"Heavenly" divorce

Well, I was listening to Echo of Moscow Radio over the internet last night, and I heard a news item which shocked me quite a bit. Apparently the biggest couple in Russian show-business, Filipp Kirkorov and Alla Pugachova, have divorced (the last link here is to a story in English - most of the others in this post are to Russian-language articles). It was a commonplace to joke about their "heavenly" marriage being a sham - Pugachova is substantially older than the sometimes flamboyant Kirkorov - and divorce has been rumored in the past, but I can't say I expected it to end like this. Apparently, they took care of the official paperwork all the way back in March of this year but saved the news until now in order to let talk-show host Lolita break the news on her program, "Bez Kompleksov" - another example of quality Channel One programming. According to her, the plan is for the pair to stay friends, and they still care about each other very much.

Apparently, though, the Russian public doesn't care that much any more. Today, Echo conducted an unscientific call-in survey of their listeners, and as it turns out they were not too sad to see this "fairytale romance" come to an end - only 18% said they were sad that the Pugachova-Kirkorov union was over.

Maybe the marriage crumbled under the stress created by Kirkorov's extensive public shaming (3 good articles in English there) in 2004 for calling journalist Irina Aroyan a c*** and mocking her accented Russian in a contretemps at a press-conference. News agency Regnum has a "dossier" of over 200 articles on this - filed under "The Kirkorov Scandal."

More on a pop icon

I'll leave the serious stuff to Andy over at SiberianLight for the time being. Preparing exams has left me unable to concentrate (or at least to write about) any serious issues. I thus feel the need to add a bit more to my earlier comment about the fluffy topic of Russia's recent celebrity divorce scandal. I located an article on Pravda.ru written in happier times - on the tenth anniversary of the Kirkorov-Pugachova wedding. It talks about how the mayor of St. Petersburg at the time of their wedding, the late Anatoly Sobchak (or "Sabchak," as his name appears in the article), encouraged the pair to tie the knot in the northern capital. Note that this was in 1994, (I think) before the addition of young Volodya Putin to Sobchak's team. If VVP had been around, maybe this farce could have been avoided, but then what would the Russian tabloids have written about all these years?

And another random article has a very good explanation, for foreigners, of "Alla Pugacheva's Everlastimg [sic] Magic." The best comparison I can think of to someone in the US context would be Elvis Presley, who was, like Pugachova, once young and attractive and then grew bloated and overblown, with crazy on-stage outfits, etc. I've heard people say about both Elvis and Alla Borisovna that they both had tremendous stage presence in live shows at all stages of their careers, so maybe the comparison is a good one. I guess we can wish Pugachova better luck in dealing with the twilight of her stardom than Elvis had.