VOLUME 6, NUMBER 2

JUNE, 1986
Soviet
and
East-Buropean
Drama, Theatre
and
Film
,.
Soviet
and
East-European
l).rama, 'l:'heatre
and
Film
VOLUME 6, NUMBER 2
JUNE, 1986
S.EEDTF is a publication of the Institute for
Contemporary Eastern European Drama and Theatre
under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Study
in Theatre Arts, Graduate Center, City University of
New York with support from the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the Graduate School and the
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of
George Mason University. The Institute Office is
Room 801, City University Graduate Center, 33 West
4Znct Street, New York, NY 10036. All subscription
requests and submissions should be addressed to the
Editor of SEEDTF: Leo Hecht, Department of
Foreign Languages and Literatures, George Mason
Unive rsity, Fairfax, VA 22030. (Proofreading
Editor: Prof. Rhonda Blair, Hampshire College
Theatre, Amherst, MA 01002.)
G;}George Mason University
SEEDTF has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals
and newsletters which desire to reproduce articles,
reviews and other materials which have appeared in
SEEDTF may do so, as long as the following
provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint must be requested from
SEEDTF in writing before the fact.
b. Credit to SEEDTF must be given in the reprint.
c. Two copies of the publication in which the
reprinted material has appeared must be
furnished to the Editor of SEEDTF immediately
upon publication.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial Policy ..... . ..... . ..... . ... ..... 3
Bibliography and Announcements 5
"The Role of the Artist in Andrei
Rublev and Dmitri Merezhkovski's
The Romance of Leonardo da
Vinci." Feter G. Christensen , , , , ,10
"Yugoslav Theatre: The Sum of
Its Parts." Dragan Klaic .. , 44
"A Miscellany of Motion Pictures."
Leo Hecht ............................. 2 7
11
Grigory Gorin." ......................... ,38
"The Contemporary Meaning of
Kozintsev's Film Hamlet."
Joseph Troncale o o o o o o 0 o 42
"The Cherry Orchard at the Folger"
Everett Jones . , , 59
EDITORIAL POUCY
Manuscripts in the following categories are
solicited: articles of no more than 2,500 words; book
reviews; performance reviews; and bibiiogt'aphies. It
must be kept in mind that all of the above sub-
missions must concern themselves either with con-
temporary materials on Soviet or East European
theatre and drama, new approaches to older
materials in recently published works, and new
performances of older plays. In other words, we
would welcome submissions reviewing innovative
performances of Gogol or recently published books on
Gogol, for example, but we could not use original
articles discussing Gogol as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles
and reviews from foreign publications, we do require
copyright release statements.
We will also gladly publish announcements of
special events, new book releases, job opportunities
and anything else which may be of interest to our
discipline. Of course all submissions are evaluated bv
blind readers on whose findings acceptance or re-
jection is based.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced
and carefully proofread. Submit two copies of each
manuscript and attach a stamped, self-addressed
envelope. The MLA style should be followed. Trans-
literations should follow the Library of Congress
system. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors
will be notified after approximately four weeks.
All submissions, inqutrles and subscription
requests should be directed to:
Prof. Leo Hecht, Editor
Dept. of Foreign Languages & Literatures
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
4
BmUOGRAPHY AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
The following relatively recent Ph.D.
dissertations are available as xerographic reprints
through University Microfilm International, P.O. Box
1764, Ann Arbor, MI 48106:
Vernita Mallard Batchelder. The Theatre
Theory and Theatre Practice of Jurij Liubimov:
1964-1971. Ph.D. 1978 University of Georgia. 340
PP
Faina Burko. The Soviet Yiddish Theatre in the
Twenties. Ph.D. 1978 Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale. 163 pp.
Sharon Marie Carnicke. The Theatrical
Instinct: A Study of the Work of Nikolaj Evreinov in
Early Twentieth Century Russia. Ph.D. 1979
Columbia University. 380 pp.
Nancy Anne Kindel an. The Theatre of
Inspiration: An Analysis of the Acting Theories of
Michael Chekhov. Ph.D. 1977 The University of
Wisconsin-Madison. 281 pp.
George Ellsworth Shail. The Leningrad Theatre
of Young Spectators 1922-1941. Ph.D. 1980 New
York University. 860 pp.
Andrea Castle Southard. The Artistic Career of
Nikolai Pavlovich Okhlopkov. Ph.D. 1980 University
of Kansas. 48 9 pp.
Thomas Joseph Torda. Alexander Tairov and
the Scenic Artists of the Moscow Kamerny Theater
1914-1935. Ph.D. 1977 University of Denver. 703 pp.
The following East European films are offered
for rental. For additional information contact IFEX
Films, 201 West 52nd Street, New York, NY 10019
(212) 582-4318:
The Hungarians (M agyarok), which was
nominated for an Academy Award as the Best
Foreign Film of 1979. It was directed by Zoltan
I
5
Fabri, is based on the novel by Jozsef Balas, and stars
Eva Pap, Gabor Koncz and Istvan Szabo. Four
peasant families and two single men leave their
homeland in 1942 to take a one-year labor contract
on a German farm where they must witness the
tragedies of war. A majestic study of peasant family
life during wartime illustrated in five movements
dictated by the seasons of the year. Hungarian
dialogue with English subtitles.
The Apple Game, directed by Vera Chytilova
and starring Dagmar Blahova and Jiri Manzel. A
comedy of errors. Czech dialogue with English
subtitles.
Tango, a Polish product, was written,
photographed and directed by 2bigniew Rybchvnski
with music by Janusz Hajduk. It won the Academy
Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1982.
Accompanied by a haunting tango, this satiric-
philosophic parable of the human predicament is
illustrated by the experiences of many people
appearing on the screen simultaneously, but oblivious
to each other.
The film Old Believers: A Russian Religious
Group in Oregon has won numerous prizes in the USA
and abroad. It is a strikingly beautiful film about the
life of this historically important religious group.
For further information contact The Media Project,
P.O. Box 4093, Portland, OR 97208.
Linguitronics, P.O. Box 9504, Arlington, VA
22209, is offering videocassettes on numerous
Russian subjects, among them the lives of foremost
Russian writers, a film about the Moscow
Conservatory of Music and a 50-minute film on the
Soviet Theatre Today.
Theatre: News from the Finnish Theatre
freq\lently publishes exc ellent articles on the
production of Soviet plays in English. F or further
information write to Finnish Centre of the ITI,
Vuorikatu 6 A 3, 00100 Helsinki 10, Finland.
6
Ronald Holloway. The Bulgarian Cinema: A
Historical Portrait of a Socialist Cinematography.
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. 256 pp.
$29.50. This survey of Bulgarian cinema from its
beginnings to the present discusses the foremost film
makers and their products. Pointing out the influ-
ences of ancient Thracian civilization, Old Church
Slavonic, orthodox iconography, nationalistic litera-
ture and theatre under the Ottoman domination, as
well as contemporary East European and Western
influences, the author examines the genesis of cine-
matic arts as reflected in major films. He also
focuses on the relationship among foremost directors,
screenwriters, and contemporary literary figures who
have exerted their influence. Of special value is an
extensive, comprehensive filmography that describes
every Bulgarian film from 1915 to 1982, listing
directors, designers, screenwriters, photographers
and principal actors. 160 photographs are included.
Zbigniew Osinski. Grotowski and His
Laboratory. New York: Performing Arts Journal
Publications, 1986. This is a Polish reading of
Grotowski and his theatre drawn from Polish sources
and situating the Grotowski phenomenon in its own
special cultural setting. The book covers Grotowski's
early schooling and influences, his major productions,
his exit from the theatre in the early 1970s to pursue
more spiritually-oriented "paratheatrical activities,"
and his current exploration of "objective drama." It
includes a wealth of documentary detail unavailable
elsewhere in English. Heavily illustrated. Translated
and abridged by Lillian Vallee and Robert Findlay.
Cloth $24.95; paper $9.95. Order directly from the
publisher at 325 Spring Street, Suite 318, New York,
NY 10013.
Performing Arts Journal Publications has also
published Drama Contemporary: Czechoslovakia,
edited and introduced by Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz.
It contains plays by Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel,
Pavel Kohout, Ivan Klima, Pavel Landovsky and Milan
Uhde.
7
The following books have been published by
Waveland Press, Inc.:
Baltic Drama: A Bibliography (1981).
Fire and Night: Five Baltic Plays, edited by
Alfreds Straumanis 0986). It is a collection of plays
by Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian dramatists. Can
be ordered directly from the publisher at P.O. 'Box
400, Prospect Heights, IL 60070, (312) 634-0081.
Toby W. Clyman, ed. The Chekhov Companion.
Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1985. It contains
an article by Laurence Senelick entitled "Chekhov on
the Stage."
Also see Senelick's article "The New Regime at
the Taganka, I in Theater, New Haven, February
1986, in which the author reviews Anatolii Efros's
new productions of The Lower Depths and War Does
Not Have a Woman's Face.
Alma Law. "The Trouble With Liubimov"
appeared in American Theatre, April, 1985.
Recent Soviet publications, in Russian, which
are available through Victor Kamkin 'Bookstore, Inc.,
1ZZZ4 Parklawn Drive, Rockville, MD 20852, include
the following:
T .A. Erem eeva. V mire teatra. Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1984.
Kaarel Ird. Teatr---moia rabota. Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1984.
A. Kamshalov. Pravo na poisk: Tvorchestvo
molodykh kinematografistov. Moscow: Molodaia
gvardiia, 1984.
T. Tursonov. Oktiabrskaia revoliutsia
uzbekskii teatr. Tashkent: Fan, 1 91B.
Iurii Alianskii. Teatr v kvadrate ohstrela.
Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1985.
Iu. Dmitriev. Akademicheskii Malyi Teatr.
Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1984.
8
Globus, a Slavic bookstore at 332 Balboa Street,
San Francisco, CA 94118, also has considerable
holdings in older Soviet books on the performing arts.
The Friends of Czechoslovak Music, a society
recently founded at San Diego State University, was
established to commemorate the centennial of the
death of Czech composer Hedrich Smetana (1824-
84). The aims and objectives of the organization are
to promote concerts and festivals of Czechoslovak
music, to give financial support to conferences and
visiting scholars, to present young artists, and to
assist composers of Czechoslovak background. For
information contact professor Jaroslav Mraczek,
Department of Music, San Diego State University,
5300 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92115-9980.
Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central
European Culture, is published by The University of
Michigan, Modern Language Building, Ann Arbor, MI
48109, and frequently contains articles on the per-
forming arts. For example, volume 2 contains an
article by Herbert Eagle on "Contemporary
Hungarian Cinema" and an article by Jarka M. Burian
on "Theatre Planning in Czechoslovakia." Volume 4
contains two articles on Witolt Gombrowicz. Order
directly from the publisher.
The Mid-West Slavic Conference held at the
University of Wisconsin April 18-19, had several
panels of interest to the performing arts including
the following:
"Chekhov as Man and Artist";
"Soviet and East European Cinema of the
Modern Era";
"Spirituality and Mission in Russian Music";
"Tadeusz Rozewicz and the Anti-Realistic
Tradition in \iodern Theatre."
The following new books will be reviewed in the
next issue of SEEDTF:
9
Vladimir Nabokov. The Man from the USSR and
Other Plays. New York: Harcourt l3race Jovanovich,
1985.
Velemir Khlebnikov. The King of Time. Trans.
by Paul Schmidt. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 19 8 5.
In addition, Simon Karlinsky's book on Russian
theatre before Pushkin which was to have been
reviewed in this issue, will have to wait for the .next.
CALL FOR PAPERS
The panel on "Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art
Theatre" at the national convention of AATSEEL
whi ch will take place in New York December 26-ZQ,
1986, will be chaired by Alma Law. Proposals for
papers are invited. Please send them to the SEEDTF
address at the very earliest opportunity. They will be
forwarded to Dr. Law who will then correspond with
you directly.
Tbe Role of the Artist in Andrei Tarkonld's
Andrei Ruble and Dmitri Merezbkovsk:i's
The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci
..
The films of Andrei Tarkovski have received
little critical analysis in the West. This is particu-
larly true of Andrei Rublev, which was discussed
mostly in relation to the publicity generated by its
success at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969. Not
only has the film itself been slighted, but there have
been no c omparative studies linking it to other areas
of Russia or Soviet culture. In this paper I would like
to take one of the primary themes of the film, the
role of the artist in society, and compare it with the
treatment of the same theme in Dmitri Merezhkov-
ski's once famous, but now often ignored, historical
novel, The Romance of Le onardo da Vinci (1900).
It is Tarkovski himself who points the wav to
my comparison. His interest in Leonardo is evident
10
not only in his autobiographical film, The Mirror, in
which one of the characters flips through the pages
of a bo<;>k of reproductions of the Italian artist's work,
but also in his most important essay on the nature of
cinema, "De la figuration cinematographique."
In Tarkovski's essay, Leonardo is clearly one of
the heroes. Along with Bach he is described as some-
one who saw the world for the first time. Leonardo's
Portrait of Genevra Benci is held up for particular
praise. Leonardo is able to look at her from the
exterior, and he creates a certain am biguitv about
her so that we don't know if she is pleasing or dis-
pleasing. She is someone 'beyond good and evil.'
Tarkovski invites us to look at this portrait:
But try to break down this portrait by Leonardo
into its constituent elements, and you will not
succeed. In every case, such a decomposition of
the impression the portrait makes into elements
explains nothing. Furthermore, the force of the
emotional impact which the image of this
Genevra Benci exerts on us reposes justly on the
impossibility of prefering such or such a detail
taken from context, the impossibility of
prefering one instantaneous impression over
another, that is, of acquiring an equilibrium in
regard to the figure we are observing. Before
us opens the possibility of a relationship with
the infinite. It is into this infinite that our
reason and feelings ye hurtled with a joyous
and captivating haste.
Although Rublev is not compared with Leonardo
in the essay, I feel that Tarkovski would also find him
to be an artist who gives us a relationship with the
infinite. Indeed, the burst of color as the camera
pans over Rublev's icons in the film's epilogue
indicates this movement outward into the spiritual
world.
An interest in Leonardo is also evidenced in the
prologue to Ta.rkovski's film in which an unidentified
11
. (
person lUlrelated to the main plot attempts to fly a
primitive flying machine. He exultantly gets off the
grolUld, but ultimately falls ann is killed. Certainly,
Leonardo was always interested in inventing a flying
machine. His notebooks show his interest in wings.
This motif is used ablUldantly in Merezhkovski's
novel, and one of Leonardo's disciples actually tries
to fly and crashes to death. Merezhkovski writes:
The Philosophy was fulfilled: Wings for
Humanity became the ultimate aim of all his
life. And here again, on the same slope of the
White Mountain, did it appear to him, as to the
child forty years ago, an Wlbearable grievance
and an inconceivable thing that men were
wingless.
He that knows all things can do all things,"
he reflected.
~ n e has but to know-and there shall be
wings!"
Although I cannot guarantee that either
Tarkovski or his co-scenarist Nikita Mikhalkov-
Konchalovski read The Romance of Leonardo da
Vinci, it seems a likely possibility, especially since
the film calls attention to the Italian Renaissance in
the episode involving Borishka, where Italians arrive
at the sight of the bell ringing. Perhaps this incident
was intended to match up with the end of the
Romance in which visitors from Russia have the word
about Leonardo's paintings, particularly the one of
John the Baptist. As I discuss Leonardo and Rublev
in this essay, I will treat them only as the creations
of Merezhkovski and Tarkovsld and not attempt to
analyze them based on other biographical informa-
tion.
Any scholarly comparison between the works of
Tarkovski and Merezhkovski needs to accolUlt for the
reception of these works and for differences between
the novel and film as types of media. Commentaries
on Andrei Rublev have offered a range of opinions
lZ
about Rublev as an artist. France Farrago in "La
Realite pleniere du spirituel," in the Tarkovski issue
of Etudes Cinematographiques writes:
But access to the light is reserved to those who
are pure of heart, feel, pardon, and pray. It is
forbidden to the man overcome by passion
(Kyrill), too captivated by the visible world and
its lusts. The path of hope is both shown and
remembered here: it is up to man to lay out a
human world. But to make himself human, man
must grow closer to God and remember him.
This illustrates the central belief of
Christianity-to know the intimate and com-
plete union of the divine and the human, with-
out confusion and without division. Evil is the
fruit of the d i v ~ e between man and his
ontological source.
In evaluating this religious interpretation of the
film, we should remember that this is not the theme
played up by Tarkovski in the fifteen-page essay he
wrote in July 1969. For him the main question is why
are certain artists geniuses? What is it that
distinguishes them from others? Tarkovski considers
Rublev a genius, whereas his mentor Theo-phanes the
Greek is not. The latter reflects the world in which
he lives, but Rublev moves hevond that point. He has
a different relationship with the people:
Rublev sees and perceives this universe with
sorrow, and he is torn apart by it. 'But his
reaction is dissimilar to that of Theophanes. He
goes farther. He does not express the crushing
weight of this life and universe. In the man of
his time he looks for the grain of hope, of love,
of faith. And he expresses it through his con-
flict with reality in an indirect and elusive
manner. His genius lies here. For the moral
ideal he seeks he carries in himself. He
expresses the hope of an entire people, their
aspirations, their thirst for union, brotheorhood,
13
and love-of everything they lack and which is
so indispensable to him.ll
Tarkovski's bypassing of the religious elements
of the film is not surprising, since he has gone on
record elsewhere for lacking an antenna for sensing
God. Nevertheless, his association of Rublev with
the moral ideals of the Russian people and his popu-
list orientation may be overemphatic in light of the
problems he had in getting the film shown.
Serena Vitale offers a middle ground between
religious and secular views of the film in her essay,
"IT. Messaggio Religioso-Politico di Rublev:
Rovesciare las prospettiva." She sees the film as a
justification of the Russian iconic tradition which is
in direct contrast with the interest in logic, rational-
ity, and psychology of the Italian Renaissance. Such
a tradition is a popular one, quite unlike the perspec-
tivist tradition developed by the intellectuals in
Italy. For her the messianic vocation of Mother
Russia is included in this world of icons. According
to Vitale:
The Russian icon is the locus of fantasy and
popular faith, the place in which those traits of
latent madness, exaggeration, and horror of all
types of reasoning, which are typical of Russian
thought, perpetuate themselves and are visibly
organized in a consciously fictive and illusory
space. For the Euclidean language of reason
the icon substitutes an and magical
language of religious myth.
Vitale sees Rublev's strength to be in his
rescuing the wonderful iconic tradition from the
sterile orthodoxy into which it had fallen, and she
points out Rublev's desire to vindicate liberty in the
name of man by refusing to paint for the Grand Duke
and choosing not to stress punishment in his depiction
of the Last Judgment. Thus her portrait of Rublev's
greatness clashes with that of Tarkovski, who
14
j
marginalizes Ruhlev's difference from the masses.
She also implies a humanistic, rather than a Christian
or a populist Tarkovski.
A fourth interpretation, that of Achille
Frezzato in his monograph on Tarkovski's films up to
The Mirror, stresses the symbolic landscape Rublev
travels, one in which horses, snow, and water, for
example, are prominent. The film contains the story
of Rublev's individuation. It is "the i t i ~ e r r y of a
man who does not give in to the contingencies of his
time, who prgceeds toward the fulfillment of his own
personality." Frezzato, in considering Christ as a
person in whom various symbols and opposites are
united, su.ggests that Christ is the symbol of the self-
realization toward which the questing Rublev is
drawn.
The juxtaposition of these four analyses indi-
cates that the figure of Rublev is both problematic
and richly conceived. The path he takes may express
the way to (1) redemption, (2) the ideals of the
Russian people, (3) liberation from stifling orthodoxy,
or (4) self-realization. However, despite their
differences all four critics agree that the story is one
of the triumph of the artist. Tarkovski shows
Rublev's return to artistic creation by placing the
shots of the icons after the forging of Borishka's bell.
The chronicle-type structure of the film offers
us a series of eight episodes in Rublev's life from
1400 (when he was 30) to 1423 (when he was 53, seven
years before his death). The passage of years
between various episodes prevents us from feeling a
certain development in his life and art. Instead, we
see him at some climactic moments, more in his
interaction with other people than alone. The
presentation of the icons is not closely integrated
with the events of his life.
In portraying the life of Leonardo,
Merezhkovski also had to keep a certain distance.
For example, only halfway through the novel are we
presented with a flashback which shows Lednardo's
15
life before 1494 (when he was 42). Giovanni, a
student of Leonardo's who is torn apart spiritually by
the various intellectual currents of the day, is often
used as an observer of Leonardo. Like Tarkovski,
Merezhkovski is interested in the relationship of the
artist to his age, and each provides a panoramic
background with many characters to achieve this
goal. Each avoids the temptation to reduce the great
artist to human size by trying too hard to create the
central character from theinside outward.
In The Romance, the phrase which Tarkovski
used concerning Genevra da Benci, 'beyond good and
evil,' is of particular relevance, for the Nietzsche
who coined the phrase influenced the design of the
trilogy on Christ and Antichrist of which The
Romance serves as the second volume. The
N iet zschean conception of the Superman rever-
berates in all three of Merezhkovski's heroes-Julian
the Apostate, Leonardo, and Czar Peter I. As has
often been pointed out, Merezhkovski developed more
affinities with Christianity and became less
enchanted with Nietzsche as his work on the trilogy
progressed. Nevertheless, this starting point in the
Superman ideal of the German philosopher stands in
sharp contrast to Tarkovski's more traditionally
religious man of the people. Whereas we are sup-
posed to understand Rublev's life in moral terms,
specifically in his grief at having to kill one of the
pillagers of the church, Leonardo is never taken to
task by Merezhkovski for creating instruments of
war.
The degree to which Merezhkovski sympathizes
with Leonardo is a question which has bothered
contemporary critics of The Romance. Unlike
Tarkovski's film which has received almost universal
acclaim, The Romance is generally seen as a serious-
ly flawed work-at times because it is not considered
in its own right, apart from the other two novels in
the trilogy and Merezhkovski's theoretical essays (on
Pushkin and others).
16
C. Harold Bedford, in his monograph on
Merezhkovski, shows himself to be one of .The
Romance's most tolerant critics. However, he feels
it was a mistake to have Leonardo "bewail the effect
of his activities and ideas" on his faithful servant
Zoroastro (who died trying to fly) and the emotionally
unbalanced disciple Giovanni Beltraffio, for this type
of muted repentance tak:f away from his status as
one 'beyond good and evil.' To appear as a Superman
would have made him seem entirely pagan. Yet
Leonardo is rejected by both Christians and pagans
because both groups are unaware that he is really the
union of the two conflicting forces. Bedford makes it
clear tha we must distinguish between understanding
Leonardo as (1) a failed characterization due to
Merezhkovski's inability to develop a workable
synthesis of Christianity and paganism, and (Z) a
successful characterization of a person who failed to
achieve a synthesis in his life.
This issue of integration of warring elements is
very much at the forefront of Tarkovski's film, for
Rublev, like Leonardo, is poised between a pagan
world and a mean-spirited version of Christianity. In
Episode 4, Ruhlev comes into contact with pagan
festivities, and in Episode 5, he balks at the
grotesque traditional depictions of the Last
Judgment. Similarly, Leonardo's world is bounded on
the one side by Merulla, the trendy aesthete swayed
by all things pagan; and the fire-breathing
Savanarola, with his prophecies of damnation on the
Florentine populace.
. Other scholars have reacted to the figure of
Leonardo in a way quite different from Bedford. Ute
Spengler, in a book on Merezhkovski as a literary
criti<:, points out that Leonardo is divorced from
suffering:
He shows no pain because of the unexpected
separation or due to the notice of her sudden
death. Suffering, that is, signs of the tragic,
cannot appear during the prevailing condition of
17
harmonious principles.
personal man if est'htion
Leonardo's freedom.
Suffering would be a
and would curtail
Spengler's evaluation is just, on the whole,
although it leaves out the grief that Leonardo feels
when he realizes that Francois I may be able to take
Manna Lisa from him. Nevertheless, in general,
Leonardo's artistic progress has nothing to do with
the pain that Rublev experiences in such episodes as
the attack on the church. Rublev kills a man and
chooses a life of silence and artistic inactivity which
lasts for about fifteen years, until his friendship with
Borishka brings him back to life as a human being and
as a painter.
Ruhlev learns to love mankind again through
Borishka. In contrast, as Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal,
in her book on Merezhkovski, points out, Leonardo is
a person incapable of love despite the fact that he is
a synthesis of masculine and feminine elements,
daring and humility, sensuality ~ intellect, and love
of beauty and spiritual yearning. Love, however, is
a category which slips beyond these pairs of oppo-
sites. Leonardo's detachment essentially precludes a
life of loving.
In his dissertation, M erezhkovski, Christ, and
Antichrist, Orest Holovaty makes a point generally
overlooked by the other critics, that M erezhkovski
takes an elitist viewpoint devoid of sympathy for the
c ommon people, 'Qho often appear to be a non-partic-
ularlized rabble.
1
Leonardo bewails the fact that
all that was holy and great in his life was
becoming the property of the rabble, the coun-
tenance of the Lord in the Last Supper was
be ing transmitted to. posterity in copies that
accommodated it with ecclesiastical vulgarity; .
. the smile of Gioconda was being shamelessly
laid bare, bec oming lewd, or else, being trans-
formed amidst reveries of Platonic love, she
was becoming good-natured and foolish.
(Guerney, p. 569)
18
J
Holovaty mentions various characters who
incarnate the desire to please the masses: Galeotto,
the alchemist; Bellincoini, the poetaster; and
Savanarola, the demagogue. The common people in
Rublev's Russia are treated with much more
sympathy. Although the Russians suffer destruction
and invasion from foreigners (Tartars) as do the
Italians (French troops), Tarkovski emphasizes the
sufferings of the people by showing the brutal
massacre in the church and by including a fantasy
scene of a Crucifixion in a snowy Russian landscape.
The common people in the prologue also benefit from
a kind of justification. Here the desire to fly is
presented as a popular impulse, not the formulation
of an artist/scientist.
Holovaty, who is basically unsympathetic to
Merezhkovski, feels that the author's attempt to
bring the various polarities of human life into a
harmony would have more validity if Leonardo were
more typical of mankind in general. Since Leonardo
is a genius in a class by himself, he cannot serve as
much of an example for mankind.
Tarkovski's approach to Rublev's genius avoids
Merezhkovski's problem in an interesting formalistic
way. Although we see Rublev in action as a painter
while he is working on the Last Judgment frescoes,
we do not have a sense of what his art is really like
until the epilogue, when the artwork suddenly appears
in all its glory. We never consider the artist in the
process of gestating his masterworks, such as the
Trinity. Consequently, the suffering and moral
growth of Rublev have more of a universal quality of
human suffering about them than do those of
Leonardo, whom we watch at work on the Last
Supper, Manna Lisa, and St. John the Bapti'S't:"
Merezhkovski must be given due credit for accepting
the challenge of dealing with Leonardo as a creator.
He must partially account or certain artistic choices
Leonardo makes. Merezhkovski shows interest in
form and style as categories of importance to the
discussion of artistic creation. Leonardo solves some
19
problems of technique and content. In contrast,
Tarkovski both in his film and his essay on Rublev,
pays no attention to the element of formalism in
artistic creation.
Rublev's concept of God leads him to make the
choice not to paint a horrific Last Judgment. We do
not see him trying to adopt an artistic tradition to
suit his own needs. Leonardo things of God as well,
but as Holovaty indicates, He is the Prime Mover, a
concept we tend to associate more with 18th-century
deism than with 15th-century Catholocism. Holovaty
shows that Merezhkovski has Leonardo conceive of
God and Christ in such a wav that the painter shares
certain qualities with them. He cites a passage in
which Leonardo's students, Cesare, brings this
comparison to the forefront by telling his master's
idea of the Saviour:
HP. is equally akin and alien to all-to John
reclining on His breast, to Judas betraying
Him,-because for him there is no longer any
good and evil. life and death, or love and
hatred, there is only the will of the F' ather--
eternal necessity, his Christ is the Prime
Mover, who being the origin and focus of all
motion, is himself immovable; his Christ is
eternal necessity, which has come to know
itself and to love itself in man, as divine
justice, as the will of the Father. (Guerney, p.
325)
In Tarkovski's film Christ is understood as the
Crucified One, not as the Prime Mover. N everthe-
less, the principle of analogy between Rublev and
Christ is at work, for: Rublev's suffering is a part of
his disappointment that the kingdom of God is not on
earth. In The Romance Leonardo suffers since his
e xtraordinary genius makes him completely incom-
prehensible to other men. Rublev is not so alien to
the men of his time, although he does have an alter-
cation with Theophanes in which he defends the
20
essential goodness of man against the sterner vision
of the Byzantine.
Rublev and Leonardo both have to account for
paganism as well as Christianity in their world
views. In Leonardo's Italy paganism is made up of
two dissimilar elements: {1) the worship of classical
Greek ideals and objects, and (2.) the folk traditions
which have turned into witchcraft and demonism.
Leonardo tries to assimilate the former type of
paganism and rejects the latter kind, which destroys
his pupil Giovanni. In essence, the kind of paganism
which can be integrated into his life is an educated
and elitist one.
The paganism which Rublev encounters in the
forest festival is different from these other two
varieties. It is neither intellectual nor perverted, but
a valid substratum of society which coexists with the
world of Holy Mother Russia. The l)agan rite cele-
brates the cycle of the seasons. Although the nature
worshippers tie up Rublev in a hut, they eventually
let him go free without injuring him. They do not
appear to want to do him deliberate harm, but rather
make sure that no one interrupts the ritual. The joy
that they have in life must be integrated into the
gloomy side of the Russian Orthodox consciousness.
This theme is not treated in the film in the form of a
debate, and it should be noted in passing that the
screenplay of the film, published in Isskustvo Kino in
1964, before modifications, indicates a work which
was originally intended to be filled with more conver-
sations about important issues, and it would have
evidenced more continuity between scenes. For
example, in the forest rite episode, there is more
dialogue which indicates the opposition of the
authorities to Y arilo, the god of the sun, love, and
fecundity.
The pagans are life worshippers, and the last
image of the film is that of horses in the rain, which
Tarkovski says are symbols of life and of Russian life,
in particular. The end of the film thul\ finds
2.1
fulfillment in Russia itself, land of icons and horses.
In The Romance Leonardo's death brings nothing of
completeness with it, and Eutychus, a Russian clerk,
identifies the painting of St. John the Baptist with
Russia, where Christianity will finally be brought to
its highest state. He dreams:
The scroll which the Precursor held in his
hand unrolled, and Eutychus read: "Behold, I
shall send My Angel, and he shall prepare the
way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek,
shall suddenly come to his temple, even the
Angel of the covenant, whom ye delight in:
behold, he shall come."
The voices of the thunders, the beating of
the angels' wings, the conquering chant of the
Alleluia, blended into a single paean of praise
for St. Sophia of the Wisdom of God.
And all the fallow-fields, the groves,
rivers, mountains, and infinite vistas of the
Land of Russia, echoed back in answer.
Eutychus awoke. (Guerney, p. 634)
Leonardo heralds the way to a future age,
whereas Rublev sanctifies the present time with his
art and sufferings. Unlike Leonardo, he has his roots
in the people, even though he can scarcely be
considered a mere mouthpiece for their beliefs. He
travels a path which culminates in the art of his later
years, symbolized by the film's positioning of all the
icons, from whatever period, at the end of the story.
Leonardo, on the other hand, is a genius when we
first meet him. He does not become a greater artist
as he ages.
Obviously, the portrayal of an icon painter
posed difficulty for Tarkovski in the wake of thirty
years of socialist realism. Yet he ul timatelv suc-
ceeded with his film despite its important emphasis
on the religious dimension of life, because Rublev is a
man of the people and not an intellectual artist con-
cerned with the formal problems of creative work.
22
Merezhkovski's novel is both more ambitious and
more flawed, for it treats Leonardo as an intel-
lectual, and so must deal with complicated ideas.
Examined in relationship to each other, a novel from
the Silver Age and a film from the Thaw give us new
insight into that often e n d n ~ e r e d species, the
Russian artist.
NOTES
1. Andrei Tarkovski, "De la figuration cinema-
tographique," Positif, No. Z49 (Dec. 1981), pp. Z9-38.
2.. Dmitri Merezhkovski, The Romance of
Leonardo da Vinci, tr. Bernard Guilbert Guernev
(New York: Modern Library, 1928), p. 414.
3. France Ferrago, "La Realite pleniere du
spirituel: Andrei Roublev," Etudes Cinema-
tographiques, Nos. 135-38 0983), pp. 2.5-50.
4. "Andre Tarkovski parle de son film," in Luda
and Jean Schnitzer, eds. Andre Roublev (Paris: Les
Editeurs Reunis, 1970), pp. 14-2.9.
5. Serena Vitale, "II Messaggio Religioso-
Politico di Rublev: Rovesciare la prospettiva," II
Dramma, N.S. No. 1 0910), pp. 47-50. -
6. Achille Frezzato, Andrei Tarkovskij
(Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978), p. 4Z.
7. C. Harold B'!dford, The Seeker: D.S.
Merezhkovski (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press,
1975), p. 77.
8. Ute Spengler, D.S. Merezhkovskiij als
Literaturkritiker: Versuch einer religiosen
Begrundung der Kunst (Lucerne: Bucher, 197Z), p. 86.
9. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Dmitri
Sergeevich Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age: The
Development of a Revolutionary Mentalitv (The
Hague, Nijhoff, 1975), p. 101.
23
10. Orest Holovaty, "Merezhkovsky, Christ, and
Antichrist," (Diss., Vanderbilt Univ., 1978; DAI 38:
487a; Order No. 7730362).
Peter G. Christensen, SUNY - Bingham ton
Yugoslav Theatre: The Sum of ita Parts
Godisnjak jugoslovenskih 1983/84 (The
Annual of the Yugoslav Theaters, 1983/84), _ Novi
Sad: Sterijino Posorje, 1985, pp. 305, price: YuDin.
1.500.
Even Yugoslav theatre professionals have
troubles keeping track of the intensive theater life of
their country, a federal state of several nations,
languages and autonomous cultural centers. While
political and cui tural decentralization allows for
diversity and self-expression each ethnic group,
there is the side-effect of parochialism and self-
isolation that mars the artistic and intellectual life
of the country. One of the rare integrative forces of
Yugoslav theater is Sterijino Posorje, an institution
that combines the national drama festival with ex-
hibits, conferences, publishing and research activi-
ties. Sterijino Posorje promotes Yugoslav theater
abroad and hosts the national m Center. It is
located in Novi Sad, a city of noted cultural and
theater tradition, 45 miles north of
The Documentary Center of Sterijino Pozorje
develops files on the contemporary Yugoslav theater
and drama and publishes several booklets each vear,
mostly about the productions selected for the
national drama festival and about their critical
reception. An Annual, composed by the small staff
of the Center, attempts to summarize the theater
life in the country. The sixth volume in this series,
covering the 1983/84 season, marks a significant
improvement, in terms of scope, organization of data
and graphic presentation. This books offers not onlv
a detailed insight in this particular season, but also
Z4
presents the structure of the Yugoslav theater, its
institutions and organizations, its main activities and
characteristic features. Under the general editorship
of Sredoje Lalic, Center's head, 140 collaborators
helped gather an impressive amount of data, that was
for the first time processed with the aid of a
computer.
In the first part of the book, the productions of
all Yugoslav repertory theaters, independent groups
and other producing organizations, almost 100 of
them, are given with full credits of authors and the
cast, photographs and data about tours, number of
performances and audience attendance. Productions
from the previous seasons, still on the repertory, are
often included as well. This extensive profile
encompasses drama, opera and dance ensembles,
theaters for children and puppet theaters. One sta-
tistic tablet breaks down productions, performances
and number of viewers for each theater; another lists
the same for each playwright and author of opera,
ballet or musical. From these lists one can discern
that while classic comediographers, such as 'Rranislav
Nusic (1864-1938) still dominate the repertory, with
21 productions in the season and a total of 110.000
viewers, there are a few contemporary authors whose
plays enjoy a popular success unimaginable only a few
years ago. Among these Neil Simons and Stoppards
of ~ l c a n s is the 36-year-old Dusan Kovacevic, whose
sarcastic "Balcan Spy" alone was produced in 15
theaters while his earlier four plavs have been done
in another ten theaters, and shown to 220.000 people.
He is surpassed in number of works by Fadil Hadzic,
whose 12 mildly satiric comedies had 28 different
productions for 177.000 spectators. In a countrv of
23 million peopl e, with high illiteracy rate and mas-
sive rural population, these are trulv astonishing fig-
ures. Among the foreigners, Shakespeare (13 pro-
ductions) comes ahead of Feydeaux (1 Z) and Hans
Christian Andersen (8), while Mrozek (9) comes out
first among the contemporaries. More conservative
bent of the musical stage is witnessed by, several
25
productions of "Gisele" and "Swan Lake", of Verdi
(Z9) and Puccini (14) operas. The total Yugoslav
dramatic repertory had 985 works in 1983/84 season,
with almost 16.000 performances and 4,Z million
spectators.
In the second part of the hook, all 3Z festivals
held annually in this country of the size of Wyoming,
are listed, with their complete programs: produc-
tions, exhibits, accompanying panels, awards etc.
Besides internationally known gatherings, such as
Bitef and Dubrovnik Summer Festival, there is a
complete picture of many regional and specialized
manifestations. Furthermore, eleven university
schools of theater and music are listed with their
programs, number of students registered, lists of new
graduates while their productions are presented as
thoroughly as those of the professional ensembles in
the first part of the book. Finally, the activity of
theater museums, institutes and documentary centers
in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Novi Sad and Sarajevo
(publications, exhibits, research projects and con-
ferences) is described. There are three indexes for
unf atiguable reader: of nain es, titles, and of partici-
pants in productions. The last one must have over
4000 names.
There are some omissions even in a work of
such an overwhelming scope and sense of detail -
mainly of some independent groups that never
bothered to send their dat& The book is ominouslv
silent about the money matters. It remains unclear
what is the impact of the running inflation rate on
Yugoslav theaters, what is the ratio of subsidies and
earned inc ome in theaters, the range of ticket prices,
the average salaries in permanent ensembles. While
the spec tators were . counted for each production,
nothing is stated about their social, economic and
educational background nor is it clear what per-
c entage of the available seats they have filled.
One is sorry that the book has not been made
more usahle for a foreign reade r - with at least the
Z6
names of the rubrics given in English, for instance,
and the explanation of acronyms and symbols trans-
lated. Yet, this annual is essential for a foreign
researcher, interested in Yugoslav theater, and in
fact accessible with some goodwill, even if he or she
has to decipher some rubrics with the help of a
pocket dictionary. For a careful reader, the hook
summarizes the contradictions of this theater
moment in Yugoslavia: a growing and immensely
popular theater, in worsening economic condition,
spoiled between privileged repertory ensembles with
secure subsidies and poorer independent groups; the
popularity of political themes, often threated with
boulevard superficiality, and thus the dominance of
domestic authors over classics and foreign play-
wrights. But that is the story behind the book. The
book itself, in hard cover and with hundreds of photo-
graphs, can be obtained directly from the publisher,
for an equivalent of 5 US $: Sterijino Posorje, Zmaj
Jovina 22, 21000 Novi Sad, Yugoslavia.
Dragan Klaic, University of Arts, Belgrade
A Miscellany of Motion Pictures
One of the most entertaining Soviet films
produced recently was Wartime Romance (Voenno-
polevoi rom an, 1984), under the direction of Piotr
Todorovskii. It was approved for production under
the somewhat aimless regime of Chernenko and
therefore should not be mistaken for a sign of
benevolence during the Gorbachev period. One of the
most attractive facets of the film is the total
absence of any propagandistic or political intent.
The story opens in 1944, at the front lines,
where a young private develops a crush for an army
nurse, a master sergeant, who is also the mistress of
the commanding officer, a major. It is interesting to
note that the two seem to have had nightly trysts in
the officer's dug-out in a trench, accompanied with
singing and other assorted noises-a rather upheroic
27
statement on the war which, except for a few shell
bursts, doesn't even seem to be happening. The major
and the nurse even enjoy racing their horses and
flaunting her charms before the envious enlisted
men. There is not a German to be seen, nor are there
any references to them. The private is a rather
subdued, even mousy character, excellently portrayed
by Nikolai Burlaev. The nurse whose name is appro-
priately Liubov or Liuba (Love), is the prototypical
imaginary blonde, blue-eyed, well-endowed .beauty
whom no Russian man could resist, masterfully
played by Nat alia Andreichenko.
It is now about seven years later, somewhere
near the end of the Stalin period, although this is not
mentioned, and the man is now happily married to a
rather physically unattractive, but extremely
vivacious and intelligent young woman superbly por-
trayed by Inna Churikova. He is a movie projection-
ist; she is attending the pedagogical institute in order
to become a history teacher. One day, as he passes
the Maly theatre in Moscow, he spies a woman selling
piroshki and recognizes her as Liuba. She is no longer
as young and attractive as she used to be, and is
clothed in an assortment of rags to ward off the
winter cold. She and another huckster selling ice
cream make off-color rem arks to each other and she
breaks out in raucous laughter-extremely unfeminine
and unattractive. Yet, he is compulsively drawn to
her and eventually gets together with her, although
he does not divulge to her that he knows her from
before.
Eventually she invites him to her hovel where
she temporarily lives with her little girl, the daughter
of the major who had been killed before he had a
chance to marry her. They commence a relationship.
He teaches Liuba a few amenities and even induces
her to make herself pretty again. She will be forced
to move out of her temporary quarters (which she
rents from an itinerant fiddle player who also loves
her). Her newly-found benefactor makes her up and
dresses her, then drags her to the local housing office
28
where she charms the governmental district deputy
chief.
By then the entire relationship becomes clear to
the wife who becomes acquainted with, and even gets
to like, Liuba although her heart is breaking. The
man continues to work on improving Liuba's outward
image. Eventually this results in her becoming better
acquainted with the government deputy who eventu-
ally proposes marriage and is accepted. Not until the
scene when her infatuated lover finally parts from
her, does he disclose that he has loved her since the
time they met on the front lines. He returns to his
wife who forgives him. One has the feeling that all
the protagonists will do just fine in the future.
This film has all the ingredients which make any
film successful in the USSR as well as in other
countries. It contains a few tears, nostalgia and
melancholy, and a good amount of gentle humor. It is
therefore not surprising that is was an Academy
Award Nominee for best foreign film for 1984.
A totally different Soviet film which, albeit a
bit older, has recently been making the rounds in
American movie theaters, is A Slave of Love (Raha
liubvi, 1979), which was directed by Nikita
Mikhalkov. The main roles are filled by some of the
best-known and liked Soviet stars, Elena Solovei,
Rodion N akhapetov anc Aleksandr 'Kaliagin, who do
their best to maintain a rather weak plot.
The year is 1918, the beginning of the Eolshevik
revolution. A small film crew is somewhere in the
southern part of the USSR, cranking out a black and
white, silent film of rather low quality entitled A
Slave of Love which stars a rather shallow actress
who is the heartthrob of all Russian male moviegoers.
The crew is away from action, as if they were in
another world. The only thing which reminds them
that all is not well, is when they run out of film.
Although everyone longs for Moscow, none of them
I
2.9
crave any political involvement except for the
leading lady's cameraman who is a Bolshevik. He has
been secretly filming atrocities committed by the
Whites Wtder the command of a sadistic captain.
This is excellent propaganda which must be relayed
to Lenin in Moscow of Petrograd. The leading lady,
partly as a result of falling in love with the
Bolshevik, has her eyes opened to the importance of
political commitement and helps her lover to hide the
film and to avoid capture.
The cameraman is eventually killed by the
captain. The actress is able to abscond with the film
during a highly implausible chase scene where she is
in a rWtaway streetcar being pursued by horsemen,
after which she joins a band of Bolsheviks and leaves
for Moscow.
The film seems to insist that no one can divorce
himself or hide from political events but must involve
himself in the currents of the times-a message
diametrically opposed to that of Dr. Zhivago.
Certainly one of the finest and most important
films ever made in the Soviet Union was Stalker
which was directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and com-
pleted in 1980. Although it has several minor roles,
the film is really a vehicle for three superb actors-
Aleksandr Kaidanovskii, Nikolai Grinko and Anatolii
Solonitsyn. Since its completion it has never been
released for general consumption in the Soviet Union,
a course of events which is not likely to change. It is
the primary catalyst for the complete downfall and
eventual defec tion of Tarkovsky. This is truly an
astoWtding film in all its elements-lighting, sound,
color, camera angle, script, set, costume, etc. There
is not one element which is not innovative, fresh an.d
shocking.
The genre is supposed to be science ficti on.
Somewhere in the future, or in a purely imaginary
world, a me t eorite has struck earth. The area of
30
impact immediately displayed strange, magical
powers and was named the "Zone." It is surrounded
with barbed wire and its circumference is heavily
patrolled by government police who shoot to kill
anyone attempting to enter it. Ostensibly this is to
protect the citizens from being destroyed by the
Zone's many defenses. At the center of the Zone
there is, purportedly, a special room. Those
resourceful enough to gain entrance to it will be
granted their innermost desires. Only a few have the
ability to navigate the Zone. They are called the
Stalkers.
The film opens in the miserably poor apartment
of such a Stalker, his wife and child. The wife
desperately wants to keep her husband from contin-
uing his crossings into the Zone, but something ciraws
him back to it, although he has been imprisonerl
several times for this transgression. His little
daughter is a mutant, hinting at a recent nuclear
holocaust. She cannot walk or speak. By this time
we realize that no one has a name. The three
characters who have been introduced are Stalker,
Wife and Monkey.
In the next segment of the film, Stalker meets
the two men who have hired him to conduct them
into the Zone. One is a fashionable novelist who is
named "Writer," the other a scientist named
"Professor." Approximately twenty minutes of the
film. follows them through the maze of destroyed
buildings, dirty puddles of water, patrol lines and
other hazards. They are finally able to breach the
line and enter the Zone. Up until this time,
everything was in stark black and white and in a
dusky light which barely enabled one to distingush
what was shown on the screen. As soon as the Zone
was ente red, there was considerably more light,
though not bright, and some color-primarily green-
to offset the vegetation.
The Zone, too, is an unkempt area filled with
the debris of civilization including its war maGhines,
31
religious paraphernalia, buildings, scientific
equipment and a variety of consumer articles. Even
in the Zone, however, everything bad been destroyed
or was in decay and "the grass no longer smelled."
They proceed towards the building containing "the
room." Stalker warns them, that although the
building is only a few feet away, it cannot be
approached directly since there are all sorts of
hazards and traps and mystical entities to thwart
those who dare to enter. For the rest of this segment
the trio struggles through untold climbs and water
barriers through a series of surrealistic and
expressionistic scapes including tunnels, sand dunes,
water falls and conduits.
During this "road to Calvary" the personality of
all three is beautifully exposed, as is the reason for
them to have ventured into the Zone. The writer
needs inspiration. He had thought that he could
change the world surrounding him, but found that the
pressures exerted upon him by his world have c h n ~ e d
him and his art. The scientist used to have a
conscience but seems to have lost it. He is the most
silently truculent of the three and the most difficult
to fathom. Stalker has been at the threshold of "the
room" many times but has not had the courage to
enter it. A former Stalker and friend who had taken
the step had become rich but had ended taking his
own life.
The three finally arrive at the portal of "the
room." The scientist then reveals that he had come
to demolish the site with a twenty-megaton atomic
device. His reasoning is not quite clear. His stated
motive is that a place which gives irrational hope is
misleading and has to be eliminated. Another reason
is that he is, with his action, destroying a fellow
scientist who was having an affair with his wife. The
writer finds that his real reason for coming has been
to shed cowardice. In fact, he turns out to he the
most courageous of the group. Stalker comes into
the Zone since it makes him feel like a worthwhle
human being. He has absolutely nothing on the
3Z
outside--no respect, no constructive work, only one
child who is worthless to him and humanity. This is
his only way for him to shine, to feel that people
looked up to him, needed him and admired him. In
the end, none of the three enter "the room." The
scientist dismantles his atomic device and throws it
in a puddle of murky water where it is soon nibbled at
by a fish and surrounded with black goo. It is
important to point out here that, although this is
supposed to be a film of fantasy, not a single truly
fantastic or unrealistic thing happens to the trio in
the Zone. The fantasy exists only in their minds.
The only unusual thing that occurs is that they find a
telephone which is connected, and electricity which
is still being conducted, in one of the huildings in the
Zone.
In the last segment of the film, Stalker has
returned to his family. Reminiscent of one of
Tarkovsky's other films, The Mirror, the black and
white film has been tinted in beige and brown colors.
He is reunited with his daughter. The viewer is then
surprised to see her, from the waist up, rhythmically
walking a rather long stretch. The film then shows
that she is, in reality, sitting on the shoulders of her
father and undulating up and down as he is walking.
Maybe that is the way in which those who cannot
walk actually can walk-on the shoulders of others.
The final scene is most effective. The little girl is
sitting at a table and moving various objects on it
with her mind. The film fades to the magnificent
strains of the "Ode to Joy" of Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, on a highly optimistic note. The world is
changing to the better. The mind can move moun-
tains. Our future lies in the mutants whom we create
out of our own folly.
This film, in many respects a "Bildungsroman,"
asks many questions and permits us to reply with our
own answers. It doesn't solve any problems, it simply
presents them in a most effective way. Of course,
the major input to the script was Tarkovskv's own
philosophy. As all his other films, it was a highly
33
personal statement. I even includes long, lyrical
passages when beautiful poetry written by
Tarkovsky's father is recited. Just as fascinating is
the camera technique. One cannot help but rem em-
ber Eisenstein's fixed camera. Many scenes are shot
in this manner. Tarkovsky is also able to center on a
minor, seemingly meaningless detail and make it a
thing of high significance. His technique is truly a
depiction of terrible beauty and sublime ugliness. His
films, particularly this one, should not be missed. It
is amazing that it has not attracted more interest in
the West.
Finally, it is impossible to abstain from saving a
few words about the NBC series on Peter the Great.
It is an old Hollywood tradition to believe that anv
film which promises a cast of a dozen leading actors
of international reputation, a hudget of many millions
(in this case 2.6. 5), and an historical pageant of grand
scale, will invariably be of low quality. This
production certainly supports this contention most
strongly. It would be difficult to find a film which is
more flawed than this one. The minor flaws were in
the acting, which was atrocious, and the setting
which was monotonous. With all the scenery to
choose from, this production was nearly exclusively
filmed in one monastery in Suzdal. There were
virtually no shots of the Kremlin and, most impor-
tantly, there was not a single frame depicting Peter's
sublime achievement-St. Petersburg. 8ut these are
still minor compared with the greater crimes-those
of false history and anachronisms. These are too
many to enumerate. Just to give a few examples:
Menshikov appeared as an adult who saved the child
Peter from being murdered; in realitv Peter was
older than Menshikov and met him in a totally
different way many years later. Peter supposedly
met Katherine during the battle of Azov; in realitv
she was only a small child then, and they met some
seven years later. Aleksei allegedly was a traitor
before the battle of Poltava; in reality he was onlv 12.
34
years old at the time and had nothing to do with it.
Peter's closest and oldest friend, Lefort, wasn't even
mentioned in the film and Gordon's role was greatlv
exaggerated. Charles XTI 'was done away with nine
years before his demise. Aleksei was certainly not
kidnapped in Vienna and forced, at gWtpoint to come
to Russia. Peter's marriage to Avdokia took place
when he was 17 years old. His role one year after the
wedding, when he was 18, was taken over by
Maximillian Schell-terrible casting. In addition,
because of Schell's illness, many scenes were shot
with a stand-in which was highly disconcerting. The
last, most significant 15 years of Peter's life were
not even mentioned and the film ends with the
coronation of Catherine I. There are an infinite
number of other errors in the film. There seemed to
be a lack of cohesion which was partly due to the
change of directors in mid-stream (Schiller and
Chomsky). The film was made using the facilities
and some of the personnel of the Gorky Studios in
Moscow, the studio which is particularly well
equipped for major historical and documentary
films. It is unfortunate that they did not avail
themselves of its many opportunities. One wonders
where all the money went-certainly the stars were
not happy despite their high salaries. Upon return to
the United States both Schell and Omar Shariff made
it clear that they hated every minute they spent
working on the film and living in the USSR. In
general, this film is very em bari"assing to us as
Americans. Very recently a Soviet acquaintance of
mine who is involved with the performing arts
cautioned me, after having viewed the Nl3C series,
never again to accuse the Soviets of r w r i t i n ~
history. At least the Soviets, when they do it, have
an objective in mind. The Americans, according to
him, do it out of ignorance and bad taste.
An excellent contrast to the NBC product is the
Soviet produc tion of Young Peter the Great which
was created by the s ame Gorky Studio a few years
earlier (1981). This was the first part of a series on
35
Peter the Great which was directed by the veteran of
many historical epics, Sergei Gerasimov, who died in
1984. The script was patterned after Alexei Tolstoi's
fictionalized biography of Peter. It, too, had a
superb cast including Dmitry Zolotukhin, Tamara
Makarova, Natalia Bondarchuk, Nikolai Eremenko,
Mikhail Nozhkin, Liubov Germanova and others.
There were also a num her of very well-known actors
and actresses from the German Democratic Republic
such as Ulrike Kinze, and Peter Reusse since DEF A,
the GDR film studios, cooperated in the making of
this film. In general, the film, a twcrseries spectacle
lasting about 135 minutes, was superb. It was
historically accurate and well followed Tolstoi's book
as adapted to the screen by Gerasimov and Y.
Kavtaradze. The actors resembled the figures they
portrayed to an amazing degree, contrary to its NBC
counterpart. Many different sets were used, as were
numerous outside locations. The acting was superb,
as was the photography. It was a delight to the
senses. Incidentally, the film is available for rent
through Corinth Films, 410 E. 62nd St., New York,
NY 10021. The private screening which I attended
at the American Film Institute at the Kennedy
Center in March, 1986, was arranged for a small
group of educators by Prof. Beverly Bloise and was
sponsored by the SCSS/AAASS Outreach Project for
Pre-College Russian History and the Virginia
Community College Institute for Instructional
Excellence.
A final postscript of a most recent nature,
which is principally, although not fully, concerned
with the cinema, must be added to this article. In
March 1986, a committee was formed to honor
Vladimir Vysotskii, the balladeer, poet and actor (his
outstanding portrayal of Hamlet in Liubimov's
production of the Shakespearean play at the Taganka
Theatre will long be remembered). When Vysotskii
died of heart trouble brought on by alcoholism in
1980 at the age of 42, there was only a short obituary
36
notice in a Moscow theatre although tens of
thousands of worshippers crowded the area around
the Taganka where his wake took place. After that,
the authorities tried to see to it that he would soon
be forgotten. Of course, this was unsuccessful. In
1982, against their better judgement, the principal
record company, "Melodia," started to issue
recordings of his songs which sold out extremely
rapidly. A cui t of Vysotskii has continued, even
accelerated to this day. For example, his grave is a
well-known gathering place for dissidents and
struggling artists. In fact, in November, 1985 a
monument was erected over it depicting a poet in
chains.
The Committee which was formed is headed by
the poet Rozhdestvenskii and includes the poet Bella
Akhmadulina, other important artists and Vysotskii's
father, Semyon. The purpose of the committee is to
prepare the way for the induction of the poet into the
ranks of officially recognized Soviet artistS since,
now that he is dead, he may be officially interpreted
as desired.
A new film featuring some of Vysotskii's songs
and depicting dissident Soviet musician Andrei
Makerevich's fight for acceptance has opened to
packed houses, adding fuel to the heated debate as to
the future of artistic freedom to be expected of the
Gorbachev regime, particularly as it affects the
performing arts. The film, Begin :1t the Beginning,
was released in Moscow on March 17, 1986, after
being heavily ce.nsored. Its subject is Vvsotskii's fate
and the question whether his successors, other satiric
folk singers are poets, will also have to perform in
secret and distribute their songs on home-made
cassettes as before. For example, Makarevich, the
protagonist and star of the new film, is also a folk
singer and "bard" in the Vysotskii mold. Until 1983,
he was frequently criticized and even attacked in the
Soviet press as provocative. His top r ock group,
"Time Machine," is still precluded from performing in
Moscow.
37
In the movie, officials and critics accuse the
singer (Makarevich) of leading Soviet youth into
"hooliganism" and implore him to follow the example
of his cooperative, conformist fell ow artists who
have earned official acceptance and permission to
perform their outdated, tired material publicly. The
singer rejects this path, allies himself with under-
ground poets, and even defends the memory of
Vysotskii in a fistfight . He sticks to his songs with
their folk-like guitar music and with lyrics which
express a mixture of sad experiences, close friend-
ships, personal hopes, and satire. According to the
director, Aleksandr Stefanovich, "This film is about a
talented man and how he must be surr.ounded bv a
moral environment to help him live."
Although it is true that this film most probably
would not have been released during the pre-
Gorbachev era, it is too early to conclude that it
signals a new "Thaw" or even a significant loosening
of the restrictions. It may simply be a case where
the arts are not considered important enough for
great restrictive measures, now that economic poli-
cies and changes are of top priority. Only time will
tell. (Part of the information concerning the
Vysotskii film was gathered from various newspaper
reports including those of theW ashington Post.)
Leo Hecht, George Mason University
Grigory Gorin
(The following article was originally published in a
brochure distributed by VAAP-Inform. It is reprinted
here with their permission and without comment).
Gorin's first plays were comedies, naturally, and
among them were "A 'Big Wedding" and "Banquet".
Simple in their composition, but with a quick and
sharp response to the latest developments, they mock
at greed, the petty bourgeois traits, vulgarity,
narrow-mindedness, dishonesty.
38
Even after he became fa.tnous as a writer, Gorin
continued working as an emergency doctor together,
incidentally with another popular humorist, the co-
author of his early plays and short stories Arkady
Arkanov, also a doctor by education. There was no
bravado about it neither there was any desire to
impress the public. Riding about Moscow round the
clock the writers had an opportunity to accumulate
experience and pick up material for their new plays
and sketches.
It was instant recognition of characters and
situations that aroused interest of directors and
actors and later of spectators in the young play-
wrights. The authors know how to build up intricate
plots, creating hilariously funny situations with a
sudden denouement, and to write smart dialogues
which make people roar with laughter.
Now G rigory Gorin writes on his own and so
does Arkady Arkanov. He is still faithful to the muse
of comedy and is very fruitful in this genre remaining
one of the most popular Soviet playwrights.
Gorin stands for the dramaturgy of great social
significance, for raising important moral and ethical
problems, for daring, pointed, irreconcilable satire.
He is against light, entertaining situational comedies.
Gorin's choice of themes and plots is wide which
distinguishes him favourably from many other play-
wrights. However, he prefers contemporary subjects:
"Little Comedies of a Big House" (the last one
written together with Arkady Arkanov) and "The
Phenomena" are two of his recent plays.
"Little Comedies of a Big House" consists of
five independent miniatures-several episodes from
the lives of tenants in an apartment house. Such
structure makes it possible to look at several
questions at once. One of the most important of
them is the generation gap problem-the relationship
between parents and their children.
39
"The Phenomena" is a lVl'ical comedy. Though
the plot of the play is expressive, it is not an end in
itself. To analyse superficially simple, but essent-
ially controversial human characters and relation-
ships is the main task for the author. Writing with
ease, wit and brilliance, Gorin stresses the idea that
no scientific discovery is more phenomenal and
unique than a human being in its best manifestations.
The most phenomenal things in the world are human
kindness, love, friendship, unselfishness. At the same
time, "The Phenomena" is free from sentimentality
and didacticism. The comedy is entertaining and
abounds in vivid and natural scenes, ironic and easy
flowing dialogues.
Lately Gorin has turned to historical themes as
well. He creates a parabolic play in the manner of
Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich Durrenmatt where the
past is indissolubly connected with the present and
where it gives useful lessons to contemporary man.
The action in " . To Forget Herostratus" takes
place in ancient Greece of the 4th century B.C. The
plot is based on a notorious story of the adventurer
Herostratus who burned to ashes one of the seventh
wonders of the world-the beautiful temple of
Artemis. The posterity remembered his name. It
bec ame the symbol of destruction, senseless and
inhuman claims for exclusiveness. Gorin raises the
problem of the role of personality in history as well
as questions the right of a "superman" to have power
over other people. The play clearly condemns
fascism, past and present, and today's extremism.
One of the beautiful ancient legends, the legend
of Till Eulenspiegel, is reinterpreted by Gorin from
the modern point of view. Without changing much in
the plot the playwright selects several themes that
are more important in his opinion and accentuates
the most relevant of them. Among the the mes
stressed are the following: freedom as the main
condition of a personality's development, tyranny as
the most terrible crime against humanity, treason
40
and cowardice as the meanest and the most unworthy
of man's vices.
Gorin's latest plays are more poetic and, at the
same time, raise more socially significant problems
and achieve more important generalizations. Lyrical
motives are fused with irony freely and organicallv.
Such is the play "A Comical Fantasy of the Life,
Love and Death of a Famous Baron Karl Friedrich
Hyeronimus von Miinchhausen". In this play Gorin
recreated a famous literary character whose name
has long become synonymous to extravagant fantasy
and lies. But Gorin's Miinchhausen is not a common
liar: he is a poet, an artistic nature out of the
ordinary. His fantasy is the fruit of his talent, of his
inspired creative imagination. He combats petty-
bourgeois morality, philistinism and earthliminded-
ness. Paradoxically, the new Miinchausen turns out a
rebel against falsehood, against hypocrisy and
bigotry. A dreamer creating ever new improbable
stories about his adventures, Miinchausen is in fact
the most honest and pure man in the society which
had wallowed in vice and falsehood.
The plav about M\inchausen is a model of
Shavian literary paradox: new blood is injected into
old plots and they become burning issues of today
vividly reflecting vital problems.
Now Gorin is in his prime. He is in his early
for ties but he is well known across the countrv.
A ware of the audiences' interest in the author
theatres willingly stage every play of his.
Gorin's plays are always well done, the parts are
excellent material for actors, the plays allow for
fantasy flight to directors endowed with a sense of
comedy. Laughter never dies down during the
performances of Gorin's comedies.
Grigory Gorin's forte is his knack of speaking
simply but without oversimplification about serious
and profound things stirring the people's minds at the
moment. It is probably this fact that explains why so
I
41
different theatres show interest in Gorin's plays, and
why different people are unanimous in their high
appraisal of them.
Grigory Gorin's more popular plays:
"A Big Wedding"
"Banquet"
"Little Comedies of a Big House"
"Till"
" To Forget Herostratus"
'.'A Comical Fantasy of the Life, Love and Death of a
Famous Baron Karl Friedrich Hyeronimus von
Mi.inchausen"
"The Phenomena"
The Contemporary Meaning of
Kozintse-.'a Film Hamlet
"A true work of art makes a coauthor of
the reader or viewer. And in "Hamlet" as a
great work of art there is always yet another
character, and that character is the people
sitting in the auditorium. The Wittenburg
student draws them into his life and revitalizes
their consciences. And in this, I maintain, is
the effect of my future film: the arousal of
goodness in people, of their consciences, of
their spiritual nobility, and of the truth and
necessity of the value of
1
all this to every man,
if he wants to be a man."
"I think that no one should make a film for
the experts. My aim is to make film moving
and emotional with an interesting story for
every viewer so that they can watch this film in
every distant kolxoz. The philosophy must be
expressed in Shakespeare's images, in the human
characters, and in a sharp sense of reality We
must make the viewer fee this picture and this
story as a living story."
42
There is a particular attitude that lies at the
heart and generates the power of the works created
by Russi an artists since the 19th centurv. There is a
sense of urgency and immediacy that the artist feels
called to convey to those entering the world of his
creation. The artistic work must strike chords
sounding immediate experience either in the life of
the artist himself, of his nation, or of mankind, in
general. The artist must be committed to the
amelioration of the human condition through a
consciousness of history and its impact upon man's
future.
In making his film of Hamlet, Grigory Kozintsev
drew upon this rich tradition of the Russian creative
genius. In Kozintsev's notebooks on both his staging
and filming of Hamlet, he makes clear his attitude
toward the Danish prince, and toward art as a whole.
Through his film, he sought to evoke in his audience a
sense of the immediacy of the Prince of Denmark's
experience and an understanding of the relevance of
Elsinore's history to the present. Kozintsev creates a
visually stunning series of images from nature to
depict a spiritual landscape that serves as a stark
counterpoint to the world of Elsinore and its ruler.
Through the interplay of these two landscapes/
worlds, issues of conscience on which the tragedy of
"Hamlet" and the human condition itself hinge,
crystallize.
The strength and the epic durability of his
images from nature give full expression to
Kozintsev's faith in the indomitable human spirit. As
an artist of the modem generation, Kozintsev
interprets life as an ongoing struggle affording man
endless opportunities to test his potential for
greatness. And, in terms of the Russian experience,
that struggle has been one with power and with the
powerful. In this film, Kozintsev touches the very
nerve ends of the Russian psyche by alluding to the
paradigm of power that has resulted in their repeated
violation not only at the hands of the most recent
43
invader, the Third Reich, but also, and what's worse,
at the hands of their own leaders again and again. It
is worthwhile noting that for obvious reasons, during
Stalin's time, all productions of "Hamlet" were, in
effect, banned. After the leader's death, however,
Hamlet was in the air; it seemed every one wanted to
do a production. Kozintsev's 1954 production in
Leningrad at the Bolshoy Dramatichesky Teatr was
the first.
After reading Kozintsev's own writing about the
subjects of his films, there is the temptation to view
Hamlet in the Soviet soda-historical context and to
dwell on that at length. It is clear that Kozintsev is
a marxist with an unshakeable grasp of social contra-
dictions, an understanding of the unending battle for
humanness (chelovechnost), and a keen sense of the
dialectic of ideological struggle. His worldview is
firmly rooted in the material of the Soviet experi-
ences of revolution, repression, and two world wars
and in his people's victories in those darkest hours.
The life stuff of his films is the very heart of human
rebirth and development through harsh phvsical and
psychological suffering. The basis of his art is the
text of his own and his nation's "life experiences"
(perezhivaniya). He strives for a direct connection
between the images he creates on the screen and the
view of life, the understanding of life that the viewer
brings to the film. His task is to educate the viewer
in human values and to arm him for the struggle with
injustice through common experiences of the trage-
dies of life: inhumanness (beschelovechnost), inhu-
manity (beschelovechiye), injustice (nespravedlivost),
and man's inhumanity to man (zhestokost cheloveka
cheloveku).
In reviewing two of the most significant films
of Hamlet by his contemporaries, Lawrence Olivier
(1948) an<l Toni Richardson (1969), Kozintsev praises
the films as artistically well done and their directors
as highly gifted artists. He takes issue, however,
with the perspectives of the films' direction. It is
with an ironic twinge that Kozintsev mentions the
44
preoccupation with ytravagance and sensuality in
Richardson's Hamlet. In Olivier's film, Kozintsev
notes the fine acting, but expresses disappointment
at the film's limiting interest in the tragedy of "a
son, his mother, and her lover," without any real
probing or "contemporary grasp of the sense of
tragedj, of the reasons for the suffering of the
hero." Olivier, according to Kozintsev "lives in
another wfrld, and shows nothing of which I am
speaking."
Like Dostoevsky, Kozintsev seeks to landscape
man's spiritual world according to his deep faith in
anrl powerful vision of man's potential. And, like all
the great artists of 19th century Russia, bv his work
Kozintsev maintains a vigil to keep this vision and
faith in the foreground of man's consciousness. As he
writes:
If we can say that man is not a flute upon which
any amateur can play and that man is beautiful
and noble, but in his path stands inhumanity,
with which he must struggle and struggle
fiercely, then we are in the realm of con-
temporary ideas, in which the words humanitv,
humanness, conscience and truth most assuredly
have a {)lace. It has become clear that if people
do not wish to deal with these concepts won by
the tragedy of generations, if they subject such
conconcepts as conscience and truth to doubt,
then they will
6
have Auschwitzes and
Buchenwalds again.
In 19th century Russia, the artist considered it his
moral obligation to keep the eyes of mankind focused
on these genuine concerns, to keep alive in the minds
of men the burning issues of existence. This tradition
of the artist as prophet and priest is an obsession of
the contemporary artist in Russia. It is summed up in
a single, simple word: obyazannost' (duty). And this
word conjures up thP. tradition to which all contempo-
rary Russian artists proudly belong-from the ,civic
45
paintings of Surikov, Perov, and Repin to the
psychologically probing and philosophically challeng-
ing writing of any number of Russian writers includ-
ing Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, as well as
Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn, to name
but a few. They honor this tradition with a religious
fervor and a strong conviction to execute their duty
as artists. To these artists, the course of human
existence, the history of mankind is, as the 19th
century Russian historian Granovskv wrote, the
history of its moral growth. And this moral growth
or progress is the sphere of the fulfillment of the
laws of history. Granovsky remarked that
The purpose of history is the attainment of a
moral and enlightened individual personality,
independent of fatalistic categories, and of a
society which is afpropriate to the demand of
such a personality.
The vocation, then, of these artists as prophets is to
summon man to consciousness: consciousness of him-
self as a higher being and, as such, of his task of
moral growth. Kozintsev's film of Hamlet is just
such a suinmons.
Kozintsev's intense dedication to the clear
depiction of the truths of life in Hamlet, or, in other
words, to the open discussion of the burning issues of
man's existence is another specific aspect tvpical of
the high Russian artistic tradition. Dostoevsky clear-
ly isolates this tendency or, perhaps more accurately,
the degre e to which this tendency is prevalent among
Russians, in The 13rothers Karamazov. At one point
in the novel, Ivan Karamazov says to his brother
Alesha:
And what have Russian boys been doing up till
now, some of them, I mean? In this stinking
tavern, for instance, here, they meet and sit
down in a comer. They've never met in their
lives before and, when they go out of the
46
tavern, they won't meet again for forty years.
And what do they talk about in that momentary
halt in the tavern? Of the eternal question, of
the existence of God and Immortality. And
those who do not believe in God talk of social-
ism or anarchism, of the transformation of all
humanity on a new pattern, so that it all comes
to the same, they're the same questions turned
inside out. And masses, - masses of the most
original Russian boys do not?Ang but talk of the
eternal questions! Isn't it so?
In The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn puts it in
terms of Russian heroes as compared to Western
heroes. He writes,
Have you ever noticed what makes Russian
literary heroes different from the heroes of
Western novels? The heroes of Western litera-
ture are always after careers, monev, fame.
The Russians can get along without food and
drink - it's justice and good they're after.
Rightt
9
Chastising Western writers and critics, Czeslaw
Milosz in his collection of essays Emperor of the
Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision, writes that
Pasternak's and Solzhenitsyn's works, in a
sense, "judge" all contemporary literature by
reintroducing a hierarchy of values, the renunc-
iation of which threatens mankind with mad-
ness. Or to put it another way they reestablish
a clear distinction between what is serious in
hum an life and what is considered serious by
people who s zhiru besyats8 (are driven out of
their minds by good living.)
Western art focuses on the disjunctures, the
fractures, the incongruities, the arbitrariness of life
to prove the re is no meaning. We want to decon-
struct meaning to prove that life is a vacuum,
47
existence - a cruel joke, and language - its vilest
tool. In Russian art, on the other hand, though these
realities are not ignored, there is an urgent need to
make connections, to find meaning, to construct it.
The Russians are long past the stage of preoccuation
with the destructive effects of life's incongruities on
man. They have picked up the pieces and are about
the task of reconstructing man and his world into
meaningful patterns. As part of that 19th century
Russian tradition, contemporary Russian artists,
including Kozintsev, feel it their moral dutv to
maintain what is of genuine concern to mankind, that
is, the serious discussion of and the search for
answers to those burning questions to which
Dostoevsky referred.
In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach notes that "the
strongest impression the Western reader received in
Russian literature and the most essential character-
istic of the inner movement documented in Russian
realism is the unqualified, unlimited, and passionate
i n t n s i t ~
1
of experience in the characters por-
trayed." He adds
It seems that the Russians have preserved an
immediacy of experience which had become a
rare phenomenon in Western civilization of the
19th century. A strong practical, ethical, or
intellectual shock immediately arouses them in
the depths of their instincts, and in a moment
they pass from a quiet and almost vegetative
existence to the most monstrous excesses both
in practical and spiritual matters. The pendu-
lum of their vitality, of their actions, thoughts,
and e motions seem s
1
lo oscillate farther than
elsewhere in Europe.
In effect, we are dealing with the author's own
intensity as distinctly and representatively Russian
when discussing the pursuit of values, this immediacy
of experience, and concern for humanity.
48
For Kozintsev, as for Pasternak, whose trans-
lation he adapted for the screen, "Hamlet is not a
drama of weakness, but of duty and self denial, of a
high destiny,

a life devoted and preordained to a

heroic task." Hamlet is marked by a sense of a
higher order compared to that of his contemporaries
and their world and is ultimately disposed to sacrifice
and action in the name of humanity. In his film
Kozintsev is preoccupied with "the enormitv of the
concepts of justice, truth, and mercy." Viewing his
world through the prism of his national experiences,
he discovers new meaning in a Hamlet relevant to our
age: We must not forget Auschwitz, racism, and
Hiroshima. He writes: "the forms change, hut the
essence of the questions which were called eternal at
one time, has again become contemporary. The very
life of man itself is like a struggle to find an answer
to such questions."
14
In his film of Hamlet, Kozintsev is certain of
his task and clearly articulates in his writing the
consequences of failure and success in it. His film
makes visually clear what lies immanent in
Shakesi>eare's text. Commenting on Kozintsev's film
and on the peculiar form of his rather tenacious
directorial approach, Peter Brook points out the
passionate conviction in the director's search for an
holistic sense of the Plgv to which everything is
committed and related. Structure is inseparable
from meaning; for Kozintsev, as critics have noted of
Hitchcock, structure is meaning and content in his
films. --
Many film critics agree that film versions of
Shakespeare's plays offer the broadest possible
avenues for the full exploration of the inherent
potential of the plays' imagery. Additionally, cinema
provides the opportunity for the essentially collabor-
ative nature of the drama to be realized and
its resonance in the various cinematic devices. In
both cases, film makes possible the rediscovery of
Shakespeare's poe tic genius. Kozintsev's filmic poem
of Hamlet is to the surface of reality as
49
Shakespeare's original poetic version is to every dav
speech.
17
In Hamlet Kozintsev has created a visual
cinematic imagery that is not merely a convenient
structure upon which to h n ~ the verbal poetic
imagery of Shakespeare nor does the filmic image
. serve to simply reinforce or repeat the visual image
conjured up by Shakespeare's words. Kozintsev was
bold enough to reach beyond these artistically
restrictive and reductive boundaries. He wrote of
the filmic rendering of Shakespeare:
The problem is not one of finding means to
speak the verse in front of the camera, in
realistic circumstances ranging from long shot
to close up. The aural has to be made visual.
The poetic texture itself has to be transformed
into a visual poetry, i y ~ o the dynamic organi-
zation of film imagery.
Taking the basic themes of awakening of conscience
and conciousness as the most significantly intense
and burning issues of man's existence, Kozintsev has
attempted to bring the full lyrical beauty of
Shakespeare to its complete fruition through his own
equally powerful, lyrical filmic image in Hamlet.
Kozintsev is concerned with creating a pictorial
narrational language that will be not a facultative
supplementary freature, but an element necessary for
the clearest articulation of the deeper meaning of
Shakespeare's poetic or verbal narrational language.
In such an interpenetration within the cinema of the
two narrational tendencies or semiotic svstems,
which are fundamentally different, words begin to
behave like pictures, and pictures, to a much
1
f/{eater
degree, acquire the properties of the word. The
pictorial narrational language focuses its dynamic
energy of explication and organization not on what
the verbal narrational language (Shakespeare's)
signifies but on what Kozintsev perceives it to
signify.
50
In Kozintsev's Hamlet, as in his last film King
Lear, we have a tour de force in the use of the
pictorial narrational language organized on the l,asis
of the four elements of fire, wind, water, and earth.
Kozintsev, in general terms, uses the epic quality of
such an elemental imagery structure to suggest the
category of the concerns that Hamlet should present
to us. The questions he faces are eternal, yet made
contemporary through the experiences of the modern
age. They stem from the abuse of and man's megalo-
maniacal appetite for power. Shakespeare provides
Kozintsev with the specific application for the
imagery when both Hamlet and Claudius say that
time is out of joint. Claudius, in his weak attempt to
placate his conscience, recognizes his crimes as the
heart of the evil that has thrown life at Elsinore out
of joint. Hamlet, acutely aware of the incongruity of
the marriage of his mother to his uncle so soon after
his father's death, is alienated from the world of time
and twice confuses how much time has passed since
the king's death.
However, time is not the only thing out of joint.
Relationships have gone awry. Polonius' only interest
in Ophelia is as his access to discovering the cause of
Hamlet's madness, thereby winning the king's favor.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, too, are after the
king's pleasure at the cost of their honor and their
friendship with Hamlet. Claudius marries his
brother's wife defiling the memory of his brother. By
indirections, truth and honor are subverted to
direction find. Language no longer serves communi-
cation. Words become disembodied traps or the
sinister means of self defense. Art, itself, becomes a
trap as the play within a play reveals the vermin-
rodent of Elsinore. Truth and beauty have fled
Elsinore; it remains but a prison, the modern symbol
of power abused.
Through the imagery in his film, Kozintsev
establishes nature as the safe haven wher.e spiritu-
ality, morality, truth and beauty have taken refuge.
There, too, Hamlet's soul finds the expression denied
51
him in Elsinore. Through his natural imagery
Kozintsev adds the dimension of hope, vision, and
insight, without which the task facing Hamlet might
prove too great. Without that primordial sense of
priorities, of the eternal questions, as Kozintsev so
frequently writes, man has a tendency to lose his
way.
From the opening shot of the sea, filling the
screen and lasting for at least 20 seconds, Kozintsev
establishes nature through the elements as the basic
representation of the spiritual world, the eternal
value of which stands as the ultimate unit by which
man's peregrinations through and perversions of the
world entrusted to him are measured. Toward the
end of the shot, the distorted shadow image of
Elsinore, dark and murky, is reflected in the sea. The
spiritual coordinates are given, the sea shows
Elsinore for what it is.
The sea is by far the dominant image from
nature with fire and earth/stone next, and wind,
last. To condense the treatment of this imagery, it is
possible to say that the images from nature cluster
around certain key points in Shakespeare's verbal
narrational language. The three most significant
points are the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet's
father and those points immediately preceding and
following it, Hamlet's soliloquy to be or not to he,
and the play, the Mousetrap. More than the other
two, however, it is the ghost scene, in which all the
elements are joined to create the most dramatic
effect of the point of truth from which all else flows.
The shot immediately preceding the appearance
of Hamlet's father consists of cross cuts from the
men on their way to the watch, to the lighted
windows of the great hall where a royal debauch is in
progress, to the horses about to be spooked by wind
turbulence accompanying the appearance of the
king's spirit. As the ghost appears, Hamlet,
restrained by Marcellus and the others, is buffeted by
a powerful wind. As Hamlet begins to follow his
52
father's shadow, all movement except Hamlet's is in
slow motion. During a shot of several seconds we
watch as Hamlet's father leads the son to the place
of reckoning. The ghost has to negotiate stone stairs,
stone walkways, and along parapets and through stone
arches before beginning his words to Hamlet.
Although the words of the ghost have a
profound effect on Hamlet, it is as if we, the
viewers, are in the eye of a hurricane, within the
world of mystery and shadow, transported for a
moment to the safe refuge of nature. The sea,
turbulent and pounding the rocky shore, is in the
background, and Kozintsev alternates shots of
Hamlet and the sea at the most crucial points of the
ghost's words. When the ghost has finished his
message, the camera glimpses his eyes where feint
but certain lighting is focused, then catches the face
of the sun on the ghost's helmet, cuts to the sky to
reveal impending dawn and, finally, cuts to Hamlet's
eyes, which have now been opened. With the onrush
of dawn flooding the sky with light, the ghost
disappears as Horatio says in text cut from the verbal
narrative but clearly depicted in the pictorial
narrative of Kozintsev's film:
I have heard,
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
A wake the god of day, and at his warning,
whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine; and of the truth herein
This present object made probati on. (Act I,
Scene I)
There are other significant points at which only
one element forms the crucial image in the pictorial
narrational language of Kozintsev. For example, fire
dominates in the scene where Horatio relates to
Hamlet that his father's ghost has appe ared. At one
point, flames in the fireplace fill the scr een t=om-
53
pletely suggesting the urgency of the significance of
the apparition, the excruciating challenge of the task
that awaits Hamlet, the burning desire of the noble
heart to seek the truth, and, of course, the painful
unknown truth itself. This image of fire is suggested
later after the revelations of the Mousetrap, when
Claudius hysterically runs from his throne, bursts into
the great hall shouting ironically for light: "Ognjal
Ognjal Oiterally, "Fire! Fire!"). Hamlet, on Claudius'
heels, follows, almost gleefully, asking Horatio
whether he had seen the telltale signs of Claudius'
guilt. He sits by the roaring fire to savor his victory,
the victory of truth. Earlier, he had turned his back
and closed the door on the blazing fireplace for fear
of what the appearance of his father's ghost could
mean. After the Mousetrap, the earlier suggestions
made through the image of fire are resolved through
its reappearance, the signification completed.
Another example of only one element serving as
the chief image in the pictorial narrative is the use
of stone representing the element of earth. Although
stone/earth is generally more ambiguous and does not
fit quite as neatly into the argument as do the other
elements, it effectively serves the same ends of sug-
gesting the world of refuge beyond Elsinore. Mute in
horror at man's perversion of the world, pre-
ponderant, rough ragged stone in the sea, on the land,
and as part of the castle frequently fills the screen
almost to the point of choking t ~ light out of the
frames. A particularly impressive use of this image
is in conjunction with Hamlet, in whose presence all
of the elements reach a crescendo. At the beginning
of the film, as Hamlet arrives at Elsinore, he climbs
a stone staircase that passes a niche in the outside
wall of the castle. Polonius later questions Hamlet
who is sitting in this same niche reading. Later,
after being mortally wounded, Hamlet, with his last
ounce of strength exits to this same niche taking the
same pose as earlier. Juxtaposed, these images
clearly speak of Hamlet's yearning for a refuge from
Elsinore and the solace which nature in this element
54
provides. He literally sits in the lap of nature when
he assumes his position in the niche. A note of
ambiguity arises when, during Hamlet's most famous
soliloquy, the camera juxtaposes the sea and massive,
mute boulders as the statement of to be or not to he,
respectively. It might be tempting to conclude,
although I would disagree, that since Hamlet exited
to the stone niche with no referent image of the sea
that his death will be fruitless and in vain. Again
there is another ambiguous use of stone/earth
imagery at the very conclusion of the film. Hamlet
dies and utters the famous line of silence. Then,
before another sound is heard the screen is filled for
25 seconds with stone. This provides quite a contrast
to the 20 second opening shot of the sea, and leaves
room for broad speculation.
Aside from the quite traditional interpretations
of wind turbulence as indication of moments of truth,
the wind imagery also presents some particularlv
interesting possibilities. For example, even without a
turbulence, the wind captures a scene in which
Hamlet has boarded the ship for England. Dwarfed
by several enormous sails, Hamlet stands on the deck
of the ship with a cross cut showing more sails being
lowered. The suggestion here might well be of the
promise of the winds of fate, which he cannot escape,
but will surely return him to Elsinore to fulfill his
destiny.
On of Kozintsev's main concerns was that he
not "link Shakespeare with art, even the most con-
temporary art, but with life." Through his use of the
images of the earth, fire, wind, and water in Hamlet
as the organizational principle of the film's imagerv,
Kozintsev lyrically depicts "the inner connections
betwee<f the life of the world and that of the human
soul."
2
He locates the coordinates of man's spiritual
reality in his elemental physical reality, keeping
them constantly before man's eyes thus facilitating
the frequent contemplation of the burning issues of
his existence. It is through his own creation of a
lyrical flow of the primitive power of nature'in the
55
film that Kozintsev successfully overcomes the urge
to recreate Shakespeare's poetry. Instead of filming
verbiage, Kozintsev creates an equallv lyrical
impression of life. In his autobiography, I Remember,
Pasternak wrote,
Metaphorical language is the result of the
disproportion between man's short life and the
immense and long-term tasks he sets himself.
Because of this, he needs to look at things
sharply as an eagle and to convey his vision in
flashes zrhich can be immediately appre-
hended.
The cinematographic technique of Grigorv
Kozintsev in Hamlet is a series of such flashes by
which one can apprehend the truth of existence as
the Russian might perceive it.
For Kozintsev, Hamlet is not a tragedy of
procrastination and reflection, but of conscience,
which, when ignored, results in the tragedies of
modern man: the death camps, nation prisons, and
nuclear holocausts. After completion of the film in
1964, Kozintsev wrote in his journal,
The heroic dimensions of the persona, though
alone, though not possessing any power or
weapon, yet uttering his "NO!" -that is
Shakespeare for us. l l ~ e idea of Shakespeare is
the opposition to evil.
He concludes:
Even if Hamlet were killed by all the slings and
the arrows, still happiness would not return to
Gertrude, nor peace to zflaudius. This is
destroyed once and for all.
Hamlet's revenge is not in his killing any
num her of people, and finally the king, ~ t in
his revitalizing conscience in these people.
4
56
Notes
1
Grigory M. Kozintsev, Sobranie
SochineNii v njati tomax (Leningrad: "'skusstvo
Leningradskoe Otgelenie, 1982), vol. 1, !> 490.
2
Kozintsev, vol. 1, p. 493.
3
Kozintsev, voL 4, p. 157.
4
Kozintsev, vol. 3, p. 433.
5
Kozintsev, vol. 1, p. 491.
6
Kozintsev, vol. 1, p. 491.
7
Leonard Shapiro, Rationalism and
Nationalism in Russia 19th Century Political
Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1967), p. 59 and 84.
8Feodor M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers
Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnet and rev.
Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: W. W. Norton,
1976), p. 215.
9 Aleksandr. I. Solzhenitsvn, The First
Circle, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:
Bantam Books, 1969), p. 324.
10
czeslaw Milosz, Emperor of the Eartb;
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981),
p. 80.
1
1
Erich Auerback, Mimesis, trans. Willard
R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1968), p. 522-523.
12
Auerback, p. 523.
13
Boris Pasternak, Sochinenija v 4-x
tomax (Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1961), vol. 3, p.
197.
14Kozintsev, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 1,
p. 237.
15
Geoffrey Reeves, "Finding Shakespeare
on Film. From an interview with Peter \3rook,"
57
in Charles Willison Eckert's Focus on
Shakespearean Films (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall, 1972), p. 37.
16see Jack J , Jorgens, Shakespeare on
Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1977) p. 3. J or gens expresses grave
reservations about approaches to Shakespeare's
plays which focus on the verbiage (as Pasternak
calls it) in isolation from the other rich
elements of the stage, for example, movement,
lighting, set design, and costumes. The cinema
exploits these elements and more.
17
J or gens, p. 10.
18
Grigorij Kozintsev, "Hamlet and King I
Lear: Stage and Film," in Shakespeare 1971, ed.
Clifford Leech and J . Margeson (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 197Z), p. 191.
1
9Jurij Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema,
trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan, 1981) p. 37, 38, 39.
2
Kozincev, "Hamlet and King Lear," p.
194.
21
Boris Pasternak, "Translating
Shakespeare," trans. Manya Harari,
Remember, trans. David Magarshack
York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1960), o. 126.
22
Grigorij Kozincev, Sobranie Socinenij_,
vol. 1, p. 494.
23
Kozincev, vol. 1, p. 495.
24
G rigorij Kozincev, Sobrani e Socinenii,
vol. 1, p. 495.
Joseph Troncale, University of Richmond
58
The Cherry Orchard at the Folger.
A Respectable Revival
In the aggregate, the revival of Chekhov's The
Cherry Orchard at the Shakespeare Theatre at the
Folger is respectable rather than outstanding. John
has not been particularly inventive
in his staging, which seldom rises above the level of
the routine; nor has he made any discernible effort to
convert the company into an acting ensemble. The
revival, though, is by no means without its rewards.
The acting, seldom less than adequate, is sometimes
very fine, and the physical production is of a very
high order indeed.
Chekhov described The Cherry Orchard as "a
comedy, and in places even a farce." One sees why
he said that. There are comedy values both high and
light in the play, as well as moments of real poig-
nancy, but it is farce that repeatedly impinges on the
more serious passages. Chekhov uses farce less for
its nonsense value than for its ironic effect. He
employs farce as a satiric device, to alienate one
from a character so that one does not become too
sympathetically involved with a character's spurious
self-pity or melancholy posturing. When sentiment
moves toward pathos or tenston shows signs of
turning into tragic intensity, Chekhov, typically,
often introduces a bit of farcical stage business or an
incongruous speech or abruptly changes the conver-
sation or the tempo. But no matter what mood the
play evokes-comic, tragic, satiric or farcical-
Chekhov's characters always remain emotionally
isolated from one another; there is no real
communication between them, and this, the author
implies, is not only characteristic of the people in the
piece, but also of all humanity as well. Thus the play
takes on a universal application.
The milieu of the piece is that of the old
Russian landed aristocracy, symbolized by an orchard
of cherry trees that adjoins the ancient manor
house. The sister and brother, Mme.
59
Ranevskaya and Gaev, who own and live together on
the estate, are charming, irreclaimable spendthrifts,
both of their wealth and of their waning lives. Their
money gone, they now face dispossession. One feels
that with a little effort, with even a modicum of
mental concentration, these aristocrats could avoid
calamity. But that is totally beyond their vacuous
and futile amiability; so their estate is sold over their
heads and the cherry trees are felled to make way for
summer villas.
'Beneath the play's graceful, easv-going surface
one feels rather than perceives a criticism of the
Russia represented by these cultured, self-absorbed
idlers. Mme. Ranevskaya is an unstable woman who
can pass with a single gesture from heartbreak to
gaiety in a moment, from acutely maternal grief over
a dead child to abject doting on a Parisian lover who
is faithless to her yet has power to o l ~ her and to
batten on her bounty.
Varya, Mme. Ranevskaya' s older, adopted
daughter, practices desperate economies, but they
are useless in the face of the mother's extrava-
gancies. V arya is attracted to Lopahin, a merchant
and the son of a former serf on the estate. Lopahh
has prospered greatly in freedom. He is loyal enough
to his old masters, dogging their footsteps with good
advice and offers of help. But in the end it is he wr.o
buys the estate and fells the cherry trees for tle
villas of an industrial population.
The role of Mme. Ranevskaya is complex and
extremely demanding, a challenge even to the best of
emotional actresses. In the Folger production, Mikel
Lambert is physically ideally suited to her part. Miss
Lambert is a very handsome woman, slender of fot'm
and graceful of movement, and she wears her
exquisite period costumes with perfect ease. ller
acting as well reveals a fine period sense. She is
quite effective in the character's lighter moments,
but when she probes the emotional depths of the part,
she brings an excess of romantic anguish to her
60
reading. True, the role as Chekhov writes it is
extravagantly histrionic, but one feels that a more
restrained pathos would make the performance more
moving. Miss Lambert is seldom affecting at all.
There are three performances of unqualified
distinction. Floyd King superbly embodies the inef-
fectual, self-indulgent Gaev, who, at fiftv-one, is as
helpless as a small child when faced with the realities
of life. As Lopahin, Michael Tolaydo explores every
nuance and facet of the character of the decent mer-
chant, a man acutely conscious of both his lowly
origin and his great success in business. The actor
also makes the most of Chekhov's hints that it is
MTfle. Ranevskaya, not Varya, whom Lopahin loves.
Foregoing the comic senility inherent in his role,
Emery Battis brings instead a genuine pathos to the
part of the ancient Firs, the family's butler-cum-
valet who has devoted his life to his masters and who
is left behind when they vacate the estate.
As Varya, Sybil Lines, much too old for her role,
is convincing in her alarm at her family's ruinous
extravagancies and touching when Lopahin fails to
propose to her, but she adopts too often a waspish
tone that lessens one's sympathy for the character.
Even worse, Miss Lines's brooding intensity somE;-
times suggests the mourning Electra. As Anya, Mme.
Ranevskaya's younger daughter, Orlagh Cassidy is
very pretty, but as yet she is more impressive as a
stage ornament than she is as an actress. Edward
Gero does very well by the part of Trofimov, the
"eternal student" who prates about progress and the
importance of work while he himself embodies sloth
and inertia. As Pishchik, an elderly and impoverished
landowner, Jim Beard cogently conveys both the
fatuousness and the self-interest of the character,
but the actor goes. too far in an attempt to convert a
subordinate role into a star turn. Michael Kramer is
laudable as Epihodov, a clumsy young bookkeeper who
pays court to Dunyasha, an anxiety-ridden housemaid
who apes the manners and dress of a ladv, whom
Nicole Orth-Pallavincini plays with skill. Rita 'Litton
61
is adroit and droll as Charlotta, Anya's rather exotic
governess. Richard Hart somewhat overdoes the part
of Yasha, a snobbish young valet with his eye on the
main chance.
John PiRoman's translation seems to catch both
the letter and the spirit of Chekhov's piece, t o u ~
English renderings such as "bird brain"-to indicate
stupidity-and "tomato"-to describe a woman-are
surely out of place in a play that remains otherwise
anchored in its period.
The interiors of Ursula Belden's excellent sets
appositely convey a sense of grandeur in decline.
Sliding walls and reversible panels are ingeniously
moved about to convert from interior to exterior and
back again. Stuart Duke's subtle lighting-soft and
subdued most of that time-is exactly right all of the
time. The gradually declining light in the last act
perfectly suggests both a dying day and a dying caste.
Mark Pirolo's superb costumes wonderfully evoke the
period of the play; indeed, all of the characters, from
the aristocrats down to a ragged beggar, look as
though they've just stepped out of turn-of-the-
century Russia and onto the Folger stage. Mr. Pirolo
is a costume designer of remarkable gifts.
To sum up, the revival at the Folger has both its
strengths and its weaknesses, with the former prf.-
dominant. Best of all, the production enables the
theatregoer to experience or to re-experience a play
from the treasure chest of world drama.
Everett Jones
6Z
\