge (Золотой обрез, 1972)
Ara the Beautiful (Ара Прекрасный, 1972, based on the poem by 20th century Armenian poet Nairi Zaryan about Ara the Beautiful)
Demon (Демон, 1972, based on Lermontov's eponymous poem)
The Miracle of Odense (Чудо в Оденсе, 1973, loosely based on the life and works of Hans Christian Andersen)
David of Sasun (Давид Сасунский, mid-1980s, based on Armenian epic poem David of Sasun)
The Martyrdom of Shushanik (Мученичество Шушаник, 1987, based on Georgian chronicle by Iakob Tsurtaveli)
The Treasures of Mount Ararat (Сокровища у горы Арарат) |
179_23 | Among his projects, there also were plans for adapting Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Goethe's Faust, the Old East Slavic poem The Tale of Igor's Campaign, but film scripts for these were never completed. |
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