fathers and sons (turgenev)

Turgenev’s novel has always felt like a lacuna in my reading. In a way it is an Austen-esque novel with an Austen-esque title. A novel that examines the petit bourgeois of the nineteenth century, their dreams, and frustrations, both romantic and pragmatic. Of course there’s a seismic difference in the way in which the respective writer’s country’s histories played out. Arkady gets his pleasant romantic finale,  but the book is dominated by the would-be anarchist, his friend Bazarov. It’s Bazarov’s fate which foreshadows the history that was to come, half a century later. It’s feasible to think that Arkady and his young bride, Katya, could have lived to see the revolution. So whilst the novel, published mid nineteenth century, is on the one hand a sentimental critique of bourgeois Russia, it is also prophetic. Bazarov himself is a man out of time, deluded as to the scope of his ambition and power, and revealed to be a child when faced with the realities of love, in the shape of the queenly Madame Odintsova. Arkady, who makes peace with his father and his way of living, is the survivor, supposed inheritor of a rural Austen-esque life of diligence and tranquility. There are, of course, other echoes. Of Chekhov’s mercurial landowners, Bely’s radical anarchists and Dostoyevsky’s extremists. Turgenev’s novel seems to exist in a state of suspended animation, half-way between two worlds. To an extent the novel surprised me with its moderation, its gentle examination of the lives and loves of a younger generation which is akin to the lives and loves of any younger generation, full of missteps, embarrassment and endings that could go either way. There’s something paternalistic in the novelist’s approach, and like any parent, it exudes love for each and every one of the book’s children, its characters.

 

stalingrad (vasily grossman, tr. robert & elizabeth chandler)

It’s taken a month to read Stalingrad. Which given the thematic, seems quite rapid. Vasily Grossman’s epic text is in many ways an anti-novel. It has no central character as such. Minor characters appear and take over the book for chapters at a time, then vanish, never to be heard from again. Split into three parts, it feels in the opening part as though this will be a classic Russian novel (with an acknowledged homage to Tolstoy), following the fate of a single Stalingrad family, the Shaposhnikovs, but as the book evolves, this central thread becomes more and more tenuous. Characters of apparent significance are despatched to Kazan, or death. This is a counter-intuitive methodology, which would go against all the tenets of the courses dedicated to the art of the novel. Yet there it stands, Stalingrad, a bastion, a monument, a living embodiment of sacrifice and struggle. Day by day, it feels, both in the reading of it and in the chronology of events, Grossman draws us into the looming conflict, which finally explodes in the third book.

Literature isn’t about character journey or narrative structure. It’s about capturing reality. So, Grossman will move from the frontline to a factory hundreds of miles away - where the weapons which permit the frontline to keep fighting are created. Or even, in one extended sequence, the coal mines from whence the power to keep the factories running is sourced. War is a chain of social interactions and commitments. To document its reality, the writer has to be prepared to dig down into the roots. Even the camels on the steppe and the fish in the rivers are affected by the hell that has been unleashed by Hitler, and the writer’s pen pays its dues to the beasts too.

The book, more than aware of its own significance, moves from scenes with peasant women to scenes with Hitler himself. The battle of Stalingrad signalled the beginning of the end of the fascist war of conquest, a war that would end in ignominious defeat. In the UK we are weaned on D-Day and Dunkirk as the great heroic events of the Second World War. Grossman explains with an almost clinical brilliance how it was at Stalingrad that the tide was turned. German soldiers idly speculate on taking India next. The riches that lie to be claimed in the Urals will continue to fuel their conquests. But a few brave soviet soldiers hold them back, fuelled, the writer argues, by a commitment to the communist cause and the sense of solidarity that the philosophy engenders, a solidarity that endows the resistance with the strength to defeat the geo-political odds. 

the disappearing act (maria stepanova, tr sasha dugdale)

Stepanova’s novella can be read in the course of a single day. It recounts the cute tale of an exiled female novelist who nearly joins the circus. A dream of so many. At the edge of the novella lurks the spectre of Putin and Ukraine. But they are kept on the edges, as the mercurial narrator tiptoes through a chaotic twenty four hours, seeking to escape fame and fortune, dreaming of another life. 

padeniye berlina / the fall of berlin (w&d. mikhail chiaureli, w. pyotr pavlenko)

My father is nearing the end of his life. So many things I have seen or read this year have, by chance, lead me back to the start of his life. Post-war Germany, specifically Berlin. We are losing the last of the generations that experienced a time when Europe was reduced to rubble. When armies marched across its broad plains. Perhaps it is because the holders of these memories are leaving us that the fear of war on European soil seems to be receding on the part of the North Americans, and growing on the part of those who inhabit the territories that suffered so much in the twentieth century.

The Fall of Berlin is a Soviet propaganda piece about the events leading to the Russian advance on Berlin, culminating in the Hammer and Sickle flying over the destroyed Reichstag. As a film it goes for a kind of docu-drama, following the fates of two lovers from the Ukraine, who will meet in Berlin after being separated for so long. Stalin features heavily, as the wise leader who oversees triumph. There's no subtlety to the movie and it was clearly made to stir Soviet pride in the difficult years after the war. The budget would appear to have been substantial: the battles scenes are extensive, and an imitation of the Reichstag was apparently constructed for the closing scenes.

It's not the greatest film ever made, but it does hark back to a past which feels all but unthinkable when one walks the multicultural streets of Berlin today. Was that all some kind of terrible fever dream? As events fall back into folk memory, as the real memories of great grandparents, grandparents and parents are lost, only art can hope to retain an idea of what happened, once upon a time, on the thriving streets of Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Charlottenburg. 

(nb My great grandparents home, where my father spent the first years of his life, was out in Spandau, on the leafy border with the East.)

birth of our power (victor serge, tr richard greeman)

Serge is a neglected figure. Although flirting with autobiography, his writing lacks that spark of irony or self-reflection that the late twentieth century western literature was prey to, before it became overrun by the confessional tracts of the belligerent individual. He recounts the dreams of what we call politics. The revolution, the overthrow of the old guard, when Marxist idealism was still a recognisable thing. Having said that: what is politics, if not the actions of men and women at the coalface of history? Serge’s text here recounts his passage from Barcelona to Leningrad, 1917-1918. The war across the border rages and the radicals in Barcelona carry the hope that this might fuel their revolt. For now, they are frustrated. Serge flees to France, hoping to travel to Russia, but he is arrested and interned in a POW camp. Only when the war ends can he finally resume his journey. He arrives in a sepulchral Leningrad, another refugee seeking food, shelter and warmth. The reality of the revolution’s dreams are laid bare; glory will not be given, it will be earned.

There is something in the controlled naivety of Serge’s writing that draws the reader in, makes a friend of them. The reader becomes his belated co-conspirator, not least because Serge is clearly not seduced by the romance of revolution; rather he is wedded to it, warts and all. 

crime and punishment (dostoyevksy, tr. david mcduff)

What brought my reading back to this strange, savage novel? In part it has been inspired by working on Rambert’s Repetition, in which a character at one point talks about how ‘everything was written, the truth was to be found in the fiction’, which chimes with the idea of the writer as amanuensis and prophet. In part it was to explore a thought in my head that the world of St Petersburg described in my memory was akin to the worlds that lie just down the road, or even sometimes across the road, in the Americas I now inhabit.

Crime and punishment is a tale from the underworld. An anti-murder mystery, where we know who did it from the very start. Here is the paradox, because we know the criminal is not the image of the desperate criminal, but rather the sensitive student, Raskolnikov, almost likeable, forever intriguing, cursed by his very hand as it enacts the murder he has intellectually decided to commit. In another world, he might have become the muddied intellectual with a career in academia or ‘the media’. But in the impoverished conditions he lives in, his intellect and imagination prove to be the road to hell, or at least Siberia, rather than a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle in Ealing, to pick a name out of the hat. All of which goes to show that the problems of an impoverished society don’t just impinge on the underclass. They also lead to a deformation of the idea of education, or, to put it another way, a Nietszchean re-evaluation of the idea of education: not as a means of furthering the health of society, but as a means of advancing the individual.

Raskolnikov crumbles under the weight of the moral bind he has placed himself in. He would be a superman, but he can’t sustain the illusion. But in his endeavour, as described by the author, we can indeed see the future written, the future which would lead to the Russian revolution, but would also lead to fascism and the love of the figure of the all-powerful leader. The fragile cat’s cradle of society only needs to lose a few threads for the whole thing to unravel. In these Americas, there will be Raskolnikovs aplenty. Driven to desperate acts in the name of their own higher purpose. Nothing much has changed, the great cities and the less-great cities continue to be the site of desperate, unheeded struggles, hidden behind the shop windows of fashion stores and car dealerships. 

the naked year (boris pilnyak, tr. alexander r tulloch)

1917 was a year that changed the world and set up a paradigm for the twentieth century. What’s your take on Soviet Revolution? Amidst all the bombast and the dogma, the actuality of what it was like to be a human being in this moment, to live, fight, love, be scared, be confused, be Chekhovian, tends to be overlooked. Pilnyak’s remarkable novel, part Tolstoy, part Sterne, offers, as only literature can, an insight. Unsurprisingly, because on the whole writers need years like 1917 to give them polenta, there are several texts which deal with the human aspect of the revolution, including work by Babel and Marina Tsvetaeva, even if, like The Naked Year, these texts tend to be little known.

Pilnyak’s novel has a complex brilliance. It captures the effects of the revolution on a world beyond Moscow, out towards the East, on the edge of Asia. Here, even language becomes muddled up. Seismic changes occur and they are just changes. One particularly lovely sequence follows an elderly aristocrat, ordered to leave his stately home, who finds himself in a paradoxical way liberated, a freedom to just be a man walking miles to the nearest train station, even if that sense of freedom will only last a day or two. The Naked Year has no central character, moving through a panoply of different figures from chapter to chapter. The novel succeeds brilliantly in demonstrating how 1917, as well as being a forerunner for the century, also harks back to the dense, hermetic life of the Russian interior, a place where Europe and Asia are in constant flux with one another.

“The rulers of Russian during the past two centuries, since Peter, have wanted to adopt this culture. Russia languished in a stifling, utterly Gogolian atmosphere. And the Revolution set Russia against Europe. And furthermore immediately after the first days of the Revolution, Russia, in its way of life, customs and towns – returned to the seventeenth century. On the border of the seventeenth century there was Peter… there was a native Russian art, architecture, music… Peter came along – and genuine folk art disappeared… – Popular rebellion is the seizing of power and creation of their own genuine Russian truth by genuine Russians. And this is a blessing!… The whole history of peasant Russia is the history of sectarianism. Who will win this struggle – mechanized Europe or sectarian, orthodox, spiritual Russia?…”

This is one of the most instructive and playful texts about the Russian revolution, one which offers a perspective which incorporates the multiple truths of that event, truths which the subsequent victors of history, from both sides, chose to bury, because ambiguity is a fervent opponent of dogma. 

the red cavalry and other stories (isaac babel, tr, david mcduff)

This collection of short stories is split into three. The first includes Babel’s early stories which appear autobiographical (but the excellent introduction by the translator, David Mcduff, assures us are not), telling tales of life in the Jewish quarter of Odessa in his youth. The second series deals, famously, with the Bolshevik war against the counter-revolutionary forces on its Western front. The third series returns to Odessa, telling tales of Jewish gangsters and other colourful characters. The first and last sections are clearly complementary and tie in to a Yiddish tradition that links to Bashevis Singer, among others, writers whose identity is constructed in large part by their Jewish roots. In the early stories, a progrom is described with a brutal intensity from a child’s perspective which we take to be the author’s, although as  Mcduff notes, it is in reality a reflection of the stories the Babel would have grown up with. The capacity of the writer to be on a bleeding front line between fiction and reality, war and peace, is evident again in the Red Cavalry series. The authenticity of the vision feels undeniable, the cruelty of this conflict where there are no obvious good guys. The struggle is desperate and existential, a supposedly philosophical conflict which in actuality boils down to men’s capacity for violence. Much of the conflict Babel describes takes place in what is modern day Ukraine and the echoes with today’s war are everywhere. This has been a land that has been fought over, on the hinge of East and West, for centuries, and that battle continues to be waged today, suggesting a more fundamental schism than whatever might be the ostensible reasons for war. Babel’s Jewish perspective, which places him both on the outside and the inside, allows him to view the war more dispassionately, and more honestly, in all its savagery, no matter the cause. 

ivan moscow (boris pilnyak, tr aaron schwartzman)

Pilnyak’s post revolutionary text is a tiny box of surprises. Structured around the brief life of the eponymous hero, it moves from Moscow to the deep Russian countryside, where Ivan Moscow is seeking to construct a factory that will produce unlimited nuclear energy. The fact that the novel is written in 1927 and the author was executed by Stalin in 1938, only adds to the unexpected nature of Ivan’s project, which is somehow connected to his love for an Egyptian mummy and the enigmatic Alexandra. Ivan fights in the revolution and dies in a plane crash, but the details seem incidental to a novel which feels like a forefather to the writing of Pelevin and incorporates in its 120 pages an interpretation of revolution, futurism, the conflict between urban and rural russia and its inherent mysteries and much more besides. 

delo (home arrest) (w&d aleksei german, w. maria ogneva)

German’s delicate tale of domestic incarceration builds slowly as layer upon layer of oppression and grief is placed on the frame of David, the professor whose denunciation of the local mayor for corruption has lead to his own house arrest. David, an educated man who speaks six languages, has a Farsi mother and a Georgian father, sometimes sports a Chinese mask and practices Japanese calligraphy, begins the film with a certain arrogance as he wages his campaign. But bit by bit that confidence is chipped away. His mother dies, his friends desert him, and save for his kindly female lawyer, he finds himself alone against the machine of the Russian state. David’s hero is Tolstoy and there’s a cast iron sculpture of Lenin on his front lawn. He is the haunted by the tragedy of a Russia that has traded in any sign of integrity. The film is loosely based on the case of Kirill Serebrennikov, who was also placed under house arrest. Only, where Serebrennikov was a Moscow celebrity who has emerged to direct operas in Amsterdam and have his film screened at Cannes, the case of David is an unknown academic in a small Siberian town. His campaign is not going to attract International attention and no-one is coming to his rescue. At times, David recognises the inevitability of prison, and his case also feels like an echo of Navalny’s. However, part of the film’s strength is the way it functions on a small scale, never leaving David’s house, only sometimes straying outside., We are incarcerated with the protagonist, and experience the physical and mental decline that goes with this injustice alongside him. It’s a low key film of surprising power and terrible pertinence. 

compartment number 6. (w&d juho kuosmanen, w. andris feldmanis)

Another tale from the Arctic circle, Compartment Number 6 is a railroad road movie which follows the Finnish protagonist, Laura, from Moscow to Murmansk. Laura finds herself in a sleeper carriage with Ljoha, a drunken Mayakovsky lookalike. Initially intimidated by him, their trip then turns into an odd couple romance. The film opens with a literary party in Moscow, where people quote Pelevin, and in this moment one wonders whether Compartment Number 6 might offer an insight into that other Russia, the one that seems to have been kicked into the long grass, both by Putin and his henchmen and the rest of the world. Pelevin’s Russia is full of strangeness and a warped literary cynicism which goes back to Gogol, Bulgakov and their ilk. But after suggesting it might investigate these offbeat roots, the film doesn’t really go there, no matter how much Yuriy Borisov, as Ljoha tries. His erratic but doleful performance lends the film a slightly more left field outlook, but this is really Laura’s story. Not all that dissimilar from this year’s breakout European film, Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, Compartment Number 6 is another film by a man which is a study in a woman achieving some kind of altered consciousness through an unexpected love affair that doesn’t work out as it might have done. This zeitgeisty theme is well framed by the train journey and the Maguffin of Laura’s quest to find the Murmansk petroglyphs, but the film’s ultimate destination feels seems more prosaic than the spectacular scenery it presents.

Mr Curry, more generously, suspected that the issues we shared with the film might have been down to the source material novel from which the film has been adapted.

a dream in polar fog (yuri rytkheu, tr. ilona yazhbin chavasse)

A Dream in Polar Fog offers a deep dive into the world of the Siberian Chukchi people, who live on the Russian coast near the Bering Sea. Set in the years before the Russian Revolution, it tells the story of John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor who suffers debilitating frostbite after an explosives accident. The captain of his icebound ship sends John, in the company of the local elder, Orvo, to the nearest town to be treated. But on the way, they are caught in a blizzard. Nearing death, a female shaman amputates John’s hands. When he returns to the coast, the ship has sailed. This is the set up for Rytkheu’s tale, which is thereafter an account of John’s integration into the Chukchi way of life. Rather than seeking any chance to flee, John finds himself more and more integrated, embracing a more traditional, holistic and ecological existence in the company of the Chukchi, who become his family. In this sense, the novel, published in 1970, feels way ahead of its time. Even more so, when one realises the novel emerges from an industrial Soviet culture which Rytkheu had previously embraced as a writer. Rytkheu’s need to capture and convey a way of life he knew as a young man shines through in the sometimes prosaic text. The author acknowledges the way in which technological advances have helped the Chukchi, but he is also fiercely protective of a way of life which is threatened by the onset of ‘civilisation’. The novel’s value as an anthropological text is clear, as well as offering a fascinating glimpse into one of most curious borders on earth. At one point the narrative mentions that people from Nome used to visit a festival on the Siberian coast. Curious, I looked up where Nome might be, to discover it is in Alaska. At their closest point, Russia and the USA are less than a hundred miles apart. The polar fog the people of these lands inhabit has little respect for arbitrary political or ideological divisions.

a dirty war (anna politkovskaya)

The journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered in 2006. Reading this book of her articles written for Novaya Gazeta about the second Chechen war, and knowing what we know about Putin’s Russia, the fact of her murder, no matter how shocking, no longer seems surprising. In much the same way as being a journalist in Mexico is a perilous profession, being a journalist prepared to go after the truth in Putin’s Russia is a job with a low life expectancy. Politkovskaya details the events of the war with a sanguine tone, describing its barbarous cruelties with her weather-beaten prose. The world had little interest in the suffering of the Chechens, and Politkovskaya seems all too aware of this. The absurdities of the Russian military campaign, one which appeared to benefit no-one and nothing save for consolidating Putin’s grasp on power, are repeatedly flagged up. One of the many grotesque chapters deals with the military office in charge of documenting the fatalities of Russian soldiers, charged with finding a way of delivering information no-one wants to hear. One can imagine his relief at finding someone willing to listen to him.

Of course, these past months we have all been compelled to finally take our heads out of the sand and pay some attention to the horrors that Politkovskaya detailed and warned about over twenty years ago. She was the Cassandra that no-one wanted to hear. Why did no-one care about Chechnya and Grozny’s fate? Perhaps because it was a Muslim country, perhaps because it was that little bit further away than Ukraine, perhaps because it was deeply inconvenient for vested interests who depended so much on the largesse of Russian wealth. Read Politkovskaya’s book and weep, not just for Ukraine, but for all the other people who have been victims of an aggression which seems to be almost nihilistic. Politkovskaya herself being another of these victims, an irony which she would no doubt have reported with the deadpan humanity which marks out as one of the bravest journalists of the twenty first century.  

petrov’s flu (w&d kirill serebrennikov)

Contemporary Russia is a big, complex country. Writers like Pelevin or Sorokin or Lebedev or Prilepin, to name a few, pay testament to this. Petrov’s Flu, a big, complex film, opens with a scene in a bus where various downtrodden Yekaterinburg citizens are complaining about how much better it was in Soviet times. In contrast to the more elegiac Leto, the world Kirill Serebrennikov conjures in Petrov’s Flu is bleak, cold, alt-Russian, in the Dostoyevskian sense. A writer commits suicide, a meek librarian becomes a serial killer, the dead rise from their coffins and walk. This is a portrait of a society teetering on the edge of insanity and violence, fuelled by vodka and disillusion. Perhaps this helps to explain, above and beyond the psychotically repressive elements of the regime, why Putin and the oligarchs lumber forward into infamy. The Lower Depths don’t have the energy to contemplate a better future, let alone campaign or aspire to it.

Against this vision, in a film that rambles chaotically over the course of two and half hours, are set sequences from the past, which surge up and take over the last act of the film. These visions are beautiful and chaotic, as we return to a dreamy Soviet era moment where the child Petrov meets a young woman who is playing the Ice Maiden in a New Year’s Eve shindig. The camera glides, a la Gaspar Noe, the film oscillates between washed out colour and black and white, in contrast to the dull harsh colours of the contemporary world. Petrov’s parents runs around in an Edenic nakedness, poets come and go, the world is touched with a strange magic.

These final sequences feel as though they might have been a film on their own, and the truth is that Petrov’s Flu, constructed around a conceit that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, is a distended, overblown film which feels both astonishingly self-indulgent and scarily brilliant. It’s an immersive fever dream, the kind of thing which gets thrown out at the first round of an Anglo-Saxon script development meeting. (Although, oddly, during the extended flashback sequences I found myself thinking of it as a Russian correlative to Licorice Pizza.) However, it’s also a film that seems to be trying to get to the heart of the modern Russian condition. The trigger for the flashbacks occur when Petrov’s sick son takes aspirin which is from 1977, which sends us all back to 1977, which is where Serebrennikov’s film posits that this terrible delirium emerged from.

The director has himself had his run-ins with the Putin regime. I am not sure of his current status. But Petrov’s Flu reminds us yet again, in spite or perhaps because of its sprawling excesses, that art is the most effective tool we possess for understanding the complexities of any given human society. 

laurus (w. eugene vodolazkin, tr, lisa hayden)

At its richest and strangest, Laurus, a meditation on death, sainthood and Russia, summons up the aura of a Chagall painting. Vivid colours which defy gravity, lovers whose love beatifies them for a moment in time (as love beatifies all lovers), a sense of infinite space beyond the edges of the canvas or the page. Vodolazkin’s tale narrates the story of a boy who acquires the gift of healing from his grandfather, a gift that it also a burden. This is another story set in times of plague when the skills of Arseny, the novel’s protagonist whose name changes several times, (ending as the eponymous Laurus), can make all the difference between life and death. The author locates two facets of Arseny’s abilities: on the one hand there is the more technological skill of being able to identify which plants offer which cures; on the other a more mystical capacity to channel a healing energy through his touch. Laurus is very much a novel about Russia, and the forces at work in the construction of the Russian psyche. This duality in Aresny feels like a commentary on the equilibrium which Russia seeks between the poles of mysticism and modernity, between the worlds of East and West. All of which is implicit rather than explicit. Arseny himself evolves from medicine man to holy fool to ambassador. The book acquires a quixotic feel as we follow his life story towards death. The writer’s take on the relationship between life and the afterlife is one of the more powerful elements of the novel; there’s a reflection on what it means to be mortal that few Western writers are willing to engage with. The sense that our travails upon this earth are part of a wider journey, one humans are very far from understanding, one that defies time (which is illustrated by the novel’s willingness to engage with anachronism). Laurus is a novel which constantly seeks to go beyond materialism to provoke a contemplation of the transcendent, the words flying off the edge of the page towards an unknown corner of the galaxy. 

nostalgia (w&d tarkovsky, w tonino guerra)

Cinemateca still has a limited foro, something like 50%, at a guess. So it’s not a surprise that this screening of Tarkovsky’s penultimate film was effectively sold out. What was a surprise, was the demographic of the audience. Impossible to say if I was the oldest person there, but what was evident was that the majority were younger than me. One normally associates venerable art movies with a more elderly public, but that wasn’t the case last night. Which was refreshing. Even more so, given the reaction at the film’s conclusion. The final shot is a lengthy, artistic, as close to the transcendent as cinema perhaps gets. The film concluded and there was a tangible silence, an immobility. No-one rushed to get up. As though we were all gradually returning to the other world, after our deep immersion in Tarkovsky world. 

Nostalgia is a film which at times feels almost playful, bordering on the melodramatic. The relationship between Gorchakov and Eugenia is charged with soap opera tension. There’s a glorious scene where Eugenia psychs herself to run up some stairs but instead goes flying on her high heels. She gets up laughing. She’s a belligerently anti-Tarkovskian character who undercuts the film’s solemnity, refusing to kneel in the opening sequence when they visit a church. Perhaps because of this lightness, the moments of alt-poetry feel all the more bewildering and astonishing. The film plays with Gorchakov’s memories, which infiltrate the narrative like a ghost dog, the same dog that crops up in both the Italian world of the action and the Russian world of memory. This more playful Tarkovsky refuses to let the viewer settle into anything close to reverence. The sound of drilling, of Chinese music, invades and distracts. The viewer isn’t sure where to place themselves, anymore than the Russian visitors seem to know how to place themselves within the complex faded glory of Italy. 

This disorientation, perhaps most cruelly expounded in a scene where a clown mocks Domenico, the holy fool who has set himself on fire, eventually builds towards the harrowing, over processed finale, whose very intensity acts as a release. Finally we understand where we are. Finally we realise that this has been as close to an act of prayer as we’re likely to get in this sacrilegious world. The seriousness comes as a relief. This is what we need. We need the snow to fall on the ruined abbey of our modern world.

mirror (w&d tarkovsky, w aleksandr misharin)

There are moments in Mirror when it feels as though Tarkovsky is exploring the outer boundaries of the possibility of fiction, and he has no option but to concede that fiction will not do what he needs. In these moments we see images of war, as soldiers trek through mud-wracked fields, or alternatively, more curiously, a mass of Chinese wave Mao’s little red book. These Chinese images fall out of apparent context into the film. The images of the Soviet war have a logic in this memory piece, reflecting the ubiquity of the second world war in post-45 Soviet filmmaking. The images of Russian soldiers lock us into the world of Tarkovsky’s children and describe the terror that helped form that world. But the images of the Chinese seem to push the narrative further, seeking to locate it in a more universal twentieth century experience, something which is amplified by the curious Spanish section, when unexpected characters appear, talking in Spanish about bullfighting, again contrasted with documentary footage of the Spanish Civil War.

Who are these Spaniards, or these Chinese, and what are they doing in Tarkovky’s delicate memory piece? But then our memories are not confined to the details of family or place. Our imaginations even as children engage with the morbid fears of the age. At another point, there’s footage of the nuclear bomb exploding, and any child who grew up in the shadow of the cold war had the bogeyman of nuclear annihilation lurking somewhere in their consciousness. Fiction can only go so far, at some point the filmmaker has to declare that his imagination has been formed by the actuality of the world. 

Having said that, in Mirror we see again the breathtaking scope of the auteur’s imagination. The way he painted poetry with a camera that glided, like a ghost, through the scenes of a child’s past. There are so many moments for the high priests of cinematic criticism to dwell on that we could be here all year. Ideas and images thrown together in a style that sometimes borders on the Dada-esque, Tzara racing around fitting pieces together that don’t appear to match, but somehow do anyway. There is something almost childlike about this investigation of being a child. The construction of the film foregoes the adult demands of coherence, delighting in a language that is being created anew, for the very first time, all over again. In this film, more perhaps than any of his others, there is a connection with Godard, both employing a seemingly haphazard process of assemblage to stretch the boundaries of cinematic possibility. 

untraceable (sergei lebedev, tr antonina w. bouis)

Untraceable has a name like an eighties pop song (by Alison Moyet or T’Pau?). It’s a novel which connects the bombast of Soviet Russia with the clinical nature of Putin’s Russia highly effectively, tracing the way in which chemical weapons were developed and used as part of a covet armoury. The results of this policy has bee seen in the UK, in those cases we know about, at Salisbury and in the murder of Litvinenko. The maguffin in the book is a lethal potion known as Neophyte, developed by a Soviet scientist who then defected to the West. Now, decades later, two Russian agents are sent to finish him off with a dose of his own medicine. The novel is short but sweeping in scope, incorporating events from the Second World War, the Chechnyan war and the present day. There’s a hint of Sorokin in the author’s occasionally forays into a more lyrical register, a poeticism which adds a garnish to the thriller-esque territory the novel adopts as a narrative mechanism. Will the defector survive or will the hapless agents get to him before he can escape? However, because the novel incorporates so much historical and poetic material, it never really feels like a thriller. It’s more a meditation on the nature of an evil that seeks to create an untraceable poison. What kind of society would require this tool? And what does it say about the connection between Putin’s Russia and Stalin’s that both seek to employ it? 

the unsent letter (d. mikhail kalatozov, w. grigoriy koltunov, valeri osipov, viktor rozov)

As regular readers to this column (?!?) might realise, the writer is somewhat beguiled by the achievements of Soviet cinema. One aspect of cinema is that it has little option but to function within the parameters of the socio-political structure it inhabits. Because cinema makers on the whole need money. What emerges in Kalatozov’s work is perhaps a prioritisation of technique and aesthetic over content. Content is dangerous, it can get the filmmaker into trouble. Technique, on the other hand, in particular in cinema, a new art with fervent Bolshevik roots, permits an innovative freedom. With his crossfades and his heightened art direction, Kalatozov exercises this freedom with remarkable panache. The narrative of The Unsent Letter is straightforward. Four geologists are sent to the Siberian taiga to discover diamonds, which will be a key development in the industrialisation of the Soviet republic. After much fruitless searching and a certain amount of Chekhovian angst (one of the geologists, Andrey is engaged to another, Tanya, but a third, Sergey, develops a smouldering passion for Tanya), they do indeed discover the diamonds, charting the location. Mission accomplished, they prepare their two boats to head back downriver. However, the night of their departure, a terrifying forest fire strikes. The boats are lost, Sergey dies, and the remaining trio have to make their way out by foot. Planes fly overhead but can’t see them for the smoke. The radio packs up. Andey is wounded and cannot walk. A seemingly innocuous tale becomes darker and darker. It turns into a survival story (pace The Revenant). Who will live, who will perish? Given the prosaic nature of the narrative, it’s perhaps hard to see how the film can sustain itself over the course of the closing hour. If this was Hollywood, the cliches would be coming thick and fast. But Kalatozov pulls it off. This is deeply immersive cinema. The lingering smoke, the Siberian marshes, the onset of Winter snow, are all realised with a cinematic flair which captivates the viewer. The camera makes us the other party in this journey, albeit from the safety of our cinema seats. We urge the three characters to survive and mourn those who don’t. 

Clearly there’s a hard-fought propaganda element to all this. The struggle of the Soviet peoples etcetera. The dream-montage which shows the development of the region has, to 21st century eyes, a dystopian air, pure nature subsumed by industry. Nevertheless, the pure skill of the filmmaking succeeds in ensuring that the human story, that of the heroic instinct to survival, supersedes any political preconceptions the viewer brings to the screen. The Unsent Letter is as gripping a film as one could imagine, which ranks alongside films like The Wages of Fear, Duel or Alien to reveal cinema’s capacity to immerse the viewer in a terrifying reality. 

the ascent (voskhozhdenie) (w&d larisa shepitko, w. yuri klepikov)

There are so many films from the USSR or Russia set in the second world war that it’s not hard to think there’s nothing new to see. The Ascent, a film I had never heard of, proved this thesis wrong. It has to be one of the most remarkable, harrowing films I have ever seen. The director, Larisa Shepitko conjures an astonishing bleak, visceral film which drives itself forward over the course of two hours to a gut-wrenching conclusion. The first hour of the film sees two partisans, Sotnikov and Rybak struggle through a snowbound landscape in search of food to take back to their group. This is almost all filmed with hand-held camera, which tumbles through the snow with the two partisans, sinks up to its waist in the snow, genuinely makes us feel as though we are also there, fleeing for our lives. Cinema as immersive experience. Just as it seems they’ve succeeded in their mission, Sotnikov and Rybak run into a German patrol and Sotnikov is wounded. Rybak saves his life, but seeking to hide in a farmhouse, they are captured. This is a plot twist that it complete contrast to anything Hollywood might have come up with. What we assume to be a film about how the plucky heroes’ escape, turns into something completely the opposite. A tale of torture, betrayal, collateral damage, death. In short, a stunningly convincing and unsettling portrayal of the realities of having an enemy force invade your homeland and the price that is paid in both physical and spiritual terms. The Ascent is another example of the remarkable talent of Soviet cinema. The Soviets didn’t just lose the Cold War, they also lost the culture war, but in their cinema we can discern a sensibility in complete contrast to that of their enemies, a capacity to create cinema that is immersive, compelling, terrifying and beautiful. Perhaps Soviet cinema whispers to us that there was another course for humanity to take, another way to put the technology into practice. Or perhaps this is just a wilfully romantic notion on my part.