What could you say about the Soviet (Russian) mentalism? What are the legends and myths do you know about it? What do you know about Wolf Messing and others?
And how would you describe mentalism in Russia today?
Tell us what you think about all this.Like in "UK / US mentalism"
I think it will be very interesting.

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I think they have the greatest mentalists in the world... But we will never know their names.

The most complete work on Messing that I know of, and from which I learned most of what I know about him, is by Tatiana Lungin:

http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Messing-Russi......82670963

When I was working on Impossible? in Ukraine there was a long process of finding someone suitable to host the show, able to perform mentalism at a very high level similar to Philip Escoffey who hosted the UK series and Gili who hosted the Belgian show. The producer, Vladimir, explained that in Ukraine there simply wasn't a tradition of theatrical mentalism in the same way as in the UK and Western Europe, and when we started talking in terms of finding someone from Russia (this was before all the crap going on now of course) the answer was essentially the same, that there was pretty scant pickings in terms of professionals. In the end the show was produced with Gili performing and it was hosted by Vladimir, simply because it was so much easier to use an existing performer than scour the nation for an equivalent local or to find a different kind of performer and teach them the effects. Gili did the mentalism and Vladimir did everything else - it was funny because Vladimir would have been a great mentalist, he was charismatic and quite a powerful personality plus he had a great beard. But that wasn't his thing and it would have been very hard to bring him up to speed.

This is all what I was told, obviously I don't have my ear to the ground in Russia. But the vibe I got was very much that what we consider to be mentalism, theatrical mind-reading, doesn't have very much traction there at all. I'd be interested to see if there is anyone with a local perspective who could say if this is true or not.

Phill