Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: The Word as Image

Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age

This book explores how one of the world’s most literary-oriented societies entered the modern visual era, beginning with the advent of photography in the nineteenth century, focusing then on literature’s role in helping to shape cinema as a tool of official totalitarian culture during the Soviet period, and concluding with an examination of post-Soviet Russia’s encounter with global television. As well as pioneering the exploration of this important new area in Slavic Studies, the book illuminates aspects of cultural theory by investigating how the Russian case affects general notions of literature’s fate within post-literate culture, the ramifications of communism’s fall for media globalization, and the applicability of text/image models to problems of intercultural exchange.

Stephen Hutchings is Professor of Russian at the University of Surrey. He was formally Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Rochester, New York. He has published books on Leonid Andreev and on Russian modernist prose. He is currently grant-holder for a three-year AHRB-funded project looking at post-Soviet television culture.

BASEES/RoutledgeCurzon Series on Russian and East European Studies Series editor: Richard Sakwa, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent Editorial Committee: George Blazyca, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, University of Paisley Terry Cox, Department of Government, University of Strathclyde Rosalind Marsh, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath David Moon, Department of History, University of Strathclyde Hilary Pilkington, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham Stephen White, Department of Politics, University of Glasgow

This series is published on behalf of BASEES (the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies). The series comprises original, high-quality, researchlevel work by both new and established scholars on all aspects of Russian, Soviet, post-Soviet and East European Studies in humanities and social science subjects. 1. Ukraine’s Foreign and Security Policy, 1991–2000 Roman Wolczuk

10. State Building in Ukraine The Ukranian parliament, 1990–2003 Sarah Whitmore

2. Political Parties in the Russian Regions Derek S. Hutcheson

11. Defending Human Rights in Russia Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969–2003 Emma Gilligan

3. Local Communities and PostCommunist Transformation Edited by Simon Smith 4. Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe J. C. Sharman 5. Political Elites and the New Russia Anton Steen 6. Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness Sarah Hudspith 7. Performing Russia – Folk Revival and Russian Identity Laura J. Olson 8. Russian Transformations Edited by Leo McCann 9. Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin The Baton and Sickle Edited by Neil Edmunds

12. Small-Town Russia Postcommunist Livelihoods and Identities: A Portrait of the Intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1999–2000 Anne White 13. Russian Society and the Orthodox Church Religion in Russia after Communism Zoe Knox 14. Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age The Word as Image Stephen Hutchings 15. Between Stalin and Hitler Class War and Race War on the Dvina, 1940–46 Geoffrey Swain

Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age The word as image

Stephen Hutchings

First published 2004 by RoutledgeCurzon 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2004 Stephen Hutchings All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-42679-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-34110-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–30668–X (Print Edition)

For my parents

Contents

List of plates Acknowledgements

ix x

Introduction – the scope of the task: in the beginning was the word

1

PART I

The photographic word

15

1 Russian realism and the camera: out from under Gogol’s ‘Portrait’

17

2 Objectivity, alienation and the fragmentation of the subject: the camera as midwife to modernity

37

3 Photographic eye as poetic I: dialogues of text and image in Maiakovskii’s and Rodchenko’s Pro eto project

57

PART II

Literature, the camera and the shaping of a Soviet official sphere

75

4 The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word

77

5 Shooting the canon: ekranizatsii and the (de)centring of Stalinist culture

97

6 Metatextuality in the post-Stalinist ekranizatsiia: the official sphere unravels

117

viii

Contents

7 Hamlet with a guitar: the autobiographical persona of Vladimir Vysotskii as an intermedia phenomenon

135

PART III

Televising the word

151

8 Literature as translation mechanism in post-Soviet televisual representations of Westernness

153

9 In place of a conclusion: television, the end of literature and Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’

174

Notes Bibliography Index

187 209 221

Plates

1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘Christ in the Tomb’ (oil on wood, 1521) Daguerreotype of the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna illustrating early photography’s tendency to imitate the conventions and poses of figurative painting (Charles Bernasco, 1870) Woman fetching water, from Ethnographic Album of Little Russia, Iosif Kordysh, 1870s Seventy-year-old bandura player, from Ethnographic Album of Little Russia, Iosif Kordysh, 1870s Severely deteriorated daguerreotype of a painting depicting a horse, Anonymous (1850–55) ‘Tatar Woman in Ceremonial Dress’ (hand-tinted print), from Photographs of People of Orenburg Region, Mikhail Bukar (1872) Portraits in Russian pull-out album kept in decorated wooden case, Anonymous (1870–85) Carte de Visite of Vladimir Korolenko, Andrei Karelin, Nizhnii Novgorod (1890) Prisoners chained before work in Duibiskaia Jail (from Chekhov’s private collection), J. J. Pavlovskii, Sakhalin Cover design and photomontages for Vladimir Maiakovskii and Aleksandr Rodchenko, Pro eto (About that), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1923) A scene depicting NEP-era reality from Aelita (1924) Chapaev demonstrates battle tactics using potatoes Chapaev viewed from below on his white battle-steed The heroicized image of Peter the Great, from Vladimir Petrov’s 1937 film adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel The staring eyes of the money-obsessed Rogozhin in Pyr’ev’s The Idiot (1956), one of many such images in the film The end of Tarkovskii’s The Sacrifice

Acknowledgements

In researching this book I have benefited from the help and advice of several institutions and individuals. I must first thank the AHRB, which generously funded the three-year project of which this book is the outcome. Without the indefatigable enthusiasm and hard work of Anat Vernitski, the Research Fellow on the project, the book could not have been written. I am deeply indebted also to Avril (‘Dicky’) Pyman and Julian Graffy for their invaluable, searching comments on draft chapters. The anonymous reader at RoutledgeCurzon, likewise, provided useful guidance. I should express my gratitude to Anna Maslennikova, Birgit Beumers, Erika Wolf and David Gillespie, all of whom offered advice and/or help with obtaining sources. The support and encouragement of Peter Sowden, the commissioning editor at RoutledgeCurzon, and of Richard Sakwa, were key to seeing the monograph through its early stages. The individuals whose suggestions and constructive criticisms at conference presentations shaped many chapters are too numerous to name. Finally, I should acknowledge the assistance of the BFI in obtaining film stills, and of the University of Surrey in granting me a sabbatical in which to complete the manuscript. Some of the material from Chapter 3 was published earlier as ‘Photographic Eye as Poetic I: Maiakovkii’s and Rodchenko’s Pro eto project’ in The History of Photography (2000), 24, 4, 300–09 (website: www. tandf.co.uk). A different version of Chapter 8 was published as ‘Ghosts in the Machine: Literature as Translation Mechanism in Post-Soviet Televisual Representations of Western-ness’ in International Journal of Cultural Studies, 5, 3, 291–315 (Sage Publications 2003). Permission to re-use this material is gratefully acknowledged. I am also grateful to Aleksandr Lavrent’ev for allowing me to reproduce the photomontages of his grandfather, Aleksandr Rodchenko. Every effort has been made to acknowledge fully the rightsholders of other copyright material included in this book. Any rights-holder whose work is not fully acknowledged should contact the author and publishers so that a full acknowledgement can be made in any future edition.

Acknowledgements

xi

For the transliteration of Russian words and names, I use the Library of Congress system without diacritics throughout. All translations from Russian are my own, unless otherwise stated.

Introduction The scope of the task: in the beginning was the word

Early in 1990 Moscow’s austere exterior was shattered by the appearance of a single red and yellow ‘M’ sign. Communist Russia’s first fast-food outlet had opened in Pushkin Square, opposite the monument to Russia’s greatest poet. The location had been provocatively selected. The hallowed literary tradition appropriated to bolster communism’s claims to the Russian cultural heritage was, like that heritage, about to be subjected to an onslaught from a system epitomized in the instant gratification offered by McDonalds and the TV soaps. Within four years book publishing was in catastrophic decline, the Soviet Union’s reputation as ‘the world’s best-read nation’ had dissipated along with the nation itself, and the organ of official Soviet literary culture, Literaturnaia gazeta, was reduced to printing pornographic supplements to shore up its precarious market position.1 The examples seem to indicate that literary culture in Russia, as elsewhere, has fallen victim to the tyranny of Western consumerism which the camera image did so much to promote. The effects of the process were more keenly sensed in Russia, owing to the precipitousness with which it had unfolded, the special status Russians accord literature, and the loading it acquired owing to Russia’s obsession with perceiving the West as its ideological other. But for these factors, the paranoid reaction generated by the incursion of image-led Western consumerism appears to be no more than an expression of a general anxiety about ‘McDonaldization’. Conventional wisdom insists that, through US dominance of the global market, national cultures are suffocating under a mountain of mass-produced trash whose makers glorify in the commercial superiority of transient visual surfaces over the permanence and depth of the literate and spiritual. Conventional wisdoms invite challenge. Even in the West, the litany of complaints is undermined by the fact that, thanks partly to US-funded glossy screen adaptations of nineteenth-century classics, literary culture is currently undergoing something of a revival. The literary traditionalist confronts a dual paradox in which nineteenth-century fiction is reinvigorated through television, while European national identities receive a boost from US global hegemony. Through its grounding in language and national myth, which emphasize borders, literature provides a bulwark against

2

Introduction

global indistinction, problematizing the notion that the printed word will capitulate to image-led globalization and confirming Colin McCabe’s sense that ‘the interdependence between print and image’ makes ‘writing crucial to knowledge and … central to modern forms of entertainment’ (McCabe 1997: 14). The fact that globalization in its contemporary phase began with the technological revolution which brought, almost simultaneously, the railway, photography and telegraphy, leads to the second challenge to received wisdoms. Far from belonging to a halcyon, pre-camera era, the tradition Pushkin represents was inaugurated at the very moment when photography was emerging.2 From the outset, Russia’s literary tradition reflected this coincidence, and, rather than develop in magisterial isolation from the currents that photography set in motion, it has perpetually engaged the camera in a tense dialogue which continues today. The subject of this book is Russian literature’s relationship with the camera, a theme certain aspects of which have been broached by others. Thus, Nancy Condee’s and Vladimir Padunov’s study of the effects of market reform on the new Russia’s literary world, Andrew Wachtel’s essay on photography in Dostoevskii, David Gillespie’s and Evgenii Dobrenko’s analyses of Russian film adaptations, and Colin Sparks’s examination of the effects of media globalization on the newly liberalized East European television outlets are all highly relevant. Catriona Kelly’s history of kul’turnost’, Stephen Lovell’s research on literacy in modern Russia, and Richard Stites’s pioneering work on Soviet popular culture have each had a recognized impact on areas overlapping with my own field of interest.3 More controversial is Frank Ellis’s polemic on Russia’s new ‘infosphere’ in which he proposes Russian print-based literacy as ‘a form of immunization against the absurdities of the electronic image’ (Ellis 1999: 129). It is to such generalizations that I hope my book will bring a corrective, whilst setting myself an objective which falls outside the purview of the above contributions: to give a systematic account of Russian literature’s interactions with camera culture within an integrated theoretical framework. The rationale for the monograph is threefold. First, the accepted view of Russian society as profoundly logocentric in orientation rests largely on the privileged position that the literary Word has held in that country since Pushkin. One of my aims is to contextualize and demystify the origins and nature of modern Russian logocentrism. Second, by placing my topic in the context of a wider word–image problematic fundamental to human culture (the integrated framework to which I refer), I hope to shed new light on the key issues confronting modern Russia, including its fraught dialogue with an alternatively idealized and demonized West. Third, the study will furnish a timely illustration of the impact of media culture on totalitarian (and posttotalitarian) societies. The full import of each of these aims, as well as the means of accomplishing them, will emerge from the discussion below. I begin, though, with a qualification.

Introduction

3

For what the book does not constitute is an exhaustive history of the literature–camera relationship. Rather, it adopts a ‘case study’ approach highlighting key moments in the unfolding of that relationship, principally the function of images of photography in nineteenth-century Russian fiction; the role of Soviet filmed adaptations of literature in creating (and dismantling) an official public sphere; the appropriation by post-Soviet television of literary culture in its struggle to re-articulate Russian identity. Such an approach requires the de-emphasizing of areas which may purport to fall within the book’s thematic remit. There is, for example, no space for the modernist novel’s assimilation of cinematic syntax (an area receiving attention from Robert Russell),4 little for the post-1991 screen adaptation, and none for new media influences on post-Soviet fiction. Pragmatic considerations aside, this narrowing of focus is justifiable in terms of the differing extent to which discrete features of my theme illuminate the central concept linking its key moments: the notion that the encounter between Russia’s literary tradition and the camera is party to a word–image dialectic in which each component is contingent on its opposite. It is the points at which the dialectic receives fresh momentum, generating new cultural meaning, rather than the relationship in its entirety, which interest me. Whilst the approach is broadly chronological, I eschew the temptation to reconstruct a continuum linking the camera’s arrival with the commercialization of Russian television. Related principles apply to the selection and handling of texts. Rather than organizing historical data according to perceived norms, I operate on the principle that something becomes culturally meaningful when it significantly breaches a norm, or positions itself at the margins of that norm’s sphere of influence.5 Moreover, a text’s true cultural significance often emerges as a result of being subjected to a critical apparatus, or a historical perspective, unavailable at the time to which it belongs.6 How do these principles affect the task at hand? First, whilst I am obliged to provide the empirical background to photography’s entry onto the Russian literary stage, to the emergence of the screen adaptation of literature, and to the conditions in which post-Soviet television operates, such information is always subordinate to the theoretically informed textual analyses which provide my argument with its main thrust. Several of the texts I examine are so familiar as to make their inclusion seem inevitable: Dostoevskii’s The Idiot and the legendary Soviet film, Chapaev, to name two. Others that might be expected to feature prominently in a study of this kind receive less attention.7 Conversely, texts that rarely find their way into critical studies of any kind (at least, in the west), such as Gleb Uspenskii’s nineteenth-century sketches and a 1930s film adaptation of a Chekhov story, are given significant space. In accordance with the principles established, it is the very marginality of these ‘minor’ texts which reveals the tensions underlying the cultural norms within whose sphere they were generated (late tsarist aesthetics, socialist realism), and the revelation of whose significance depends upon the application of models developed with twenty-first-century hindsight.

4

Introduction

Underpinning my rejection of exclusively empirical models is a suspicion of their positivist foundations. Belief in the possibility of value-neutral tools capable of extracting stable knowledge from fixed objects of scrutiny is substituted by a commitment to a notional dialectic of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of knowledge, recalling post-positivist approaches to physics which recognize the influence of the scientist’s instruments of measure on the matter being measured. This does not mean that there is no onus on me to persuade readers of the validity of my arguments. But rather than empirical ‘proof’ I would prefer, as in Richard Sennett’s account of qualitative research, to aim for ‘plausibility’ by ‘showing the logical connections among phenomena’, in light of the textual features that I adduce (Sennett 2002: 43).8 Moreover, operating in the realm of cultural meanings, we cannot avoid mention of human intentionality. To reconstruct generalities by ‘averaging out’ over a corpus of texts does not offer access to these intentionalities, nor the meanings they articulate. Meaning in this sense has to do not with impersonal aggregation but with what Bakhtin characterizes as context-bound encounters of a multiplicity of discourses involving re-accentuations of ‘alien words’ (images) which presuppose a non-empirical relationship between particular and general.9 In the neo-Hegelian terminology of Slavoj ¯i¿ek: ‘[P]articular examples struggl[e] with universality, displac[e] it in a specific way, and the great art of dialectical analysis consists in being able to pick out the exceptional singular case which allows us to formulate the universality “as such” ’ (¯i¿ek 2001: 26). We are dealing not with ‘representative examples’ but with ‘generalized particularities’ in ¯i¿ek’s sense. There is, thus, every justification for focusing on occasion on the peripheral exceptions without whose ‘structural necessity’, the generalized ‘domain of rules’ would collapse (¯i¿ek 2001: 25).

The word/image divide: from eidos to the figural Why subsume my project within the broader problematic of word and image? In one sense the answer is obvious: Russian literature’s dialogue with the camera is a subset of the larger relationship and to understand the principles driving the latter will furnish insights into the workings of the former. But there is another reason. For if we are interested in the literature–camera interface as a generator of meaning, then we cannot ignore the fact that meaning itself has a word–image aspect to it. At its roots, if something means, then it transcends inanimate nature to embrace the abstract properties of consciousness and the word. As Russian philosopher Aleksei Losev puts it: ‘The entire physical world … is a word, for it … is something that submits to comprehension’ (Losev 1990: 66). But since abstract essences are of a different order to nature, they are liable to become divorced from it and thus cease to function as its meaning. Alert to this danger, Losev posits a reciprocity of nature and essence whereby the former exists only as the ‘other’ of the latter, as ‘otherness’ itself, whilst the

Introduction

5

latter (essence) can only realize itself in that otherness as a dialectical synthesis of (individuating) difference and (universalizing) identity. This synthesis is given the name of eidos, familiar from Platonic philosophy which identified eikon (likeness) as the sensible, singular impression of the suprasensible eidos, and logos as its abstract, generalized description (Peters 1967).10 Thus, image and word are the obverse of one another in the aftermath of the ‘fall’ from eidetic unity. Ancient thought was driven by a striving to come to reconcile this disjunction. For Plotinus, imitation becomes the basis of the relationship between logical ideas and their iconic representations: That which is sympathetic to [the World Soul] is what imitates it in some way, like a mirror able to catch a form. Yes, the nature of the All, too, made all things skilfully in imitation of the realities of which it had the rational principle. (Plotinus 1984: 32) But imitation presupposes a reification aimed at abstracting an idea’s key attributes and replicating it, and thus ultimately reinforcing the disjunction between word and image. For this reason, the ‘likeness as imitation’ notion which held sway over Western civilization throughout modernity is linked with the dualisms of subject and object, spirit and body, and with the differentiation between ‘natural’ signs which represent their object through mimesis and ‘conventional’ signs which do so through human concordat. The split is conveyed in the etymology of the term ‘representation’ which on one hand refers to the re-presenting of the world in all its sensuous contingency, and on the other hand to the rendering of that world through arbitrary signs representative of it in general.11 Ironically, however, whilst (even because) the conventional word has retained epistemological precedence over the iconic image, the ‘natural’, embodied realm of vision has long served as the locus of aesthetic and moral value. In the mid-nineteenth century, John Ruskin posited ‘the innocent eye’ of painting as the instrument of a superior knowledge grounded in the external senses rather than the inner abstractions of the intellect. The notion of a spatio-temporal world ‘out there’, detached from the seat of the perceiving consciousness and alienated from the medium of words, is traceable to Alberti’s ‘discovery’ of linear perspective in 1435. But in presupposing a single point in space from which to depict the world, linear perspective is, as Erwin Panofsky recognized, itself a ‘systematic abstraction from the structure of … psychophysiological space’ that has little to do with the bodily senses (Panofsky 1991: 3). Equally, language’s claim to be able to refer to non-optical areas of experience rests on a notion of ‘envisionment’ with imagery at its heart. For Michel Foucault, meanwhile, the very concreteness we associate with vision is itself dependent on language:

6

Introduction It is as if the role of language were, by duplicating what is visible, to make it evident and thus to show that in order to be seen it needs to be repeated in language; words alone root the visible in the concrete … [B]etween what is hidden within the evident and what is luminous in the inaccessible the task of language is to be found. (Foucault 1987: 119–20)

Implicit in this study is the principle that, whilst they remain irreducible to, and unintegrated with, each other, word and image exist not as irreconcilable antinomies, but in co-dependency, with word as the hidden ‘other’, even the Derridean supplement, of image and vice versa.12 The post-eidetic interpenetration of word and image is not enacted in the socio-historical vacuum of the aesthetic tradition of ut pictura poesis which, in dubbing painting ‘dumb poetry’ and poetry ‘speaking painting’, is no more than a conceit aimed at fixing the ‘sister arts’ in cosy mutuality.13 Commenting in opposition to this tradition on the shifting relationship between the categories, W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that ‘the history of culture is the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming … certain proprietary rights on a nature to which only it has access’, and that the ‘word–image threshold’ acts as the site of a culture’s ‘fundamental conflicts and tensions’ (Mitchell 1987: 44). Iurii Lotman, meanwhile, highlights the heterogeneous nature of all representation, the universal importance of the ‘word–picture boundary’, the association of the creativity of meaning-production per se with ‘the transfer of one semiotic sphere into the other’ (Lotman 1990: 62). Mitchell acknowledges that the text–image paradigm juxtaposes fundamental values, ‘text’ connoting time, abstraction and difference, ‘image’ evoking space, immediacy and identity, stressing the significance of the point at which these fundamentals are brought into conflict, but cautioning against the essentialist idea of a pitched battle for referential authenticity in which the values in question are permanently ‘reified’. He recognizes that verbal and visual texts can never be mutually subsumed, but rather that both syncretically combine word and image in varying conflictual patterns whose precise configuration depends on the disposition of societal forces (Mitchell 1987, 44). Thus the balance of power between word and image in nineteenthcentury novels and in photography is a function of the demand for new forms of communication and the rise of mass markets. The arrival of photography must be treated alongside the growth of mass-circulation newspapers, together with their effect on the fiction market. Meanwhile, the association of Western media imagery with global abstraction and of native literary tradition with ‘sensuous’ national identity provides an instance of the verbal laying claim to the territory of the visual, indicating how the word–image clash installs itself at the heart of intercultural communication. If the balance of power between the opposing terms shifts according to context, then so too does the form in which they are embodied. The examples

Introduction

7

just cited involve reproducible photographic images rather than paintings. For Walter Benjamin, the capacity for infinite reproduction defines the camera, since it destroys the ‘aura of authenticity’ commanded by the painterly image, severing its ties with tradition and ritual. Benjamin links this process with a diminution in the sense of reality as unique and permanent (Benjamin 1999: 74–5).14 Photography thus undermines the image’s association with concrete, natural vision, aligning it with the disembodied word. But this is to ignore photography’s ‘indexical’ ties to its object.15 As Susan Sontag argues: ‘The force of photographic images comes from their being … richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them, potent means for turning the tables on reality – for turning it into a shadow’ (Sontag 1999: 93). So, camera images replicate from within the original dichotomy of (abstract) word and (concrete) image. Moreover, photographic reproduction enables the image to detach itself from its context and partake in projects driven by ideological or commercial agenda, balancing its links to objectivity with a capacity for the subjectivism normally considered the province of the word. Sontag historicizes this ambiguity by showing how it undergirds modern capitalism: A capitalist society … needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthatize the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources … The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs. (Sontag 1999, 92–3) We should likewise problematize the ‘essential’ values of the word. Modern fiction, for example, is a form of verbal discourse conditioned by writers’ awareness that they are dealing as never before with mass audiences, with the fact that ‘literature has come finally to be defined as … a mediation in which both what is mediated and the agents of mediation have become infinitely problematic’ (Chambers 1984: 12). On the other hand, even now, verbal discourse (the handwritten letter, the oral anecdote, lyric poetry) can align itself with sensuous intimacy, and against alienating, mass-reproduced imagery. Moreover, the category of fiction is not restricted to verbal forms, nor defined by narrative. Images engage in the same fraught relationship with the truth as literature; narrative is as inherent to film as to the novel. Nor is storytelling necessarily fictional; historical discourse, too, constructs narratives rather than merely recounting events. Film further complicates the situation. Apart from undermining narrativity as a marker of verbal discourse, it subverts the link between the camera and the eye by tilting perceptions towards artifice and fantasy. As Benjamin observes, ‘With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion movement is extended … a different nature opens itself – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously

8 Introduction explored by man’ (Benjamin 1999: 78). The arrival of more thoroughly audiovisual forms such as television, meanwhile, epitomizes what D. N. Rodowick calls ‘the figural’, a term he associates with the dismantling by the electronic media of the modern era’s ‘strict separation between plastic space which requires representation, and linguistic reference, which excludes it’ (Rodowick 2001: xii). He defines it as ‘a semiotic regime’ where linguistic discourse crosses the border and enters the spatial realm of things and representations, whilst the independent weight of things congeals into abstract signs that ‘proliferate anonymously in everyday life’ (Rodowick 2001: 65).16 In the figural, then, we discern a kind of post-lapsarian eidos, a recombination of word and image in which, rather than combine into an integral whole, the categories co-exist in a state of uneasy tension.

Theoretical framework: border, ekphrasis and metatext The fact that the categories of word and image interpenetrate according to historical context renders the theoretical paradigm they form capable of mediating between the extremes of formal analysis based on properties deemed inherent to the novel, or to film, and a content-based analysis founded on the socio-historical factors surrounding the camera’s encounter with literature. For whilst it recognizes the coalescence of particular values around notions of word and image taken in isolation, it also accounts for wider concerns, since the intersection of those sets of values provides a microcosm of the problem faced by the powerful: that of how to naturalize the ideological abstractions in which their power is grounded.17 Russian cultural history demonstrates this axiom well. The very origins of the Russian state lie in Prince Vladimir’s fateful decision in 988 to align the newly founded Rus’ with Eastern Byzantine Christianity, based on what he perceived as the mystic beauty of the Orthodox liturgical ritual in which the idea of the new nation was to be embodied. Later, Peter the Great’s mission to re-orient Russia towards the West was commemorated in the building of St Petersburg, which represented the supreme instance of ideological word cast as marble image. Lenin’s subsequent efforts to complete this mission were embodied in the unprecedented visual propaganda campaign aimed at initiating the illiterate masses into the subtleties of Marxist dogma. The collapse of the USSR was itself enacted at the intersection of the word–image axes; the rhetoric of glasnost (literally, ‘voiced-ness’) was one of the image rather than the word. Gorbachev himself employed the remarkable metaphor of glasnost as a form of ‘divine light’ (quoted in Mickiewicz 1997: 11).18 As the examples indicate, Mitchell’s notion of word–image thresholds as points of cultural tension fits the broader concept of borders as prime generators of meaning, the idea that meaning itself ‘lives on the boundary between its own context and another, alien context’ (Bakhtin 1981: 284). But it is the cultural border as word–image crossover point which remains my focus

Introduction

9

throughout. The nature of my topic requires a shift in emphasis through different media, and the form that the border takes will shift accordingly. Of persistent value, however, will be a series of variations on the concept of ekphrasis. Citing Homer’s verbal depiction of Achilles’ shield, W. J. T. Mitchell, Grant Scott and James Heffernan define the term as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (quoted in Wagner 1996, 10).19 In many cases of ekphrasis, however, the visual image is not ‘real’ but imaginary. For Mitchell, ‘all ekphrasis is notional and seeks to create a specific image that is to be found only in the text as its “resident alien” ’ (Mitchell 1994, 157). He is alluding to the idea that literature represents visual images only in as much as the challenge they pose to the verbal text’s mode of being must be subdued. In Peter Wagner’s words, ‘ekphrasis … stages a paradoxical performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image, even while attempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing it’ (Wagner 1996: 13). We might revise the definition of ekphrasis and posit it as involving verbal framings of pictures, where framing combines its formal meaning (the ‘pictures’ are surrounded by verbal text which constitute their limits) with the metaphorical meaning of framing as a ‘set up’ contrived to rebuff the claims implicit in pictorial images. By questioning the status of its ‘resident alien’, ekphrastic literature is linked with those metatextual moments when a text takes stock of its own truth-claims and structures. Since all representational fiction (all fiction claiming verbally to render a visible world) follow ekphrastic principles, ekphrases proper are essentially mise en abime structures enabling narrative to foreground its own representational activity. Ekphrasis and metatextuality are thus never far apart in the chapters that follow. A concept aimed at exposing a text’s sense of its own boundaries is, incidentally, particularly appropriate to the Russian literary tradition which has always engaged in frame-breaking activity, existing on, and dissolving, the boundaries between fiction and politics, poetry and ethics, narrative and journalistic polemic (Morson 1991: 379–94).20 Because early photography itself perched at the intersections of high art and mass entertainment, science and journalism, ekphrastic representations of photography offer a highly nuanced method of exploring the import of Russian literature’s frame-breaking mode. We also need to account for texts in which, rather than transcoding visual sign systems into verbal, the two systems co-exist side by side. Wagner refers to such composite works as ‘iconotexts’ (Wagner 1996: 16). Examples include paintings incorporating, and thus spatializing, written text, and verbal texts punctuated by images ‘temporalized’ as narrative sequences. The issues at stake overlap with those raised by pure, literary ekphrasis, without necessarily coinciding with them. Further along the spectrum running from unadulterated verbal discourse to pure imagery, we must consider ‘reverse ekphrasis’: visual renditions of verbal texts. A prime example is the film adaptation, until recently treated as a reflection of cinema’s continuing urge to ape its ‘high cultural’ cousin, and thus of little interest to film purists. For our purposes,

10

Introduction

however, it embodies a crucial form of word–image liminality. Soviet society attached immense importance to the Russian literary tradition whose heritage served to ground communism in national culture. According to Lenin, film, ‘the most important of all the arts’, was the key tool with which that ideology was promulgated. The adaptation is the very point at which ‘alien’ ideology and ‘indigenous’ national heritage confront one another. Finally, turning to ‘post-literate’ word–image liminality, we must account for the diffusion of literary values within audiovisual culture. Whilst the supremacy of the Russian Word may have given way to the insidious influence of Western-dominated television, the latter remains riddled with diverse ‘literary modalities’, as I term them, which enter into productive tension with the sea of audiovisual signals in which they are embedded, helping to negotiate post-Soviet national identity through the Scylla of a tainted communist past and the Charybdis of a hegemonistic Western present.

And the word became flesh: structure of the argument The three parts of this study trace a progression (from photography within literature, to literature as film, to literature within television) ostensibly commensurate with the idea of literature’s slow capitulation to the camera image. However, film’s predominance as a tool of ideological persuasion and television’s superior popular appeal do not reduce literature’s capacity for generating cultural meaning which, rather than residing within particular media, depends in our model on intermedia encounters. This notion of word–image thresholds as key semiotic producers must be supplemented by reference to theoretical terms specific to the medium under scrutiny. In Part I, for example, the concept of ekphrasis is supported by ideas drawn from narratology. In Part II, theories of cinematic temporality and viewpoint are required to explicate the relationship between present and past specific to the film adaptation, and the difficulties film experiences in concretizing authorial presence, respectively. The discussion in Part III is informed by current thinking on globalization’s effects on national identity, and by television genre theory. Part I comprises three chapters focusing chiefly on ekphrastic renderings of photographic images, though it also features examples of texts in which photographs are key narrative components. My interest is less in literature as a passive reflection of photography than in how it translated photographic epistemologies into new structures of literary meaning. The photographic ekphrases frequently interact with descriptions of paintings, forming a nexus (photography–fiction–painting) which deepens their metatextual function. I begin in Chapter 1 by showing, via an analysis of Gogol’s ‘The Portrait’, how the proliferation of images inspired by mechanical reproduction technology was inflected within incipient Russian realism’s narrative strategies. The centrepiece of the chapter is an analysis of The Idiot, which, for reasons that will become apparent, provides the monograph with its guiding leitmotif.

Introduction

11

Here, I relate Dostoevskii’s exploitation of the camera’s association with infinite replication to his awareness of the decline of romantic concepts of vision and originality. As technology improved, photography began to support the documenting of social types which, refracted through Russian fiction, contribute to the interrogation of the notion of generic essence. Meanwhile, the diffusion of photography throughout the upper echelons of Russian society lends to interpersonal relations an increasingly mediated quality. These trends find their clearest literary expression in Turgenev’s novels which, I contend, confirm Russian realism’s indebtedness to the camera. Chapter 2 begins with Tolstoy, for whom the camera’s assault on generic essence serves as the springboard for a commentary on human alienation which runs counter to the tendency in nineteenth-century aesthetics to equate the camera with ‘scientific objectivity’. I investigate the alienation effect in a reading of photographic ekphrases in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s ambivalence towards the camera is, I argue, shared by Chekhov. Whilst objecting to its falsification of human relations and its reifying epistemology, Chekhov, along with Gleb Uspenskii, explores the democratizing potential harboured within its counter-aesthetic stance. I discuss these features in the context of the popularity of the photographic visiting card (vizitochka). Finally, I show, through readings of stories by Garshin, Sologub and Bunin, how early Russian modernism projects realist responses to photography onto the plane of individual consciousness, revealing an unstable subjectivity, discontinuous with itself. In Chapter 3, I trace Russian modernism’s dialogue with the camera into the revolutionary era, selecting Maiakovskii’s and Rodchenko’s iconotext, Pro eto (About That), as my case study. I suggest that the democratic impulses and indexical relationship with reality intrinsic to photography lent it to the revolutionary ideal: the creation of a radical new material culture. Yet its prominence in revolutionary society exacerbates the contradiction according to which literature’s lyric ‘I’ seeks refuge from the proliferating public sphere fostered by the impersonal camera ‘eye’, while acknowledging that sphere as the ground for its existence. I discuss these phenomena in the context of Maiakovskii’s intermedia dialogue with Rodchenko, his concern with mortality, and his approach to metaphor. Maiakovskii’s sensitivity to the mediated self leads us in Part II to four chapters concentrating on the literature–film interface in the context of Soviet efforts to manufacture an official sphere. Chapters 4 and 5 analyse the role of the reverse ekphrasis – the screen adaptation – in consolidating the socialist realist culture with which that sphere became synonymous. Chapter 4 shows how the Soviet ekranizatsiia exploits the divide between Soviet cinema’s centripetal tendency (a function of its proximity to the locus of power) and its centrifugalism (its reliance on photography’s contingent ties to its material context). In the case of classics set at the margins of the Soviet empire, this works to official discourse’s advantage: a Russian literary

12

Introduction

canon can be imposed onto the ethnic peripheries, which in turn celebrate their now universal visibility. In the 1934 version of Furmanov’s Chapaev, however, photographic contingency, together with film’s subjective identification mechanisms and difficulties in dealing with imperfective narration, conspire to undermine authorial assertions of party-mindedness over the spontaneity of the wayward hero. Chapter 5 further pursues the contradictions noted in Chapaev. An adaptation of Gorkii’s autobiographical trilogy attempts to synthesize cinematic subjectivity with official third-person discourse by superimposing onto the narrative anonymous, aerial perspectives and impersonal intertitles. The resulting tension, I contend, undermines the position of the Stalinist viewer who, whilst identifying with the hero’s objectifying viewpoint, is himself constructed as the object of an authoritarian state. A second conflict of a temporal nature emerges between the need for the ekranizatsiia to situate socialist realism in authentic literary tradition, and its status as a selfdeclared product of its time required to assert difference between word and image. In an adaptation of Treasure Island, the act of transformation is celebrated through the rendition of Stevenson’s text as a Marxist musical comedy. This metatextual gesture is mirrored within the ekranizatsiia as a genre through its growing autonomy from the literary canon to which it is nominally subordinate.21 Chapter 6 examines the mutation of the metatextual word–image disjunction during the post-Stalin period from a means of bolstering official culture into a tool of subversion permitting cinema to expand the official canon into taboo areas and turn a critical eye to socialist realism. I focus on a version of Ostrovskii’s How the Steel was Tempered whose ambivalent position ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the public myth of Ostrovskii’s hero is structured into the narrative through a self-conscious, dual ending. The genre’s exploitation of temporal disjunction, meanwhile, attains its apotheosis in adaptations of nineteenthcentury classics where the distance between the point of cinematic narration and the narrated past fosters nostalgia for the lost values of that past, and in covert allegorization strategies projecting the excesses of the (literary) past back onto the Soviet (cinematic) present. I close with a brief account of Tarkovskii’s The Sacrifice where, paradoxically, cinematic autonomy is utilized to venerate Russian literature’s identification with the Word, as Tarkovskii articulates a pure cinematic vision inspired by Dostoevskii. Chapter 7 concludes my account of the unravelling of the Soviet official sphere with an analysis of the artistic persona of Vladimir Vysotskii. I connect the unofficial star’s intermedia peregrinations between word and screen with the failure of late Soviet attempts to control the demarcation of literary culture. The chapter centres on an analysis of Vysotskii’s role in a screen version of Pushkin’s tale of the return to Russia from Paris of his black ancestor, Hannibal. I discuss how the role incorporates into its working out of the word–image clash issues of cultural marginality and of Russia’s ambiguous relationship with the West.

Introduction

13

Part III treats literature’s subliminal influence on television culture in the framework of ways in which Russian television’s assimilation of Western genres to its own cultural paradigms has affected the development of a postSoviet identity. Informed by notions of intercultural dialogue, Chapter 8 argues that Russia’s dominant literary culture provides a ‘translation code’ for its reception of new televisual forms, shaping its conceptions of ‘Western-ness’ and ‘New Russian-ness’. Chapter 9 returns us to fiction proper via a discussion of how ekphrastic representations of television adverts in Viktor Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’ enable the novel to ‘frame’ and thus achieves metatextual distance from the mass, commodity culture to which, as Pelevin recognizes, it is party. Drawing on postmodernist theory, and highlighting the novel’s eschatological intertexts, I suggest that, by locking Russian literature’s messianic mission in ambivalent embrace with both the Soviet past and the commodified image, Pelevin deconstructs the former’s utopianism and the latter’s meaning-negating logic, carving out space for the re-installation of a post-Soviet Russian Word which transcends its newly confirmed state of subordination to its Western other. Generation ‘P’ thus brings to a head the issues at stake in the monograph’s three main aims as stated at the outset: the response of Russia’s unique literary culture to the fate of meaning in the age of infinite reproduction; its descent into, and emergence from, totalitarianism as a function of the ever-expanding reach of the visual regime installed by the camera media; the impact of the shifting interface between literature and the photographic image on developments in Russian attitudes to the West.

Part I

The photographic word

1

Russian realism and the camera Out from under Gogol’s ‘Portrait’

The mass-reproducible image enters the Russian literary stage In Gogol’s tale, ‘The Portrait’, the unfortunate hero, Chartkov, places a newspaper advertisement for his art studio after buying a painting of a moneylender which has miraculously enhanced his own artistic powers: We make haste to delight the inhabitants of our city with an acquisition marvellous in every respect. You agree that we have many beautiful physiognomies, but up till now there has been no way of transferring them onto a magical canvas so as to be handed down the generations. Now that gap has been filled … Hurry, hurry … you will not know what to marvel at most – the faithful likeness to the original, or the unusual brightness and freshness. (Gogol 1962: 511) Earlier, the narrator has boasted that because ‘the nineteenth century has … significantly surpassed the old masters of painting … the imitation of nature has now become brighter, livelier, clearer’ (500). Whilst these references are uncannily reminiscent of early depictions of photography, such as those of Edgar Allen Poe, they actually relate to the demonic qualities of a painting which wreaks havoc, and ultimately death, on its owners.1 It is no coincidence, however, that in 1845 Gogol appeared in the first Russian group photograph of whose existence we know, along with seventeen other painters and writers (Barchatova et al., 1990: 8). Nor is it mere chance that 1841, the year before ‘The Portrait’ was revised for publication in Gogol’s Collected Works (the story was first published in 1835), is associated with the discovery of chemicals allowing the fast processing of photographic images on paper.2 In fact, the ability mechanically to reproduce lifelike copies from nature in great quantity had existed from 1800 in the form of lithography.3 Photography, well known in Russia by the time Gogol published the revised edition of ‘The Portrait’, was initially restricted to the daguerreotype method, capable of remarkably fine detail, but existing only in the single copy on metal-coated glass.4

18

The photographic word

Gogol is an early figurehead of the Russian literary canon. The tradition inaugurated by Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol, and canonized by Belinskii, rapidly established literature as the guiding moral force in Russian society, securing its profoundly logocentric reputation.5 The realist novel which first brought Russian literature to the world’s attention developed in the shadow of the mass-reproducible image, and of incipient globalization. The two chapters making up Part I explore the implications of the convergence of a newly emergent national literature and a set of technological innovations which had photography at their heart. The reference point for each stage of my investigation will be photographic ekphrases within specific fictional texts. When exploring the meanings that arise from these word–image encounters I shall take it as axiomatic that such encounters act as the site of some of nineteenth-century Russian culture’s fundamental tensions. In Chapter 1 these tensions range from changes in notions of originality, the knowability of generic essences, the purity of vision and the extensivity of space and time, to contradictions resulting from conflations of the public and private spheres, and the increasingly mediated quality of human relations. In Chapter 2 I explore the interactions between these themes and a new cluster of conflicts attributable to the Russian imperial mission, the mismatch between the reifying aspects of camera technology and its vast democratizing potential(s), the struggle between traditional high art and mass culture, and the growing sense of the fragmentation of the self and of linear time. By examining photography’s incorporation into fiction’s network of meanings, at a time when camera technology is striving to make its presence felt within both aesthetic and scientific arenas, we learn much about how literature conceives of itself as a representational form. Even when it is not explicitly invoked for this purpose, the camera image served as literary fiction’s hidden ‘other’ – its desired ideal, yet also its despised nemesis. For this reason, many of the ekphrases metatextualize the surrounding literary narratives in which they are embedded. The moment of their embedding foregrounds the work’s sense of its place within the aesthetic and cultural categories to which photography is attempting to gain admittance, its representational remit as compared with that of other media, and the contract between writer and reader which legitimates it. Until the emergence of photography, literature’s visual other was provided by painting. With its indexic link to reality and its mass reproducibility, the photograph differs from painting as much as it resembles it and it is no coincidence that our key ekphrases are frequently juxtaposed with descriptions of paintings. On occasion I investigate a three-way relationship involving photography, literature and painting. My focus on this nexus enables me to reject the notion that literature engages in unmediated reflection of an outside world and to avoid confining the metatextual moments within a sealed aesthetic world permanently detached from the society in which the fictions were produced.

Russian realism and the camera 19 Each chapter contains extended analysis of works in which photographs play the role of more than authenticating background detail. The supreme illustration of a nineteenth-century novel in which issues surrounding the camera image are foregrounded is Dostoevskii’s The Idiot, the novel in which Dostoevskii established the link between God’s Word (Slovo) and the literary word (slovo).6 The word–image tensions I treat come to a head in The Idiot, which, along with the work of another writer sensitive to the social context in which photography emerged, Turgenev, forms the centrepiece of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 focuses on Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gleb Uspenskii, then touches upon the early modernism of Garshin, Sologub and Bunin. The yearning for a means of copying things in mass quantities, separating them from both their makers and their originals and circulating them ad infinitum, is indissociable from the rise of what Marx calls the commodity fetish. Marx, who himself attacked the deleterious tendency of photographs to prevent us from seeing objects in their wholeness, connects this process with the move from the gold to the paper standard in international markets in the early nineteenth century.7 Drawing on Marxist theory, Gisele Freund points out that photography’s arrival was preceded by the rise of the European middle classes for whom everything, including the portraits by which they visually affirmed their status, had to be produced in ever greater quantities.8 Thus, photography was anticipated not only by lithography, but by silhouette techniques in the eighteenth century when the bourgeoisie was coming into its own. Historians note that, despite economic backwardness and autocratic rule, ‘a clearly articulated industrial capitalism was in evidence [in Russia] by the 1820s and 30s’ (Blackwell 1982: 21), a capitalism which included ‘the formation of an all-Russian market, the beginnings of international commerce … and the use of wage labour in industrial activities’ (Fuhrmann 1972: 258), and that, ‘as early as the end of the eighteenth century, most of Central and North European Russia … became consuming regions’ (Baykov 1974: 9). Indeed, in Virgin Soil, Ivan Turgenev confirms that the silhouette fad reached Russia when he writes of one country mansion: ‘The eighteenth century met the visitor in the hallway in the form of little screens convered in cut-out silhouettes of powdered ladies … Silhouettes were the height of fashion in the 1780s in Russia’ (Turgenev 1954: IV, 311). It is no surprise, then, that the linking of the mass-produced image with commodity capitalism should find an echo in Gogol. ‘The Portrait’ opens with a description of the mass of cheap paintings amongst which Chartkov finds the image which sets him on his fateful path. At the beginning of Part Two, the portrait makes its return years after Chartkov’s unfortunate demise, once again amidst ‘a mass of pictures laid out anyhow’ at an auction (Gogol 1962: 528). The image of the old moneylender, himself capable of making money increase ‘by immeasurable percentages of growth’ (532), cannot, it seems, be prevented from being passed on ad infinitum, removed from its devilish original, forever accumulating in value. It is given ‘an incredible

20 The photographic word price’ (527) at the auction, in contrast with the pennies Chartkov paid for it. It confers wealth on Chartkov when he learns the secret of copying nature in great quantities and people were amazed at ‘how quickly his pictures were produced’ (520). But it also confers a terrifying madness which turns people into images of themselves. On the point of death, Chartkov imagines everyone around him as ‘[t]errible portraits’ which ‘looked down from the ceiling, from the floor and the room expanded to infinity to contain all these motionless eyes’ (527).9 Thus, the very structure of the story imitates its own object – the infinite circulation, proliferation and pecuniary inflation of reproducible images abstracted from their originals. Significantly, Gogol’s reader has to wait until well into Part Two before the terrible portrait is connected with its original – the old moneylender. At the end, when the cycle of destruction seems finally to have been broken and, as we learn from his narrative within a narrative, the artist’s son has rediscovered the portrait that he has sought to eradicate, we suddenly learn that the painting has been spirited away to resume its cycle whilst the artist’s son, his eager listeners (and we readers) have been distracted by his (by Gogol’s) narrative: ‘Taking advantage of the concentration of the listeners, carried away by the story, someone had already managed to spirit it away’ (545). The narrative of the portrait is destined, likewise, to be endlessly retold as, in its endless circulation, it incorporates ever more incredible sequences of wealth-acquisition followed by catastrophe and death. Gogol’s fantastic realism made a major contribution to establishing Russia’s still new literary tradition on the path to international renown. In reference to the short story which cemented the writer’s status as the founder of the civic approach that became the cornerstone of Russian realism, Dostoevskii famously claimed that all the novelists who followed Gogol ‘came out from under [his] Overcoat’. In an insightful article, Anne Lounsberry shows how Gogol’s Dead Souls was written on the cusp of Russia’s new print culture which transformed the intimacy of the salon into the anonymous expanse of the modern reading public. In passing she mentions ‘The Portrait’ as a story in which Gogol responds to the new situation by anticipating his later dream of a work of genius accessible to an infinity of readers, one which ‘transforms the crowd’s … heterogeneity of opinion into a single mute paean’ (Lounsberry 2001: 380). Lounsberry draws no distinction between verbal and visual art. Yet when Chartkov’s portrait is spirited away, Gogol’s fantastic realism (his ‘Portrait’ is replete with naturalistic detail, yet situated squarely within the supernatural) expresses awareness of the symbiosis linking print culture to the artificial reproduction of images. For this is the point at which the ekphrastic meeting of word and reproducible image which is ‘The Portrait’ comes to a head, when the narrative ceases to try to contain the growing alienation of creator from consumer embodied in the proliferation of images, and instead itself accedes to that process.

Russian realism and the camera 21 The attributes of Gogol’s central image are those which perturbed viewers of the earliest daguerreotypes, like Balzac who suggested that each photograph stole an external layer of reality from its original.10 It is the same sense of the threat to man’s physical being posed by the daguerreotype, its exceeding of the rules of artistic representation, which characterizes Gogol’s supernatural portrait: ‘This was not art … These were live human eyes … pasted onto canvas. … This was not a copy from nature, this was that strange glow of life with which the face of a dead man rising from the tomb would be illuminated’ (501–2). The photographically exact image’s affinity with the devil is, Gogol surmises, directly related to its demonic aping of nature’s surfaces which makes it akin to death; Orthodox thought often pictures the devil as ‘God’s ape’. Photography’s inherent demonism drew the interest of other writers of the fantastic, including Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose prose, like Gogol’s, exhibits both naturalistic and supernatural proclivities. Far from constituting a paradox, the simultaneous presence of naturalistic and fantastic qualities within the Gogol–Dostoevskii line in Russian realism flows from the fact that, from the outset, it developed in the shadow of the technological revolution marked by the invention of the camera; the photographic image is fantastic because it copies reality in microscopically accurate detail, the more so if, as Gogol intimated, and as the postdaguerreotype period confirmed, those copies can be infinitely reproduced. In the years following ‘The Portrait’, the daguerreotype rapidly infiltrated Russian literary consciousness. In 1843, the journal Otechestvennye zapiski commented on the photographic portraits of a daguerreotypist called Grekov, and the following year Biblioteka dlia chteniia rebutted criticism of the photographic pioneer Fox Talbot (Elliott 1991: 34–5). It made its first entry onto the Russian literary stage in the form of a comic farce by the minor dramatist Vladimir Sollogub called The Daguerreotype. Or Familiar Faces (Dagerrotyp. Ili znakomye litsa) (1855). The play’s hero, Apollon Azotin, owns the photographic studio where the action is set. The play satirizes the long exposure times required by early photography (sitters sneeze at the last moment, necessitating multiple sittings for just one image), and the unrealistic expectations placed upon it by the public: ‘Don’t do me as I am now, but as I looked before’, requests one of Azotin’s female customers (Sollogub 1855: 73). It portrays the daguerreotypist’s studio as a focus for social interaction. At one point Azotin boasts: ‘Everyone can come to my studio’ (91). More importantly, it reveals the link between photography’s ability to generate exact likenesses, and its capacity, through the spread of such surrogates, to mediate human relations through a vicarious form of social intimacy. The plot revolves around the machinations of an adulterous husband and wife, both of whom are exposed as having secretly ordered daguerreotypes of their respective lovers when they meet accidentally at the studio. Through its title (‘The Daguerreotype or Familiar Faces’) the play posits the photograph

22 The photographic word as a metaphor for the misleading semblance of universal familiarity that it brings with it. It also furnishes an early hint of photography’s potential use to the law enforcement branch of the tsarist regime as a surveillance tool; on discovering her husband’s secret portrait, the wife triumphantly announces: ‘This daguerreotype will incriminate you. Show it to me!’ (109).11 Unfortunately for her, however, the husband exploits the poor fixing techniques characteristic of early photography and wipes the image from the glass plate before his wife can see it. The impermanence of daguerreotype images was, as we shall see, to provide one of Russia’s literary giants with a powerful metaphor for impermanence of another kind. By the 1850s there were several hundred daguerreotypists in Russia, many from western Europe operating on an itinerant basis. Photography was perceived in Russia as a Western import, which added to the negative connotations surrounding its presence in Russian fiction. These professional daguerreotypists travelled the country touting their skills in aristocratic estates, and amongst the newly emergent urban bourgeoisie. In Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment (1866), the sinister Svidrigailov, who aspires to emigrate to America, tells Raskolnikov that he regrets not becoming a specialist ‘like a landowner, or a photographer’ (Dostoevskii 1991: 542). Literary realism, itself linked to the rise of the middle classes, swiftly began to include the camera in the social background of its ever more domesticated plots, responding to it, and incorporating it into its representational codes. In Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the staid conservative, Pavel Petrovich, notes hanging on the walls in the room of the maid, Fenichka, with whom his brother, Nikolai Petrovich, has been having an affair, several ‘rather bad photographs of Nikolai Petrovich in various poses’ and ‘a completely unsuccessful photo of Fenichka herself – an eyeless face smiling forcibly in a dark frame’ done by a travelling daguerreotypist (Turgenev 1954, IV: 200). Through a semiotic doubling device endemic, as Lotman has argued, in realist art, these inferior photos simultaneously rebuff photography’s impudent claim to high art status and reinforce literature’s apparently superior capacity for representational authenticity; for the location of the ‘real’ Fenichka beyond the photographic frame – she appears immediately afterwards in person – legitimizes Turgenev’s account of her vivacious presence: ‘ “What is more charming than a beautiful young mother with a healthy child in her arms”, he enthuses, having described her now radiant face and plump figure’ (Turgenev 1954, IV: 200).12 Photography’s dialogue with nineteenth-century society intensified with the arrival of the collodion paper-based reproductive technique.13 Aided by other new reproduction technologies and by the emergence of a mass media, photography swiftly installed itself at the heart of literary fiction throughout Europe, including Russia. And no one in Russia was more ready to engage with these innovations than Fedor Dostoevskii.

Russian realism and the camera 23

Sighting/citing the end: eschatological vision and photography in The Idiot Dostoevskii, one of the first writers to become visually familiar to his readership through photographs, belonged unambiguously to the camera age. Yet his attitude to photography was far from unambiguous. His comments on the new medium often reveal hostility to the camera’s reductive technology. In his early novel, The Insulted and the Injured (Oskorblennye i unizhennye), the heroine, Katia, tells her rival, Natasha, on meeting her, that she has seen her photo and that ‘the original is much better than the copy’ (Dostoevskii 1956, 5: 397). In the later novel, The Adolescent (Podrostok), Dostoevskii writes: Photographic snapshots … rarely come out as good likenesses, and this is understandable: it is exceedingly rare for the original to be like itself. Only rarely does the human face express its essential feature. The artist devines this main thought … Whereas a photograph finds a man as he is. (Dostoevskii 1975b, 13: 370)14 Yet, at the same time, Dostoevskii could not help but be fascinated by photography’s uncanny powers of reproduction, which he likened to those of the very medium with which he so unfavourably contrasts it. Earlier in The Adolescent we find a reference to a snapshot capable of doing precisely what we are subsequently told snapshots cannot do: ‘The main thing which struck me in the photo was the unusual spiritual likeness … as if this were a real portrait and not a mechanical imprint’ (Dostoevskii 1975b, 13: 361). Moreover, the writer’s faith in the authenticity of painterly representations of reality received a shock from which it never recovered when he realized, on seeing Holbein’s sixteenth-century portrayal of the dead Christ in Geneva (see Plate 1), that this very authenticity, through its affinity with photographic reproduction, rendered the painterly image an embodiment of the evil it is elsewhere invoked to counter. His wife recalls that he froze in horror before the Saviour’s swollen corpse: On his agitated face there was the frightened expression I often noted during the first moments of his epileptic fits … he could never forget the sensation he had experienced in the Basel museum in 1867: the figure of Christ taken from the cross, whose body already showed signs of decomposition, haunted him like a nightmare. In his notes to The Idiot … he returns again and again to this theme. (Quoted in Magarshack 1985: 7) The Idiot is Dostoevskii’s response to his Geneva experience, and to the angst inspired by his realization that the mutual contamination of opposing qualities in painting and photography carries disturbing implications for the way the modern world is envisaged and represented, and for the values it embraces.

24

The photographic word

Early in The Idiot, the hero is handed a photograph at the home of his hosts, the Epanchins. He gazes, transfixed, at the face – that of Nastasia Filippovna – which is to haunt him thereafter: ‘So this is Nastasia Filippovna!’ he said, looking at the portrait attentively … The portrait was indeed of an extraordinarily beautiful woman. She was photographed in a black silk dress … her eyes were dark and deep, her forehead pensive; her expression was passionate … ‘A remarkable face!’ replied the prince. … ‘Her face looks cheerful, but she has suffered a lot, hasn’t she? Her eyes show it … ’ (Dostoevskii 1975a: 56, 59) The face that captivates Myshkin is that of an absent person whom he is able to contemplate in unencumbered intimacy: ‘This blinding beauty was even unbearable – the beauty of that pale face, those almost hollow cheeks and burning eyes … The Prince gazed at it for a moment, looked round, hurriedly drew the portrait to his lips and kissed it’ (102). The photograph’s status as reproducible image allows it to be exchanged and disseminated in public, making it a focus for what Dostoevskii was, through his reliance on income from his writing, acutely aware are also objects of exchange – words. The portrait is tossed from Gania Ivolgin to the Prince, and to all the Epanchins in turn, in each case provoking animated conversation and serving as mediator of the characters’ interrelations. Indeed, Dostoevskii links the reproducible image, words and human characters through their shared status as objects of exchange. When Nastasia indicates her willingness to wed Gania in return for a large financial payment (an agreement she reneges on), she chooses to do so not verbally, but by sending him the photographic portrait: ‘Well there can be no more doubt about it’, complains Mrs Ivolgin. ‘She announced her decision by her portrait’ (120). Nastasia’s photographically actualized role as ‘hot topic’ of conversation in the plot echoes her role within the narration, providing one instance of what Michael Finke describes as the novel’s ‘many explicitly metapoetic moments’ (Finke 1995: 77). Shortly before her appearance in person, she is the subject of a narratorial digression describing her sordid relationship with the landowner, Totskii, and mirroring the conversation about her on the train bound for Russia with which the novel opens. As the story’s prime focus, the absent heroine mediates as exchange object between narrator and reader, and between the characters within the story. Her ghostly presence in the opening chapters is placed into relief by her dramatic appearance in the flesh at the Ivolgins, when the contrast between original image and mediating copy announces the novel’s overarching theme. For The Idiot is Dostoevskii’s paradoxical attempt to correct Holbein’s heresy and create a true artistic ‘imitation’ of the inimitable Christ, who is in turn a human image of the originary Logos. The paradox is reflected in Myshkin’s criticism of the very same Holbein canvas depicting

Russian realism and the camera 25 Christ, the sight of whose battered corpse is enough to undermine Christian faith. Significantly, the portrait is a copy of the original hanging above the door of a room in the house of Rogozhin, Nastasia Filippovna’s murderer (Dostoevskii 1975a: 419). Dostoevskii does not, however, dismiss the possibility of representing the divine Word in visual form. On the contrary, his verbal icon posits vision as the privileged form of perception, and painting as the model for such vision. Aside from the Holbein, the novel contains numerous references to paintings, real and imagined. Myshkin discusses how he would paint the execution of a condemned man, while Nastasia indulges in her own imaginary painting of Christ. Myshkin describes his first mystical experience in terms recalling a romantic landscape: High up on the top of a precipitous cliff there were the ruins of an old medieval castle; our little village was far below, hardly visible; the sun shone brightly, the sky was blue and everything was still … I could not help feeling that if I went straight on I should reach the line where sky and earth meet … and at once discover a new life. (81–2) Unlike photography, unmediated artistic vision bears the stamp of originality. Whenever Nastasia appears in person she induces spellbinding silence – a complete absence of words – which contrasts with the idle chatter provoked by her photo, for visual presence is capable of exposing a person’s soul. The photographic image, as we recall from The Adolescent, reveals no more than superficial, mechanical resemblance. The power of artistic vision lies in its ability to penetrate beyond the banal transience of mass-produced surface to a lasting, unrepeatable essence epitomized by the solitary painting. At the end of The Devils (Besy), the sinister Stavrogin confesses how he dreams of a painting he saw in Dresden, out of which suddenly emerges Matriosha, the girl he has shamefully defiled. The image of the emaciated girl’s little raised fists is etched on his mind forever. This contrasts with a photograph he had earlier bought of an unknown girl also resembling Matriosha. Stavrogin carelessly places the photo on his mantelpiece and forgets about it, symbolizing both the brutally casual manner in which he treated the girl, and the ethical currents underlying the differences between painting and photography (Dostoevskii 1971: 694–5). However, in Dostoevskii’s world of ever changing, endlessly exchangeable images, painting cannot but be tainted by photography’s association with the ephemeral and the superficial. The mutual contamination produced a tension in attitudes to early photography which, in the posing of its subjects, was generally assimilated to painting (see Plate 2). This tension is expressed in Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s 1877 sketch praising a prominent Russian photographer, Karelin. Marvelling at improvements in depth of field facilitated by new advanced lenses,15 he comments that

26

The photographic word

Karelin’s images are so real that they look like paintings. In reference to a photo of a duke, Nemirovich-Danchenko enthuses: ‘The duke appears exactly as he would to our gaze … This is not a photograph but an artistic portrait with a complete correspondence in every detail’ (NemirovichDanchenko 1877: 34, 35).16 Likewise, Nastasia Filippovna’s photoportrait has the painterly power to make Myshkin’s heart overflow with ‘boundless pity’ (Dostoevskii 1975a: 362). Dostoevskii’s ambiguity towards the photographic image reflects its dual status as a mechanistic copy, and yet as a magical imprint of the real, which places it in the same paradigm as the icon and as Christ Himself, whose miraculously dual nature was first established in patristic theology.17 For Dostoevskii, none the less, it is painterly vision which portrays people in eternal mode, yielding knowledge of their end.18 The novel contains several images of the last seconds of people condemned to death. The first is Myshkin’s account of a conversation with a man who, like Dostoevskii, received a late reprieve from a death sentence. Myshkin recalls the man’s impressions of sunbeams during what he thought were his final moments: ‘He could not tear himself away from the rays … it seemed to him that these rays were his new nature, that in three minutes he would merge with them’ (83). Later, the prince gives a rambling account of a man about to be guillotined: ‘It was exactly a minute before death … that very moment when he climbs up onto the scaffold … the priest holds out a cross, and he extends his blue lips and gazes and knows everything’ (55–6). Crucially, this scene in which Myshkin sees the final hour of a man, who in turn sees mankind’s final hour, is not a completed painting but an idea for a painting mooted in conversation. Dostoevskii’s final images, it appears, are subject to both visual and verbal mediation. Sometimes, however, Myshkin is accorded direct experience of the end. When he sees Rogozhin raising a knife to strike him, he foresees the murderous act with which the novel ends. The insight’s visionary quality is confirmed by the ‘extraordinary inner light’ accompanying the epileptic fit which follows (252). Rogozhin’s murderous eyes piercing Myshkin’s soul from without are displaced by the blinding epileptic revelation that penetrates his soul from within. At that terrible moment Myshkin attains visual insight into the end and the new beginning – the crucifixion and the resurrection. But this, too, is an imperfect knowledge. For it is Nastasia whom Rogozhin eventually kills. The confusion duplicates that surrounding Myshkin’s own status: is he the Christ – the self-knowing, self-fulfilling end – or merely someone who sees someone who sees the end; i.e. is Nastasia Filippovna the true Christ, for it is she who envisions Christ’s sad, knowing face entwined with her own appalling destiny? In her account of the painting that she would paint of Christ’s final hours in Gesthemane she explains: ‘He looks into the distance; a thought as great as the entire world resides in his glance … his face is sad … The sun is setting. There’s my picture … I am soon to die’ (384). However, Nastasia’s picture, too, is an

Russian realism and the camera 27 indirect vision, an ekphrasis of a Christ that has yet to be realized as image. It is a double mediation. For we learn of Nastasia’s verbal fantasy from a letter read by the Prince, not the intended addressee. Again, Nastasia metatextualizes the dilemma faced by Dostoevskii, who must communicate a verbal imitation of the unique Christ image to his anonymous public. The consumptive, Ippolit Terent’ev, is another character with eschatological insight. His illness is terminal, causing him to talk of his ‘sentence’ (srok prigovora) (342). He too expatiates verbally on an image of Christ, offering a thorough critique of the Holbein copy. Ippolit’s criticism is identical to that of photography in The Adolescent, for it is based on a rejection of the idea of substituting ‘the main idea’ (Christ in risen form) with a depiction of ‘man as he is at the moment’ (Christ’s suffering body). The Holbein is, for Ippolit, a Western corruption of the Russian Logos, which, as the Prince claims, will save the world. In The Devils, which followed The Idiot, the opposition between corrupt, Western, mass-produced image and sacred Russian Word is made explicit when Liamshin, one of the revolutionaries against which the novel is directed, secretes into a gospel-seller’s bag pornographic photos from abroad which, when they scatter across the ground, cruelly scandalize the poor woman (Dostoevskii 1971: 525–36). Like his fellow eschatologists, Ippolit translates knowledge of death into an artistic image of a condemned man’s last moments, linking the concepts of mediation and copy with the terrifying formlessness of apocalypse. Thus, the final moment in Holbein’s Christ is not a New Beginning, but a ‘dark, eternal force without image’ which later appears to him in the form of a tarantula (Dostoevskii 1975a: 339–40). Yet Ippolit is himself no stranger to plagiarism. During his pre-death confession, he mocks the prince’s vision of eternity by asking whether it is available even to ‘this tiny fly buzzing around me now’. Later, Myshkin recalls that he had used those exact words in Switzerland and that ‘Ippolit had borrowed the little fly from his former words and tears’ (343, 352). Moreover, Dostoevskii ‘lifts’ the details of the fly from his own heroes, just as Myshkin is a verbal lifting of the original Christ. At the end of the novel, as Myshkin gapes at Nastasia Filippovna’s corpse, we are told that ‘suddenly a newly awakened fly began buzzing’ (610–11). The effect is to reinforce the link between copying and formlessness. There is a correlation between proneness to plagiarize and propensity to talk, just as there is a sliding scale from the silent Myshkin, through Ippolit, to the mendacious Lebedev. Lebedev’s key insight is that biblical references to the Wormwood star polluting the waters of life presage the starlike railway network destroying European civilization. Lebedev is an inveterate liar who recognizes the cited word as a word detached from its original object, and that ‘both words and lies consist in the devilish … thought of how to catch a man out’ (259). How, then, do we explain that Dostoevskii’s own opening scene describes a train journey symbolically presaging the end of civilization? How can Lebedev’s deceitful words convey Dostoevskii’s truthful images?

28

The photographic word

We should first note the tripling between 1856 and 1860 of the number of Russian periodicals.19 Dostoevskii’s novels are steeped in issues culled from the press, and in an awareness of how wide-circulation newspapers facilitate the mediation of human personality. His Diary of a Writer (Dnevnik pisatelia) is, as Deborah Martinsen argues, the first attempt by a Russian writer to orient himself towards a mass audience through the creation of a contemporary ‘Everyman’ persona (Martinsen 1997: 151). This, meanwhile, implies an interrogation of the concept of the original individual. The Idiot touches repeatedly on the originality, purported or actual, of its characters. Gania is described as a commonplace person who ‘wants to become original at any price’. Kolia is urged to ‘live by his own wits’ and is accused of quoting whole sentences out of periodicals. General Ivolgin concocts an entire anecdote copied from an article he has read in L’Indépendance (384, 328, 212, 94). The media’s constraint on originality is, for Dostoevskii, a contradictory phenomenon, for newspapers had become both the place where the original and bizarre are celebrated, and the reason for the copycat crimes which undermine that originality.20 He incorporates this contradiction into his novel. The passages describing Myshkin’s discovery of Nastasia’s body are remarkable for their macabre visual detail and for the fact that they are conveyed in unmediated third-person mode, rather than classic Dostoevskian skaz. They represent Dostoevskii’s own failed attempt to capture the end ‘in sight’, rather than in mediated talk. Yet Rogozhin’s murder (like Dostoevskii’s novel) is based on a press report depicting an identical crime. Rogozhin even plagiarizes the idea of placing bottles of disinfectant next to the body ‘like they did there, in Moscow’ (504). But, just as Nastasia Filippovna’s photograph is both mechanistic copy and vivid essence, so the media purveys the original and essential as well as the banal and demonic, for newspapers had permanently altered the boundaries between private and public, original and commonplace. In the press, horrendous crimes are gossiped about like the trivia of after-dinner conversation. Martinsen notes the popularity in the 1870s of literary forms clarifying the now murky relationship of self to outside world (Martinsen 1997: 152). What had been considered the property of the private individual was now the legitimate topic for public discourse. Events belonging to literary fantasy are shunted to the inside pages of the provincial rag. In this context Dostoevskii famously asked: ‘Is not my fantastic “Idiot” reality, and the most ordinary reality at that?’ While modern forms of communication account for the mediation of life and the fading of the magic of vision, they also generate a new means of according singular events the quality of universal essence. No sooner is a fantastic murder committed than, thanks to the provincial hack, it enters the drawing rooms of all and sundry. Dostoevskii structures entire plots around private curiosities projected into the public arena. The events leading to Rogozhin’s crime are strung together through a sequence of scandals in which the bizarre and intimate become the ‘talk of the town’. Typical is

Russian realism and the camera 29 Ippolit’s decision to read to an embarrassed audience his final testament, taken after flicking a coin and justified by the assertion that ‘tomorrow there will be time no longer’ and that it is to be published in a journal (318). Final knowledge is here bound up, not with searing vision, but with an explosive release of private words into the public arena. Events in the novel at large are similarly structured. Myshkin’s premonition that he will break a Chinese vase, realized as he becomes the object of ridicule from onlookers, is a microcosm of the Prince’s vision of the End realised in the murder of Nastasia Filippovna – a copy of Rogozhin’s crime, just as the crime is a copy of a newspaper event and of the biblical apocalypse which, like Lebedev, it cites incessantly. It reconfirms Dostoevskii’s fascination with the mediatory word’s capacity to thrust the intimate into the realm of public consumption, his realization that, in a world of reproducible images, the power of eschatological Vision evaporates. The novel’s eeriest moment comes with Nastasia Filippovna’s written premonition of her end at Rogozhin’s hands: ‘Those eyes … are always silent, but I know their secret. His house is gloomy and monotonous and in it there is a secret. I am sure that he has hidden there a razor wrapped in silk, just like the Moscow killer had … I would kill him from fear, but he will kill me first’ (380). Myshkin, into whose hands the letter passes, is the scandalized reader of Nastasia Filippovna’s private vision of the End, just as we are the scandalized audience for Dostoevskii’s novelistic vision. Dostoevskian narration is modelled on the gossipy tones of the scandalmonger who thrives on the thrill of publicizing the private and prurient. Dostoevskii’s Idiot is doubly mediated. He is a copy of the original Christ who can no longer be seen, and his story is the object of scandal for both Lebedev’s fictional grapevine and the readership of the journal in which the novel is published.21 Dostoevskii’s awareness of the significance of Myshkin’s fictional status emerges in Lebedev’s assertion that ‘every reality is improbable and untruth-like. And the more real, the more untruth-like’ (313). Fantasy and normality, fictional lies and journalistic facts, public and private, are mutually entwined in the world of photographic reproduction and anonymous verbal mediation. As Robert Louis Jackson notes, Dostoevskii regarded lying as the basis for art (Jackson 1978: 199–200).22 Thus, even liars like Lebedev are entrusted with citing The Idiot’s apocalyptic sources. The purity of unmediated vision is now possible only in the hallucinatory sickness of epilepsy.

Turgenev, photography and the slippage of generic type Dostoevskii inhabited realism’s margins. Whilst it did not hold the same morbid fascination for other Russian writers, photography was equally influential in shaping their approach to literary representation. To appreciate this we must recall the importance to early Russian realism, and to its chief promulgator, Belinskii, of the concept of ‘type’. Not long after Belinskii’s

30 The photographic word heyday in the eighteen-forties and fifties, the benefits of shorter exposure times made it easier to photograph groups of people in internal and external settings.23 This gave birth to ‘genre photography’ and the accumulation of portraits of social and ethnic types posed in their natural surroundings (see Plates 3 and 4).24 Initially Karelin used models dressed according to type rather than the real thing, laying bare the tension between type as fictional essence and type as everyday reality. But by 1872, The Russian Geographical Society was issuing detailed instructions as to how to photograph ethnic types in all their authenticity, calling for attention to ‘every single pose, books, household goods … paintings showing the use of any individual object … various paintings, scenes from public life and pets’ (quoted in Barchatova et al. 1990: 81). Such attention to detail was to have its own effect on vision in the modern world – an effect foregrounded in literary adaptations of this microscopic technique. That Russian photography was now acquiring a documentary aspect is suggested by the founding in 1858 of the first photographic society in Odessa. The 1860s saw the Scottish-Russian photographer Carrick’s portraits of street types rise to prominence. Photographic exhibitions held in the sixties and seventies documented the ethnography of Russia’s expanding empire. As early as 1855, in response to ethnographic expeditions taking place throughout Russia, V. Stasov commented that ‘not a single part of our state has previously been so systematically represented’ (quoted in Elliott 1991: 43). By the 1870s Ivan Raoult was selling photos of posed ethnic types, whilst Ivan Boldyrev produced albums with titles such as ‘Views and Types of the Don’ and ‘Views and Types of the Nechenskii Penal Territory’. Meanwhile, the proliferation of cameras was achieving an almost global reach for these social and ethnic types. In 1878 the Paris International Geographical Exhibition contained an exhibit devoted to ‘Slavic Types’. In 1889 Russia held its own international exhibition in Moscow. In 1878, the Russian Interior Ministry commissioned a photographic Album of Russian Costume to aid it in designing a new army uniform ‘in tune with the spirit of the people’ (quoted in Barchatova et al., 1991: 81) – an indication of the camera’s role in shaping imperialist thinking. The connection between these trends and the development of Russian realism is reflected in the fact that the satirical writer Saltykov-Shchedrin set up in the second half of the nineteenth century the first museum with a photographic archive section containing genre portraits (Barchatova et al. 1991: 84). Saltykov-Shchedrin’s own offbeat, grotesque realism draws on the notion of type; he produced several volumes containing thumbnail sketches of social types. One consequence of the impact of new mass-circulation journals on mid-nineteenth century Russian society was the mass-mediation of ideas previously restricted to a small elite. The intelligentsia began to have access to theories of social betterment – those of Proudhon, Bentham, Fourier and others. This fertilized the populist movement for land reform, giving rise to the to the ill-fated ‘Going to the People’ project whose failure

Russian realism and the camera 31 can be traced to the chasm between the reality of peasant life and the massmediated notions of peasant readiness for change influencing the populists (narodniki).25 One writer obsessed with the chasm, and with the revolutionary types who fell victim to its different manifestations, was Ivan Turgenev. His major novels centre on heroes representing particular stages in the development of the Russian revolutionary and it is to the last of these, Virgin Soil (Nov’), that I now briefly turn. The early part of Virgin Soil depicts scenes of small circles of people discussing ideas born in circumstances remote from their own, but made available through the international press. Markelov, a collaborator of Nezhdanov, the novel’s tortured hero, at one point compares the revolution’s need for violence with the blood that flows when a boil is lanced. Turgenev ironically notes how much Markelov liked this comparison which he had ‘read somewhere or other’ (Turgenev 1954, IV: 258). Another of Nezhdanov’s acolytes writes to the hero that, in his agitational work amongst the peasants, he has ‘supplemented Fourier’s theory of the passions’ (296). Turgenev casts his sardonic eye upon the group as they plan to implement these ideas among people from whom they are equally distant. The novel deals with the consequences of the plan’s enactment through the comic failure of Nezhdanov, its tortured hero, to live among the people he has, by his own admission, overaestheticized. Nezhdanov, himself a poet, candidly acknowledges that ‘it is difficult for an aesthete to come into contact with reality’ (‘trudno estetu soprikasat’sia deístivitel’noí zhizn’iu’) (403). This failure is mirrored in Nezhdanov’s inability to love the admiring girl, Marianna, who he hastily marries as part of the grand project. But, in a form of infinite regress, the novel indicates its own concern with image–reality mismatches in the representation of the types who enact the populist dreams. Appropriately, the regress centres around the juxtaposition of a painted portrait and a photograph which changes hands on the novel’s very last page. Following Nezhdanov’s untimely death, Mashurina, a shady collaborator determined to continue the cause, casually asks Paklin, Nezhdanov’s associate, whether he has ‘some note or other from Nezhdanov, or a photograph’ (477). Paklin had himself earlier complained that the enigmatic Nezhdanov (no concrete reason for his downfall is given) had destroyed his papers, his verses, everything that could have revealed his true nature: ‘Everything has disappeared into the universal maelstrom and perished for good. There remains but the memory of his friends – until they disappear in their turn’ (471–2). Paklin rummages in a drawer and obliges, commenting that the photo he has found is ‘even quite a good one’ (477). Mashurina, herself a secret admirer of Nezhdanov, blushes, thrusts the photo carelessly into her pocket and leaves, refusing to reveal her future plans, at which point the novel ends. The episode is best understood in the context of a parallel reference involving a painting. For it is a clear echo of an earlier occurrence when Nezhdanov is overawed that Marianna’s suitor, Markelov, whose feelings are unrequited, should offer him a handpainted portrait of the woman he loves. Nezhdanov is embarrassed that

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The photographic word

he will carry next to his heart an image painted by a man who has literally surrendered his love to Nezhdanov. The difference is pointed. The unfathomable Nezhdanov is remembered by Mashurina through a mediocre photograph circulated with little thought to its indexical connection with the original subject. His image is, for Mashurina, prolonged beyond the end of the novel (it is the last ‘sight’ we, too, catch of the hero) but it is no authentic memory, since the true Nezhdanov remains obscured, even to Turgenev’s readers. It is a reproducible image with no intimate link to its origin, as liable to distort the complex, disappointing reality about its source (Mashurina, we assume, will continue revering the discredited Nezhdanov) as Nezhdanov’s mass-mediated image of the narod was liable to founder on the rock of peasant authenticity. Marianna’s painting, by contrast, Markelov’s sacred testament to his love, conveys not only its source’s beauty (Turgenev’s ekphrasis stresses its fine likeness), but also the unrepeatable intimacy of the feelings that inspired it. (The contrast between photograph and painting is in keeping with Turgenev’s own pronouncement in an article he wrote about Goethe’s Faust to the effect that a portrait’s representation of reality is ‘a thousand times better than that of a slavishly honest daguerreotype’.26) Metatextualized through the image of the photo on which this deeply unsatisfying novel peters out, Turgenev’s Virgin Soil bears witness not only in its theme but in the playing out of its narrative to the fallacy of the generic type (Nezhdanov’s aestheticized narod).27 It also foregrounds the gap between public image and internal reality which defines the flawed type – the narodnik – who dares to take that aestheticization as reality (Mashurina’s idealized Nezhdanov). Finally, it exposes the role of massmediated words and images in circulating those fallacies (the reader’s own sense that in Nezhdanov, the poet, s/he has encountered nothing but a predictable surface with no hidden depths).28 Photography had established itself at the heart of novelistic reality by the time of Virgin Soil. Apart from the ending, there is an earlier scene when Nezhdanov is ‘loafing around with nothing to do’, leafing through a photograph album (237). This became a standard image of photography in the Russian novel, indicating photography’s decline from being the object of (sometimes indignant) fascination, to one associated with everyday idleness. Photography should not be seen in isolation from the penetration into everyday existence of rail travel and telegraphy which together transformed people’s sense of time and space. Turgenev, whose works are saturated with socio-political detail, was peculiarly sensitive to these processes. The action of his earlier novel, Smoke (Dym), takes place against the background of all three inventions, each of which make telling appearances, and one of which inspires the novel’s title. The novel is unusual in Russian literature in that virtually the entire plot takes place outside Russia, in Baden-Baden. There is, however, much reference to rail travel to and from Moscow. As the dilettante community of Russians populating the novel discuss Russian, English and French newspapers in Germany, an early image of modern cosmopolitanism emerges.

Russian realism and the camera 33 The story, such as it is, treats the abortive romance in Baden-Baden of the hero, Litvinov, with Irina, who, in a reversal of standard Turgenevan gender stereotyping, is deprived of the capacity to love, having already rejected him years before. Irina now causes Litvinov to forego his relationship with Tania, his new fiancée in Russia. In this context, Turgenev suggests that the collapse of space and the acceleration of time brought about by modern technology contribute to a crisis in human intimacy which distorts the relations between his characters. Irina herself comments on Litvinov’s decision to telegraph rather than write to Tania informing her that he is to return to her, and not stay in Baden-Baden to give his relationship with Irina a second chance: ‘Ah, so you find it necessary to hurry’, she cajoles him (Turgenev 1954, IV: 120). Later, Litvinov looks at the smoke rushing past him from the train on which he is travelling back to Russia – the smoke of the novel’s title – causing him to forget all that had happened in Germany: The track swerved and the whole mass of smoke disappeared and immediately reappeared in the opposite window … Smoke, smoke – he repeated … And everything suddenly seemed like smoke to him … Everything is smoke and steam, he thought. Everything seems to change incessantly. Everywhere there are new images. Phenomena succeed phenomena, yet in essence everything is the same. Everything hurries somewhere and everything disappears without trace. (175) Shortly afterwards, even his memories of Irina have become as smoke to him: Everything that had happened in Baden appeared to him as though it were a dream. And what about Irina? Even she became pale and disappeared from view, and Litvinov could vaguely sense only something dangerous underneath the mist gradually enveloping her image. (179) Simultaneously accelerating time and expanding distances between people, trains become an all-too-convenient aid to forgetfulness. Communications technology is associated with a corresponding facility to collapse space and facilitate memory through time. For Turgenev, the illusoriness of this facility is embodied in a seemingly innocent reference to a photoportrait which, in turn, becomes embedded in a semantic network whose subtle expansion transforms the photograph, alongside the train steam, into a central metaphor and a model for the novel’s construction. Much earlier, with Litvinov at the height of his destructive passion for Irina, he pulls from his briefcase a photograph of Tania, the first time the heroine has been described by the author:

34 The photographic word Her face stared sadly up at him, distorted and aged by the photograph. Litvinov’s fiancée had a remarkable expression of tenderness and meekness in her intelligent, light-brown eyes, and a white brow on which a sunbeam seemingly shone at all times. (112) Litvinov cannot take his eyes off the portrait, but then lays it aside (‘otodvinul ego’), whispering ‘Everything is over … Irina, Irina!’ (112). Appropriately, the photographic surrogate is superseded by an image drawn from a recent memory of Irina: ‘Tania, Tania, my God, Tania … but the image of Irina rose before him in her black funereal dress, with the radiant silence of victory on her marble-white face’ (112). The photographic image here serves as a semiotic foil to the authenticity of the ‘real’ image that succeeds it. Here, too, technology holds out the false promise of facilitating human contact over distances and through time (Litvinov has brought Tania’s ‘living imprint’ from Russia to Germany). The photograph mediates between people, contributing towards the rarefied ambiance of the new cosmopolitan elite. Mediation, however, is not life, and this proves to be one of Turgenev’s chief insights. Irina’s image suffers the same fate as that of Tania. One follows the other into oblivion, like trails of smoke from a steam train. The illusoriness associated with mediatory surrogates is bound up with the false permanence they promise. Throughout Smoke, Litvinov is haunted by mental images of both Tania and Irina which imprint themselves, photograph-like, on his memory, only to disappear without trace. Just before leaving Baden-Baden, he recalls Irina in consciously photographic mode: ‘And he became pensive and the image of Irina adopting the very pose in which it had imprinted itself forever (navek napechatlelsia) in his recent memories quietly presented itself … before him’ (169). For in an unambiguous reference back to the photograph of Tania he had earlier pushed aside, he then mentally pushes aside into oblivion the image and the memories it carries: ‘But not for long. He came to and with a new burst of indignation pushed aside (ottolknul proch’ ot sebia) both those memories and that charming image’ (169). The verbal echo is no more coincidental than is the use of the photographic metaphor of imprinting reality, which recurs frequently throughout Turgenev. The plot of Smoke is structured as a series of scenes, images, encounters from a past which imprint themselves on an insubstantial present reluctant to fix these imprints which, anyway, are a distortion of their originals. The narrator reveals early on that the central encounter – between Litvinov and Irina – is a repetition of a previous encounter which ended similarly unsuccessfully, engendering the impression that we are being presented with a faded copy of an already flawed original. Turgenev’s model here is, of course, the early daguerreotype, not the later calotype, since the former was renowned for its tendency to deteriorate to the point where the original image is barely recognizable (see Plate 5).29 It is in this context that we can read Elizabeth Allen’s observation that Litvinov

Russian realism and the camera 35 suffers from a form of psychological disintegration in which his personality fragments uncontrollably into a series of past selves: ‘The “I” who feels, sees and knows is not the Litvinov who believed he created and controlled his own fate’ (Allen 1992, 196). Even Litvinov’s relationship with Tanya is fraught with repetition. Close to the end, he prostrates himself before her to ask her forgiveness, remembering ‘how he kneeled before her just like this once in Baden’, but adding: ‘That was then, and this is now!’ (184). Turgenev was not the only writer, nor Russian literature the only national literature, to exploit photography’s capacity to imprint a flawed version of the past upon the present. The hero of Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1855) is a daguerreotypist. He photographs a member of the household in which he is staying who bears a strange resemblance to a painted portrait of a family ancestor. The novel relates how the ancestor’s bizarre death and the story behind it is uncannily repeated, but with an ultimately positive outcome, within the present generation. Here, too, the photoportrait replicates the imperfect imprinting of past upon present that structures the narrative. In Turgenev’s case, the ability to imprint reality goes hand in hand with the insubstantiality and transience of the reality thus fixed. The notion that ‘everywhere there are new images, phenomena succeeding phenomena, as everything, smoke-like, disappears without trace’ is central to the Turgenevan conception of reality. Turgenev’s interest in capturing the fleeting moments in nature, a feature of his literary landscapes, was identified as a key contribution to European realism. What is also characteristic of Turgenev, however, is a hostility to this very ability to fix and capture. There is often a character in his novels who epitomizes this quality. In the closing lines of Smoke Irina is praised ironically for her ability to identify the most amusing and petty aspect of a character and ‘fix it [zakleimat’] with an unforgettable word’ (186). This is always seen as a negative trait. In Rudin, the hero’s tendency to use words to ‘pin people down like butterflies’, to quote Rudin’s action-oriented foil Lezhnev, accompanies his inability to put those words into action: like Irina and Nezhdanov, Rudin is incapable of true, sacrificial love. Turgenev was aware of the paradox that his own literary method is distinguished by the ease with which it captures the flawed essences of characters like Nezhdanov with a few well-chosen words, and imprints transient nature as though it were a butterfly. One way of explaining what critics see as the bafflingly unmotivated, out-of-character ending to Rudin (the previously ineffectual hero dies in glorious, though futile, self-sacrifice on the Paris barricades) is to view it as an attempt to provide the hero with an escape from his restrictive literary pigeonhole.30 For Rudin expresses the same paradox at work in Virgin Soil: that, with its inability to do anything other than fix the surface moments of reality, each mechanical copy of a recurring type – whether verbal or visual – ultimately slips further away from the generic essence it seems, with its mass reproducibility, so well placed to

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capture, casting ever greater doubt on the existence of that essence. This is true of the relationship between the mass-mediated image of Russian peasantry that animates Nezhdanov’s revolutionary mission and the reality he finds after ‘going to the people’. It is true also of the relationship between the public persona of Nezhdanov the brave narodnik, and the private reality of Nezhdanov the tortured introvert incapable of meaningful action (Turgenev never clarifies what is eating his pitiful hero). It is, we recall, the mediated image of Nezhdanov, not Nezhdanov himself, that is circulated at the end and that, like the credulous Mashurina, we take away with us. Turgenev’s dilemma is contextalized by Nancy Armstrong’s observation that, in the 1850s and 1860s, photography caused ‘the basis of individual identity [to pass] from resemblance to difference’ (Armstrong 1999: 126). Rather than embracing the self-confirming approach to identity epitomized in painting (‘that is how I am, even though it is not an actual copy of me’), and, as Nathaniel Hawthorne had the prescience to recognize, photography highlights the differences between individual representation and represented origin (‘I know that is not me, even though it is my exact copy’).31 Nineteenth-century realist fiction – and Turgenev’s work in particular – is defined by its struggle with this contradiction. That the metaphysical implications of the problem were foreseen as long ago as 1835 by Gogol suggests that incipient Russian realism’s urge to take on the struggle emerged not from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’, but from under his ‘Portrait’. The story of how this struggle intensified within the mature realism of Tolstoi and Chekhov, and of how it presaged the quintessential modernism of Sologub and Bunin, is the topic of Chapter 2.

2

Objectivity, alienation and the fragmentation of the subject The camera as midwife to modernity

Tolstoy and the camera as technology of alienation The slippage of photographic surface from generic essence evident in Turgenev’s novels confirms that, far from being concerned with a reconciliation of universal and particular, and thus with making rational sense of the world, Russian realism is oriented towards disjoining the two, towards the alienation of the physical world from the realm of meaning. It is the further consequences of this phenomenon that we must trace in the present chapter. We should note that the ability of photography to capture reality in medias res, to abstract it from the continuous flow of life, became ever more central to its perception in Russian society, and within Russian literature. As technology improved in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the possibilities for extra-studio photography were extended, leading to the medium’s acquisition of the documentary function so important in its history.1 One of the first settings in which cameras were used in this context was the battlefield, and the first war which produced photographs in large numbers was the Crimean War of 1854–56 which, as Michael F. Braive comments, ‘gave birth to the war reporter and the war photographer’ (Braive 1965: 219). Such photographers were compelled by the complexity of their equipment to adopt a position aloof from the battle itself. This, added to the careful selection of images upon which the press insisted, caused the war simultaneously to give birth to ‘armchair tourism’ which allowed, in the words of a contemporary of the campaign, ‘optical gluttons to feast on the misfortunes of others’ from the comfort of their homes (quoted in Braive 1965: 219). Punch satirized this phenomenon, in a letter supposedly from a wife of a photographer to her husband: ‘[I]f you could send me home, dear, a nice view of the battle, I should feel extremely obliged. PS If you could take this view, dear, at the moment of victory, I should like it all the better’ (quoted in Braive 1965: 226). In the works of Tolstoy, who dabbled in photography and whose wife, Sophia, was a prolific amateur photographer, we sense the medium’s structuring presence.2 Tolstoy was familiar with the horrors of the Crimean campaign and it is no accident that we find in his Sevastopol stories the first

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exposé of the perspective of the armchair tourist. In the first of the stories, ‘Sevastopol in December’ (‘Sevastopol’ v dekabre’), Tolstoy’s narrator adopts the second-person narration characteristic of the sketch format, but uses it to reveal the morally detached attitude of the voyeur who experiences war as a visual feast: [G]o in at the door to the left … You will see doctors with pale, gloomy faces and arms red with blood up to the elbows … You will see the sharp curved knife enter healthy white flesh … You will see the doctor’s assistant toss the amputated arm in a corner and in the same room you will see another wounded man … watching the operation … On coming out of this house of pain you will be sure to experience a sense of relief … The space you are approaching is the Fourth Bastion … you will experience interesting sensations and see interesting sights … you feel a peculiar delight in the danger – in this game of life and death. (Tolstoy 1991: 7–12) Gary Saul Morson has demonstrated the frame-breaking, anti-aesthetic effects of this technique, together with its didactic implications, although he perhaps overstates the uniqueness of the second-person device, characteristic of many Russian literary ocherki.3 However, the technique must be placed in the context of the new documentary vision of the camera lens and the reaction it sparked against military voyeurism. Reactions notwithstanding, such voyeurism became an established feature of the documentary genre and was most graphically illustrated a few years later in dramatic images from the American Civil War. Improvements in exposure technique led also to the use of photography for purposes other than the sanitized depiction of warfare. The visual cataloguing of Russia’s vast empire was a task for which camera technology was ideally suited and, as early as 1843, the great photographer Levitskii was talking in terms of ‘conquering the Caucasus’ (quoted in Braive 1965: 211). Indeed, his portraits of ethnic types in national costume, and those of others, did much to establish the representational correlative to Russia’s growing military domination over its ethnic minorities (see Plate 6).4 Tolstoy had been militarily involved in the Caucasian campaigns earlier in the century and several of his Caucasian tales display a far-from-coincidental familiarity with photographic perception. In ‘Prisoner of the Caucasus’ (‘Kavkazkii plennik’), written in 1872 as part of a cycle of educational tales for children, for example, the native Tartars by whom the Russian hero, Zhilin, has been captured are portrayed in all their exotic strangeness as though through an objectivizing camera lens: Through the chink he can see a road … He sees a young Tartar girl in a coloured shirt, belted in the middle, in trousers and boots, her head covered with a kaftan, and on her head a large jug of water. She walks

Objectivity, alienation and fragmentation 39 and her back sways and trembles … walks past to the well and yesterday’s Tartar man comes out with his red beard, in a silk quilted jacket, with a silver sabre in his belt and sandals on his feet. On his head he wears a tall black sheepskin hat, with its flaps turned back. (Tolstoy 1979: 178) Tolstoy’s indiscriminate use of the terms ‘Tartar’ and ‘Abrek’ for the multifarious tribes of the region is typical of the Russification era when writers and photographers were contributing to the colonizing campaign, subjecting indigenous populations to their own generic labels and guaranteeing epistemological control. But Tolstoy’s attitude to the epistemological subjugation of the Caucasian tribes was not without ambiguity. In ‘Prisoner of the Caucasus’, it is the friendship that Zhilin establishes with a young Tartar girl, possible only when he has ceased objectifying his captors, which facilitates his escape. Moreover, Tolstoy was aware of how the new modes of interaction that photography brought in its wake changed and distorted relations between people at the empire’s metropolitan centres. Nowhere is this more evident than in Anna Karenina, for many, the zenith of Russian realism, into which photography insinuates itself at several levels. Anna Karenina is soaked in the burgeoning camera culture. By 1874 when the novel was published, examining photograph albums had become part of the collective ritual of metropolitan High Society (see Plate 7) – a fact that Tolstoy utilizes at key points.5 The scene in which Vronskii visits Anna at the Oblonskii’s for the first time is preceded by a family conversation about a mutual acquaintance. Anna rises suddenly, declaring that she ‘has her picture in her album’. When Anna returns, Vronskii has left, but the stir caused by his visit creates an embarrassed silence broken only by the album ritual, which masks the episode’s function as catalyst of Anna’s fatal passion: ‘They glanced at one another and said nothing but began examining Anna’s album … To Anna it seemed strange and not quite right’ (Tolstoy 1970: 69). Anna’s reference to the portrait is an excuse for her to look again at the photograph of her son Seriozha whom she ‘longed to talk about’ (69). The motif of the absent son juxtaposed with the all-too-present lover, which announces the commencement of Anna’s affair, runs throughout its course. For this is not the only time that Anna’s love for Seriozha is mediated through his photographic image. At another peripeteia in Anna’s affair – the point when her maternal feelings and her incipient resentment towards her lover fuse in jealous anger – the photograph’s mediatory role is again stressed: She returned the baby to its nurse … Rising, she … took from the table an album in which were photographs of her son at different ages. She wanted to compare these likenesses and began drawing them out. She

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The photographic word took them all out but one, the last and best of the photographs. He was there in a white shirt, brows frowning, while his mouth smiled. (489)

The reality of Anna’s life as a social pariah with her baby and her increasingly unsympathetic lover is contrasted with her maternal passion for an idealized Seriozha embodied in his gleaming photographic image. But the role of photographic mediation in Anna’s relations with those closest to her deepens further when she examines the image more closely: She caught hold of a corner of this photo several times with her deft little hands … but each time they slipped … she drew out the photo next to it (one taken in Rome of Vronskii with long hair) … and with it pushed out her son’s photo. ‘Yes, there he is!’ she said with a glance at Vronskii’s likeness, and suddenly remembered that he was the cause of her present grief … [H]aving caught sight of that manly, noble face … she felt an unexpected flow of love toward him. ‘But where is he? How can he leave me alone in my anguish?’ she thought suddenly with a sense of reproach. (490) Manipulating the images of the two beings closest to her, Anna plays them off one against the other in their absence and, in Vronskii’s case, turns in an instant the very idealization so central to her love for him (‘that manly, noble face’) into the catalyst of her budding hatred (‘But where is he?’). Later, Anna catches Vronskii examining the same photos left carelessly on the table and she snatches them back, causing Vronskii to decide that ‘it was necessary to have an explanation with her’ (492), thus precipitating the first of their debilitating rows. Both the inception and the decline of Anna’s passion for Vronskii are instigated by photographic images, a state of affairs paralleled in another late-nineteenth-century European novel of tragic passion, Hardy’s Jude The Obscure (1894), in which the illicit passion of Jude and Sue is likewise mediated, and undermined, by photography. In one scene, Hardy reveals the insidious effects of photographic duplication upon the authenticity of human relations, as Phillotson, Sue’s virtuous husband, dotes over the image of his unfaithful wife: He opened another drawer, and found therein an envelope from which he drew a photograph of Sue as a child … There was another of her as a young woman, her dark eyes and hair making a very distinct and attractive picture of her … It was a duplicate of the one she had given Jude … Phillotson drew it half-way to his lips. (Hardy 1961: 161) Later, as Jude is reduced to spying on his beloved from outside her window, the hero allows his imagination to speculate on the fate of a photographic image of himself which Sue, in turn, is soaking in amorous speculation:

Objectivity, alienation and fragmentation 41 Sue … had opened a rosewood box, and was looking at a photograph. Having contemplated it a little while she pressed it to her bosom … She closed the shutters, and Jude turned away … ‘Whose photograph was she looking at?’ he said … it was his, surely? (Hardy 1961: 205) If Tolstoy is less deliberate than Hardy in the way he uses photography as a metaphor for desire, Anna Karenina none the less implicitly (and ekphrastically) juxtaposes photography with painting, as Turgenev had earlier. Thus, unlike the heroine’s photographs, the portrait of Anna painted by the painter Mikhailov gives unmediated access to its subject, as Levin discovers in his meeting with her: Levin looked at the portrait which, in the bright illumination, seemed to step out of its frame and he could not tear himself away from it. He forgot where he was, and without listening to what was being said gazed fixedly at the wonderful portrait.… Anna had come out from behind the screen to meet him and Levin saw in the dim light of the study the woman of the portrait … on the same height of beauty as that on which the artist had caught her in the portrait. (Tolstoy 1970: 630) Appropriately, it is Levin, Tolstoy’s mouthpiece, who is spellbound by the painting’s beauty, while Anna is accorded an attachment to the superficial distractions of photography. For photographic mediation serves as a figure for the objectifying attitudes which beset Anna (and other characters) throughout and which, together with Levin’s countervailing pronouncements, form the core of its philosophical system. Anna’s cruel distaste for her husband’s automaton-like mannerisms (his templated behaviour belongs to a Tolstoyan paradigm of negative technological imagery which includes photography and trains) is another example. So too are Karenin’s protruding ears which Anna notices for the first time after falling in love with Vronskii, as though she has discovered the kind of physical trait that comes to light on examining a person’s frozen photographic exterior alienated from his human essence.6 For Tolstoy, Anna’s problems are bound up with the technological developments of her age. Vronskii’s photographically idealized manliness which so captivates both her and Kitty is dismissed by Kitty’s father in telling terms: ‘Levin is a thousand times the better man. This one is a little St Petersburg fop. They are machine-made by the dozen, all to one pattern’ (my emphasis, 51). It is no coincidence that the three nineteenth-century Russian novels in which photographic images of a face from the past impose themselves with tragic effect on a present, also feature trains as motifs of sinister value: Turgenev’s Smoke, Dostoevskii’s The Idiot and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

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Photography’s newfound objectifying capacity affected, too, the fictional contract between author and reader. Tolstoy was the first author to be photographed so extensively that his image became recognizable to a wide cross-section of literate society. This in turn induced a capacity for selfobjectification leading to a growing tendency to base literary characters around a publicly constructed autobiographical persona. When we read of Tolstoy’s hero that ‘He thought that a plain kindly fellow like himself might be loved as a friend, but to be loved with the kind of love he felt for Kitty, a man must be handsome’ (21), Levin’s self-conscious hang-ups about his physical attractiveness are of unquestionably autobiographical origin, as are his doubts about God and discourses on politics and religion. The awkwardness with which the autobiographical ‘Levin line’ is integrated with the fictionalized Anna–Vronskii drama points to the transitional moment at which the novel was written. By the turn of the century Marcel Proust had resolved the dilemma by creating in A la recherche du temps perdu (which attaches seminal importance to photography) the new, self-reflexive autobiographical persona who was to dominate twentieth-century prose – the narrator (Marcel) who both is, and is not, his creator (Marcel Proust).7 If the new way of seeing hailed by photography transformed the authorial image in fiction, then it also altered fiction’s representational focus and thus the direction taken by the realist novel. The example of Karenin’s suddenly-noticed ears is only one of numerous Tolstoyan examples in which bodily gestures, positions adopted by hands, facial features, sudden shifts in expression, fleeting glances betraying changing emotions, and so on, are frozen as if on camera for scrutiny and endless reproduction, in a way that would have been unthinkable before the invention of the camera. The novel is packed with similar, fleeting impressions which exemplify the writer’s ability to make mute, physical detail speak volumes. Tolstoy’s contemporary, another keen amateur photographer, Emile Zola, linked late realism’s obsession with visual minutiae to the camera: ‘I do not think you can really say you have seen something until you have taken a photograph of it which will reveal all the details you would otherwise not have noticed and which in most cases cannot even be seen’ (quoted in Braive 1961: 199; emphasis mine).8 Taken to its conclusion, Tolstoyan realism deals, not in the living life celebrated by Levin, but in a rarefied world invisible to the human eye, removed from the inexactitude accompanying human embodiment. Internalized within Tolstoy’s artistic method is photography’s unsettling capacity for reconciling exactitude of copy and abstraction from source as two sides of a single coin.

Mass-reproducible images and the democratization of media space: Chekhov Despite its appositeness to Tolstoy’s realistic method, the force of Zola’s point lies elsewhere. For photographic detail, imperceptible to the inattentive

Objectivity, alienation and fragmentation 43 human gaze, more often than not lies beyond the frame of those meaningmaking templates which Tolstoy’s readers sense so keenly. One Russian who incorporated this concept into his writing was Anton Chekhov, part of whose ‘struggle’ with Tolstoy consists in his subtle adjustments to Tolstoy’s approach to photographic realism.9 Chekhov’s mature works are saturated with odd, photographic details – networks of tiny veins on faces, perspiring bald spots – unmotivated in any sense other than their ability to convey the excesses of sheer existential presence. But for Chekhov, far from offering an antidote to negative photographic surfaces, painting represents the epitome of falsehood to which such detail is counterposed as the epitome of authenticity. Chekhov’s descriptions are often motivated in such a way that a painterly, cameoed reality constructed from the viewpoint of a character with artistic proclivities is shattered by a singularly unaesthetic detail of the kind so often caught on camera. In ‘The Grasshopper’ (‘Poprygun’ia’), the amateur artist, Olga, who has deceived her hardworking doctor-husband in an affair with a dilettante painter, attempts pictorially to idealize the rural scene in which she and the painter find themselves. Her cameo, along with her illusion of a tasteful affair, is destroyed when she notices a peasant woman’s thumb dipped into the soup bowl she is about to serve Olga. Tolstoy was arguably the last writer who opposed painting to photography as its positive foil. Despite his willingness to deconstruct the painting–photography hierarchy, Chekhov’s attitude to photography, along with the way it affected his art, was, like that of all his predecessors, ambiguous. In Dostoevskii’s era, the daguerreotype was sufficiently widespread to be found in minor aristocratic households, such as that of the Epanchins. By the century’s turn, it belonged to the fabric of Russian everyday life. Unlike Nastasia Filippovna’s photo, the photographic references peppering Chekhov’s oeuvre seem incidental and are frequently presented as the epitome of trivial indulgence. In ‘At Home’ (‘V rodnom uglu’), one of Chekhov’s idealistic heroines reacts scornfully to the news that a provincial doctor has had the bad taste to ‘fall in love with her photograph’ (Chekhov 1977, 9: 315). Similarly, in ‘The Betrothed’ (‘Nevesta’), a bridegroom shows his fiancée, Nadia, the house in which they are to live. Buried away among details of the decorous furnishings is one brief mention of a gigantic photograph of the bridegroom’s father. Yet Chekhov’s correspondence reveals that the Dostoevskian double standard towards the camera medium continued unabated throughout the nineteenth century. On one hand, countless Chekhov letters end with requests that the addressee forward a photographic visiting card (kartochka). The carte de visite, invented by Disderi in 1853, caused the photograph’s status to decline to that of a trivial fashion item which, none the less, became an essential part of the accoutrements of the late-nineteenthcentury man of letters (see Plate 8). On the other hand, in one letter Chekhov witheringly dismisses photography as the most futile pursuit known to man (Chekhov 1957, 12: 121). And Gorkii recalls Chekhov

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teasing a man about his passion for gadgetry such as gramophones and photographs in which ‘everything comes out in caricature, dead’ (Gorky 1967, 200). Despite exploiting photography to challenge Tolstoy’s painterly templating of meaning, Chekhov’s propensity to link photography with the lifeless and mechanistic echoes Merezhkovskii’s critique of the nineteenth century’s obsession with ‘the crude photographic exactitude of experimental snapshots’ (Merezhkovskii 1970: 9). Both Chekhov and Merezhkovskii link the emergent mass culture to which photography belongs with the undiscerning tolpa. The overdressed doctor in ‘At Home’ is compared with ‘a badly painted portrait’ (Chekhov 1977, 9: 319). In ‘The Betrothed’, the grandiose photographic portrait is accompanied by a detail which serves as a recurring leitmotif of bad taste: the garish painting of a naked woman beside a purple vase. Merezhkovskii and Chekhov fear, like Baudelaire, photography’s suffocation of high culture.10 Photography’s misplaced aesthetic pretensions must be seen alongside other reproduction technologies. In Beatrice Farwell’s words: ‘[P]eople of little education became the consumers of mass produced words and pictures, and thus arose the disdain for the bourgeois philistine … Kitsch had been born’ (Farwell 1977: 8). For Chekhov, photography is kitsch incarnate. And, given the late-nineteenth-century fashion for placing photographs in the most extravagant of frames, this is no surprise. But for Chekhov, photographic kitsch is assimilated to, rather than contrasted with, painting. No longer the negative foil to true painterly vision, photography is assimilated to painting in all its bad faith, or merged with the authentic prose of life as painting’s positive counterpart. Whatever high culture is, it is no longer epitomized in the beauty of painterly vision. Chekhov understood, like John Ruskin, that it was photography which was largely responsible for this reordering of the aesthetic hierarchy.11 None the less, Chekhov’s nostalgia for an aesthetic hierarchy immune from the camera’s assault on its age-old values is reflected in his contempt for photography’s throwaway quality. In ‘A Journey by Cart’ (‘Na podvode’) we learn that the heroine’s only remaining possession is a badly faded photograph of her mother. At the end, she identifies a real-life double of her mother whose image conjures up her entire childhood. For Chekhov, photographs offer the combination of trivial and transient described by Walter Benjamin: Every day the need to possess the object in the form of a copy becomes more imperative. And the difference between the copy … and the picture is unmistakable. Uniqueness and duration are as immediately conjoined in the latter as are transience and reproducibility in the former. (Benjamin 1979: 250). ‘The Betrothed’, in which these issues are brought to the fore, tells of a girl’s restless desire to escape from her philistine fiancé and provincial past,

Objectivity, alienation and fragmentation 45 the death of her idealistic friend, Sasha, and her decision to move to St Petersburg. Sasha’s role in precipitating her departure is pivotal, his rhetoric that of a Dostoevskian visionary: If only you would go away and study. Only enlightened … people are interesting … For the more such people there are, the sooner heaven on earth will ensue. Not a stone will remain unturned in your town … everything will change, as if by magic. (Chekhov 1977, 10: 208). But this vision of final victory over the crowd is itself a product of crowd mentality. Proof comes when Sasha reveals that he has advised another friend ‘to turn her life upside down’ (217–19). Unsurprisingly, he no longer seems original and smells of something ‘already departed to the grave’ (220). Even the story’s dramatic finale carries the deathly odour of plagiarism. Nadia’s decision to leave rests on the assumption that ‘her life has been turned upside down, just as Sasha had wanted’. Her singular action – like Rogozhin’s murder – is borrowed from a model templated for infinite reproduction. The qualifying phrase, ‘as she supposed’ (‘kak ona polagala’) in Chekhov’s last sentence suggests that Nadia’s once-and-for-all departure is one in a long production line of departures: ‘[T]he next day she said farewell to her family … and left the town, as she supposed, forever’ (220). Significantly, Sasha, once a ‘fine artist’ (203) now works in a lithographic factory intended precisely for the mass reproduction of artistic images. For Chekhov, visual art connotes falseness and unoriginality, reification of the other and abstraction from the messy business of real life, which is why he frequently equates painting and photography. In ‘The Grasshopper’, Olga, the aspiring painter, decorates her walls with a ‘pretty collection’ of exotic knick-knacks and photographs (Chekhov 1977, 8: 9), and ‘hops’ from man to man and pretentious commonplace to pretentious commonplace about her longsuffering husband. Chekhov is hardly alone among Russian writers in defining his value-system against art. But he is unusual in tending to identify the aesthetic with the painterly rather than with literature. Chekhovian aestheticization is embodied in visual framing and in vision itself. Sasha’s idyllic visions are undermined for two reasons. First, they are ‘citings’ not sightings – when Sasha talks about his world of ‘wonderful gardens and extraordinary fountains’ he is quoting from the same repertoire of images from which comes Nadia’s ‘opaque life, full of mysteries’ (Chekhov 1977, 10: 208, 220). Second, the fact that they are dependent on sight further diminishes their authenticity. The static nature of perspectival vision, encapsulated in the landscape, is an extension of its abstracting function. People who live according to a visual model are inclined to write off their past, eschew the messy contingency of the present and project their desires into an aestheticized future: ‘She clearly perceived that her life had been turned upside down, as Sasha had wanted, that … all that once was

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had been torn away from her and had disappeared, as if burned away to nothing … and in front of her lay sketched out a new, broad and spacious life’ (219–20). An end enclosed within frames is merely the precursor of another tedious beginning. Chekhov’s assault on aesthetic vision, as we saw, often takes the form of the disruption of painterly scenes by intrusively ordinary detail. In ‘The Betrothed’, Nadia suffers the indignity of a self-inflicted puncturing of the melodramatic veil in which she has enwrapped her dilemma: ‘Nadia thought that she was upset and that she would have to suffer and to think torturous thoughts right up until the moment of departure, but hardly had she … lain down in her bed than she immediately fell asleep and slept soundly right through to the evening’ (214). For Dostoevskii, the press resituates the original amidst the ordinary. For Chekhov, originality has become so corrupted by universal mediation that it is the ordinary which must assume its function. Hence Chekhov’s refusal to condemn his aestheticizing characters, none of whom remain untainted by the propensity to frame and copy. Chekhov acknowledges that we live in a world in which authenticity must be searched for in the spaces between mediated truths. In ‘The Betrothed’, Nadia’s contempt for her fiancé and her mother is justified by the former’s kitschy nude and the latter’s fashionable dabbling in spiritualism. Yet it is undermined by the fact that her contempt is itself mediated through Sasha’s templated belief in ‘turning the world upside down’. This, however, is no retreat into modernistic relativity. Rather, Chekhov gives form to the new objective reality of mediation itself which, unlike Dostoevskii’s blinding visions, is best expressed as an encounter of ‘words’. His stories are steeped in references to telegrams, phonographs, even telephones – communicative devices whose collective effect is the undermining of the magic of vision. In ‘The Betrothed’, visual perception – and its ethical correlative – is subverted by the modern technology through which it is filtered. Thus, Nadia’s aestheticizing distortions are enhanced by the view from her speeding train: ‘When … the train set off, all that past, so big and serious, was compressed into a small lump, and a gigantic, broad future opened up … all that was visible was a green field; the telegraph poles flashed by’ (215).12 Chekhov had always tended to privilege sound over vision, and to contribute to the decline of what Martin Jay dubs ‘ocularcentrism’ (Jay 1995). His first mature work – ‘The Steppe’ (‘Step’ ’) – is punctuated with the off-key noises of ambient nature. By the time of ‘The Betrothed’, Chekhov was using sound to introject layers of indeterminate meaning between the mediated certainties of his characters’ words: the regular ‘tick-tock’ noise rapped out by the nightwatchmen as Nadia ponders her momentous decision; the violin string snapping after a strained conversation about hypnotism; the shutter breaking loose as Nadia and her mother melodramatically bemoan their fates. Marshall Mcluhan associates electrical forms of mediation with the return to prominence of ‘acoustic space’ repressed by

Objectivity, alienation and fragmentation 47 print and visual perspective: ‘Acoustic space has the structure of a sphere in which things create their own space and modify and coerce each other. Without the visual stress necessary to drive the other senses underground into the subconscious, their interrelatedness is constant’ (Mcluhan 1988: 35). Chekhov’s juxtapositions of predictable word and unpredictable sound rely precisely on acoustic space. Common to both Chekhov and Dostoevskii is an impulse to work with the grain of the new forms of mediation. This desire is, however, overshadowed by a deeper-rooted sense of the crisis such forms have inflicted on vision, and on the relationships between copy and original, word and image. The crisis is encapsulated in the status of the photograph which supplants direct human intercourse by interaction with what Anne McCauley terms ‘a machine-generated and therefore irrefutably exact alter-ego, a fabricated “other” ’ (McCauley 1985: 224). Under the spell of the impending fin de siècle, both writers challenged ocularcentrism in its most mystical form: that of the visionary image ‘through to the end of time’. For Dostoevskii, such images are no longer possible: Ippolit’s vision of the end is nothing but a formless tarantula, and Myshkin – vehicle of the writer’s own eschatological vision – goes mad. For Chekhov, it is no longer desirable: Nadia stands condemned for her utopian fantasies indulged without regard for her responsibilities in the present. Like Tolstoy, Chekhov was sensitive to the shifting borders between the public and private spheres which the arrival of the reproducible image facilitated. In an 1884 story, ‘The Album’ (‘Al’bom’), an outwardly gratified senior civil servant is on his retirement given a photograph album containing photos of his colleagues. In the privacy of his home, his children cruelly deface the photos. His son cuts out an image of a titular councillor, pastes it onto a match box and brings it to his father with the words: ‘Look Dad, a monument!’ (Chekhov 1977, 2: 382). The father laughs heartily, his amusement encapsulating the possibility of private manipulations of peoples’ public images afforded through the easy distribution of reproducible images. The theme is reversed in ‘Whist’ (‘Vint’), a story published in the same year. Here, a senior civil servant surprises a group of junior colleagues playing whist outside of work hours. He discovers that, instead of playing cards, they are using defaced visitochki depicting the photographic images of their superiors, including the senior civil servant himself, calling out the surnames of the officials rather than the names of playing cards. Here the reproducible camera image enables the lowly chinovnik (official) of Russian literary tradition to mock and objectify those above him ‘to their very faces’. These ‘faces’ are in truth photographic indices of their objects, safely removed from their sources.13

The aesthetics of media space: Uspenskii Another writer whose work engaged with photography’s democratizing potentials within its very narrative structure was Gleb Uspenskii, whose own

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early commitment to the Populist cause reflected the numerous genre portraits of peasants to which he was exposed. Indeed, like SaltykovShchedrin, Uspenskii devoted much of his oeuvre to sketches aimed at portraying generic types of the Russian provinces. Uspenskii is central to Russia’s ‘Civic Tradition’ and for that reason was inducted into the Soviet canon of great nineteenth-century Russian realists. Uspenskii’s belief that true art must fulfil a social function and his rejection of the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement, which was gathering pace at the time he was writing, endeared him to Soviet historians eager to bolster membership of the Critical Realist School created anachronistically to provide Socialist Realism with a predecessor. Indeed, Uspenskii’s quirkily engaging sketch, ‘Straightened Out’ (‘Vypriamila’) became a standard text in the official Soviet rebuttal of aesthetic purism. ‘Straightened out’ ends, like many of the texts considered in this section, with a reference to a photograph. Unlike Chekhov, Uspenskii valued photography’s utilitarian aspects and was inspired by its mass popularity which he saw as the embodiment of art’s new democratic potential. Like Chekhov, however, and in confirmation of the camera’s position at the centre of a redefining of aesthetic boundaries, Uspenskii presents his photographic detail as a contamination of an artwork located inside a frame. Whereas Chekhov remains unaware of the link between his frame-breaking technique and the camera he so despised, Uspenskii openly celebrated it. The first-person hero of ‘Straightened Out’ is a populist named Tiapushkin, modelled on the author. The ambiguous status of the narration – half autobiographical, half fictional – mirrors that of the photograph (part artefact, part document) with which it closes. Tiapushkin begins with an account of peasant poverty observed from a train. The depressing scene produces a feeling of limitless misery in him – compounded by the juxtaposition of his deliberate intention ‘to observe and not live’ and the ‘essential truth of village life’ (Uspenskii 1957: 235). It is only when he dreams another scene of a peasant woman working in elegant harmony with the landscape that he experiences an overwhelming sense of elation which he cannot explain. The narrator then reveals that his experience finds its apotheosis in his reaction some years ago to the Venus de Milo in the Louvre. Tiapushkin then inserts a lengthy narrative digression (a story framed within a story) detailing the build-up to his visit to the Louvre. He is travelling with friends across Europe, in the hope of discovering the authentic ‘truth’ about life they have been unable to identify in Russia. They visit London and Paris and comment from a distance on scenes of deprivation. First, Paris impresses them with its ‘ladies of the street’ who ‘turned out … to be not street ladies but human beings’ (Uspenskii 1957: 240). The impression of irresponsible aestheticizing indulgence is confirmed when they visit London and discover the delights of a fish restaurant which convince them that ‘The English “truth” is higher than the French’ (242). Sumptuous, sweet-smelling salmon is juxtaposed with an account of poverty of the sort that makes one stop in

Objectivity, alienation and fragmentation 49 horror ‘at a clear manifestation of real life’, quite different from the ‘polite exterior’ proffered by its French equivalent. The visitors conclude that, with its fresh, unadorned salmon and fresh, unadorned poverty, London is the essence of life itself (245). But on returning to France and visiting a Paris morgue, the friends are exposed to a vision of such tasteless horror that their hierarchy of authenticity collapses. The narrator is forced to apologize to the reader ‘for this unaesthetic picture’ as he recounts with disgust how the feet of one corpse were covered in corns (246). On the following day Tiapushkin’s hierarchy suffers a still more mystifying blow at the Louvre when, standing before the Venus de Milo – the very epitome of aesthetic elitism – he is overcome with a joy which he compares to the image of a scrunched up glove – his soul – as it is filled with air and ‘straightened out’. Tiapushkin cannot say why this piece of high art affects him so powerfully, nor ‘precisely which lines … “straighten out” and expand my scrunched-up human soul’ (249). However, he is sure that the ‘straightening out’ sensation produced by the Venus echoes his experience when marvelling at the peasant women back in Russia, and that the sensation is unconnected with the interpretation of the sculpture ventured by the poet Fet who, in a poem called ‘Venus de Milo’, writes of the luminous beauty of the naked female form (250). On every return visit to the Louvre, the Venus produces the same reaction, but with a difference. The elation resulting from the straightening out now accentuates and foregrounds (rather than frames and aestheticizes) the true nature of the misery beyond the walls of the Louvre: I still could not find the connection between the enigma straightening out my soul and the thought about how hard life is for mankind which followed immediately upon the straightening out … but I began … to imagine to myself all the misery of the noisy street outside the Louvre. (250) What this lofty artefact shielded from the grime of human existence has revealed is not the false truth embodied in the aestheticized images of poverty indulged in earlier, but the ‘most terrible falsity’ of the lives of those condemned to backbreaking labour, perpetual hunger and filth (251). In a metonymic slippage typical of Uspenskii’s technique, the figure of the scrunched up glove is displaced from the aestheticizing observer’s soul to that of the oppressed souls he has hitherto falsely aestheticized: ‘All these terrible falsities, … so unlike one another, make it evident only that man himself is scrunched up, deformed, disgraced’ (251).14 To be ‘scrunched up’ is thus to be spiritually impoverished, whether this results from physical hardship, or from a propensity to aestheticize other suffering human beings. Authentic life and authentic art amount to the same thing incarnated in the last image one would expect to find it – that of the Venus de Milo, who now embodies not the effete beauty of the female body, but the revelation of

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injustice and the urge to ‘go to the people’ to correct that injustice. The space of the accepted meaning of the Venus (the summit of detached Western mimesis), in other words, is appropriated by the subversive Russian tradition, with its counter-aesthetic emphasis on participation in the struggle against injustice.15 In identifying the height of aestheticism with the depths of extraaesthetic reality, it is clear that Uspenskii is not just redrawing the borders of art, but completely inverting its value system. Here the significance of the fact that the Venus de Milo episode is presented as a story within a story comes to light. Following his visit to Europe, Tiapushkin returns to the reallife task of bettering the lives of the Russian peasantry, acknowledging the sculpture’s role in solidifying his decision to ‘go to the people’: I was profoundly glad that the great work of art was strengthening me in my decision to go to the dark masses of the people. Now, thanks to everything which this great work of art taught me, I know that I have the strength to do this, and that I can and must go there. (255) Since Tiapushkin is giving up his voyage of aesthetic discovery for unglamorous work among peasants, the return to Russia is equated with a return to the containing narrative outside the frame of the aesthetic digression which has the European sculpture at its heart, and thus to authenticity itself. Meaning replaces form, just as authentic peasant life replaces the Venus. Tiapushkin closes his story by informing his readers that when he now visits Paris he feels it no longer appropriate to visit the Louvre. He writes from his ‘remote little village, blanketed in snow, in a miserable, unwelcoming little hut’ (255). Yet still the Venus sensation surfaces to ‘waken his limbs, broken with paralysis’ (255). In a final twisting of the knife into the corpse of conventional aestheticism, Tiapushkin triumphantly declares: ‘[I]n order not to lose the feeling that has awakened in me, I will buy a photograph and hang it on the wall, and when I am being oppressed … by the weight of country life, I will look at it, remember everything and become cheerful’ (255).16 As in Virgin Soil, the insertion of the photograph into the story’s last lines influences its dominant code of interpretation. For we are now encouraged to equate the utilitarian camera image’s assault on the borders of conventional aesthetics with Uspenskii’s semi-fictional text straddling the boundary of art and journalism, announcing its own politically motivated rejection of aesthetic orthodoxies. Ironically, this most utilitarian of narratives attains its apogee in a gesture of acute self-reflexivity. Tiapushkin’s polemical assertion that he does not need to stand before the Venus for it to have its required affect, since he can gaze at its photographic copy, accords with Benjamin’s lament about the ‘decay of the aura’ surrounding the traditional artwork. Benjamin attributes this decay to

Objectivity, alienation and fragmentation 51 photography which, however, he sees as double-edged, for it also coincides with, and gives succour to, the revolutionary movement – a development celebrated in terms that would make an appropriate epigraph for Uspenskii’s story: With the advent of photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis … At the time, art reacted with a theology of art … which denied any social function of art … mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual … Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on … politics. (Benjamin 1979: 226) As Uspenskii demonstrates, photography’s ability to project art into the reality beyond its frame accounts for its revolutionary aesthetic. Paradoxically, the camera’s democratizing inclinations enabling Tiapushkin to appreciate the Venus from his peasant hut contributes also to the globalization process driving modern consumerism. As Tiapushkin gains revolutionary inspiration from his photographically reproduced Venus in the corner of his izba, a multitude of bourgeois families everywhere gaze simultaneously in self-satisfied pride at the same image enclosed in an elaborate gilt frame hung upon the decorous walls of their urban mansions.

Photography and epistemological contradiction in Chekhov’s Sakhalin project Photography’s egalitarian potential emerged at the dawn of the photographic era, when a nineteenth-century British commentator noted with pleasure that Victoria and Albert can now hang on ordinary people’s walls next to images of a nondescript ‘Mrs Fry’ (quoted in Armstrong 1999: 130). The ease with which public personae could now enter the lives of ordinary people signalled the beginning of the era of the media star. The ramifications of this phenomenon were identified in Chekhov’s ‘A Boring Story’ (‘Skuchnaia istoriia’) (1889), in which the cynical narrator wrily mocks his naive female friend’s habit of bringing home photoportraits of the famous actors she admires. It is, predictably, one such actor who breaks her heart prior to the denouement of this, one of Chekhov’s bleakest tales. As Chekhov also intimated, photography is connected to a mid-nineteenth-century tendency with profoundly undemocratic consequences: the development of ever more extensive surveillance techniques. In Russia, one of the earliest examples of the use of photography as criminal evidence was during the trial of the Decembrist Davignon in 1845 (quoted in Barchatova et al. 1990: 37). Photographic technology thus served to control and contain democracy just as it enhanced its spread. Some of the earliest examples of the criminal mugshot were unearthed in the archives of the Tsarist police.

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Such mugshots provide a negative domestic equivalent to Levitskii’s idealized genre shots. Each is driven by the desire to catalogue and achieve epistemological control over Russia’s vast empire, whether through restriction and surveillance, or reductive exoticization. Chekhov’s own contribution to the fetish for the visual cataloguing of Russia’s empire emerges in his Sakhalin project. For much of the period that he spent on the Sakhalin island penal colony, Chekhov was, at his own request, accompanied by the photographer I. I. Pavlovskii, whose visual records of the convicts were archived in Chekhov’s private collection of photographs. Indeed, the juxtapostion of photographic document and writerly text reflects the fact that Chekhov came under the sway of the same late-nineteenth-century utilitarian challenge to traditional aesthetics which Uspenskii embraced so avidly. The urge to abandon conventional aesthetic detachment in favour of civic-minded involvement is for Chekhov indissociable from the pragmatic, civic-minded medium of photography. The Sakhalin photographs are also central to Chekhov’s mission in that they represent the intersection of mugshot and genre shot techniques which dominate the unwieldy narrative (see Plate 9). On one hand such images establish epistemological control over the Russian criminal fraternity, yet on the other they claim to represent the human essence of these unfortunate convicts, to disseminate rational knowledge about their lives in the hope that it might lead to an alleviation of their plight: ‘In order to believe that Russian convicts do not kill and rob the first person they meet out of cowardliness and laziness, it is necessary either to be of a negative opinion about mankind in general, or simply not to know mankind’ (Chekhov 1977, 14: 62). Chekhov’s descriptive text is modelled upon the epistemological function of the accompanying photographs. Yet the extent of the Sakhalin record undermines the model. The sheer spread of descriptive supplements to the generic essences the famously laconic Chekhov attempts to record reveals how illusory the idea of such control was to be.17 In attempting to convey the scale and complexity of this island of human beings treated by the state as a homogeneous criminal mass, Chekhov resorts to pseudo-scientific documentation of general facts and figures (a method to which photojournalism contributed significantly), supported by references to individual cases distended with contingent detail (a trait inherent in the photographic image). Referring to an area of Sakhalin called Korsakovsk, Chekhov volunteers one of the countless sets of figures with which his narrative is laden, using it as the catalyst for a portrait of a perfectly unremarkable prisoner whom, once described, Chekhov abandons so that he can move on to yet another such anonymous individual in a process of infinite accretion: 41 pairs live as families, of which 21 are unmarried. There are only 10 women living in a free state, and that is 16 times fewer than in the Rykovskii region and even 4 times fewer than in Due … Amongst the exiles in Korsakovsk there are some interesting personalities. I shall

Objectivity, alienation and fragmentation 53 mention the life prisoner Pishchikov … This was a tall, emaciated man, of noble appearance, with a long beard … He is hardworking and very polite … The Zhakomin family is also interesting … (190–1) The scale represented by the data adduced is patently unequalled by the contingency of the illustrative examples. Photography encourages the proliferation of extraneous detail and the stressing of unique and unrepeatable features rather than of types, even as it lays claim to knowledge. As Cathy Popkin puts it: ‘[T]hough Chekhov goes home with data enough for three dissertations … these convicts are not accessible to him as real objects of knowledge. Nor, as a result, as objects of representation’ (Popkin 1992: 39). Far from modelling the camera image, the Chekhovian word subverts the function it claims to appropriate from photography by exposing both sides of the paradox at its heart. Unsurprisingly, Chekhov’s monumental document closes not with verbal images of individuals (which peter out well before the end), but with pages of dry statistics culminating in a reference to an obscure law about the medical treatment of criminals. The prosaic excess of factual detail littering the document and the mechanical templating blighting the outlook of characters like Sasha in ‘The Betrothed’ amount to the same thing: the passing of meaningful visual knowledge.

Photography, time and the fractured modernist self If photography affected Russian realist constructions of relationships between people, and between visual detail and essential meaning, it also contributed to new literary perceptions of the self. This became central to the modernist movement which owes as much to the explosion of mass culture that is one of the camera’s legacies as it does to the inward turn towards the subjective realm that is another. In Chapter 1 we explored Turgenev’s novelistic appropriation of the divided photographic self. This tendency is amplified in the writing of Vsevolod Garshin, traditionally categorized as a bridge between Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy (all of whose influence he bears) and the angst-ridden modernist fantasies of Andreev and Sologub. Garshin’s ‘The Encounter’ (‘Vstrecha’) was written in 1879, a year after Virgin Soil. Early in the story, a character called Kudreshov asks to see a photocard of an acquaintance’s fiancée. Earlier the acquaintance, Vasilii Petrovich, had taken the photo from his pocket to admire the girl from whom he has been parted. The familiar face causes him to dream of family happiness with the girl. Complimenting Vasilii Petrovich on her beauty, Kudreshov, whom Vasilii Petrovich has encountered by accident, then wonders about the future when relations are more prosaic: ‘I’ve imagined you in ten years time, in a dressing gown, with a pregnant wife now grown plain, seven children and very little money.… Will you still be carrying this photo in your pocket?’ (Garshin

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1976: 94). The cynical Kudreshov uses this frozen moment, abstracted from the temporal flux, to cast doubt on the stability of Vasilii Petrovich’s feelings across time. Ultimately, the capacity of mechanical images to mediate between people separated in space and time proves fallacious, since such images fragment the temporal flow upon which the interaction of self-identical individuals depends. In ‘Night’ (‘Noch”) (1880), Garshin develops his exploration of the modern self to its conclusion. Here a character undergoes a personality breakdown resulting from his perception that the past self on which his present self stands consists only of unrelated fragments. His crisis commences when he notes the ability of particular smells or sharp motifs to ‘arouse in the memory whole pictures of what was experienced long ago’ (Garshin 1976: 138). This causes him to recreate in a temporal vacuum ‘a series of formless and gloomy scenes in which he is the main player’ (138). As Bunin and Proust later clarified, such involuntary memory is linked with photography.18 Indeed, we learn in a flashback that it is precisely when Garshin’s character sees a photograph on a table that the sequence of thoughts which led him to the crisis point begins (144). As the breakdown progresses, the hero is caught gazing at himself in a mirror. Garshin dwells on his reflection in detail, referring to ‘a tall figure, restlessly pacing the room, eight steps in one direction, eight steps in another’ (150), creating the illusion that he is describing a real person. The hero’s crisis-inducing confusion of authentic self with an inauthentic copy spatio-temporally detached from its source is metatextually echoed in the reader’s ambivalence over the status of the description of his hero (mirror image or authentic self ?). Finally, the hero’s ego implodes, the alternations between first- and secondperson pronouns indicating the proximity of total collapse: ’Is it really you thinking what you are thinking?’ … My God! If only there were one authentic, genuine feeling which didn’t die inside my ‘I’ … If only I could rip out this evil … monster with a large belly … You have already consumed everything. All the strength, all the time is devoted to serving you. (151) Garshin’s proto-modernist photographic temporality was later to be incorporated wholescale into the writing of Bunin. From an early stage, photography informed Bunin’s approach to memory and the past, and eventually the relationship between narrated time and the narrating self. In ‘Tania’ (‘Tan’ka’) (1892), an aristocrat who has lost both wife and son adopts a peasant girl and, looking at her fresh, youthful face, remembers his own past, stopping obsessively before a photoportrait of his son. The photographic imprinting of past upon present emphasizing the irretrievability of lost time, whilst simultaneously resurrecting it back to life, became Bunin’s hallmark.

Objectivity, alienation and fragmentation 55 In ‘At the Source of A Life’ (‘U istoka dnei’) (1906), an early autobiographical tale, Bunin recalls how as a young child he acquired self-identity by looking into mirrors which enabled him to unify exterior images of his self with his inner consciousness: ‘The mirror … astonished me only now when my perceptions were suddenly illuminated with the first clear flash of consciousness, when I divided myself into a perceiving and a cognizing self’ (Bunin 1978: 70). In 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes characterized the daguerreotype as ‘a mirror with a memory’ (Holmes 1859: 747). Bunin’s narrator acknowledges this truth when he remarks at the end that it is by looking at old photoportraits of himself that he understands his infantile experience with the mirror: ‘I saw youths, and it is only by looking at my portraits that I now know whom I saw then’ (79). Like the past-ness of literary narration itself, the photoportaits foreground both the fragmentation of the self through time, and the possibilities (offered by technology, and by autobiographical myth-making) of re-unifying the shards. The use made of the photographic metaphor by the conservative pseudorealist Bunin counters the decadent Merezhkovskii’s hostility towards photographic technology, confirming that Merezhkovskii’s anti-utilitarianism represented only the first, reactive stage in the camera’s incorporation into modernist aesthetics. Later, Decadent fiction shows a greater affinity with Bunin’s neo-realism. In Fedor Sologub’s writing, around which the magic of the camera hovers like a shadow, we see two sides to the photograph’s capacity to double reality. Indeed, the duality of the camera image recognized by Bunin is exploited to ambiguous effect in the context of Sologub’s openly decadent poetics with its play on the fragility of the borders between death and life, self and world, male and female. In ‘Earth to Earth’ (‘Zemle zemnoe’) (1896), a young boy, Sasha, is obsessed with his dead mother. When he and his father are transfixed by a photograph of her dressed in black, Sasha wishes for her return. Later, he secretly defaces the photo, drawing moustaches on his mother’s mouth. He is delighted when the resulting image appears to render his dead mother alive, and restored to his own state of carefree childhood: ‘Mama looked young and happy, with her painted-on moustaches, like a boy who had decided to play a joke, and so kind, so funny’ (Sologub 1990: 282). The mother has, through Sasha’s defacement of her photograph, merged with Sasha’s playful, living self. The photograph’s indexicality motivates its association with the spirit of the dead person it represents.19 Yet the fact that the portrait is a sign of the mother’s presence, rather than that presence itself, permits the manipulation of that living spirit by the perceiving viewer. Sasha’s punishment for the defacement precipitates the dénouement in which Sasha visits his mother’s grave and, in a characteristic Sologubian gesture, expresses, then retracts, a desire to merge with his dead mother: ‘Trembling all over, exhausted by a mysterious fear, he got up and went back … to earthly life, to a deathlike and languorous path’ (Sologub 1990: 286). Reversing the defacement episode, Sasha’s life spirit is all but assimilated by

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his mother’s corpse which, in one further inversion, infects earthly life with its deathly aura, establishing death as the true life and vice versa. The duality of the photographic image – index of a living presence yet sign of that presence’s passing into absence – provides the symbolic fulcrum of the infinite interplay between alternating states. This duality has been at the centre of our attention throughout this section. By superimposing it onto the phenomenon of mass reproduction heralded by the camera, and onto the border dividing image and word, we shed light on the key sources of tension at the dawn of Russia’s entry into the global era: (i) the decline in the authenticity of notions of painterly vision, generic essence and originality; (ii) the growing mediation of human relations and of the private sphere; (iii) the democratizing and reifying effects of the camera’s transformations of time and space on the boundaries of traditional forms of representation; and (iv) the projection of these phenomena onto the plane of inner consciousness and the resulting fragmentation of the self. Implicit throughout is the conviction that it is at the border of reproducible image and literary word that these conflicts find their clearest expression. We see this in the way that our literary examples incorporate the tensions within their own structures of meaning. Meanwhile, the unbroken line linking these issues across the nineteenth century confirms that, just as the Russian literary tradition which attained its loftiest peak in its realist novels was born in photography’s shadow, so the modernist movement which succeeded it was the next stage in a chain of cultural developments which drew the culture of the camera ever closer to their heart.

3

Photographic eye as poetic I Dialogues of text and image in Maiakovskii’s and Rodchenko’s Pro eto project

Russian modernism, the reproducible image and the poetic persona The term ‘modernism’ encompasses more than the sum of a few self-contained avant-garde movements operating on the elite margins of European culture at the turn of the last century and uncovering uncharted realms of experience. To the contrary, modernism cannot be understood apart from twentieth-century mass forms of communication, and the emergence of socio-political forms (consumer capitalism, totalitarian communism) in which the ‘kitsch’ culture generated by these forms thrived.1 High modernism is thus bound up with visually-oriented modernity itself, without which neither Soviet communism nor consumer capitalism would have proved remotely durable. Susan BuckMorss writes of the camera’s ability to create ‘simulacric corporealities’, doubles of reality, which fostered the ‘dream worlds’ upon which, she argues, both capitalism and totalitarianism are founded: ‘Doubling’ duplicated virtual realities as material phantasmagorias that could be really experienced. This gave a special dream character to industrial production in the case of the USSR, and to commodity production in the case of the United States. It was when existence was … just like the advertising or propaganda image, that one felt truly alive. (Buck-Morss 2000: 150) As we have seen, Russian literary modernism’s response to the camera predates communism by several decades; indeed, I argued in Chapter 2 that, rather than merely respond to photography, Russian modernism, like its realist predecessor, was born largely of an encounter with the new medium. The fragmentation of the self characterizing the writing of Garshin, Sologub and Bunin is linked with the projection of photographic mediation (which accounted for realism’s questioning of generic essences) onto the plane of individual subjectivity. And the democratizing effect of photography’s infiltration into the daily lives of ordinary Russians which Chekhov met with such ambiguity is inseparable from modernist notions of art as independent sphere represented in Russia by Valerii Briusov’s early poetry. Given the threat posed

58 The photographic word to figurative painting by mechanically reproduced images, and to serious literature by mass popular fiction, exemplified in Russia by books like Verbitskaia’s potboiler, The Keys to Happiness (Kliuchi schast’ia), it is hardly surprising that artists of all hues should retreat behind the walls of the fortress of the autonomous art object. But, as the Frankfurt School has shown, this very notion is itself a product of the reification of art that followed nineteenthcentury mechanization.2 Early modernism’s squeamish eschewal of the new culture of the masses recalled Romantic notions of the artist as a lone, misunderstood genius oppressed by the ignorant crowd. Such conceptions of the artistic self found quintessential expression in modernism via the mythmaking activities of the Russian symbolists, whose carefully constructed artistic personae overshadowed their biographical selves. Fedor Sologub and Andrei Belyi, for example, are pseudonyms (for Vladimir Teternikov and Boris Bugaev respectively) marking elaborate identities synonymous with each writer’s literary reputation. The self-conscious authorial persona was no less potent a force when coincident in name with the autobiographical writer; the examples of Aleksei Remizov and, in particular, Vasilii Rozanov are cases in point.3 For Rozanov, the self’s tendency infinitely to fragment into discrete ‘others’ within the individual consciousness, first apparent as early as Turgenev, torments the author, yet also enables him perpetually to defer his true identity, to shield it from the deleterious effects of exposure to the public, dedicating himself to writing for its own sake: I am alien to my own soul. Who am I? It is only clear that there are many ‘I’s in ‘I’ and many more ‘I’s within those ‘I’s; I’ve been writing without a reader for a long time … just because I like writing and I won’t be angry if a reader who has bought my book throws it in the trash bin by mistake; My innermost subjectivity has made me live my life behind an untearable curtain. Nobody is able to touch that curtain. (Rozanov 1970: 435, 3, 54) In Rozanov’s semi-journalistic writings, Chekhovian ambivalence towards mass everyday culture is further reflected in the juxtaposition of outspoken hostility towards the press and the ‘infiltration everywhere of the kabak [public house]’, and a taste for the unpretentious qualities of domestic life which counter the vanity (samoliubie) and puffed-up pretensions of literaturizing (literatorstvo) (227). This positive reassessment of the everyday resonates in the work of Blok and Belyi who expressed keen interest in the opportunities afforded by camera-based technologies, incorporating jagged film syntax into their writing, and delighting in the earthiness of cinema culture, prior to its contamination by bourgeois philistine pretentiousness. Blok, who had ‘long loved the cinema just as it was’, came to lament the moment when it ‘fell into the … vulgarity of “high society” subjects’ (quoted in Leyda 1960: 130).

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One reason why mass phenomena like photography found Russian modernist art such fertile soil was that they accorded with the revolutionary discourse that dominated the Russian avant-garde movement of the second decade of the twentieth century. In a purely utilitarian sense, the synthesis of popular media like photography with sophisticated literary forms guaranteed that Bolshevik propaganda remained accessible, yet broad in influence(s). In 1925, the Futurist poet Aleksandr Kruchenykh laid down criteria for the ideal agitka (propaganda representation): [A]n agitka must be very popular, lucid in thought, language and form; second, it must be very artistic and original. If it does not satisfy the second condition, then its influence will be limited only to the primitive masses, missing the highly cultivated … ones, and … its influence will soon evaporate even among the simple population. (Kruchenykh 1925: 45) But at a more abstract level, the notion of an everyday mass culture transformed into a worker’s utopia by an elite vanguard was at the heart of Bolshevik philosophy and influenced the non-objective art of the Russian constructivists, to the extent that Vladimir Tatlin posited the revolutionary artist’s task as the complete replacement of the worn-out everyday objects of yesterday by a pristine new existence in which the form of domestic objects harmonizes with their higher revolutionary content: A new everyday life requires new objects … Our everyday life is built on … natural principles and an object from the West cannot satisfy us … It is for this reason that I show such an interest in organic form as a point of departure for the creation of the new object … Such are our principal tasks in working on the organization of new objects in the new collective way of life. (Quoted in Zhadova 1988: 267–8) Rodchenko, meanwhile, discussed the new material culture in semianthropomorphic terms: ‘The objects receive a meaning, they become friends and comrades of humans and humans begin to learn how to laugh, to rejoice and to converse with objects’ (quoted in Margolin 1997: 10). Photography’s role in the establishment of the new culture was a function not only of its democratic nature, but also of another attribute discussed earlier: its indexical ties to its object of depiction. The camera image’s facticity lent it to the literature of fact movement (literatura fakta) of the early 1920s, whose emphasis on travel accounts, diaries and newspaper clippings created space for photographic inserts. Sergei Tretiakov, a writer associated with the revolutionary LEF group and an accomplished photographer who used camera images extensively in his literary travelogues, once commented that he was unsure whether he would be more upset by the loss

60 The photographic word of his pen, or of his Leica camera (Tretiakov 1934: 4). More generally, the camera’s ability to combine artistic techniques (point of view, perspective, depth of field, line, etc.) with a grounding in actuality meant that it matched the rhetoric proclaiming the overcoming of the bourgeois fictional impulse and the establishment of a new proletarian art of quotidian reality in which life, labour and art merge in a revolutionary realization of the Symbolist dream of life-creation (zhiznetvorchestvo). In film director Dziga Vertov’s words: We relegate ‘art’ to the periphery of our consciousness. We place life itself at the centre of our attention … Instead of surrogates for life (theatrical performances, film drama etc.) we bring to the workers’ consciousness facts, carefully selected, recorded and organized from both the life of the workers themselves and from that of their class enemies. (Vertov 1984: 50) Later on, a rift occurred between those determined to return the photographic medium to a representational mode and harness it to the backward-looking party dogma of socialist realism dominant in the USSR from 1932, and those who remained committed to a radical aesthetics of photography as creation that used actuality as its material. In 1931 The October Association which included Rodchenko proclaimed in defiance of the gathering forces of conservatism: We are for a revolutionary photography, materialist, socially grounded, and technically well equipped … Through the fixation of socially directed and not staged facts, we agitate and show struggle for socialist culture … We are against picturesque photography and pathos of an old bourgeois type. (Rodchenko 1931: 150) It was Vladimir Maiakovskii who wrote of poetry as a form of production like any other, demonstrating his affinities with the revolutionary avant garde for which photography was emblematic in the ways outlined above. Having helped write the Futurist manifesto calling for Pushkin and Dostoevskii to be ‘thrown overboard the ship of modernity’, and having dedicated several years of his life to the ROSTA poster campaign where he first collaborated with Rodchenko producing both texts and images, Maiakovskii enthusiastically endorsed photography’s democratizing potential and was fully conversant in the aesthetics of the mass-produced image and the challenges it posed to conventional art. Indeed, of all the writers to emerge from the avant garde, Maiakovskii was the most thoroughly steeped in the contradictions of the camera age. He took a strong interest in films. Some of his poems are structured like film scenarios and newsreels, and

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evidence of ‘cinematic vision’ recurs throughout his oeuvre. In 1918, Maiakovskii made three films, for which he authored the scenarios and played the leading part.4 He was among the most photographed figures of his time and is one of the world’s first ‘media stars’. Maiakovskii, like the Symbolists, had a strong sense of his artistic persona, but unlike his predecessors and despite his impeccable revolutionary credentials, he was less sanguine about the prospects of exploiting that persona to liberatory effect; for Maiakovskii it was less a case of the persona as a haven into which to escape from the masses, than a prison created by those masses. Significantly, Maiakovskii did not adopt a pseudonym. The interplay between the thirdperson ‘Volodia’ of the play ‘Vladimir Maiakovskii’ and the first-person lyric ‘I’ of the poetry marks Maiakovskii’s awareness that, in the media age, the publically constructed persona, whilst alienating the self from itself, is ultimately its only mode of being. The effort to reconcile the rift between the third and first persons reflects Maiakovskii’s allegiances to the zhiznetvorchestvo project which he inherited from the Symbolists yet which, unlike them, he sensed was doomed to failure. He understood the difficulties in maintaining a private identity in the face of such contradictions and the contribution made by photography’s objectifying effects to the emergence of those difficulties. But he also recognized that the frozen photographic image detached from its subject might in certain circumstances facilitate the manipulation of the poetic ‘I’ so as to secure an albeit precarious sanctuary for it. It is this potential – at odds with photography’s indexical link to actuality – which was to be exploited in Rodchenko’s photographic montages. Similarly, the split temporality of the photographic image – at once marker of transience and pointer to eternity – offered hope to a poet obsessed with mortality. The ease with which reproducible images can be combined into fictional sequences detached from their original referents pointed up a final contradiction. For whilst this feature, later to become the principle of cinematic montage, leads to the association of photographic reproduction with fantastic abstractions from reality, conversely the acute fictionalized vision of the metaphorizing lyric poet (later to capture the imagination of Iurii Olesha) becomes linked with the most vividly compelling of realities.5 In this, the concluding chapter of the first section, I explore how Maiakovskii works through the complex of themes outlined in a collaborative venture undertaken with the photographer Rodchenko: the long poem Pro eto. In this venture, rather than representing photography in verbal form within itself, as in the previous two chapters, literature incorporates the camera image whole in the form of illustrative photocollages. The extent to which the images passively echo Maiakovskii’s verbal metaphors and the extent to which they actively transform them is central to the dialogue between photography and lyric poetry and to the reordering of the hierarchy of aesthetic forms that the two artists institute, not only within the poem’s structure, but also on the physical boundaries of the text itself. This project

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plays out the battle between the poet’s lyrical ‘I’ expressed in words, and the objectifying camera ‘eye’ of the anonymous public which is at once the ‘I”s antagonist and the very ground for its existence, at the same time exploring the link between this eye and the genericized mass readership that constitutes Maiakovskii’s audience. It does so in the context of Maiakovskii’s obsession with the end of things which links the project to the photoportrait of Dostoevskii’s Nastasia Filippovna. As in Chapters 1 and 2, the analysis in this chapter is largely text-based, representing an individual case study of a word–image encounter of wider significance. As with the preceding analyses, I do not attempt to recreate that encounter in its entirety, let alone set the Maiakovskii–Rodchenko collaboration in the full richness of its cultural context, or of Maiakovskii’s tortuous artistic trajectory. Rather, I offer a close reading of the way in which Maiakovskii’s verse and Rodchenko’s images interpenetrate one another against the background of revolutionary culture and within the framework of the theoretical issues outlined in the Introduction. My focus is on the generation by the poetry–photography juxtaposition of meanings to which each medium separately is unable to give adequate expression.

Imag(in)ing the end When Dostoevskii’s Myshkin is transfixed by a photoportrait of the face which haunts him thereafter, the image bears the imprint of a knowledge too terrible to contemplate – knowledge of the tragic end to Nastasia’s life, and, in the context of the novel’s eschatological thematics, of the end of time. Fifty years later, on 5 June 1923, Maiakovskii published the first edition of a poem, Pro eto, illustrated with photomontages produced by his agitprop collaborator, the constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko.6 The last of Rodchenko’s photomontages (see Plate 10) is juxtaposed with verses in which the poet imagines that in some future utopia he has been resurrected from the dead to serve as keeper at a zoo – a favourite haunt of Lily Brik, the love of his life. The collage is dominated by a photo of Lily who, likewise, looks back from the end at a captivated viewer in the ‘real’ time of the era in which the image was produced. It also contains an instantly recognizable photograph of Maiakovskii, looking in at a caged polar bear and up at the superimposed image of Lily.7 Maiakovskii knew that his persona was a function of his being in the public eye, and of the camera image’s unbreakable association with its own reproducibility. By portraying the poet looking at Lily, who looks into the camera (and out at us), Rodchenko identifies Maiakovskii, the unique self, with us, the anonymous viewers of Maiakovskii the public persona. The zoo montage is the last in a sequence of eight, the first of which uses ‘family’ snapshots of Lily Brik in various poses, but always staring out at the camera. (Most of the photos for Rodchenko’s montages were in fact taken by the studio photographer, Abram Shterenberg, in 1923. The inside front cover also lists Vasserman and Kapustianskii as contributory photographers.) The

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intervening six montages focus on Maiakovskii. The sequence thus reflects a progression from Maiakovskii as obsessive, gazing subject, through Maiakovskii as gazed-at object, back to Maikaovskii as gazing (but also gazed at) subject. In the poetic text, the I is always the lyrical subject of consciousness – even when the object of depiction is the poet himself. Yet, because of Lily’s piercing stare (and because Rodchenko, not Maiakovskii, is the creative presence behind the images), there is a consistency in the montage too – in that the lyrical poet is always the frozen object of another’s gaze, even if he simultaneously shares that gazer’s visual perspective. Pro eto thus enacts a dialogue between ‘I’ and eye in which each conditions and restructures the other. The mutual dependency of word and image is epitomized in Rodchenko’s polar bear – a visual citation of Maiakovskii’s metaphor of the self as bear. Literalizing Maiakovskii’s verbal image, Rodchenko highlights poetry’s reliance upon metaphoric vision. But the importance of vision to metaphor equals that of linearity to the viewing of a photo. We dwell over a family snapshot, moving from figure to figure in order to rebuild the memory it invokes. In a collage of snapshots, our eye must move from discrete image to discrete image in order to read the significance of the work as a whole.8 Reading is a paradigmatic as well as a syntactic activity; the small but familiar image of Maiakovskii is ‘read’ as such because it belongs to a set of such images which must be ‘learned’ and assimilated. Thus Rodchenko uses the inherent abstraction of the image to follow Dostoevskii in drawing attention to the fate of originality in the camera era: Maiakovskii the poetic I becomes a function of Maiakovskii the mass- produced image. Rodchenko’s images also embrace verbal linearity in the textual sequence they form. Nor is the poem ‘blind’ to this additional conundrum, for, though centred around the lyric theme of a man’s obsessive love for a woman, it is also an epic narrative, relating the life history of a public hero. The conflict of genres repeats the dilemma that Maiakovskii lived: that of a powerful ego which must be accommodated in a society in which the individual is suppressed in favour of the massovyi and heroic. As the revolutionary futurist Natan Altman put it: ‘Try to distinguish an individual face in a proletarian procession. Try to understand it as individual persons – absurd. Only in conjunction do they acquire all their strength, all their meaning’ (Altman 1988: 163). The conflict finds its visual equivalent in Rodchenko’s montages, which on one hand present atemporal images of an ageless Lily Brik, but on the other hand tell a story with a protracted linear path. Each montage is accompanied by the line from Maiakovskii’s poem that it ‘illustrates’, abstracting moments from the narrative flux and perpetuating them in frozen, photographic images which acquire their own function. The excess of visual over textual meaning has another aspect. Rodchenko’s sequence elides the impossible spatio-temporal gaps of the poem – from Alaska, to Petersburg, to Moscow, to the future, turning fantasy into hard photographic fact. It does so not by reconstructing a life from insignificant origins

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to glorious death, but through seven timeless images of famous lovers, never out of the public gaze. But in the very the act of eliding the gaps, the montages expose them, for because of its association with the objective and documentary, photography confirms the fictional absurdity of the idea that Maiakovskii might re-emerge in a thirtieth-century zoo.

Naming the nameless: the mediation of love Pro eto was inspired by Maiakovskii’s tormented love for Lily Brik, wife of fellow LEF collobarator and literary critic, Osip Brik.9 Part I tells of a phone call to Lily’s apartment, her refusal to speak to the prisoner-like poet, and the jealousy which turns him into a polar bear, stranded on an ice-floe (actually a pillow). His despair is then associated with the period seven years ago when he wrote the tragic poem ‘Chelovek’ (‘Man’) in which he portrays himself standing suicidal on a bridge over the Neva. He imagines flying across land and sea to Moscow, where he runs to and fro between Christmas gatherings characterized by the philistinism against which he invokes love as the only true weapon. His appeals for help in saving the man on the bridge are ignored. Maiakovskii proclaims that he wishes, through love, to save not only himself, but the whole world, for which he is prepared to stand crucified for two hundred years. His wish is realized as he is shot to death by the philistines. His tatters become the red flag on the Kremlin, and the manbear joins the Great Bear in the sky. Finally, Maiakovskii dreams of resurrection at a zoo, where he will be joined by his beloved, and where universal love will begin to flood the universe. In published form the collaborative project consisted of the text of Maiakovskii’s poem and the eight collages (or ‘montages’, as Rodchenko insisted they be termed). It also included a front cover, another striking Rodchenko photomontage. In fact, Rodchenko produced a total of twentyone compositions for the poem. The cover design and the eight definitive montages are reproduced in Plate 10. Most of the originals, which as Lavrent’ev points out, were tinted with colour (or pasted onto tinted paper), are now held at Moscow’s Maiakovskii museum and Library to which they were given by Rodchenko in 1953.10 In Rodchenko’s cover, the words of the title are superimposed on Lily’s photograph so that the darker colour of the printed words changes to the white colour of the photographic background at the very point where the letters intersect with her black hair. From the outset, the relationship between word and image is incestuous and interactive, rather than ordered and hierarchical. The overlapping of title and photograph suggests that the eto of the title refers to the person of Lily. In the poem, the referent of the word eto is never supplied. At the end of the introductory stanza, the reader is left to supply the word liubov’ as a missing rhyme: ‘This theme has made day darker than dark/ Strike with verses, it commands, at those brows above/ The name of that theme is … !’ (‘Eta tema den’ istemnila v temen’/ Kolotis’ –

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velela – strochkami lbov/ Imia etoi teme … !’). The word allows the poet to conceal, hint at, and generalize his theme. The photographic image forces him to name and particularize it. It is the usually silent image which ‘spells out’ the truth of Maiakovskii’s poetic verse. The problematic of particular and universal is brought to the fore in the opening lines: ‘In this theme both personal and petty/ Sung not one time/ Sung not four/ I revolved like a poetic squirrel/ And I now want to revolve more and more’ (‘V etoi teme i lichnoi i melkoi/ Perepetoi ne raz/I ne piat’/ Kruzhil poeticheskoi belkoi/ I khochu kruzhit’sia opiat’). The dilemma of being a lyric poet surrounded by byt (the everyday) is made worse by the realization that byt reaches out to include love. The connections between Maiakovskii’s difficulties in articulating the personal and the grey uniformity of mass mediation is foregrounded in the fact that Lily stares out at us – Maiakovskii’s vast circle of readers. The camera eye’s mechanical impersonality deprives the instant it records of intimacy and uniqueness, even as it captures those qualities. This is Lily – the unique object of Maiakovskii’s amorous intentions – made available for viewing by an anonymous mass of voyeurs. In the first montage we are met by the gaze of multiple images of Lily reclining on a divan, standing (with a bed pasted underneath her feet), defiantly staring us in the face, and in semi-profile. Her image is interspersed with photographs of luxuriant chairs and an ink drawing of a telephone receiver. Underneath the montage, Rodchenko cites the lines: ‘In bed/ She lies/ He’s alone/ On the table – a telephone’ (‘V posteli ona/Ona lezhit/On/Na stole telefon’). The photographic subject’s gaze is directed towards an infinite number of points around the centre-point of the image. We look at her, but she is forever looking elsewhere. Even if she meets us with her gaze, we know that it was intended originally for someone else. Rodchenko’s montage constructs Maiakovskii’s readership as a plurality of non-coincident viewing positions (heightening our sense of belonging to an impersonal mass) and ensures that the representation that is the object of our vision returns our gaze in mediated fashion: Lily is looking at us via her gaze at the camera eye. In the poem the pining poet is stranded at the other end of the telephone line he is about to activate. Like us, he communicates with Lily from a distance, via a mechanical apparatus. The montage thus furnishes a metatextual commentary on the communication structure of the text of which it is part. The metatextual function extends to another level, for the picture of Lily on a bed is composed of a separate portrait, pasted onto an image of an out-of-proportion bed. Rodchenko always insisted on the role of linearity in breaking down the illusion that photographic representations reproduce a synthetic whole from real life, an effect reinforced by the fact that his Lily is standing rather than, as in the poem, lying.11 However, precisely because the montage is an iconic realization of the conventional signs to which it is linked, the subversion of the representationalist ideology that it performs at the level of image is transferred to the level of text. Maiakovskii, too, put Lily on a bed to suit his creative purposes, rather than simply having ‘found’

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her there. Rodchenko’s multiple images of Lily convey the intensity of Maiakovskii’s obsession. Yet, by translating temporal recurrence (she is on his mind at all times) into spatial repetition (the images fan out across the page), Rodchenko discloses the mediated nature of that obsession. The photographs are unified by the striking sameness of Lily’s face, set with an identically posed expression of enigmatic unattainability. Maiakovskii’s poetic love is for a public construct whose very multiplicity indicates her status as a mechanically reproducible image available for scrutiny by all, her gaze directed to everyone and to nobody.

Photography and the lyric subject The voyeuristic camera eye is always absent from the scene it portrays. By contrast, the subject of lyric poetry is present in the form of the shifter pronoun ‘I’. Maiakovskii was one of the first writers to realize how mass communications foregrounded the distance separating the I as ‘subject of enunciation’ from the thoroughly socialized I as ‘subject of discourse’, which is why the third-person hero in his autobiographical play is called Vladimir Maiakovskii.12 Removing Maiakovskii from the scene, Rodchenko suggests the elusive (and illusionary) presence of the artist behind the camera, identifying voyeuristic camera eye with obsessive lyric I, restoring the lost ground between poet and persona. However, photography’s impersonal objectivity soon reasserts itself. In the second composition, the poet makes his appearance, hunched up in a corner, with Lily’s housekeeper about to answer the phone call in the opposite corner, and a strip of urban landscape, upon which Lily’s telephone number is superimposed, joining the figures.13 Pasted onto the image of Maiakovski’s receiver is a picture of a brontosaurus. The accompanying text reads: ‘From the wire there crawled/ Clawing with envy/ A monster from those troglodyte days’ (‘Polzlo iz shnura/ Skrebushcheisia revnosti/ Vremen trogladitskikh togdashnee chudishche’). Maiakovskii’s efforts to render his own subjectivity must bow to the objectifying force of the very camera eye which had earlier facilitated his escape from objectification. The poetic ‘I’ is transformed instantaneously into a photographically boxed, scientifically registered, third-person ‘He’ and the distance between subject of enunciation and subject of discourse becomes a yawning chasm. In Rodchenko’s photo, Maiakovskii is imprisoned by the objectifying gaze of the photographic eye which reduces him to the banal status of ‘star in snapshot’. As Buck-Morss puts it, ‘The star was a product for mass consumption whose multiplying image guaranteed the infinite reproduction of the same. The deeper the camera penetrated, the more it gave back a universal visage’ (Buck-Morss 2000, 148). The byt by which Maiakovskii feels so oppressed includes the very apparatus by which that oppression is recorded.14 Photography played a vital role in establishing Maiakovskii as a media star. Faced with trying to articulate a private love in an arena where his every movement is known, Maiakovskii resorts to references so cryptic that

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they are accessible only to the private self – the name of the street in which Lily lived, even her telephone number. But readers would have had no problem in following the autocommunicative references which ultimately reinforce rather than undermine the poet’s star status. Rodchenko exposes this contradiction, eliding private with public. Photographic montages accord all images equal semiotic status: the photo-record of a printed telephone number and the photo-record of a poet are both records of a reality reproduced for public consumption. To express private feelings in the media age is automatically to make them public property; what we see is not Maiakovskii hunched up in jealous agony, but Maiakovskii the man posing as Maiakovskii the poet hunched up in jealous agony, mediating private emotion through media image. The semiotic levelling function characteristic of photography performs a second exposé. A metaphor is a verbal device for rendering the world vivid, a temporary transformation of one thing into another in order to enhance the first’s presence. Photographs record actuality, and to posit a brontosaurus as a slice of actuality is to undermine actuality itself. Moreover, Rodchenko’s image relies on conventional wisdom about how a troglodyte monster looks. Nobody has ever seen one, but we have all learned to recognize its form: the metaphor (and the jealous word that it represents) is no less a mediated form subject to infinite reproduction than the posed photographic image of the poet Maiakovskii. The visual realization of verbal figures carries over into the next montage where a picture of Maiakovskii staring from a bridge into the Neva is placed above one of him, hands clasped to ears, sitting on an ice-floe with some cut-out polar bears. The two photographs are joined by an enlarged segment of the Neva bridge and accompanied by the words: ‘I paw my ears/ Tug at them in vain!/ Hearing my voice/ My very own/ My paws drilled through by my knife-edged voice’ (‘Ia ushi lapliu/ Naprasno mnesh’!/ Slyshu moi/ Moi sobstvennyi golos/ Mne lapy dyriviat golosa nozh’). The split between Maiakovskii the lyric subject and Maiakovskii the object of his own poem is here dramatized as the speaking I’s dialogue with the Man on the Bridge who accuses him of having abandoned his alter ego. The man on the bridge is described in Pro eto as having stood for seven years, since that is the period separating the poem from the earlier ‘Man’ in which Maiakovskii appears suicidal over the Neva for the first time, and in which he again relates his life, from birth through to ascension into heaven, and, by implication, the end of time. By deploying his own biography to represent the generality that is Man, Maiakovskii filters the problematic of particular and general through that of private and public, bridging the divide by invoking the persona of Christ, the unique individual who is also the perfect man, made in God’s image. The later association of Man with public (photographic) images and all that they connote in terms of banality and alienation complicates and ultimately subverts this paradigm. In externalizing Maiakovskii’s conceptualization of himself as a bear, the photograph destroys any distinction between inner and outer. Bear and

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poet, poet as bear – all is here on public view, exposed for what it is. Like the other images in Pro eto, these cut-and-paste figures, isolated from their original context, are representations of representations.15 Montage is thus the genre most suited to realizing photography’s mediatory function. The poet with whom the bears are juxtaposed is also a representation of a representation who, because he knows he is exposed, via the camera, to the public glare, must adopt the theatrical pose of despair. In the poem, the divide between the suicidal Maiakovskii of seven years ago and the despairing author of Pro eto is negated through the image of the Neva’s bridge across time. Rodchenko’s collage transposes figure of speech into concrete image, time into space. Of course, the notion of a poet literally hearing his own seven-year-old words is, in the scientific era, a delusion. Yet that same era has engendered a new mythic space in which, through the infinite reproducibility of the photo (and, indeed, the recorded voice), the media persona can live on agelessly, splitting himself in two, then magically reunifying his alter egos as one. This, then, is the positive aspect to photography’s role in negotiating the particular/general dichotomy.

The poet, the objectifying image and the masses In the next montage, the tension at the heart of the photographic medium intensifies. The composition combines an array of objects and figures designed to capture the oppressive atmosphere of byt into which Maikvoskii plunges on his return to Moscow: ‘Everything stands for centuries/ Unchanged/No one strikes it/And the mare of the everyday won’t move’ (‘Vse tak i stoit stolet’ia/ Kak bylo/Ne b’iut/ I ne tronulas’ byta kobyla’). Together with the paraphernalia of tea-drinking, for Maiakovskii the epitome of byt, we find multiple images of the self-satisfied bourgeois, and even the oppressed negro, in thrall to tea-time culture.16 There are also gilt-edged photographic frames, confirming photography’s association with the objects of bourgeois comfort established by Chekhov. Maiakovskii, larger and darker than the other images, is singled out from the surrounding scene. Yet he, too, is framed by Rodchenko as an object of leisurely scrutiny; and, confined to photographic form, he too must bow to the temporal flattening which inflicts upon all photographic images, no matter when recorded, the single, uniform pastness which Roland Barthes links with death. The photograph’s objectivizing function forces us to ask where the meaning-generating mechanism of the work is located. Is Maiakovskii free to split from his ego and speak as pure subject? Is Maiakovskii looking at and objectifying Maiakovskii, or is it Rodchenko who, as a generator of photographic images, looks at and objectifies the poet’s egos, subjective and objective? This raises the question of the relationship between montage and text. Are Rodchenko’s compositions illustrations subordinate to a pre-given text of which Maiakovskii is the undisputed poetic subject? Or is this a text of the media era in which meaning is a function of the anonymous reader’s interpretation

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mediated through his mythic image of the poetic subject? Is the relationship between image and text then reversed, with Maiakovskii’s text subordinate to Rodchenko’s images? And does the reader identify with objectifying camera eye rather than subjective poetic I which becomes, in turn, its shadow? The advertising slogans in the fifth photomontage cite a previous venture, the ROSTA posters produced to advertise Soviet goods during Bolshevism’s brief flirtation with free enterprise. In these posters, Maiakovskii played the subordinate role, generating two-line slogans to accompany Rodchenko’s advertising images.17 In Pro eto, Rodchenko applies his mass-produced images in support of Maiakovskii’s poetic text, questioning the status of photography as a low cultural medium, and demonstrating the fluid, shifting status of both written word and visual image in the twentieth century. The interpenetration of Maiakovskii’s poetic and Rodchenko’s visual endeavours is highlighted in Rodchenko’s account of a reading of the poem in Lily Brik’s bedroom which becomes so overcrowded that Rodchenko designs a constructivist-style sign to hang on the door, instructing visitors not to sit on the bed. Thus, visual techniques intended for the propagation of socialism to the masses infiltrate Maiakovskii’s innermost space. The episode illustrates the erosion of boundaries between lyric and epic, verbal and visual accomplished in Pro eto and recalls Walter Benjamin’s remark that the Bolsheviks had abolished private life. The next photomontage thematizes the relationship between poetry and the masses as one of sacrificial victim to baying crowd, depicting the poet balanced atop the Kremlin with a crowd and a lonely Lily Brik beneath, and an aeroplane flying past. Out-of-proportion cut-outs of a car tyre and children are also incorporated into this modern crucifixion scene. The skyscrapers stress the international reach of bourgeois philistinism, but also recall Maiakovskii’s fascination with America’s futuristic technology of flying machines and automobiles (hence the wheel). During the course of the poetic fantasy, Maiakovskii’s powerful ego flies across Paris, seeing itself as a ‘a grey, cinematic shadow’ (‘kinematograficheskoi seroi ten’iu’) (Maiakovskii 1994, 34). A cinematic shadow is the object of an anonymous gaze. When he arrives from his flight in Moscow on the Kremlin tower, what terrifies Maiakovskii is the fact that he is now entirely visible: ‘They’ll all notice/From here I am completely visible’ (‘Zametiat// Otsiuda viden ves’ ia’) (Maiakovskii 1994, 35–6). The age of mass production, global travel and universal fame has conferred upon him fantastic new freedoms, but it has also left him the passive object of the gaze of the masses who reject his appeal that he is ‘only verse … only a spirit’ (‘tol’ko stikh … tol’ko dukh’) with the cry: ‘No/You are our century-old enemy’ (‘Net/Ty vrag nash stoletnyi’) (36). The (literary) word becomes equated with the (photographic) image of the crucified Word of God.18 Like all cinematic shadows, Maiakovskii’s is an illusion. He no more flies across the Seine than he is crucified on the Kremlin. The photographic image taken out of context can be made to lie. In realizing Maiakovskii’s crucifixion fantasy as a photograph of the poet attached to

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one of the Kremlin towers, the collage stresses the vision’s illusionary nature and confirms that Maiakovskii is an anachronistic poet in the age of the masses and of the image. The Word as Icon (the Russian writer as Christ figure) becomes literally the word as mass-produced image. Maiakovskii’s gaze over the people and into the camera eye reestablishes the familiar link between his readers and the hostile masses. He writes at the threshold of the mass communications era, when a writer can no longer be sure of his audience. The poem ‘150,000,000’ (published anonymously, as though the poet were speaking with the voice of the entire Soviet population) is the most extreme example of Maiakovskii’s struggle with this dilemma.19 Meeting Maiakovskii’s eyes, we are now the crowd oppressing the poet with our objectifying gaze. Maikovskii the mechanically-reproduced photo is transformed into Maiakovskii the bearer of the Russian Word sacrificed to the anonymous populace. The penultimate composition is linked with Maiakovskii’s miraculous rebirth as a zookeeper and is accompanied by the lines: ‘Four times I’ll age/ Four times grown young’ (‘Chetyrezhdy sostarius’/ chetyrezhdy omolozhennyi’). The collage combines a young-looking Maiakovskii and three photos of children, one of whom is Jackie Coogan from Chaplin’s film The Kid. As Lavrent’ev argues, the camera in the foreground ‘seems to fix them all simultaneously’ (Maiakovskii 1994: 76).20 These shots of the poet in three stages of youth viewed by us in the present exploit the peculiar temporality of the photograph to resurrect the past for the benefit of the future. Merged into one are photography’s three key traits: its shifting temporality (connoter of both death and immediate presence), its dual ontology (embracing transient being and infinite regeneration) and its ambiguous cultural status (as both high art and popular culture) – traits which transfer themselves to the literary medium to which they are here bound. The photograph’s dual ontology positions it midway between truth and falsehood. Like Jackie Coogan, Maiakovskii cannot live eternally, yet here is his familiar figure, reissued for the thousandth time. Photography deals in presences which are not presences and thus bears a close affinity with fiction, whose metaphoric division of figure from figured suspends it between ‘life’ and ‘not life’.

The word resurrected Rodchenko exaggerates the split between figure and figured in his last montage by depicting it as concrete, photographic fact: Maiakovskii gazes in at a visual realization of the poetic image of himself as a caged animal, and upwards at Lily surrounded by images of animals, as the poet dreams that she will be resurrected to stand alongside him in his utopian zoo of the future: ‘And she/ –she also loved animals – /She too will come to this zoo’ (‘I ona/ – tozhe zverei liubila – /Tozhe stupit v sad’).21 Like Nastasia Filippovna, Lily stares hauntingly back at an eternity of viewers from the end of time. Yet, like

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the fictional photoportrait, the picture of Lily is an image from the age of reproduction – a snapshot to be passed around for scrutiny by strangers. Lily’s portrait is cut from a run-of-the-mill photograph kept on Maiakovskii’s desk; in projecting Maiakovskii’s private life into the realm of the public, Rodchenko exposes the fallacy behind Maiakovskii’s metaphoric fantasy of life in the future. Yet these ephemeral images do speak to us from the end of time. Spur-of-the-moment whims, frozen, reproduced and made permanent for scrutiny through the centuries, Rodchenko’s paste-together images simultaneously unmask and triumph in photography’s claim that it is reality incarnate. In so doing, they undermine their own claim to embody the immediacy of vision for which photography is celebrated. Indeed, these images (and Maiakovskii’s poem) cannot now be viewed without the poignant reminder that Maiakovskii, who committed suicide in 1929, is indeed looking back at us, resurrected in photographic form. Rodchenko pinpoints the way in which the twentieth-century dominance of mass, visual modes of representation has paradoxically undermined the primacy of vision. If a desk snapshot can serve as an image of eternity, then the association linking vision with the concrete and actual is destroyed. It is photographic reproducibility which facilitates Rodchenko’s juxtaposition of shots of Maiakovskii at a Russian zoo with images of animals from other zoos, and of an elephant in its native India – an impossibility before photography. Maiakovskii’s text refers to Lily’s love for animals and pleads for the universal love in which everyone is brother and sister. Rodchenko’s photography ‘illustrates’ the universal dimension of Lily’s love: she loves not only the animals she saw with Maiakovskii, but all living creatures. But the illustration engineers a reversal of roles between the specific and the universal. For while photographic universality is based on the cut-out-andthrow-away ephemerality of the individual snapshot (Rodchenko skims through a magazine and extracts one of a hundred photos of India), its intimacy relies on that same mass-produced universal reach (Lily and Maiakovskii’s zoo enters the lives of the work’s anonymous readers).22 This mutuality of intimacy and universality applies not only to photography’s mode of production and consumption, but also to the relationship between viewer and viewed that it institutes, and thus between photographic eye and poetic I. In the resurrection image, both Maiakovskii and Lily are represented. Thus, viewers are able to enter into intimacy with Maiakovskii by gazing at Lily through his loving eyes, but also to enter Lily’s skin by gazing at images of the objects of her love. Reader and viewer, photographer and poet, hero and heroine, gazer and gazed are brought together in a way which makes it all the more appropriate that Maiakovskii should assume the role of Christ, of whose single resurrected body we will all, in theological terms, become members at ‘the end of things’.23 The life of a man who lived out the truth of his poetry and died on the cross of his suffering merges with the life of his hero in the persona that is Vladimir Maiakovskii. Sacred imprint of the real and throwaway, mass-produced copy, Rodchenko’s photographic

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Maiakovskii aspires to the condition of the icon – the Word as Image. It does so, however, through its own intimacy with the literary word with which it is quite literally conjoined. Maiakovskii, the poet who in his own words ‘trod on the throat of his song’ in order to align himself with the new mass culture of images, is also the literary ‘other’ upon which the new camera-based media rely to generate meaning.24 Literary culture broadly understood thus shows itself capable of expansion even as literary activity proper shrinks under the impact of mass visual culture, whether in its totalitarian or its late capitalist manifestation. In Pro eto we confront the dialogue of Word and Image on three levels: that of the metaphysical encounter of textual sense and visual presence; that of the Russian emphasis on iconicity as Word transformed into Image; and that of the dialogue of visual and verbal forms through which, as Lotman suggests, cultures develop and progress. As we know, Russian culture accords special status to holy images. Dostoevskii was both repelled by photography’s mass-produced banality and fascinated by its capacity to impregnate paper with the trace of living truth. The new medium’s contradictory relationship with that truth is reiterated when Myshkin’s Nastasia Filippovna and Maiakovskii’s Lily Brik are juxtaposed with one another. For, while the fictional heroine’s image is accorded the stamp of privileged Dostoevskian Higher Truth, the real Lily’s status is an imaginary one designed to highlight the tragic gap between Maiakovskii’s dreams and his present, grim reality. The paradox is the function of a larger contradiction. During the pre-camera era, the visual image was held as the emblem of truth (realist fiction is laden with ekphrases of landscapes, interiors, etc.), while the camera has led to the saturation of our culture with infinitely manipulable, ever-replaceable images and, as Martin Jay argues, to the decline of vision as the measure of truth (Jay 1995: 344–61). It is this which allows Rodchenko to represent a fantastic future through banal snaphots. Maiakovskii’s word liberates Rodchenko’s camera images to fulfil the ideal inherent within them, just as the ideal of painterly vision facilitated nineteenth-century verbal fiction’s attainment of realist exactitude that, by Dostoevskii’s time, had already begun to fade. Maiakovskii looks at Dostoevskii from across the threshold to the camera age. Pro eto thus bridges Parts I and II of this study. ‘Liberating’ the camera image from the verbal hypostasis in which it is incarnated in the nineteenthcentury novel and juxtaposing it in literal form with the literary word, but within the covers of a printed book, it anticipates the filmed adaptation of literature which likewise exists on the border of the camera medium and its verbal other but within the frame of the cinema screen. Maiakovskii’s poem also provides a lead-in to the next section, in that its concern with the changing nature of the public sphere prefigures the role of the film adaptation in shaping the literary canon promulgated within Stalinist discourse; Maiakovskii’s own liminal position on the boundaries of official Bolshevik culture and that of the automomous avant garde provided a convenient route of access for the former onto the terrain of the latter. Finally,

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Rodchenko’s photomontage technique, which detaches camera images from their represented objects to create new meanings, complicates the word– fiction/image–reality paradigm, echoing the use of cinematic montage which featured prominently in the transformations performed by Soviet screen adaptations on their source texts.

Part II

Literature, the camera and the shaping of a Soviet official sphere

4

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word

The film adaptation in theory and practice If Maiakovskii’s publically mediated persona helped, albeit ambiguously, legitimate Soviet authority amongst the educated classes, then this legitimation was itself a function of the high status accorded to the literary sphere generally in Soviet Russia, even in the context of the ever-burgeoning camera media, and even at its avant-garde margins. As Ian Christie has intimated, the notion that the revolutionary avant-garde was born in an ‘immaculate conception’, or that, as Eisenstein put it, ‘we came like Bedouin and pitched our tents in an empty space’, is a myth. Christie writes specifically of cinema: ‘[T]he space was far from empty, and nor was the emergent Soviet cinema such an anti-literary, anti-theatrical movement as it often painted itself’ (Christie 2002: 1). Literature was important to Soviet culture from its inception. It played no less a role in legitimating Stalinism amongst the broader masses. One of the masses’ first experiences of the Soviet regime was the vast literacy campaign of the 1920s, and Maiakovskii’s role in the campaign (he wrote an alphabet book in which every letter of the alphabet was accompanied by a satirical drawing and a two-line verse) is legendary. It is hardly surprising, then, that cinema, considered first by Lenin, then by Stalin, as the state’s key ideological tool in the battle to win over the populace to its increasingly harsh cause, was also steeped in literary culture.1 In Stalin’s case, following growing suspicion of the revolutionary avant garde, the prime goal of Soviet cultural policy became the need to create a universal middle-brow culture capable of cementing loyalty to the regime across the social classes, a need fulfilled by socialist realism.2 The precepts of socialist realism were officially formulated at the 1934 Union of Writers’ Congress by Zhdanov, and the movement adopted Maxim Gor’kii as its figurehead. Cinema already held distinct advantages over photography: it possessed both a narrative dimension and, through the techniques of montage, the ability to generate subliminal meanings controlled by invisible directors, beholden for the immense resources they required, and for dissemination of their work, to a still more distant state. Simultaneously with the

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emergence of socialist realism, cinema acquired the all-important (for ideological purposes) dimension of sound. Taken as a whole, it offered a prime mechanism for grounding socialist realism, with its literary origins, in the popular consciousness. In particular, the film adaptation of literature provided a tool (i) for rendering accessible those literary classics which the guardians of socialist realism deemed appropriate, and (ii) for marking the contours of the socialist realist literary canon – literature as packaged for Stalin’s official sphere. It is the Soviet ekranizatsiia which serves as the point of encounter between literary word and camera image in this section. The film adaptation genre has, in recent years, increasingly attracted much attention. The field has, broadly speaking, followed a three-stage development. Because of their apparently parasitical relationship with their sources, such films were originally (and often still are) portrayed in terms of the degree to which they render the spirit of their verbal originals. As Imelda Whelehan writes: Cultural assumptions about the relative worth of the literary versus the film medium are still … entrenched enough to be likely to influence our approach to adaptation … it is possibly the ‘literariness’ of the fictional text which itself appears to give credence to the study of adaptations at all. (Whelehan 1999: 17) The latter point is especially pertinent to some otherwise insightful studies of the ekranizatsiia that have emerged from Russia, whose literary bias is much stronger than in the West.3 But, as Whelehan acknowledges, in the late 1980s Western film studies (and subsequently literary studies), scholars began to explore the film adaptation in its own right, focusing on technical matters such as the translation of authorial discourse into visual language. Brian McFarlane offers the most comprehensive example of this paradigm, whose underlying assumption is that the adaptation is not a parasite but a genre which operates with an entirely separate set of values and meanings. McFarlane’s formalistic approach, however, ignores the question of the adaptation’s function within a broader cultural context. Most recently, scholars have addressed this lacuna by examining the genre in terms of its implications for national identity in the global era (Giddings and Sheen 2000). The function of Merchant–Ivory productions of the English classics as carriers of post-imperial values is one much discussed example.4 The danger here, of course, is that these models, whilst considering the adaptation as a discrete genre, risk ideological reductionism every bit as much as the McFarlane model courts excessive formalism. Whelehan proposes an eloquent solution to this dilemma by re-framing the debate in terms of the adaptation’s centrality to an understanding of the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms and of the acquisition of ‘cultural capital’:

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word 79 [W]e might … gauge the extent to which an audience is … influenced by preconceptions of the nature of a high/low cultural divide between the consumption of films and literature, and discover that the business of acquiring the literary original is part of the process of acquiring cultural capital described by Bourdieu. (Whelehan 1999: 18) She goes on to advocate close readings of adaptations: ‘[E]ffective textual comparisons across the literature/media divide demand acute skills of close reading and narrative analysis, as well as a good acquaintance with the general debates about the interface between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture’ (19). However, when concluding that ‘such a study allows us to acknowledge our actual reading practices in a postmodern cultural context, and inserts the reading of literary texts into the same critical sphere as the consumption of more explicitly commercial texts’ (19), she falls victim to the apparently unavoidable need to assign the adaptation to one or other of the categories that it straddles (literature/popular culture). The same is true of another, related turn in adaptation studies which, like Whelehan’s ideas, has undoubted relevance to our theme: the positing of the adaptation as a figure for all modern texts. This insight was hinted at by Andre Bazin, author of the first academic study of the phenomenon: [t]he ferocious defence of literary works is … aesthetically justified; but we must also be aware that it rests on a rather recent, individualistic conception of ‘the author’ and ‘the work’ … [I]t is possible to imagine that we are moving toward a reign of adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the work of art … will be destroyed. (Quoted in Naremore 2000: 14–15) Bazin’s formulation, echoed in Adorno’s writings, was taken up by Dudley Andrew who, as Naremore suggests, showed that that ‘every representational … artifact can be regarded as an adaptation, hence the very word re-presentation’ (Naremore 2000: 9). Like Whelehan, Naremore locates the adaptation at the centre of modern, mass-produced culture, claiming that: [t]he study of adaptation needs to be joined with the study of recycling, remaking and every other form of retelling in an age of mechanical reproduction and electronic communication. By this means, adaptation will become part of a general theory of repetition, and adaptation study will move from the margins to the center of contemporary media studies. (Naremore 2000: 15) Seductive though such a notion is, it repeats Whelehan’s error by assimilating adaptation to a field of study in which the logical moment of

80 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere transmutation of word into image, and the mechanisms by which it is accomplished, is relegated once again to the background. W. J. T. Mitchell’s notion of the cultural centrality of the word–image threshold, however, offers a single solution to both aspects of the film adaptation dilemma: the need on one hand to consider the genre according to its own structural features rather than as a sub-category of film, literature or politics, and on the other hand to avoid the danger of abstracting it from the broader cultural context. Because it focuses on the precise point of encounter of fundamental values, Mitchell’s model can be used to express the adaptation as a specific cultural form. But it also incorporates wider ideological concerns, since that very set of oppositions provides a microcosm of the problem faced by modern states: that of how to embody the ideological abstractions on which they are founded. Nowhere was the need to concretize ideological abstraction more pressing than in the Soviet Union, as evidenced in Lenin’s claim that, for Bolshevism, cinema is ‘the most important of all the arts’. It was left to Khrushchev some forty years later to point specifically to the potential of the film adaptation in cinema’s popularizing mission: Films are an effective ideological weapon and a mass medium of education. When a book appears not everybody reads it. Some books are within reach of only the advanced reader, and besides it takes a good deal of time to read them and grasp their meaning. Films are easier to understand. That is why cinema is the most popular of the arts. (Quoted in Faraday 2000: 79) Yet transitive notions of the relationship between literature and film embraced by a series of Soviet leaders (film as a simple embodiment in accessible form of complex literary truths) were as deceptively untrue in the Soviet Union as elsewhere. Nowhere more than under Stalin’s regime, with its adherence in all matters cultural to the theory of socialist realism, did cinema’s deeply ambiguous relationship with literature come to the fore. The literary derivation of the dogma that guided Soviet cultural policy almost until 1991 is important to bear in mind not only because of the privileged status that literary figures and literary texts occupied in the socialist realist hierarchy, but also because of the inner qualities of that dogma’s precepts. Notions of the expression of reality in its revolutionary development, and of partiinost’ (party-mindedness) and ideinost’ (ideological correctness) lend themselves naturally to verbal discourse with its inherent semantic multivalency; words can be made simultaneously to bear referential (‘reality’) and optative (‘in its revolutionary development’) modalities more easily than visual images. The conflict between socialist realist principles and the recalcitrant referentiality of the cinematic image is one of several tensions which came to the fore in the post-Stalin ekranizatsiia and form the focus of Chapter 5. Many of them, however, were present in adaptations of the early

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word 81 Soviet and Stalin periods, meaning that, from its inception, the Soviet ekranizatsiia served, albeit unintentionally, but in vivid confirmation of Mitchell’s contention, as the site at which the fundamental contradictions of Soviet culture came to light. One way of getting to grips with the roots of these contradictions is to consider them, as Terry Eagleton has done, in the light of the ancient dispute over religious icons. The iconoclasts considered embodying divine authority in sensuous form to be sacrilegious.5 Yet, as Eagleton points out: ‘Only by coming to feel affection for the law will we obey it, which means that we need tangible images. If power does not infiltrate our hearts in this way, it is likely to prove alarmingly fragile’ (Eagleton 2001: 26). The Soviet ekranizatsiia resonates with Eagleton’s insight in two ways. First, the making visual of literature mirrors the process of making ideology sensual. Second, in a totalitarian society with a prominent literary tradition, yet high illiteracy, the mass-distribution ekranizatsiia has much to contribute to that process (individual adaptations as inverted ekphrases – visual renditions of verbal texts – illustrate the problems encountered in translating political abstractions into visual form). The ekranizatsiia will be considered primarily in relationship to the Stalinist literary canon. Canons are tools by which cultural consensus is imposed and by which the boundaries of the official sphere are established.6 In a totalitarian society where consensus is at a premium, ekranizatsiia reinforces the literary canon, but also shapes and alters it. In addition to the canon itself, we must consider three sub-canons: classical Russian fiction appropriated to furnish a ‘pre-history’ of prevailing socialist realist orthodoxy, socialist realist prototypes and newly canonized foreign texts. In each case, film’s institutional centrality ensured its allegiance with canon-forming forces. Thus, we might speak of the ekranizatsiia as a key force in shaping the official sphere under Stalin and beyond. In the second half of this chapter, I examine an adaptation of a socialist realist classic, Furmanov’s Chapaev, focusing on differences between text and image in order to illustrate how the process of embodiment was enacted under the conditions of Stalinism, but ending on the contradictions it entailed. Chapter 5 extends the analysis of these contradictions through readings of specific works from each of the sub-categories, illustrating how the ekranizatsiia’s transformative work destabilizes the boundaries of the official sphere. Chapters 6 and 7 will trace the consequences of this activity in the post-Stalin period.

The film adaptation before Stalin We should first look briefly at the pre-history of the Stalinist film adaptation. The early nineteen hundreds were a time when intellectuals such as those of the Vekhi (Landmarks) group were pondering the nature of Russian national identity, its relationship with the traditions of Western democracy and the Orthodox religion.7 Many early Russian films were adaptations of classics (or

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parts of classics) by Lermontov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevskii.8 This reflects the role the new medium had adopted in promulgating Russian selfhood. But cinema, initially associated with popular urban culture rather than with high art, was struggling simultaneously to establish its right to be considered a valid aesthetic medium. The fact that, of all the films produced in Russia between 1909 and 1917, nearly half were adaptations of Russian classics (with several foreign works in addition) also indicates the extent to which cinema was invoking literature in an attempt to raise its own aesethetic standing. A medium capable of screening War and Peace (as was the case in two 1915 versions of the novel) is a medium worth taking seriously. The cinematic image’s efforts to achieve equivalence with its verbal equivalent are reflected in the literal nature of the adaptations which generally do little more than condense the literary plots into manageable cinematic packages. One notable exception was Evgenii Bauer in whose films, as Rachel Morley has shown, literary texts are cited and adapted in order to be questioned and challenged. In her analysis of Bauer’s film A Child of the Big City, which updates Gogol’s ‘Nevskii Prospekt’ (‘Nevskii Avenue’) and Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment to make them relevant to contemporary concerns, Morley writes: ‘[s]ubverting nineteenth century Russian literary sources enables Bauer, a twentieth century filmmaker, to suggest that the old codes of morality are being undermined and dismissed as invalid in the new century’ (Morley forthcoming). In a different context, this subversive approach was to insinuate itself into film adaptations of both the Stalinist and the post-Stalin period. Bauer’s innovations aside, it was the same drive to invoke literature to consolidate cinema’s status at the root of pre-revolutionary film which was to affect the post-revolutionary cinematic canon itself. When ekranizatsii of the early 1920s dealt with topics reflected in other films of the same period, they conferred on those films by association the literary seal of approval, confirming their place in the film repertoire. For example, ekranizatsii of the year 1924 include as recurrent themes depictions of struggle against political enemies (kulaks, Fascist regimes, religious figures) and approval of political causes (education or opposing drinking).9 The same topics are echoed in non-literary films. Paradoxically, literature was equally heavily involved in the next stage in Russian cinema’s efforts to consolidate its specificity as a medium. The drive for specificity was initiated by the Formalist movement. Just as, in Shklovskii’s words, literature was to be liberated from the position of ‘handmaiden’ to adjoining disciplines, so cinema was to be freed from its subordination to theatre.10 But the closeness to Formalism of mainstream directors like Room ensured the presence of formalist influences in the Soviet film canon, despite the nationalization of the literary classics by official decree in 1919.11 Unsurprisingly, however, the same devices presented as the epitome of literary specificity (the estrangement of objects to de-automatize perception) feature in formalist-influenced film theory. Moreover, the very notion of a self-contained medium is literary in origin and ignores cinema’s

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word 83 natural syncretism and affinity with low-cultural forms. Even Eisenstein’s theory of montage – the aspect of film which defines its uniqueness as a medium – was illustrated with examples of metaphors drawn from Pushkin.12 The essence of cinemacity turns out to be a disguised version of the essence of literariness. The wholescale importing by film of literary values would seem to confirm Adorno’s intuition that the whole of modern mass culture is adaptive in nature. But in the case of the Soviet cinematic avant garde, it is adaptation in which literature per se is thoroughly negated. Eisenstein, and especially Dziga Vertov’s Kinoglaz movement, were to combine the formal innovation of cinema to which literary theorists contributed, with an emphasis on both the non-literary authenticity of the camera image and the revolutionary discourse of Marxism–Leninism. Vertov motivated the paradoxical synthesis by linking his groundbreaking cinematic techniques with the new revolutionary reality in which the difference between representing subject and represented object, creation and reality, is elided. In a series of public addresses made between 1922 and 1923, Vertov objected specifically to film’s reduction to a verbal–literary core decorated with filmic illustrations, even refusing the notions of scripts and actors, and claiming that real film creates the world that is its object even as it represents it: If we cut out all the themes, leaving only the captions, we get the picture’s literary skeleton. We can shoot other themes to go with that literary skeleton, realist, symbolist, expressionist … The correlation is the same: a literary skeleton plus film illustrations – such … are all our films … The essential thing is the sensory exploration of the world through film. We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the camera as kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye … I am kino-eye … I have placed you, whom I have created today, in an extraordinary room which did not exist until now … I am kino-eye … and through montage I create a new, perfect man. (Vertov 1984: 12–17) Stalin halted Vertov’s avant-garde cinema in its tracks towards the end of the 1920s when it reached its most brilliant expression. Apart from key films, such as Tynianov’s version of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’, and Eikhenbaum’s film theories, the most lasting legacy of literary formalism’s impact on cinema is the numerous film scenarios contributed by the movement. During the mid-1920s, Shklovskii, Tynianov, Maiakovskii and Babel were all among members of the Formalist entourage who wrote scenarios.The dearth of scenario writers and the call to involve writers and critics in film production is one of Soviet cinema’s abiding themes. A Party Cinema Conference in 1928 referred repeatedly to a ‘script crisis’ and recommended that:

84 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere … cinema … utilise all the best achievements of literature and enrich them with its own specific resources … With the aim of greater productivity in creative cinema work we must maintain a much closer link between the writer, the scriptwriter and the director. (Quoted in Taylor and Christie 1988: 212–13) The literary avant garde’s involvement in early Soviet film production suited both parties. For the avant garde it provided an outlet in a context in which the practice of openly avant-garde aesthetics was dangerous; for the film industry it furnished a ready source of quality film scenarios. This phenomenon extended beyond the demise of Formalism itself: Shklovskii contributed to a scenario for Dostoevskii’s House of the Dead in 1932, Tynianov provided the source text and the scenario for the film Lieutenant Kizhe in 1933, while Shklovskii did the same for the film Minin and Pozharskii in 1939. Cinema was seen as a safe refuge for the persecuted literary avant garde. Indeed, the closeness of prominent directors like Pudovkin and Room to the movement ensured the presence of formalist influences at the heart of the Soviet film canon. However, the picture is ambiguous, as demonstrated by the fate of Olesha’s Strogii iunosha (A Severe Youth). The formalist-inclined Olesha’s scenario was published in 1934, but the film version, directed by Room, and in which numerous minor changes were made to accommodate the scenario to the increasingly repressive environment, created a political scandal and was banned.13 Here cinema’s proximity to the levers of power cancels out the greater suspicion in which the literary avant garde was held under Stalin. As well as writing scenarios, Shklovskii, Maiakovskii, Tynianov and Brik were also interested in the relationship between literature and film and were drawn to the ekranizatsiia with an agenda of their own. This is reflected in their choice of texts. For example, Gogol’s ‘Shinel’’ (‘The Overcoat’) had long attracted Formalist interest (Eikhenbaum’s essay ‘How Gogol’s “Overcoat” was Made’ is a classic of formalist criticism). The 1926 adaptation for which Tynianov provided the scenario – and in which the work is given a pseudoexpressionist treatment – is one of the Soviet silent period’s best films. Amongst foreign works in which the formalists had a longstanding interest are those of O. Henry, Jack London and Upton Sinclair. All three feature prominently in adaptations produced during the twenties and thirties (and, indeed, before the revolution). Whilst none of these writers are politically problematic (in Sinclair’s case, quite the reverse), it is significant that they took precedence over writers of a more obviously ‘civic’ orientation like Dickens and Zola. Henry, London and Sinclair – minor writers in the English-speaking world – became central to the Soviet literary canon (London and Henry featured in school curricula for all eighth- and ninth-grade Soviet children). Via film, literary formalists helped shape that canon in a mildly eccentric manner. Because formalism saw film as a different medium from literature, formalist adaptations were, unlike most pre-revolutionary ekranizatsii, conscious trans-

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word 85 formations of their original sources. Even Pudovkin’s ideologically sound but formalist-influenced Mother (Mat’) (1926) translates Gor’kii’s revolutionary classic into cinematic language which adds rather than approximates to its literary source. The notion that adaptations should transform their literary sources was politically motivated too. It is hardly surprising, then, that we should find among early Soviet films a 1923 version of Poe’s horror story, ‘Masque of the Red Death’ (directed by Vladimir Gardin) entitled, after Marx, A Phantom Stalks Moscow (Prizrak brodit po Moskve). The transformative ethic even influenced the work of directors who cut their teeth in the pre-revolutionary private cinema industry, as in Protazanov’s adaptation of A. Tolstoy’s Aelita in which Tolstoy’s science-fictional account of a Martian workers’ revolution is given a radical overhaul, transforming the revolutionary events into a function of the vivid imagination of the main character. At the same time, the novel’s passing reference to the fact that the Martians possess communication screens (ekrany) is expanded into imagery of Martian dwellers watching developments in revolutionary NEP-era Russia on an interplanetary screen. In the book, the action takes place primarily on Mars. Protazanov switches the focus to a torrid, earthly melodrama involving crime, passion and detectives, but also a wry commentary on the flaws of NEP society which enables us, like the Martians, to witness on our ekrany authentic NEP-era byt from an ironic distance (see Plate 11). By blending science fiction and popular melodrama in a subversion of the literary origin, Protazanov stresses the versatility of film, which deals not in allegorical revolution but in everyday revolutionary reality, over monolithic verbal fiction, yet also highlights film’s ability to project inner consciousness onto public screens.14

Ekranizatsiia under Stalin: paradoxes of autonomy and control The logical outcome to the infusion of nineteenth-century bourgeois literature with revolutionary spirit is the abandonment of classical literature as a source for cinematic adaptation. This happened temporarily in the very early Stalin period. During the mid-1920s libraries throughout Russia were purged of the classics of Russian and world literature until a 1926 edict permitted the return of a long list of writers, including Derzhavin and Tiutchev.15 The screen adaptation lagged behind the purging-restoration process, yet significantly, in 1930, when 128 films were made altogether in the Soviet Union, only eight were literary adaptations, and of those only one was a classic. But in the newly repressive atmosphere of mature Stalinism, cinematic versatility was harnessed to the task of commandeering Russian classics for the Stalinist national identity project. Numerous adaptations of classics were made in the late 1920s and early 1930s by the non-Russian republics. Georgian State Cinema, for example, produced adaptations of three separate parts of Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni) in 1926–27 – all of which were readapted by Mosfilm in the 1950s – and of Lev Tolstoi’s Kazaki (Cossacks) in 1928. Adaptations of Russian

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classics set in the Caucasus during the era when Russia was establishing its imperial hold in that area fulfil a dual function. They confirm the accession of the republics to the project which places the (newly imperial) Russia at its centre. They also ‘introduce’ to the Russian-speaking audience via a familiar classic the culture of the far reaches of the Soviet Union. The fact that a Russian classic set in the Caucasus was now ‘venerated’ by Caucasian filmmakers guarantees the authenticity of the view of imperial relations articulated by that text. The literary adaptation mediates between Russia and the republics, naturalizing the act of imperial imposition; the republics are ‘given their own voice’ in that they are adapting works from the Russian canon set in their region, or whose authors have native connections. Meanwhile, Russia pays ‘tribute’ to the cultures of the non-Russian republics, but via a native literary canon. National canons claim universal value which, when enacted via photographic images, are incarnated in ethnically specific detail. Hence versions of Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s Caucasian tales are replete with local scenery and ritual. After the Second World War, this practice was widened to include Eastern European countries under Soviet hegemony, as in the 1959 Soviet–Bulgarian co-production of the film On the Eve (Nakanune), based on Turgenev’s eponymous novel about a Bulgarian revolutionary who develops Russian–Bulgarian connections in aid of the liberation of his homeland. The film gained ‘authenticity’ through the choice of a Russianspeaking Bulgarian actor to play the leading role. The significance of the classical canon for the pedagogical impulses of Stalinist ideology is also reflected in the fact that, from the mid-1930s onwards, a growing number of adaptations began to feature in the annual output of Soiuzdetfilm, the studio established to produce politically uplifting material for children of the socialist motherland. Most famously, Gor’kii’s autobiographical trilogy was adapted for Soiuzdetfilm, but with little concession to children’s sensibilities, by Mark Donskoi between 1938 and 1939. In addition, the swift adaptation of ideologically appropriate literature specifically written for children became a feature of 1930s cinema. The works of Arkadii Gaidar, culminating in the hugely popular Timur and His Gang (Timur i ego komanda), filmed in the year it was written (1940), furnish the best example. Alongside Soiuzdetfilm and Mezhrabpromfilm, the semiprivate company whose relatively free-ranging remit encompassed the adaptation of foreign literature, the 1930s also saw the emergence of a studio producing animation films (Soiuzmultfilm), including adaptations of folk tales reflecting the regime’s efforts to synthesize Russian narodnost’ (national spirit) with Stalinism-Leninism. One way of interpreting these trends is to suggest that they indicate the destruction of cinema’s hard-won autonomy as a medium. It is no coincidence that the planned parcelling out of film categories to dedicated studios happened in step with the ending of NEP – a policy whose market orientation ensured that, though cinema was nationalized from 1919, films geared towards popular taste and individual interest

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word 87 groups continued through the 1920s. (Aelita is one product of the NEP era. Another is the series of Jewish films, including a number of adaptations of novels by Sholom Aleikhem; there was even in 1928 a film called ‘Martin Vagner’, an adaptation of a novella by I. Illesha, released by Nemkino – a studio for German Russians.) An alternative view, however, stresses that, far from representing the undermining of cinematic autonomy, these trends indicate a cinematic metacommentary on the established canon from which the new medium is now sufficiently separate to be able to recategorize it according to its own needs, to re-read it, to redivide and recombine its texts according to its own criteria. A related development is the selection of several works by one writer for combination into a single film. Tynianov’s creative synthesis of ‘Shinel’ and ‘Nevskii prospekt’ in the 1926 film Shinel’ set the pattern.16 This anthologizing practice paralleled the splitting of single works into separate films (as in the Lermontov series). Echoing Bauer’s pre-revolutionary approach, Soviet cinema manifested a growing disrespect for the unity of the individual work on which the sanctity of the canon depends. The function of film as metatextual co-writer of the canon is similarly reflected in the 1937–39 film The Great Citizen (Velikii Grazhdanin), a radical recasting of The Devils in which Dostoevskii’s sardonic treatment of Lenin’s murderous revolutionary precursors is transformed into a similarly negative treatment of counter-revolutionaries in the 1920s supposedly involved in the assassination of the Leningrad Party Leader, Kirov. Such cinematic autonomy is not based on the articulation of a pure cinematic text free from all external influences, but is in keeping with the idea of a cinema subordinate to the propaganda needs of the totalitarian state. It is an autonomy forged in relation to cinema’s significant other – literature – and accords with Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of the automatization process in which ‘the autonomy of a field of restricted production can be measured by its power to define its own criteria for the production and evaluation of its products’ (Bourdieu 1993: 115). The degree of power gained over the literary tradition by the nationalized film industry in 1920s Russia thus functioned in consort with the lingering influences, direct and indirect, of the formalist principles of cinematic purity, themselves derived from those arguing for the autonomization of that same literary tradition. The economic power was eventually expressed in the privileges acquired by the cinematic elite, but its culturo-political equivalent was embodied in the leeway that the ideologically ‘safe’ (relative to literature, that is) film industry began to enjoy even under Stalin (which is not to ignore the fact that films, like books, were subject to rigorous censorship and, often, suppression). Much later, in the 1960s, with their capacity for allegorization and the communication of oblique, subtextual meanings, literary adaptations were to capitalize on cinema’s subtly enhanced independence and become a site for the expression of unorthodox opinions permitted by a censorship apparatus rendered marginally less vigilant owing to the persistent mantra that, for the communist propaganda apparatus cinema, is ‘the most important of all the arts’.

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Socialist realism and the ekranizatsiia If, in Soviet culture of the late twenties and early thirties, cinema in its most radical forms appeared, through the autonomization process, to challenge its verbal rival, then in what became a complex dialectic, literature exacted revenge with the arrival of socialist realism, whose master texts all derived from fiction. Moreover, the Stalin period saw a return to prominence generally of the written word and the cultivation of an equivalence between the literary word and the written Word of party authority. Alla Latynina stresses in this context the function of institutions like the Stalin Prize for literature which ‘consolidated the relationship of culture (literature) and authority’ (Latynina 1996: 109). But for it to take root in popular consciousness, the socialist realist dogma in which this relationship was contained needed film to ground itself in organic tradition. For this reason, prototypes to a hastily prescribed canon of socialist realist classics were identified in minor novels with relevant attributes, such as Lilian Voynich’s Englishlanguage novel about the nineteenth-century Italian democratic movement, The Gadfly, whose status as a standard Soviet text was reinforced by adaptations made at (or just beyond) the margins of the Stalin era.17The Vasil’ev brothers’ film of Furmanov’s 1924 novel, Chapaev, became on release the most popular film of the Soviet era. When it came out in 1934, Pravda’s front page carried an article entitled ‘The Whole Country Will Watch “Chapaev” ’, illustrating how privileged cultural texts were deployed in order to construct a Stalinist public sphere; the film adaptation, with its synthesis of popular appeal and the intellectual weight carried by its literary association, was uniquely qualified to serve in this capacity. Fadeev’s prototypical socialist realist novel Razgrom (The Rout) was adapted in 1931, as was Sholokhov’s Tikhii don (The Quiet Don), a work which deviated from socialist realist norms yet was invoked whenever socialist realism was mentioned. The prevalence of adaptations of key socialist realist works in film production of the early Stalin era is, then, explained by cinema’s popularizing potential. In a country struggling to overcome illiteracy, film’s phenomenal reach is also important. Because of the centralized way in which Soviet films were released, the title of the Pravda article on Chapaev is no exaggeration. The ekranizatsiia also situates socialist realism in the classical tradition, and in progressive culture the world over. Many of the books adapted under Stalin treat past revolutions, Russian and foreign. Pushkin’s Kapitanskaia dochka (The Captain’s Daughter), based on the Pugachev uprising and adapted three times in the Soviet era, emerged as a canonic text for both Russian cinema and self-identity.18 Still greater are the number of adaptations of works set during the Civil War. Thus Soviet cinema manufactured a revolutionary culture developing organically from uprising to uprising, to which the bright future depicted in socialist realism is the natural culmination. Adaptations of works set during foreign uprisings enabled Soviet

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word 89 cinema to naturalize socialist realism both spatially (its roots stretch across the world) and temporally (they reach into the depths of history).19 The dilemma of how visually to render a precept bearing an optative modality suited to written fiction (‘the tomorrow in the today’) is overcome by photographically concretizing literature set in a past with a direct line to the revolutionary present. The origins of the foreign works selected for adaptation is significant. Throughout the 1930s, the French classics predominate – Hugo, Barbusse, Verne, Balzac, Maupassant, Perrault; all feature at least once, and in some cases (Hugo, Balzac, Verne) repeatedly. English literature, by contrast, is virtually absent. Twain’s Tom Sawyer was the only English-language nineteenth-century classic to be screened during this period; there is, despite his social progressiveness, no Dickens. This is partly explicable by reference to France’s revolutionary tradition to which Bolshevism had long wished to accede. The fact that Verne and Perrault are hardly of a revolutionary sensibility confirms that Stalinist cinema was operating at levels of abstraction above that of the individual work or the individual writer (Verne’s political neutrality is subordinate to his belonging to the country with the prime European revolutionary tradition). With its combination of centripetal qualities (as an industry requiring central resources it embraces the centre’s values) and centrifugal qualities (its association with photographic truth means that it situates itself in the local and concrete), cinema was ideally suited to implement the abstract Stalinist project. This principle is embodied in the ekranizatsiia, (i) since literary culture is at the core of the ‘universal values’ that the Soviet state needed to inculcate, and (ii) since the rendering visual of a verbal fiction mirrors the incarnation of an ideology. Soviet cinematic specificity resided not just in doing Stalin’s bidding more effectively than other media, but in an internal logic foregrounded by the adaptation which, to justify its existence, must indicate difference from, as well as adherence to, its source. A 1939 version of Chekhov’s ‘The Man in a Case’ (‘Chelovek v futliare’) reveals how the ekranizatsiia self-consciously signposts the time to which it belongs, simultaneously exploiting the camera’s ability to capture contingent detail. Made during a period of heightened anti-religious activity, it expands Chekhov’s critique of pedagogic formalism into a sensuous exposé of religious repression. Equally, cinema at large must consolidate its right to patronage by emphasizing its discreteness from other cultural forms.20 Like cinema in general, the ekranizatsiia acquired its own normative texts. Aside from the repeat adaptation of key nineteenth-century classics (Gor’kii’s Mother, Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter, Gogol’s Ukrainian tales, Tolstoy’s Cossacks), the 1930s witnessed adaptations of minor contemporary writers. Gaidar’s Timur and His Gang (1940) enjoyed such popularity that in 1942 Gaidar wrote a scenario for the sequel, Timur’s Oath (Kliatva Timura). And a scenario by the minor Ukrainian writer Lev Kassil’ resulted in The Goalkeeper (Vratar’) (1936), a highly popular Stalin-era comedy. Cinema

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developed a self-propagating culture to which literature merely provided support, reversing the hierarchy between the media.21 Simultaneously, and paradoxically, Stalinist culture became more verbal in orientation. Adaptations were now invariably framed by shots of the title pages of their sources. At the end of the Stalin era a new wave of reverential Gogol adaptations which began with the centenary of the author’s death featured an actor with familiar Gogolian moustaches playing the skaz narrator, commenting on the action, inadvertently undermining the point of skaz which is to turn the narration into an object of satire.22 During the same period key adaptations helped to shore up the post-war Eastern bloc, as we saw with On the Eve, the first Soviet version of Turgenev. In 1955 the second adaptation of The Gadfly railed against the collusion of Catholicism and imperialism in nineteenth-century Italy, synthesizing religious and international themes. Both On the Eve and The Gadfly are framed by stock images of the heroes staring out across the elements (a raging sea, a mountainous landscape) – images borrowed from Gor’kii’s revolutionary romanticism and presenting a domesticated version of international solidarity: these heroes are concrete manifestations of the fact that Italy and Bulgaria, too, have revolutionary movements grounded in their own imperial pasts, yet those movements are assimilated to the Russian master-image as particular to universal. The tensions between the need to embody international revolution in specific international proletariats and the desire to domesticate these specifics is brought out, comically, in an example from The Gadfly of the misapplication of cinematic contingency: at one point the camera alights on a street sign for Brindisi printed in Cyrillic! On one hand the detail, absent from Voynich’s original, authenticates the action by situating it in a specific locale at the periphery of the Russian geopolitical imagination. On the other hand, the same gesture negates that authentication by domesticating it for its Russian-speaking recipients.

Socialist realist adaptations and the problem of stikhiinost’: Chapaev Further investigation of the complexities of the socialist realist ekranizatsiia illustrated by the example from The Gadfly requires analysis of individual Stalin-era films. At the same time this will give us the opportunity to explore how our ‘macro’ level of inquiry (the treatment of cinema’s relationship with the literary canon as a whole and with Stalinist ideology) informs the second ‘micro-level’ of the word–image boundary: that of the translation of specific literary texts into cinematic form. We begin with Chapaev, the supreme example (if the film’s mythological status is a measure) from the first category of ekranizatsiia: the Stalinist adaptation of a canonical socialist realist classic. In the case of the Vasil’ev brothers’ 1934 adaptation of Furmanov’s 1924 autobiographical novel, the relationship between the text and the film is particularly fraught and we should begin with an account of the written source.

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word 91 The legendary Vasilii Chapaev first found fame as the hero of Furmanov’s novel, before mutating, via early Soviet oral legends, into screen form. Based on Furmanov’s own Civil War experiences as political commissar, the novel begins with fifty pages of speculation about the hero whom Furmanov, called Fedor Klychkov in the novel, is about to encounter. The prospect of meeting the already legendary figure generates a distinctly un-Marxist idealisation: ‘Before him stood the fairytale figure of the ataman, exciting, tormenting and delighting him’ (Furmanov 1966: 24). When the meeting finally occurs, Chapaev awakens the commissar from sleep and is subjected to ‘a penetrating stare’ (63). Curiously, the Chapaev that appears is described as ‘ordinary, with almost feminine hands’ (63). Yet his very diminished stature both increases the conceptual aura surrounding his feats and makes them palpable in a way that a fairy-tale giant would not. As this opening reveals, the relationship between representing body and embodied concept assumes special significance within Furmanov’s novel, even before the issue is revisited in the screen adaptation. Bolshevism had to resolve the tension between its ideological faith in the collective, and its strategic need for a vanguard to implement the ideology. Through a gesture which was to become a defining socialist realist trope and to establish Chapaev’s status as a classic of the genre, Furmanov’s answer is to posit Klychkov as the force of reason sent to check Chapaev’s elemental heroism or stikhiinost’. The solution finds its aesthetic expression in an ever greater role for the abstract word over the spontaneity of the visual image. Fedor’s enchantment decreases as his function as a literate observer, consciously organizing what he sees, increases. The narrative degenerates into a series of episodic sketches, ever more reliant on the use of hindsight – the enwrapping of Chapaev’s image as a figure from the past in the light of his significance for the post-Civil War present. The shift of emphasis from representation as visual embodiment to representation as a verbal (and temporal) ‘putting in place’ can be traced to Klychkov’s first battle experience in which he agonizes over his cowardice. In the next scene we find Klychkov, in recompense, enacting his role as the tool of party discipline, joining Chapaev in punishing his men for looting from defeated White villagers. Henceforth, Klychkov is in control, just as Furmanov asserts his organizing narrative word over the recalcitrant image of its object. But what happened to Klychkov’s obsessive fascination? Never answered artistically, the question later recurs in political terms. The problem now becomes not how did Klychkov’s obsession with Chapaev cease, but why did Furmanov embody his account of the spontaneous peasant heroism in the individualist Chapaev in the first place? One answer proffered is that it is Chapaev’s outbursts of negative ‘stikhiinost’ ‘(his petulance, his fits of anger and stubborn refusal to acknowledge facts) which differentiate him from the abstract concept he is called upon to embody and which lend his figure the visual samobytnost’ (originality) needed to make the embodiment gel into something tangibly real (126). Elsewhere, Klychkov sidesteps the problem by

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claiming that it is the peasant masses in their particular context which provide the singularity: ‘It was that mass, at that moment and in that condition which gave birth to [Chapaev]’ (200). Furmanov acknowledges the confusion he has generated by then suggesting that the difference between Chapaev and other such heroes is merely that the ataman happened to be surrounded by devoted glashatai (proponents) who publicised his cause (202). Why then should Chapaev’s Public Relations machine operate more efficiently than that of others? Furmanov’s limp response: Chapaev embodied the raw qualities of the masses ‘more completely than the rest’ (‘polnee vsekh’) (204). The narrative short-circuits itself. Chapaev’s exploits are aestheticized because they are themselves the most aesthetic embodiment of heroism. This raises a question central to Soviet cultural debates of the 1920s – that of the relationship between fiction and fact. The debate is encapsulated in the controversy surrounding the literatura fakta (literature of fact) movement, and in the arguments between Shklovskii and Dziga Vertov over the possibilities of fiction and the documentary for the future of film (see Taylor and Christie 1988: 131–3). At the end, Klychkov expresses his doubts about the very existence of the heroic feats: ‘Where is the heroism of Chapaev? Where are his great feats? Do they exist at all?’ (303). This confusion over the status of Furmanov’s narrative accounts for the fact that he presents, under Klychkov’s name, unadulterated extracts from his own diary. In order to represent the truth, fiction must both merge with it and separate itself from it. The separation fulfils two functions. The first is to prevent an erosion of distance between presented truth and presenting consciousness which would inhibit the attribution of meaning. The second is to guarantee the visual fascination of the truth to be made present (Chapaev cannot admire what he is part of). The two sides of the contradiction match two aspects of a familiar Russian dilemma: how the intelligent can appropriate the unbridled dynamism of the narod. This partly explains the intergeneric dialogues which characterize Russian literature’s existence on the boundaries of aesthetics and history, seeing and doing.23 The intergeneric tradition is one expression of the broader fantasy of a merger between art and history at work in Furmanov’s novel – one of the few vestiges of the avant-garde project whose decline Furmanov helped mark. Before he dies, Chapaev is treated to some frontline theatre performances organized by Anna Nikitichna (Zoia Pavlovna in the novel), Furmanov’s future wife. Klychkov enthuses: ‘The artist, the agitator and the commissar – all this merged together in one concept: the warrior’ (298). The fantasy is undermined by Nikitichna’s condescending perception that the soldiers needed ‘simple, comprehensible pieces’ (300), thus re-establishing the gap between observing subject and observed object, art and action, which Furmanov requires to structure his fiction. It was, appropriately, the popularizing Anna Nikitichna who collaborated in the making of Chapaev the film.24 But, like the novel’s internal embodiment of word as image, Chapaev must deviate from its verbal source to

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word 93 establish its right to exist. Apart from the ideologically motivated omission of references to Klychkov’s initial cowardice, and attempts to bolster his authority, the obvious differences are the added subplot depicting the love of Pet’ka, Chapaev’s loyal orderly, for Anka, a female machine gunner, insights into enemy behaviour (including the scene of the peasant polishing the floor of the White General who has ordered his brother to be flogged), and episodes depicting Chapaev’s native wit, as when he demonstrates battle tactics with potatoes (see Plate 12). Many of these changes are explained by the oral translation mechanism facilitating Chapaev’s migrations from screen to page: the 1920s apocryphal legends with their inflated versions of Chapaev’s prowess. In conjunction with structural changes imposed by the switch of medium, the plot differences can be aligned with ideological issues arising from a comparison of the two works.25 Draft scenarios have Furmanov waking at the beginning from a dream of Chapaev looking commandingly down from his steed to the sound of the real Chapaev entering the room. In the definitive scenario, the first frames represent Chapaev riding into camera (Leyda 1960: 314–15). The abandonment of the dream (and of the build-up to Chapaev’s appearance) indicates cinema’s lack of a temporally distanced narrative consciousness. Positioned at the site of the camera, the viewer replaces Furmanov as subject of consciousness. But with no distinct reality to wake up to, viewers remain in dreamlike thrall to the fantasy figure. This cinematic identificatory mechanism is reinforced by the inclusion of the shot of Chapaev on a horse within a pseudo-objective battle scene (see Plate 13).26 Because film’s subject of identification migrates with the camera between characters, a visually embodied holder of party values is liable to become the object of another, less reliable vision (Ellis 1992: 40–4), as in scenes where the viewer shares Chapaev’s jokes at the commissar’s expense. Thus, the Vasil’ev brothers inadvertently undermine their own efforts to correct the text’s ideological waverings. Film operates in the present tense. Even flashbacks cannot emulate verbal past-tense narration, as Chapaev’s death indicates. The directors translate the temporal omniscience accorded Furmanov’s readers, who know Chapaev is to die, into a spatial montage juxtaposing shots of the White assault with shots of Chapaev relaxing. We experience the impending threat, but not the inevitability of death, whose meaning is crowded out by our vicarious desire to forestall Chapaev’s fate. When the film was first shown, some of the same mature socialist workers praised by the film’s reviewers went from cinema to cinema hoping to find a true version in which their hero lives on! Whilst Furmanov’s novel is compressed into sketch-like summaries illustrated by individual episodes framed by an imperfective ‘he would’, film lacks an imperfective aspect, barely differentiating the central from the marginal, constructing each episode as a singular event to be integrated with the main plot and underscoring its capacity to invoke in its viewer pure,

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singular presence (Ellis 1982: 40–44). Even Boris Shumiatskii, Stalin’s film czar, acknowledged in Pravda that the film’s effect on today’s masses relies on its ability to unite them in co-presence with the individual heroism of yesterday, unwittingly recalling the very ‘stikhiinost’’ Furmanov aimed to expose and eradicate.27 The audience senses its collective belonging through its identification with visually striking images of singular individuals. Thus, in a scene in which Anka is about to be engulfed by the Whites, she suddenly rejoices at Chapaev’s appearance. The camera oscillates between mirror-like close ups of Anka’s ecstatic face, and long shots of the massing Red Army, instigating a three-way identification between viewer, heroine and heroic masses. In reinforcing the Party’s role (the film’s task must not just adapt Furmanov’s novel, but ‘adopt’ it into the socialist realist canon), the Vasil’ev brothers depict Klychkov solving the looting crisis, in the face of a stubbornly resistant Chapaev who, when mistakenly thanked by the wronged peasants, undergoes a transformation conveyed through a facial close-up. He immediately gives his admonitory speech (lifted word for word from the novel), shot admiringly from below, with Furmanov sitting inconspicuously in the audience. Visual gesture becomes the outer manifestation of the inner Party truth which remains unseen, silent, but forever present.28 Rather than contradicting inner truth, sensual surface, with all its excesses, becomes that truth’s ideal expression. This filmic desire for a coincidence of inner truth and outer gesture is apparent in the rendition of Furmanov’s depiction of the peasantry’s long ‘coming to knowledge’, compressed here into sudden revelations. The decision of the White servant to switch allegiance is identified with the precise moment when he realizes that the General bears responsibility for his brother’s fate. The camera focuses on the peasant’s face to capture the moment of inner truth made available for public scrutiny. The very impulsiveness critiqued within Furmanov’s novelistic viewpoint provides the mechanism by which its cinematic representation is achieved. In another transformative gesture with ideological consequences, the novelistic hindsight framing Chapaev’s death in meaningful context is translated into the musical soundtrack dominated by the mournful tones of the ‘Black Raven’ folksong. The enwrapping of emotive image by rational word is replaced by a mystic fusion of word and image in which Chapaev becomes a fated, mythic figure. Far from undermining the Party’s underlying truth, Chapaev’s folksy eccentricities confirm that Truth and, contrary to the novel’s intention, remove him from time. Concretization, as Furmanov implicitly understood, needs a dialectic of word and image. Socialist realism merges the two, denying also the movement of past to present. The Black Raven theme also confirms that the film is an embodiment of the official folklore that accumulated around Chapaev after Furmanov’s novel, assimilating novel to legend and allowing the portrayal of Furmanov besides the fictionalized figures of Pet’ka and Anka.29 The Vasil’ev brothers’ adaptation

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word 95 is thus not merely one of text to screen, but also one of a literary text that still displays the vestiges of the Leninist avant garde, to an officially sanctioned culture bearing a deeply conservative populism grafted onto a pre-existing rural folklore. No discussion of Chapaev can be left without reference to the enduring fate of its intrepid hero beyond Stalinism. It was, ironically, the very public visibility and mythic abstraction dominating the 1934 film which generated the hero’s subversive, post-Stalinist hypostasis. This subversion was the price to be paid by Stalinist mythology for the constructing of such inflated abstractions. Much of the cinematic Chapaev’s humour is directed against the lack of practical know-how characteristic of the much-derided bureaucratic intellectual. In the context of Stalinist efforts to undermine the status of the intelligent, the presence of such humour in the Vasil’ev brothers’ film is understandable. (The fact that it sits uneasily with their counter-emphasis on the principles of Party-mindedness is one of many tensions with which viewers must engage.) In the anekdoty of the sixties and seventies the humour is inverted, since the addressee of the typical Chapaev joke is precisely the knowing intelligent (by now replete with dissident tendencies) who mocks the naive beliefs and impossible feats of the unwitting socialist hero. In a post-Soviet twist to the Chapaev story, and to his peregrinations from text to oral culture to film and back, the anecdotes provided the basis for Viktor Pelevin’s novel Chapaev and Pustota (Chapaev i Pustota) in which the characters of the anecdotes find themselves entangled in a web of absurd plot-lines involving post-Soviet businessmen, Eastern mystics, Western popular icons, and the heroes of the 1934 Chapaev. The seeds of the inversion that Chapaev suffered under Stalin’s successors were present in the original film which itself echoed tensions inhabiting Furmanov’s original text. For Furmanov, the problem is one of self-justification: how can a text railing against the ideological pitfalls of sensuous, individualistic spontaneity establish as its centre of narrative interest the enigma of a sensuous, spontaneous individual? Through its tortuous ideological ratiocinations, Furmanov’s text foregrounds this contradiction, but in the 1934 film the tension is superseded by an all-too-convenient elision of inner (verbal) abstraction and outer (visual) surface in which the latter supports the emphasis on reason and discipline propagated by the former. Yet the change of medium, implied audience and function (that of marking the emergent cultural consensus; the film’s release coincided with the launch of socialist realism) means that the film must initiate viewers into its ideology of abstract Party Truth precisely through spontaneous celebrations of sensuous surface. It is only logical that the tables should later be turned through a re-construing of the sensuously witty Chapaev as a puffed-up, socialist-realist abstraction ripe for puncturing by a sensuous wit supplied by a revanchist, post-Stalinist intelligentsia with distinctly unofficial allegiances. It was left to Pelevin to complete the circle by re-appropriating Chapaev for the new post-Soviet literary avant garde.

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We must now trace the further development of the contradictions at work in Chapaev, a quintessential socialist realist adaptation, by considering examples of the remaining two categories of the genre we identified: those of the foreign work and of the nineteenth-century Russian classic.

5

Shooting the canon Ekranizatsii and the (de)centring of Stalinist culture

Cultural cross-dressings: Treasure Island and the socialist realist canon Against the background of the processes affecting the Soviet ekranizatsiia outlined in Chapter 4, I now want to extend my exploration of how these processes influenced individual works by focusing on examples of films from the three subcategories of the canon of socialist realist ekranizatsii: (i) the foreign classic; (ii) the socialist realist prototype; and (iii) the nineteenthcentury Russian classic. Like Chapaev, the films I consider were all made in the 1930s in the baleful shadow of an increasingly repressive Stalinist machine and, like the Vasiliev brothers, their directors all attempted to bend into conformity texts offering resistance to the ideological paradigm. In negotiating this tension, they go beyond Chapaev in revealing a secondary conflict between the universality of the centralizing model they pretend to impose and the recalcitrant particularity of the concrete images in which that model is incarnated, a conflict compounded by the way Stalinist culture constructs its spectator in relation to the masses. This set of problems – endemic in Soviet film – is duplicated in related difficulties surrounding the translation of verbal texts into cinematic images. Despite their surface rhetoric of veneration, Stalinist film adaptations mark deviations from their literary sources in a form of self-consciousness which, while antithetical to Soviet aesthetics, is inherent in the film adaptation.1 This feature has a bearing on the way that ekranizatsii deal with their liminal status on the boundaries of popular culture and high art, and on their incorporation into a cinematic culture whose very centrality to the public sphere led eventually to the sanctioning of a measure of autonomy enabling the ekranizatsiia subversively to re-shape the official literary canon. Stalinist adaptations of foreign literary classics served several functions. On one hand they established socialist realism’s organic relationship to the pantheon of world culture. Conversely, they provided the opportunity to demonstrate the organic presence of revolutionary sensibilities within key Western cultural texts. (A few directors, including Pudovkin, who directed a Shklovskii adaptation in 1939, found in them a haven from Stalinist ideological

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strictures.) On a pragmatic level, the broadening of available texts for adaptation to include an array of foreign classics also enabled Soviet film better to fulfil the entertainment function imposed upon it in the aftermath of the avant garde’s ignominious fall from grace. This third function reflected the recognition amongst cultural policymakers that, to ensure popular compliance with the rigours of the rapid industrialization programme it was undergoing, the Soviet Union needed an equivalent to the alternatively soothing and exhilarating Hollywood films it had absorbed with anxious fascination from before the revolution.2 Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island offered the potential to fulfil all three functions. It was, first, a foreign classic with universal acclaim. Second, its vaguely militaristic undertones (some of its characters are British Army officers) provided ample opportunity for a socialist realist rewrite. Third, it is a rip-roaring romantic adventure yarn with appeal both to children and to adults. Indeed, the frequency with which texts oriented to both child and adult audiences were adapted in the 1930s and 40s underlines the infantilization of Stalinist culture – a process to which film, with its fluid identification structures, was able to make a vital contribution.3 The 1937 film Treasure Island (Ostrov sokrovishch), directed by Vladimir Vainshtok and based loosely on Stevenson’s novel, is essentially a musical, influenced by the Hollywood spectacular of the sort whose Soviet equivalent was, Stalin claimed, best represented by the 1938 comedy Volga, Volga.4 Like Chapaev it filters its textual source through a third medium, confirming that a key stage in adapting literature to the Soviet screen is the identification of a mediating text, or genre of text, which subtly displaces the authority of the original.5 None the less, like most Soviet ekranizatsii, but unlike Chapaev (which bears the traces of an earlier avant-garde emphasis on cinematic purism), Treasure Island opens with the frontispiece of Stevenson’s novel, thus signaling its claim to being an authentic enactment of a master-text. To further this impression, the film credits are stylized as script from an old, leather-bound book. What follows deviates sharply from Stevenson’s original, suggesting both that the old script technique is a stock device with which all later Stalinist ekranizatsii are saddled, and that the film is intended as a deliberate subversion of its acknowledged source. Film adaptations owe allegiance both to their literary source and to the time in which they were made. In 1937, Stalin’s version of class warfare barely accorded with Stevenson’s retrograde heroes seeking their private fortunes. Introductions to Soviet translations of the work (which provided Vainshtok with his already mediated source) redress the balance by stressing Stevenson’s sympathies for the Scottish Independence movement, but none of this filters through into what the author intended as an adventure novel. The next frames highlight the ekranizatsiia’s capacity for taking this line of reinterpretation to its conclusion and for negotiating the dual allegiance. They depict another text in a script identical to that of the credits which transposes the action to an eigthteen-century Irish rebellion against British oppression. The familiar heroes, Jim Hawkins (the narrator) and Dr Livesey,

Shooting the canon 99 are now affiliates of the liberation movement. The search for the treasure is motivated by the desire to distribute the spoils to the revolutionary army.6 Smollett is portrayed as a captain in the class-obsessed English army, and when he joins the hunt, his rivalry with Livesey is not personal (as in the novel), but that of an opposing political force. The third group of treasureseekers, the pirates, difficult to locate within the Marxist class paradigm, become an inconvenient hindrance to ideological clarity, but are retained for their entertainment value. The Irish background domesticates the novel for the context in which it is made (the USSR’s stance against imperialism), whilst maintaining the authenticity derived from showing prototypical socialism in a specific international context. The old script device sutures the gap between novel and film, rendering them part of one continuous revolutionary text. The opening scene consists of long shots of horsemen riding along the seashore with soldiers in pursuit. The rebels are carrying Dr Livesey, wounded in the revolutionary cause, to the inn of Mrs Hawkins, a rebel sympathizer. The film thus transforms Stevenson’s ‘private’ first-person confessional opening (Jim Hawkins recalling Billy the sailor arriving at his parents’ inn) into a demonstration of collective solidarity. In the novel it is Billy, at best a morally neutral character, who initiates the action, but in the film it is instigated through the clash of good and evil (Smollett and Livesey do not appear in the novel until later). The depiction of the rebels, dressed informally and with unkempt hair, conveys this elemental, natural character and contrasts it with the prim uniforms and tidy wigs of the stereotypically staid Englishmen. Meanwhile, Livesey’s leadership skills and political wisdom assimilate him to the role of class-conscious commissar and the film to the socialist realist paradigm. The marrying of the adventure motive and the political motivation is not always smooth. The pirates, despite their ideological anomalousness, are essential to the plot. Vainshtok exploits cinema’s characteristic subjectivization of viewer experience to paper over the cracks. When Billy arrives at the inn, the camera angle oscillates rapidly from behind the invisible, mysterious Billy, to close ups of Livesey’s face as he listens attentively to the noises downstairs. We are seduced into sharing Livesey’s puzzled engagement with Billy’s arrival, whilst being given sufficient visual information not to identify with his position entirely. Livesey’s intense interest also leads us to believe that Billy is connected with the political struggle. It is only when Jenny Hawkins, the daughter, tells Livesey that the noises emanate from ‘some sailor or other’ that the distinctness of the ‘Billy line’ from the ‘revolutionary line’ is established, although even now the viewer may assume that the naive girl is mistaken. Of course, Billy is much more than ‘some old sailor’, since he possesses the key to the story – the map of Treasure Island. The stitching of the political line into the adventure line is thus achieved with minimum effort. Vainshtok adopts a second strategy when dealing with the refusal of the adventure novel to conform to the socialist realist model. In the film’s most

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notable feature, he openly flaunts the text/film disjunction by recasting Jim Hawkins, Stevenson’s hero, and the consciousness behind the narration, as Jenny Hawkins dressed as a boy in order to be allowed to participate in the adventure. For most of the film Jenny performs the boyish exploits associated with his character. However, the frequent close-ups of her face, as well as the fact that the viewer is privy to her ruse, mean that, unlike the other characters, we remain perpetually aware of the gender transformation rendered still more audacious through the knowledge that Stevenson’s intention was to write a boys’ story in which there would be ‘no need of psychology or fine writing … [and] women were excluded’ (Stevenson 1962: vi). In a phenomenon which acquired new impetus within ekranizatsii of children’s texts of the war period, the subject position constructed by the film switches to and fro between Jenny’s intra-diegetic, semi-infantile excitement at the prospect of adventure on the high seas, and a paternal, extra-diegetic source of knowledge. The oscillation, peculiar to screen adaptations of children’s novels, mollifies the contradictions of Stalinist society, as the repressed awe inspired in the viewer by the all-seeing, all-knowing Father transmutes into paternalistic condescension towards the child.7 The film not only changes Stevenson’s historical setting and the gender of his hero, but also transports it to a different genre. The adventure novel becomes in its Soviet version a musical with songs and dances, a switch weakly motivated by the pirate refrain ‘Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum!’ The musical comedy, central to Soviet film of the 1930s, was deployed for the ease with which it accommodated Stalin’s (in)famous claim that ‘Life has become better, comrades, life has become happier’. Films belonging to this genre simultaneously comment on and create the optimistic scenario invoked, serving as an index of that happier life through their very existence, and as a tool with which to combat the lugubrious pessimism of the opposing class view;8 Aleksandrov’s paradigmatic Volga, Volga ends with a song stating that laughter is a means for defeating enemies, a gesture mirrored in Treasure Island. The choice of the musical form for Treasure Island denotes its membership of a film category asserting the Soviet Union’s ideological victory over its class enemies. Rather than re-accommodating itself to its verbal original, the film celebrates its repackaging of Stevenson’s novel via two provocative gestures: the rendering of an (albeit, already popular) English classic as mass culture and of the male hero as a female. The three strategies (subjectivization of viewer perception; transformation of Jim into Jenny; switch from classic literary text to cinematic musical) converge in the subtext of Jenny as a love interest for Dr Livesey, and for the male viewer whose perspective he shares. The girl who dresses as a boy to remain with the unsuspecting man she admires is a music-hall (and Shakespearean) cliché. So when Jenny sings of the podruga’s (female friend’s) need to protect her drug (male friend), she gives abstract, Marxist camaraderie gendered, bodily form. The cross-dressing is also the point of convergence for

Shooting the canon 101 the two sides of the oscillation process (identification with a paternal, extradiegetic source of authority, and identification with the childlike Stalinist subject). The only way to maintain an identity fragmented between child and father is through the union of same and same (father and daughter) as different (man and woman). In indulging in condescending, incestuous lust for Jenny, the viewer enters the spheres of both cerebral knowledge and corporeal desire, reconciling the conflicting needs of Stalinist ideology: to be internalized conceptually, yet to be experienced in the flesh. There is another motivation for the gender change, since it redirects the film away from the purely male world of adventure towards the conventional, romance-oriented family. This reflects Stalin’s rejection of experimental sexual relations favoured by the Bolsheviks in favour of family values, but also pays lip service to the Leninist espousal of feminist principles. When congratulating the victorious revolutionaries, Livesey says of Jenny’s actions: ‘You have proved that young female patriots are capable of fulfilling their duty to their motherland’ (‘Ty dokazala, chto molodye patriotki umeiut vypolniat’ svoi dolg pered rodinoi’). That the viewer is always aware of Jenny’s ruse accords with the latter-day proletariat’s superior class consciousness. At the same time, the foregrounding of the act of transformation maintains our awareness that the film provides a modern, Sovietized version of the English bourgeois adventure novel. Yet the film’s transformation of this literary classic into a slapstick musical with sexual undertones also marks the attempt to inject visceral emotion into, and popularize, Marxist ideology. In a single paradoxical gesture, Treasure Island performs a political correction of its original which weakens its visceral appeal, and an earthy, ‘enfleshment’ of the ideology behind the correction. Appropriately, the nexus of ensuing contradictions is represented in the ambivalence of the cross-dresser. Ultimately, politics wins out. Jenny’s final words, spoken in response to Livesey’s praise of her patriotism, are ‘Long live freedom!’ (‘Da zdravstvuet svoboda!’). The motherland (rodina) and freedom (svoboda) of which Jenny and Livesey speak – Ireland and the Irish liberation movement – translate all too easily into Soviet Russia and international Leninism. Still more allegorically loaded are the ‘enemies’ (vragi) referred to in the song that provides the finale: ‘Whoever is not with us is a coward and an enemy’ (‘Kto ne s nami, tot i trus i vrag’). The song’s words are laden with significance in the context of Stalinist official culture. Furthermore, the foregrounding of the act of transformation of Jenny into Jim – Jenny is simultaneously the Stevenson character from the English novel and its bold Soviet feminized correction – institutes a complex play of difference and identity. It identifies as exotic ‘others’ (Irish patriots) characters who, in their embrace of political freedom, resemble ‘our own’ Soviet revolutionaries, and as familiar ‘selves’ (the enemies of the people lurking in our midst) alien British officers (the film was made at the symbolic peak of Stalin’s terror). Each side of the self/other paradigm slides into its opposite, whether in positive or negative

102 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere mode (Soviet self becomes British/Irish other; British/Irish other becomes familiar Soviet self), demonstrating the arbitrariness of Stalinist discourse, its reliance on signs ever liable to invert their meanings.9 The film’s last moments depict the revolutionaries shown at the beginning, galloping this time not along the seashore in flight, but in close formation across a bridge. The panoramic shot that eventually reduces them to outline figures serves a generalizing function (‘these are not just Irish revolutionaries, but progressives the world over’), whilst the crossing of the bridge serves as the final transgressive gesture – the transformation of retreat into advance. That the screen then folds back into the pages of Stevenson’s classic represents a last ironic nod to the classical source which Vainshtok’s highly popular movie has so pointedly undermined, even while showing deference to it.

Deference as difference: Donskoi’s Gor’kii trilogy Deference of a less obviously problematic kind is shown by Mark Donskoi in his Gor’kii trilogy: Gor’kii’s Childhood (Detstvo Gor’kogo), Amongst the People (V liudiakh) and My Apprenticeship (Moi universitety), also made at the height of Stalin’s repressions. Gor’kii’s name is closely associated with socialist realism (he did much to promote it) and several of his works, primarily Mother (Mat’), were cited alongside Furmanov’s Chapaev as textbook exemplars of the genre.10 Suitably reinterpreted foreign predecessors to socialist realist models such as Treasure Island grounded the movement in world culture. Secondary texts within the oeuvre of the model text’s author provided still more organically secure roots. If this were not reason enough for the director, Mark Donskoi, to turn his talents to adaptations of the autobiographical trilogy, then the recent death of the great figurehead of socialist realism himself made the decision inevitable, particularly in light of the emergence during the late 1930s of a Stalinist version of the ‘biopic’ genre.11 Totalitarianism survives through its ability to insinuate itself into people’s consciousnesses from the earliest age, which is why the 1920s saw so many changes to Soviet school curricula, and why, in the 1930s, the studio earmarked for the production of films for children enjoyed generous funding. Donskoi signalled the propagandistic importance of Gor’kii’s trilogy by producing his adaptations in the Soiuzdetfilm studios, whose pedagogical remit readily accommodated tasks such as that of making accessible the achievements of a canonic Soviet writer to a new generation, and of paying tribute to an icon of Stalinist culture.12 The cinematic trilogy takes the sanctification process to which Gor’kii had already begun to be subjected during his lifetime to a new level, each film beginning with the subtitle: ‘In memory of M. Gor’kii’.13 Because neither the pedagogical function nor the sanctification process are reflected in the source texts, Donskoi’s trilogy must venerate its originals

Shooting the canon 103 by asserting its difference from them. The difference is compounded by the thorough familiarity of the name, biography and outward appearance of the revolutionary hero to the films’ viewing audience, gained through the numerous newsreels in which Gor’kii appeared and his status as a member of the Soviet establishment. This transforms the nature of the audience’s perception of Donskoi’s trilogy which cannot maintain the author’s original focus – the revelation of how the boy Peshkov became Gor’kii – since that story is already well-known. No longer able to present itself as a release in linear fashion of private facts into the public sphere, the film must mythologize rather than inform.14 The necessarily foregrounded disjunction between text and adaptation, however, enables Donskoi to use the trilogy to project the ‘tomorrow’ of Stalinism back onto the ‘today’ of the period of the films’ setting, thus ensuring that a text conceived outside the socialist realist era conforms to socialist realist principles.15 The proleptical feature with which the director supplements Gor’kii’s texts mirrors a primary foreshadowing process at work within the texts which motivates Donskoi’s secondary prolepsis. For the novels of Gor’kii’s trilogy were themselves twentieth-century rationalizations of nineteenth-century traditional life; it was a politically mature Gor’kii who began writing them in 1913, using his position of hindsight to evaluate events of whose meaning his childhood persona was only dimly aware. Gor’kii’s trilogy is defined by the way in which the events narrated are framed from the position of hindsight represented by the mature Gor’kii’s interventions in the narrative. For example, he repeatedly points out that the hold over the young Peshkov exerted by both grandparents was a function of the boy’s lack of consciousness, his inability to perceive the ignorant prejudices fostered by their worldviews and fully to articulate the rage and injustice to which the writer later gave expression. The trilogy traces the path by which the gap between the third-person Peshkov and the first-person Gor’kii was closed – a strategy that the film cannot pursue. Underpinning the ideological changes that the switch from pre-revolutionary text to post-revolutionary screen imposes on Donskoi is a formal transformation: that of a first-person autobiographical text to the thirdperson cinematic medium. The transmutation of narrated I (Aleksei Peshkov) into narrating I (Maksim Gor’kii), the rationale behind the books, is replicated in the film’s transformation of Gor’kii the writer into Gor’kii the mythical hero. Bound up with the split between Gor’kii as mortal hero and Gor’kii as eternal myth is a problem familiar to us from Chapaev, the need to represent exceptionality within an ideological framework privileging collective over individual, and simultaneously to ensure that the lives of public icons are made to conform strictly to a set of mythological paradigms constructed for the official sphere.16 The paradoxes are apparent from the opening shots of the first film. Gor’kii’s Childhood is punctuated by motif-like shots of the Volga, an instantly recognizable intertext for ‘Mother Russia’. The elision of the

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‘authentic, people’s Russia’ of the revolutionary period, and that of the late nineteenth century in which it is set, justifiable within a Stalinist framework (‘the Russian people always embodied Marxist truth’) skirts the difficult issue of Gor’kii’s literary critique of peasant backwardness and brutality; he refers to the ‘bestial rot’ (‘skotskaia drian’) of peasant existence and bemoans the ‘abominations [which] oppress us’ (‘merzosti … daviat nas’) (Gor’kii 1962: 153). Here we encounter Donskoi’s inability to account for the disjunction between the events that Gor’kii is describing as Aleksei Peshkov, and the adult Gor’kii’s rationalization of those events from the revolutionary perspective. The elision of the exoticized folk culture of the film action and the film’s framing ‘consciousness’ is reinforced by the musical backing which amplifies the numerous folk songs in orchestral mode. Donskoi achieves, not the rationalization of the nineteenth-century past, but an exoticization in keeping with late-1930s Stalinist conservatism.17 Donskoi’s selective approach to Gor’kii’s novel contributes to the idealizing effect he substitutes for the writer’s first-person interventions. Thus he omits the grandmother’s religious tales, which for Gor’kii instill passivity towards the peasants’ fate. Although the boy’s grandfather is portrayed in a critical light, the criticism is largely cancelled out by the absence of the adult Gor’kii’s judgemental commentary and the exotic folk motifs. Though written before the formulation of socialist realist principles, Gor’kii’s trilogy conforms to those principles, in that the present-time frame with which the adult narrator so pointedly manufactures meaning out of the past-time action he depicts dovetails with the autobiography’s guiding theme: the coming to consciousness of Gor’kii the revolutionary, his success in integrating the lessons of his past into his pathway to the progressive future. At the end of Childhood, Gor’kii reasons: Sometimes I ask myself: is it worth speaking about all this? And … I answer to myself … it is this truth which has to be known to its roots, so that, heavy and shameful, it can be dragged out from memory by its roots. (Gor’kii 1962: 152). The autobiography is a revolutionary Bildungsroman. Donskoi downplays this linear process of ‘coming to consciousness’, owing to the lack of a means of framing and attributing (present) meaning to (past) events, and to the tendency instead to emphasize the young Gor’kii’s membership of a timeless ‘Russian people’. The latter tendency, however, facilitates the film’s capacity to meet another socialist realist precept: the expression of the present in its trajectory towards socialism. By projecting aspects of the Stalinist present (the heroic status of the Russian people) back into the pre-revolutionary past (the brutalities of the tsarist period), we perceive the revolutionary future in the cinematic present. The lack of a cinematic process by which Peshkov can be shown progressively to overcome the spontaneity of the Russian people finds a substitute

Shooting the canon 105 on the level of plot. One of the few overt distortions of Gor’kii’s plot involves the pathetic figure of ‘Just the Job’ (‘Khoroshee delo’), the eccentric lodger whose expulsion from the family household because of his obsession with chemistry engages Peshkov’s sympathies. In the film he is given the role of a former political prisoner whose rejection of the system becomes a behaviour model for the future Gor’kii. His departure from the household is accorded epic proportions and mirrored in the departure of Aleksei at the film’s end.18 Through this device, a distortion of the original, the film forces Gor’kii’s work into the straitjacket of a key socialist realist principle: the necessity for a mentor to induct a disciple into party consciousness.19 As in Chapaev, the process by which a hero overcomes his stikhiinost’ itself relies on viewers’ spontaneous identification of visual parallels. The romantic realism favoured by Gor’kii (epitomized in the sense of exceptionality experienced by the young Peshkov) conflicted with the need for Stalinist ideology to make the lone revolutionary conform to collective exigencies.20 But the dispute only echoed a deeper tension: that between the guiding role of the party intelligentsia and the unenlightened proletariat it was called upon to lead. There was a marked shift from the Leninist period, when the proletariat was accorded the consciousness to govern as a collective, to the Stalinist period, when the party elite and ‘the strong individual’ came to the fore. Gor’kii’s status as founder of the socialist realist tradition put him in an analogical position to that of Stalin: Donskoi’s trilogy bolsters a personality cult within socialist realism, mirroring the cult of personality at work in Stalinist society at large to which it also, indirectly, gives succour. Donskoi’s film mythologizes Gor’kii both as one of the people (the idealized local colour blends him with the folkloric backdrop to his life) and as an exceptional individual (viewers begin with the hindsight that they are to be made privy to the early years of someone whose greatness, acknowledged in the credits, is already known).21 Neither the biographical Peshkov nor the biographical Gor’kii are the subject of the film’s hagiography, but rather a composite atemporal figure formed from pronouncements made by the writer throughout his life. In revering Gor’kii as mythological hero, Donskoi undermines the integrity of the hero’s texts.22 In order to be raised to his future status as embodiment of the people’s culture (to be made different), the young Peshkov must at the same time be assimilated to the people (made the same). One way in which the film manages this tension is to contrast cinema’s mass appeal with the high cultural status of the literary word. At key points, the folkloric mise-en-scène and soundtrack are overlaid with ‘literary’ intertitles providing the post-1917 rationalization. However, the success of this cinematic sleight of hand comes at a price, for the fact that these are third-person rather than first-person intertitles obscures the organic links between Peshkov and Gor’kii. (The tension surfaces in the film’s title, Gor’kii’s Childhood, which adds the name ‘Gor’kii’ to the writer’s original ‘Childhood’.) Donskoi presents Peshkov’s leadership attributes at a much earlier age than Gor’kii, projecting the writer back onto Peshkov, rather than framing

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Peshkov from Gor’kii’s viewpoint, exhorting viewers to perceive the revolutionary future in the pre-revolutionary past. Moments from Gor’kii’s texts selected for adaptation are inevitably those which point to his future status as the leading socialist realist man of letters. In My Apprenticeship, the camera dwells admiringly on a scene of the young hero reading poetry to his fellow workers at the bakery – an episode mentioned by Gor’kii only briefly and in the imperfective past.23 The closing scenes of Donskoi’s film depict Peshkov initiating a song picked up first by a group of accompanying boys, then by the orchestral backing, reconciling Gor’kii’s popular spirit with his aloofness and exceptionality. There follows a series of shot-reverse shots locating the subject of vision in the group of boys as they watch Peshkov stride across the Russian landscape, walking metaphorically towards his future destiny as socialist figurehead.24 As he disappears across the horizon, the boys’ viewpoint merges, through an aerial long shot, with that of the anonymous, universalizing, third-person state, as Gor’kii’s unique first-person presence is finally expelled from view.25 The tensions embodied in the closing scenes of Gor’kii’s Childhood intensify in the remaining two films. By the last one, My Apprenticeship, they reached breaking point, as indicated in contrasting reviews.26 The problems are particularly acutely felt here because the film (like the book) depicts Gor’kii/Peshkov as a young adult, with all that this implies in terms of the hero’s consciousness of what he sees around him. In order to assuage the more substantial ideological criticisms, the need for distortions of Gor’kii’s original plot becomes all the greater. My Apprenticeship begins, unlike its source, with an affirmation of the collective spirit of the people, expressed, as so often in the trilogy, through the depiction of peasants in collective song. The book, by contrast, offers the most developed critique of life among the peasants (it is the only volume to be published after the revolution). Gor’kii mordantly articulates Peshkov’s sense of alienation from the brutality and ignorance surrounding him. Because Peshkov is now a young man, the alienation is situated as much in the consciousness of the hero as narrated object as it is in that of Gor’kii, the narrating consciousness. Donskoi addresses this problem in a number of ways. First, he selectively uses anonymous, third-person intertitles to lessen the visceral effect of Peshkov’s alienation. However, as Adorno has remarked, modern cinema’s powerful unity of sound and image, and the meanings and effects projected by this unity, cannot be displaced by intertitles.27 In Donskoi’s rendition of the hero’s engagement with students about the political merits of their spontaneous revolt, intertitles characterizing the uprising as ‘motiveless’ (a judgement belonging to official socialist realist rhetoric on ‘stikhiinost’’ rather than from the mature Gor’kii) are outweighed by the vicarious detachment sensed by viewers as they see Donskoi’s image of Peshkov staring wistfully into the distance, his back turned on the marching protesters. Moreover, the intertitles derive from an impersonal authority located in the post-revolutionary present, rather than from Gor’kii’s rational-

Shooting the canon 107 izing consciousness. This reinforces the lack of integration between Peshkov and Gor’kii, and the way in which, rather than an active first-person subject transforming narrated I (Peshkov) into narrating I (Gor’kii), Peshkov and Gor’kii merge into a single object of Stalinist ideology. Donskoi dwells upon those moments in Gor’kii’s text when Peshkov expresses his affinity with his fellow men, as when he is depicted repeating over and over the phrase ‘I love you brothers!’ (‘Ia liubliu vas, brattsy!’). Other moments which can be made to conform to socialist realist ideology are also exploited to maximum effect: Peshkov’s paean of praise to the joy of labour, and an episode in which he spends the proceeds of his work on buying the works of Schopenhauer, thus asserting the link between intellectual and physical labour.28 Most significant, however, is Donskoi’s focus on Peshkov’s leadership qualities – that which differentiates (without separating) Gor’kii from his fellow men. From an early stage he is shown reading poetry to his fellow workers at the bakery (Gor’kii, man of letters, is visually superimposed onto Peshkov-Gor’kii, working man of the people), and exhorting them to confront unscrupulous bosses. Throughout, we see workers watching Gor’kii as he delivers his homilies and takes on responsibility for defending his comrades’ rights. Viewers are thus constructed as observers of Gor’kii, the object of (albeit reverential) scrutiny, a reversal of the original text in which Gor’kii’s consciousness is the filter through which we observe all that he narrates about Peshkov. Adorno connects the screen’s equalizing quality with the advent of mass culture, but it is also fundamental to the needs of totalitarian societies.29 The inevitable moments in My Apprenticeship when Peshkov is absent from the screen only reinforce the sense that the film’s unifying consciousness is located at the impersonal site from which the intertitles are articulated and which transforms all the objects of representation into singular instances of its unmotivated, generalizing activity. By contrast, the typifying function of the literary narrator, who belongs to a pre-totalitarian era, is motivated through the life experiences which link the narrating consciousness and the narrated objects of representation. It is Gor’kii rather than Peshkov whom we observe in Donskoi’s My Apprenticeship. Passages selected for adaptation are inevitably those which point proleptically to Gor’kii’s future status as leading socialist realist man of letters. Sections which reassert the disjunction between Peshkov and Gor’kii are omitted or played down. For example, the Ukrainian character, Khokhol, who in Gor’kii’s My Apprenticeship acts as a mentor for the young Peshkov, is excised, since his presence would suggest that Peshkov, far from being already a leader of men, remains a novice. Donskoi’s My Apprenticeship thus provides a reverse image to his Childhood in which the ‘disciple/mentor’ paradigm is imposed from without rather than excised from within. The purpose, however, is the same: that of eliding the chasm between Gor’kii the public legend and Peshkov the private individual. In My Apprenticeship, the actor playing Peshkov is, for the first time in the trilogy, made to resemble the mature Gor’kii, whose face and demeanour were

108 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere amongst the best-known of all Stalinist public figures. As well as carrying Gor’kii’s distinctive hairstyle and moustaches, and trademark regional accent, the actor mimics the writer’s loping gait and slow, deliberate movements.30 This only adds to the sense that what we see on screen is an already formed, legendary Gor’kii, not Peshkov on his path to fame. However, the camera always reveals traits specific to the actor as an individual. What we see is therefore always both ‘more and less than’ (superfluous and inadequate to) the biographical Gor’kii whose status as unrepresentable myth is, consequently, enhanced still further. The acute self-awareness of the adult hero in My Apprenticeship represents a considerable challenge to the Stalinist film-maker. Despite the elision of boundaries between Peshkov and Gor’kii, the director cannot ignore the book’s central episode: the aborted suicide attempt ensuing from Peshkov’s sense of desolation about his inability to engage with his fellow men. Yet the theme of suicide hardly befits a socialist realist legend. Unsurprisingly, Donskoi resorts to the use of intertitles, condensing Gor’kii’s drawn-out account of Peshkov’s despair at being unable to defend the students into the terse understatement: ‘He was seized by a feeling of personal inadequacy’, followed by words suggesting that the prime reason for the hero’s suicide attempt was political. For this is the voice not of the mature Gor’kii, but of Stalinist ideology in which despair has no place. The event itself is skirted around. The camera depicts Peshkov writing his suicide note, but the scene ends with a joke in which Peshkov signals that his intentions are not entirely serious: ‘I’ll write something funny for them; the cure for toothache of the heart is gunpowder and lead’.31 Still not content with the dark implications of this awkward episode, Donskoi completes the amelioration process by ending his film with an episode absent from Gor’kii’s novel, which follows the suicide sequence with descriptions of Peshkov’s life amongst the Volga bargemen. Incongruously, a bold, confident hero is depicted aiding a woman to give birth on the banks of the Volga. In the film’s closing image, Peshkov is shown raising the crying child in his arms and declaring: ‘Yell, new inhabitant of the Russian soil!’ (‘Ori, novyi zhitel’ russkoi zemli! ’).32 The implications are clear: dark thoughts of death are succeeded immediately by intimations of the bright tomorrow that awaits the child in the film-maker’s present. The ‘tomorrow in the today’ of socialist realism becomes the ‘today in the yesterday’. The image of Peshkov/Gor’kii holding the newborn child is interspersed with shots of a stormy Volga, and the soundtrack fills with the sounds of crashing water and folk-singing. Storm waters are, as any viewer would have known, Gor’kii’s own metaphor for revolution (here at least the film speaks through the consciousness of the adult Gor’kii) and the theme of the revolutionary tomorrow that Gor’kii and the child are about to build is melded with the theme of the Russian people’s eternal greatness.33 In one final elision, Gor’kii’s own epigraph is superimposed onto the screen as the film closes: ‘I walk so as to warn and illuminate people in their darkness’. Here, too, the

Shooting the canon 109 anonymous voice of official ideology and the individual consciousness of Gor’kii are reconciled, but at the site of the all-subsuming, impersonal Stalinist word rather than that of Gor’kii’s ever recalcitrant image.

Centre as periphery: The Man in the Case Donskoi’s convoluted manipulations designed to bring Gor’kii’s text in line with socialist realist principles are justified by the fact that Gor’kii lived on beyond the period in which his autobiography was written to become an, albeit reluctant, Stalinist figurehead.34 In our third category of socialist realist adaptation – the nineteenth-century classic – the ideological distortions perpetrated on the originals are deprived of such ready-made motivations. Few film versions of nineteenth-century classics were made in the 1930s (though, with the coming of sound, Ostrovskii’s plays were readily adapted for the screen).35 One writer whose works attracted increasing attention from film-makers during this period was Chekhov. Chekhov stories in which there is even a hint of social critique of tsarist Russia were adapted one by one through the 1930s, 40s and 50s.36 Apart from the ideological imperative, the spate of Chekhov adaptations can also be traced to the severe paper shortage of the 1920s which had made the publication of the shorter classics, rather than longer novels, more economic. One of Chekhov’s best-known satires, ‘The Man in the Case’ (‘Chelovek v futliare’) was adapted in 1939 by Isidor Annenskii. The film repeats many of the ideological superimpositions of the Donskoi trilogy, but, like the latter, ends up subverting its own intentions through a misreading of the relationship between different narrative levels. With its satirical treatment of the bureaucratic conservatism of tsarist officialdom, ‘The Man in the Case’ lends itself well to the Soviet canon of nineteenth-century critical realism, providing an organically rooted pre-history to the revolution and to socialist realism. But the dogmatic rigidities of the 1930s demanded that even Chekhov should be shown to be revealing reality in its revolutionary development.37 Accordingly, at the end of a grim portrayal of tsarism’s oppressive atmosphere, the brother of Belikov’s fiancée (the pseudorevolutionary figure in the film) proclaims ‘Freedom, freedom, even a hint of it gives hope’ (words Chekhov attributes to his wistful narrator on the occasion of Belikov’s funeral) as he rides into the distance across Russia’s vast open landscape (an ideologically charged visual intertext). Prior to this, the brother’s role as herald of the bright tomorrow is signalled in a decidedly unChekhovian rant against the ‘full-bellied’ (‘sytykh’) of today, and in his mention of the fact that Belikov was a worker for the ‘state system’ (‘gosudarstvennyi stroi ’) during the funeral speech for the unfortunate teacher. The film alters the text of Chekhov’s story so that Belikov’s irrational fear of liberal practice in any area is made to encompass fear of revolution: ‘Soon they will permit even revolution’ (‘Skoro revoliutsiiu razreshat ’), he announces ironically

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(audaciously paraphrasing the original text) in his protest against the ‘liberal’ idea of allowing women to cycle. In another example of the polemical use of hindsight typical of Stalinist adaptations, the true victim of the irony is Belikov himself, since viewers are in the privileged position of knowing that they did indeed ‘permit revolution’. Annenskii’s film makes other alterations to Chekhov’s original, the sum result of which is a film that is unmistakably a product of its time.38 For example, the motif-like phrase that Belikov uses to indicate his shell-like aversion to change – ‘to make sure nothing bad happens’ (‘kak by chego ne vyshlo’) – is transferred to a priest who does not feature in the story. The terror of progress is transformed from being the property of a personality type into the characteristic of an entire regime. The anti-religious impulse, absent in the original, is developed into a major theme in line with Stalin’s anti-religious campaign which reached new heights towards the end of the 1930s. The school priest is shown mistreating a servant, and the film opens with the priest crossing himself in front of the school pupils, before cruelly intimidating them. This sequence is followed by one in which teachers are reading marks out to their pupils in a monotonous drone which exploits cinema’s ability to incorporate the real time of present perception in its representation of a literary imperfective (the viewer experiences the monotony, rather than having it represented by an imperfective verb). The intrusion of ‘apocryphal’ figures like the priest and his servant can then be justified in terms of the need to concretize Chekhov’s relentless literary imperfectives through the accretion of contingent visual detail, and because ‘the Stalinist view of nineteenth-century literature held that the daily life depicted was not a product of the creative minds of Pushkin, Gogol or Chekhov, but the past per se, to which the classical writer had merely added a plot line’ (Dobrenko 2001: 63). The problem of converting a story remarkable even by literary standards for its reliance on imperfective verbs into a cinematic medium is particularly evident in a film version of a short story. Another of the Belorussian director’s means of dealing with this problem is to pad out the text with other non-linear action such as the musical interlude. The story is set in the Ukraine and affords the opportunity to insert local colour in the form of Ukrainian folk-singing in which Varvara, Belikov’s fiancée, indulges at length. Having been ‘bored’, along with the pupils, by the monotonous sequence in the school at the beginning of the film, viewers are now ‘entertained’, along with Belikov and the rest of the family gathering. This juxtaposition demonstrates how, in film, a single ideological viewpoint can be embodied through shifts between a multiplicity of spatio-temporal viewpoints. Significant, too, is the fact that the film is a Belorussian production, for the use of Ukrainian folk-song in a Belorussian film of a Russian classic legitimates the notion of the Soviet Union as a progressive union of equally valued national traditions. The folk-song, along with the political pronouncements of Varvara’s brother, form the positive pointers to the utopian tomorrow of the ethnically unified proletarian state.

Shooting the canon 111 In a review of the film published in Pravda in 1939, Aleksei Kapler points out the suitability of the story for adaptation since, through it, Chekhov ‘actively takes part in our struggle’, providing us with ammunition in our fight against the coward, and the good-for-nothing dreamer (Kapler 1939: 6). He thus formally acknowledges the utilitarian motivation behind the Stalinist theory of ekranizatsiia in which the film’s value for the present supersedes the need for accuracy in its representation of the past. The most significant liberty taken is the abandonment of the story’s status as a framed narrative in which the narrator is also a character able to comment upon the events and place them in a philosophical context (the story belongs to a trilogy of tales told on a wet night during a journey undertaken by three friends).39 Through the story which succeeds ‘The Man in the Case’, ‘About Love’ ( ‘O liubvi’), Chekhov indicates that the answer to Belikov is not political revolution but spiritual liberation and a commitment to love. Framing the events of ‘The Man’, the narrator argues that the most depressing aspect of Belikov’s personality was the fact that he represents a way of life in which people were actually afraid of people like him.40 Chekhov’s Belikov is depicted as a pathetic figure, a ‘homunculus’ (chelovechek). In the film, by contrast, the fear of Belikov, contextualized in the story through the framing device, is brought to the fore and presented, unframed, as a function of Belikov’s concrete qualities. From the beginning, Annenskii portrays Belikov as a sinister figure. Rather than using his favoured phrase ‘so long as nothing comes of it’ in comically tortuous sentences, he repeats it in short, pointed bursts which have a genuinely baleful effect, a change recognized even at the time of the film’s release. The Pravda review makes the point that, while Chekhov’s story concentrates on ‘the banality of evil’, the film turns evil into a spectacularly embodied threat (Kapler 1939: 6).41 The protagonist, who in the story merely infects the inhabitants of the provincial town with a vague malaise through his constant worries about propriety, affects them more directly in the film by aggressively controlling their lives. While Chekhov’s story is rather abstract, presenting Belikov’s behaviour as ‘of a kind’, the film incarnates the generic abstraction through visually precise illustrations. Yet this concretizing urge generates universalizing abstractions at another level. The film’s opening scene, absent from Chekhov’s original, depicts Belikov entering a church during a school lesson with the local priest. When Belikov enters the church he is filmed at medium range and fills the space of the entrance, so that his figure is the only detail visible. This reflects his central role in the plot, presenting him as a ‘larger than life’ figure. The opposition between the priest’s stern sermon and a viscerally repulsive close-up of a boy picking his nose ridicules the priest’s authority. Meanwhile, the physical proximity of Belikov and the priest displaces the implied criticism of the church onto Belikov himself. Thus, from the beginning of the film, whilst Chekhov’s generic Belikov is rendered in the specific, this very gesture serves to re-universalize Chekhov’s critique of tsarist oppression to cover all aspects of pre-revolutionary society.42

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As in the case of Donskoi’s ‘Just the Job’, a minor character in ‘Man’ is given prominence and used to personify the revolutionary potential of the masses. A general truth generated by centripetal forces at the heart of the filmmaker’s present is again displaced onto a marginal character at the periphery of a classic text. For the brother of Varvara, Belikov’s putative fiancée, who in the story resents Belikov on personal grounds, is now accorded the features of a revolutionary figure, which confers on his hatred of Belikov an ideological dimension. His long hair and unfettered body language, as we recall from Treasure Island, typify Stalinist representations of revolutionary characters and form a visual intertext cited from the repertory of the Soviet cinematic canon. In a further expansion of marginal features in Chekhov’s original, Annenskii’s film elaborates on the alienation felt by Varvara and her brother towards Belikov’s provincial home – a barely-mentioned detail in the text. The scene of their departure is given considerable weight in the film, which dwells on the moment when Varvara and her brother discuss the town’s stifling atmosphere as the reason for their return to the Ukraine. No such departure is mentioned in the original where, after Belikov’s funeral, the narrator informs us that ‘barely a week passed before life had fallen back into its usual rut’ (Chekhov 1977: 53). Annenskii transforms passive submission into incipient opposition, hinting at a progressive future emblematized in the closing shot of the distant horizon opening up before the departing carriage, a future in which Tsarist oppression and its agents are no longer feared and submitted to, but despised and resisted. This resoundingly revolutionary generalization is extrapolated at the expense of a centrifugal dispersion of meaning onto the peripheries of a text already peripheral within the socialist realist hierarchy (Chekhov’s gentle provincial satire hardly presages revolutionary fervour). Yet its assimilation to the socialist realist heritage brings great rewards to a movement seeking legitimation in classical tradition. However, Annenskii’s reliance on photographic contingency and his inability to accommodate the creation of meaning through the use of varied narrative levels fosters a reading of the literary source which conspires against the Stalinist director’s own ideological position. The truly ‘socialist’ approach would have been to adopt the framing viewpoint of Chekhov’s narrator and rationalize people’s fear of Belikov as a function of their unenlightened status. Instead, visceral fear wins out over rational explanation and an ostensibly archetypal, socialist realist recasting of a nineteenthcentury classic acquires an underbelly reminiscent of Western commercial film in which the capacity to entertain the viewer is valued above all else. This may, of course, be precisely what Annenskii intended and an indication of the officially sanctioned ekranizatsiia’s potential as a smokescreen for directorial deviation from Stalinist aesthetic axioms.43

Shooting the canon 113

Conclusion: the canon misfires The ekranizatsiia provides a model of Stalinist culture as a whole, since the problem of how visually to materialize a verbal fiction mirrors and overlaps with that of how to embody a political ideology. As Dobrenko puts it, ‘[Soviet] literature and cinema intersect in the legitimization of authority’ (Dobrenko 2001: 65). Crucial in this context is the adaptation’s ability to mediate between high art and the vernacular culture of the masses, and thus to replicate the process of rendering the abstract values of the official realm in the language and imagery of the populace.44 The adaptation also helped shape the literary canon of foreign, Russian and Soviet classics for a socialist realist framework and consolidate the Soviet national identity project.45 The screening of literary classics facilitated the grounding of socialist realism in an organic tradition based in the nineteenth century. Socialist realist film adaptations of non-socialist-realist classics exploited their position of hindsight to project the ideologies of the present into the literary past and make the original appear retrospectively to depict reality in its revolutionary development. In the Gor’kii trilogy, however, the projection of the mature Gor’kii’s iconic image onto the figure of the young Peshkov countervails another key socialist realist principle: that of the gradual imposition of partymindedness upon the ungovernable spontaneity of the people. Socialist realist adaptations of proto-socialist realist texts are fraught with tensions revealing the problematic nature of Stalinist film’s framing of the literary canon. The contradictions account for the fact that, notwithstanding what Antoine Baudouin and Leonid Geller call the Soviet ‘programme générale de verbalisation de l’image’ and the ‘amplification visuelle du message littéraire’ (Baudouin and Geller 1991: 140, 143), and despite the adaptation’s role in venerating its literary source, Stalinist ekranizatsii inevitably and self-consciously rewrite their originals. E. Levin claims that 1930s adaptations constructed a mythography with the nineteenth-century radical critic Dobroliubov’s re-interpretations of Russian literary classics at its heart (Levin 1994: 91). In support of the notion of the Stalinist word’s supremacy over the image, and in reference to a vitally important distinction between two stages in the Soviet film scenario process, O. Bulgakova notes that it was the initial literary scenarios (avtorskie stsenarii) which received the censors’ most assiduous attention rather than the directors’ scenarios (rezhisserskie sstenarii) in which political loyalty could be relied on more confidently, though there are numerous examples of film scripts falling to the censor at the latter hurdle (Bulgakova 2000: 150). At the macro-level, the film adaptation as genre performs a metacommentary on the formation of the literary canon and its relationship with popular culture. At the level of the individual film, as in Treasure Island, the act of transformation carried out in the adaptation process is celebrated. The temporal aspect of the process is a two-way affair. Complementing the projection of hindsight from the Stalinist present onto the literary past in

114 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere order to ensure ideological correctness is the exploitation of photographically captured contingent detail to authenticate the truth of present dogmas. Part of the ekranizatsiia’s tendency to mark its autonomy from its source is its awareness of the need to work within the generic codes of film. As a result, stock images drawn from filmic genres developed into fully-fledged intertexts cited routinely, and knowingly, in ekranizatsii throughout the Soviet period. The relative autonomy of the ekranizatsiia is confirmed in the emergence of a micro-canon, that is, the prevalence of certain works by recognized authors (Gogol’s Ukrainian tales; Chekhov’s satires) and of the works of relatively unknown writers. Later adaptations even respond to earlier versions of a single work (such as Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and Voynich’s The Gadfly). However, the sense of autonomy often depends on the perceived need for an intermediary form permitting the film to establish distance from its source, but also serving as the translation mechanism by which the adaptation transfers its source from page to screen and from high to popular culture (the oral legends surrounding Chapaev in the 1920s; the emergent Soviet musical; a sanitized, Soviet folk culture). In the Donskoi trilogy, the filters acquire their own ideological loading which they project back onto the literary original; Gor’kii’s autobiographical persona is mythologized as belonging to a romanticized narod (despite the original’s emphasis on Peshkov’s alienation from the people). A further difficulty is to be found in film’s reliance on identification mechanisms that contravene key ideological precepts. The lack of a narrative frame, and the tendency of cinematic viewpoint to shift along with camera angle, mean that screen versions of texts reliant upon the framing role of the narrator rarely control the slippage of that role. Such slippage precipitates the ekranizatsiia’s disintegration into a multiplicity of unreliable viewer positions which undermine the ‘safe’ meanings projected from the narrator’s position in the present, leading the viewer into spontaneous, subjective identifications with politically unreliable character positions. Attempts to compensate, through the use of third-person intertitles originating from an anonymous, collective voice in the present and halting the slippage of meaning, flounder owing to an inability to integrate the superimposed text with the unified flow of image and sound. As Baudouin and Geller argue, ‘Pictoraliser revient certes à … marquer d’une nouvelle légitimité culturelle. Mais c’est aussi injecter une dose de subjectivité dans la représentation, mettre en question la vérité rationelle’ (Baudouin and Geller 1996: 224). Whilst films like Gor’kii’s Childhood replace subjective moments in their source texts with stock images of collective endeavour and joyful uniformity drawn from cinematic models, these images are themselves inflected with the subjective identification mechanisms upon which they rely in order to make their embodiments convincing.46 Spontaneity – the principle socialist realism attempts to overcome – becomes the means by which socialist realist texts are given cinematic authenticity. Viewers are drawn into the intratextual network of perspectives only to become, along with the characters

Shooting the canon 115 bearing them, the implied object of an ultimate viewpoint, that of the allseeing, all-knowing leader whose sudden presence is imposed, unintegrated, on the masses who must, but cannot, become the subjects of all vision and all knowledge. This impossible mission finds symbolic expression in the image of the cross-dresser, object of paternal knowledge, yet catalyst for the unleashing of subjective (male) desire. The difficulty in integrating particular (subjective, private, individual) with universal (objective, official, collective) underlies all the other tensions we have explored. It is the contradiction at the core of Stalinist ideology, and is foregrounded in the problems involved in reconciling the camerarendered contingent ‘realities’ of film with the abstract truths of literary fiction. In Chapter 4 we quoted Terry Eagleton’s identification of political power’s need for ‘tangible images’ with which to ‘infiltrate our hearts’ and stave off its ‘alarming fragility’ (Eagleton 2001: 26). The function of the Stalinist ekranizatsiia illustrates the truth of what Eagleton then says about the dilemma faced by modern culture. For if the only authority that will convince us is one we palpably feel, then the ‘sensuous mediation’ which this demands ‘places a limit on the universality of reason’. To preserve its ‘august authority’, Reason ‘must give the slip to all fleshly representation, and so can be brought to bear on our sensibilities only with difficulty’ (Eagleton 2001: 26). Or, as Slavoj ¯i¿ek puts it: ‘[A]n ideological edifice, if it is to function “normally”, must obey a kind of “imp of perversity” and articulate its inherent antagonism in the externality of its material existence’ (¯i¿ek 1999: 4). Framing the canon with the voice of Soviet reason to accord it appropriate meaning, and embodying the fictions generated under the auspices of that Reason in accessible, bodily form, are two different things. In Dobrenko’s words, ‘One way or another, the outcome of any screen adaptation is unpredictable … And it was just this kind of unpredictability that the heavily structured Stalinist culture could not … accommodate’ (Dobrenko 2001: 77). The Stalinist ekranizatsiia is driven by a dual movement. On one hand, it must root socialist realism in the soil of the literary classics, authenticating the ‘truths’ of the Stalinist self in concrete images of other realities. On the other hand, that very authenticating action transforms the film into a selfdeclared product of its time, giving the ekranizatsiia a corrective function whose logic demanded the assertion of difference between text and image. This explains the metatextuality we identified in the ekranizatsiia as a genre and in individual ekranizatsii. Such metatextuality is not that of the autonomous artwork, but rather what Pierre Bourdieu describes as the function of a ‘field of production’ which accumulated sufficient ‘symbolic capital’ to secure its borders (Bourdieu 1993). Thus the distance between cinematic image and source text asserted in the interests of supporting the ruling ideology and integrating it into a carefully fashioned official culture blurs into the assertion of distance between cinematic image and ideology itself. As we find in Chapter 6, this manifested itself in subversive films of

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the Brezhnev era which develop the allegorical tendency implicit in the class politics of Treasure Island into a tool of covert subversion serving the interests of a counter-cultural movement engendered at the heart of official culture. The failure to integrate particular and universal as a problem of artistic meaning dovetails with the incipient dis-integration of Stalinist society. A canon shot is ultimately a canon misfired.

6

Metatextuality in the post-Stalinist ekranizatsiia The official sphere unravels

Spirit, matter and the expansion of the canon The purpose of this chapter is to trace the burgeoning of the metatextualisation process in the post-Stalin period, when, under the influence of developments in cinema’s institutional status, it contributed to the emergence of a counter-cultural movement precipitating the end of communism. The variant of metatextuality peculiar to the ekranizatsiia owes much, as we know, to the ‘cultural capital’ cinema acquired thanks to its position as Stalinism’s central ideological tool. One of the effects of this position was the spawning of an elite afforded privileges paralleling those accorded to luminaries of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Once the terrors of the 1930s had receded, the protection enjoyed by the Film-makers’ Union afforded opportunities for the informal exchange of artistic ideas in a relatively unconstrained environment (Faraday 2000: 72), and for a greater (albeit still minimal) degree of licence in expressing some of those ideas. The new opportunities were bolstered by the failure of the Soviet cinema industry, due in part to a hypertrophy of political imagination, to develop a positive film-making programme. Its controllers had been reduced merely to the function of negating and censoring. Boris Shumiatskii’s inability to realize his dream of a Soviet producer-led Hollywood is the most graphic illustration of the broader failure.1 In the 1930s, and with the efficacious mechanism of self-censorship in operation, ideological rectitude was, with few exceptions, unbending; officialdom would even chastise directors for their over-zealous commitment to rigid ideological models and for reneging on their duty to entertain. With the threat of world war and the urgent need to appeal to universal emotions like national pride and steadfastness in suffering, things loosened up somewhat. One of the key film adaptations of the pre-war period was Vladimir Petrov’s Peter the Great (1937), based on Aleksei Tolstoi’s mythmaking epic, which, within a framework distant from Marxist concerns, contributed to Stalin’s personality cult; the heroicized image of Peter dominating the film soon entered Soviet iconography (Plate 14). During the aftermath of the war, directors were given freedom to carry out the urgent task of manufacturing a war mythology capable of shoring

118 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere up an ideology which, despite the successful repulsion of the Nazi invaders, had begun to display fatigue. Compelled also to reflect the patriotic upsurge occasioned by the Red Army victory, they began to apply unconventional approaches to sanctify the lives of individuals who had distinguished themselves in battle. Films like Zoia (1944), glorifying a female partisan’s martyrdom, bordered on the hagiographic. Adaptations were crucial to this process and were used to legitimate the award of Stalin prizes to literary works which served the new mythologizing cause, as well as to bring such works into line with party mandates.2 The 1948 film version of Boris Polevoi’s ‘Tale of a Real Man’ (‘Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke’) celebrated the triumph over adversity of the pilot, Aleksei Mares’ev (Meres’ev in film and story), a double amputee. It also brought Polevoi’s original closer to the socialist realist template which still held sway in official culture. A 1946 film performed a similar corrective to Kataev’s ‘Son of the Regiment’ (‘Syn polka’) whose subjective leanings belied its adherence to the myth of the Great Soviet Family. Screen adaptations followed literary publications with unprecedented rapidity, reflecting film’s function in imposing centripetal brakes on the centrifugal tendencies shown even by favoured writers. The 1948 adaptation of Fadeev’s The Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia), for example, was praised for restoring to Fadeev’s tale of a heroic young partisan unit the importance of the Party’s role which the author was attacked for ignoring in 1947 (having in 1945 won the Stalin Prize for the novel, which he then rewrote in line with the film in 1951). On the other hand, directors were liable to exploit the latitude they, too, had been given in interpreting aesthetic orthodoxies. This resulted in an emphasis on subcultural elements in films like The Young Guard (the Young Guard unit was a youth group with its own rituals and entry rites).3 This emphasis had already emerged under the politically harsher conditions of 1940 in the screen adaptation of Gaidar’s Timur and his Gang (Timur i ego komanda) (1940), a children’s story about a militaristic gang of boys. Through adaptations of war literature (and pre-war works like Timur) the film industry used its privileged status to ease the expansion of the Stalinist canon outwards into areas of human experience previously considered alien to Marxist-Leninist principles, and forwards into new texts reflecting the changing needs of post-war society. Under the more relaxed atmosphere of the post-Stalin Thaw, film-makers began to spend the cultural capital they had accumulated by moving backwards to the established canon and transforming it from within. This process has two aspects: the filming of works by recognized authors which had not before been deemed suitable for the screen; and the reinterpretation of texts that already formed part of the Soviet canon. A prime example of the first category is Ivan Pyr’ev’s version of Dostoevskii’s The Idiot (Idiot), made in 1958, two years after Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin’s excesses. Apart from Shklovskii’s House of the Dead (Mertvyi dom) (1932), and a 1934 version of ‘White Nights’ and

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‘Netochka Ivanova’, Dostoevskii had not been screened during the 1930s and 40s. The fact that, with its Christological thematics and dark denouement, it was The Idiot (rather than one of Dostoevskii’s earlier socialist-influenced works) which first bucked this trend is surprising. Also striking is the identity of the director, Ivan Pyr’ev, who, as director of Mosfilm and first secretary of the Union of Cinematographers, was no rebel (though he is a complex and contradictory figure). Josephine Woll links the political liberties taken by Pyr’ev not only with the ‘cultural capital’ phenomenon, but also with a postwar drive to increase Soviet production and exploit the vast underused human capital which is cultural capitalism’s economic corollary (Woll 2000: 8–9). In this light, Pyr’ev was the ideal figure to initiate the expansion of the Soviet canon into the dangerous territory that is Dostoevskii’s oeuvre. The 1958 version of the first part of Dostoevskii’s novel was released under the title Nastasia Filippovna. For reasons that remain obscure (but which may reflect the greater prominence of Christological themes in the second half of The Idiot – though, as we shall see, Pyr’ev was later to adapt the more thoroughly Christian-oriented Brothers Karamazov), Part II was never made. In keeping with traditional Marxist critiques of bourgeois economics, the film’s focus is on the corrupting power of money. Much of the action revolves around Gania Ivolgin’s hesitation over whether to ‘buy’ Nastasia’s hand in marriage. Omitted along with much else are the Prince’s searing epileptic insights and the lengthy passages in which Myshkin describes his reaction to paintings depicting men at the point of death, including the heretical Holbein. Pyr’ev thus accomplishes a cinematic ‘materialization’ of Dostoevskii’s literary iconography.4 Pyr’ev dwells upon the appearance and passing from hand to hand of Nastasia Filippovna’s photoportrait. The function of the photograph in underlining the heroine’s status as object of exchange is enhanced by the ostentatiously gaudy frame in which the portrait is kept, a detail that Pyr’ev superimposes on Dostoevskii’s account. Given the requirement to compress Dostoevskii’s plot and extract its ideological juices, it is odd that Pyr’ev retains the scene dealing with the Prince’s mysterious talent for calligraphy. The photoportrait/calligraphy juxtaposition symbolizes the chiastic relationship at the novel’s heart: that between the descent of the iconic image, via photography, to the modern word’s status as devalued exchange object, and Dostoevskii’s corresponding aspiration to elevate the status of the word, to that of the iconic image whose purity permits vision through to the essence of things. Because Pyr’ev’s Idiot deals in ideologically safe cinematic images as well as in dangerously garrulous words, his film’s visual quality paradoxically approximates at times to the repressed iconic ideal. N. Lary notes the importance Pyr’ev attached to eyes (see Plate 15), and the wealth of sustained facial close-ups in the film (Lary 1986: 113), one whose most successful aspects is the genuinely auratic quality of Myshkin’s demeanour. Whilst Myshkin’s aura is an unintended by-product of the way that Pyr’ev adulterates Dostoevskian metaphysics to absorb The Idiot into the

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Soviet canon, there is another, more self-conscious aspect of the film which succumbs less easily to this explanation. For in dealing with the novel’s eschatological plane, Pyr’ev indulges in his own ‘vision through to the end’. The scene in which Rogozhin intimates to Myshkin the sinister nature of his designs upon Nastasia Filippovna is interrupted by a lightning-swift montage sequence in which a glass of wine is spilt and the camera flashes in close-up on the blood-red liquid in anticipation of the murderous end that the heroine eventually meets. This is supplemented by shots involving the imagery of fire whose apocalyptic associations would not have been lost even on the atrophied cultural memories of the film’s Soviet audience.5 Rather than being excised, Myshkin’s penetrating epileptic visions of the end are appropriated, shorn of their religious connotations, by the all-seeing camera eye. To be sure, like the Ivolgins’ attitude to the photo-portrait, Pyr’ev’s materialist reconception of Dostoevskii treats The Idiot as a manipulable copy detached forever from its origin, an object whose exchange value increases the ‘worth’ of the Soviet canon. But just as Nastasia Filippovna’s photoportrait resists reification through the hypnotic hold her iconic image gains over Myshkin, so Pyr’ev’s reification of Dostoevskii is infiltrated by traces of the author’s original iconic project in a supreme example of the resistance to cinematic re-writing offered by complex texts like The Idiot. By anticipating an ending that can never be realized, the metatextual assimilation of Myshkin’s epileptic insight points to a space beyond the outer limit of permissibility and thus to a time beyond the bounds of the regime maintaining that limit. Expanding the Soviet canon back into its nineteenth-century origins, Pyr’ev’s adaptation of Dostoevskii’s prophetic novel simultaneously announces the beginning of the Thaw, enabling the canon to see proleptically through to its own end. Pyr’ev’s The Idiot did not mark the end of his fascination with Dostoevskii. The desire fully to reinstate Dostoevskii in the literary canon was an abiding theme of the latter part of his career. In 1959 he directed a lightweight version of White Nights (Belye nochi). In 1968, Pyr’ev’s commendably faithful film of The Brothers Karamazov was released (it was finished by Mikhail Ul’ianov and Kirill Lavrov after his death). The adaptation did not avoid the metaphysical dialogues around which the novel is centred. In the post-Stalin context, however, a faithful rendition of a Christian text cannot but engage in its own ideological critique of the preceding tendency to bend fictional texts into Marxist conformity. Once again, a centrifugal function (the concretization of a literary text at the margins of the canon) performs a subversive commentary on a centripetal tendency (the requirement that literature be ideologized according to Marxist orthodoxies).

Socialist realism and metatextuality: Pavel Korchagin The Thaw afforded filmmakers the chance, then, to extend the Soviet literary heritage. The early 1960s saw adaptations of the 1920s satires of Il’f and

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Petrov, of Tolstoy’s Christian-inspired Resurrection, War and Peace (Bondarchuk’s 1965 epic), the controversial Platonov’s ‘Fro’ (1964), and several mildly subversive stories by Evgenii Shvarts. It also enabled them to revisit texts at the summit of the socialist realist hierarchy, like Ostrovskii’s How the Steel was Tempered (Kak zakalialas’ stal’). This pivotal socialist realist novel had been adapted once by Donskoi, in 1942.6 Made during the Second World War, the film concentrated on sections of Ostrovskii’s novel dealing with the Red Army’s fight against foreign intervention in Ukraine. Donskoi himself turned his hand in 1955 to a new version of Gor’kii’s Mother in response to a call for a return to the Leninist heritage in anticipation of Khrushchev’s assault on the Personality Cult. The title of a 1958 re-adaptation of Fadeev’s The Rout (Razgrom) is indicative of this trend. Mikhail Kalik and Boris Rytsarev called their film The Youth of our Fathers (Iunost’ nashikh ottsov), a title which itself metatextually comments on the nostalgic purpose of the remake. In reflecting early Thaw values, the film enacts a temporal version of the conflict between centripetalism (Fadeev’s position at Soviet culture’s temporo-ideological centre) and centrifugalism (Thaw-era cinema signals the flight of the Soviet system towards collapse). In this atmosphere, both as a text written before the Stalin repressions, and as a celebration of Civil War idealism, Ostrovskii’s classic was doubly ripe for its reinterpetation in 1956 by Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov. Alov was himself a war veteran when he enrolled at the State Institute of Cinematography (Woll 2000: 36), commanding sufficient authority to begin his experimental re-examination of the Leninist past with minimal fear of retribution. Together with his partner, Naumov, he had already underscored his Leninist credentials with the ideologically ‘safe’ 1954 film Restless Youth (Trevozhnaia molodost’). Ostrovskii’s novel is a Bildungsroman set in the Civil War period and telling the story of Pavel Korchagin’s ideological journey via the Komsomol, the Cheka, the Red Army, and sexual abstinence, into a workers’ brigade, where he suffers a debilitating illness resulting in blindness and paralysis, yet continues his work for the revolutionary cause. Left on his sickbed with only his mother to care for him, Korchagin, the author’s alter ego, decides to record his experiences but the manuscript is tragically lost in the post. His last heroic act is to recommence the manuscript. The film ostensibly fits the corrective mould of the Stalinist ekranizatsiia. Sections of the novel dealing with the Bolsheviks’ struggle against antisemitism and Trotskyist oppositionism are replaced with highly visceral representations of railway construction work, reinforcing the work ethic at the heart of Soviet mythology. And whilst the Bildungsroman requires meandering progress towards Bolshevism’s ascetic ideal, Alov’s and Naumov’s striking cinematic montage generates a sudden contrast between the face of Rita (Korchagin’s admirer), burning with incomprehending passion, and Pavel’s iron determination to sacrifice himself to Bolshevism, enhancing his victory over sexual desire. (Korchagin’s later marriage is omitted altogether).

122 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere Unlike Ostrovskii, Alov and Naumov open not with Korchagin’s childhood, but with a close up of his blind eyes, as he lies listening to a radio broadcast about his life. The sombre narrator speaks of an already sanctified hero, ending with two sentences, the second of which Korchagin himself repeats: ‘Passionately desiring to remain useful to his party and class, he wrote a book about his great battles. The sole copy of the manuscript was lost in the post.’ Henceforth it is evident that the film is a rendition less of Ostrovskii’s original text than of the cultural myth of Korchagin. As the directors commented, this is a film in which they ‘contemplated the [needs of] the present day’, rather than exalting in the hallowed status of Ostrovskii’s original (Alov and Naumov 1989: 45–6). The image of Korchagin’s vacant eyes is succeeded by a shot of his fingers fumbling at a typewriter, followed by his life-story in flashback. Korchagin sees in his mind’s eye (and we through his subjective vision) what he cannot see in reality. The film restores Korchagin’s sight, replacing the process of turning private life into public myth with the subjectivization of an already sanctified myth in which the descent into blindness becomes a bright cinematic vision. The reconception of the private–public dynamic was a key issue in postStalin cinema.7 In Alov’s and Naumov’s adaptation, the realignment of values takes place against the background of a source that, in the form in which it entered Stalinist mythology, epitomized the collectivist principle of sacrifice for the cause. In a poignant critique of Ostrovskii’s rhetoric of collectivism, the camera dwells on Rita as she hears a speech given by a party comrade prematurely reporting news of Korchagin’s death in the context of the achievements of the larger collective. The scene is shot from Rita’s viewpoint, as the sound of the speech fades, accompanied by a close-up of her face etched with grief. The private sorrow of a devastated lover is contrasted with the distanced rhetoric of collective achievement. Rita is later depicted conversing with Pavel at a Komsomol convention as they listen to a nameless speech-maker who is shot from behind, legs apart, head obscured. The camera surveys the homogenized masses through the speaker’s open legs as his metallic tones are heard, incorporating the private–public problematic into the structure of the viewing experience. The entire story is experienced as a voyeuristic insight into the private sufferings of an individual whose public fame is of mythic proportions. This is evident, too, in a scene at the end in which the viewer eavesdrops on Korchagin’s muttered oath never to reveal his suicidal thoughts and to re-acknowledge the importance of living for the Cause. The viewer is made party to the private deliberations by which the hero arrives at coincidence with his public myth.8 Whilst the accumulated masses at the Komsomol meeting are represented in negative, impersonal mode, however, other scenes materialize the inspirational idealism that motivated Korchagin. The memorable railway sequences convey the 1950s nostalgia for what one critic has called the ‘narcotic joy’ of revolutionary pathos (Troianovskii 2001). During one scene addressed to present-day viewers, Pavel reassures a comrade that their backbreaking

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exploits will be remembered by future generations. Antagonism to those unwilling to share that ethic is also embraced within the film’s poetics. A worker who refuses to work on the railway is shown fleeing ignominiously down a receding corridor of Komsomol members. Yet the same urge painstakingly to recreate the visual texture of the grim Civil War era in the interests of underscoring authentic Leninism’s achievements also offended the sensibilities of those still steeped in the Stalinist culture of ‘varnishing reality’.9 The coexistence of subversion and adulation, often within one shot, positions the film at the margins of Ostrovskii’s original, causing it to oscillate between positions inside it, and its associated myth, then outside it, and eliciting praise from isolated commentators for its eschewal of schematicism in favour of ‘an art as complex as life itself’ (N. Okhlopkov, quoted in Alov and Naumov 1989: 38). This duality appears to be resolved when, with the flashback complete, we return to the blind Korchagin re-stating his devotion to the Party to the sound of the revolutionary march sung earlier on the railway. The handwritten title ‘How the Steel was Tempered’ (‘Kak zakalialas’ stal’’) appears in centre frame as, in keeping with Stalinist orthodoxy, physical and intellectual labour merge. The film closes the circle of Ostrovskii’s autobiographical fiction, and the author’s own life, reconciling the Korchagin public myth with the voyeuristic cinematic account of the private life on which it is based. For it is the present-day viewer who gazes in admiring recognition at the title of the book whose hero has been the film’s subject. But in an audacious gesture, the screen suddenly fills with Korchagin’s vibrant beaming face, as his jubilant voice declares to camera: ‘If you thought Korchagin laid down his weapons and died, it is all a pack of lies (brekhnia)’. This comic-book, pop-cultural figure reveals the false nature of the Korchagin myth that Ostrovskii’s literary work fostered. It simultaneously undercuts the broader myth of the virtues of unbending selfsacrifice to the collective, and of the naive idealism of the era in which the myth arose. The inside–outside dualism is structured into the film’s ending, demonstrating how the ekranizatsiia’s inbuilt metatextuality exploits the image–text relationship to comment on the ideological framework of which it is part.

Adaptation, socialist realism and memory: Panova’s Mercy Train Alov and Naumov continued to explore the limits of Thaw-era cinematography by contributing to the rehabilitation of Dostoevskii with a highly expressionistic, self-conscious adaptation of ‘A Nasty Story’ (‘Skvernyi anekdot’) (1966), whose grotesque portrayal of an almost bestial narod caused it to be shelved until 1987. But Alov and Naumov were not alone. Alongside the appearance of adaptations broadening the established canon, there were in the 1960s films reflecting the wave of politically exploratory

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literary prose, including Aksenov’s Colleagues (Kollegi) (1962) and My Younger Brother (Moi mladshii brat) (1962), and Shukshin’s A Boy Like That (Zhivet takoi paren’) (1964). Nor, as we shall see, was Pavel Korchagin the only socialist realist film exhibiting a self-consciousness at odds with socialist realist aesthetics. Socialist realism did not end in 1956. One writer who worked at the margins of the official dogma was Vera Panova. Several of her relationshipfocused, but otherwise conventional, novellas were screened in the 1960s (some using Panova’s screenplays), including Seriozha (1960), Evdokiia and The Seasons (Vremena goda) (1961; the latter filmed in 1962 under the title Leap Year (Visokosnyi god)), Fellow-Travellers (Sputniki) (1964), and Workers’ Village (Rabochii poselok) (1965). Among the most interesting was Mercy Train (Poezd miloserdiia) based on Fellow Travellers, released as part of the build-up to the celebration in 1965 of the twentieth anniversary of the Victory over Fascism, and a contribution to the construction of a nostalgized myth of the Soviet war effort whose importance during the Thaw period matched that of either the resurrection of Leninist ideals, or the reinterpretation of the Soviet literary canon. Like Pavel Korchagin, this film, which tells of the personal tribulations of a medical team on board a train used to treat injured soldiers, is ambivalent towards its source text. On one hand, the unorthodox aspects of Panova’s original, which, although written under Stalin, stresses interpersonal relations over class consciousness, are excised. As befits a socialist realist film, most attention is given to the medical commissar, Danilov. The viewpoint in Panova’s original, by contrast, shifts between characters. The film, directed by Iskander Khamraev from Panova’s scenario, also omits Panova’s characters’ less endearing traits (particularly those of the puffed-up Suprugov who attracts the attentions of a naive young nurse, Iuliia). These corrective gestures align Mercy Train more with Annenskii’s The Man in a Case than with Alov’s and Naumov’s A Nasty Story. Yet, the use of narrative voiceover enables Khamraev to introduce a subjective note, switching the focus away from the characters to the author’s persona. Mercy Train begins with Panova’s musings about her difficulties in remembering what happened so long ago, making her personal memory of the war the source of the film’s consciousness. It is the now-celebrated Panova who provides the secondary mythic text through which her own originary text is filtered. At the end, when Irina finally realizes that Suprugov has no interest in her, Panova interjects: ‘Don’t worry, girl! Better to be alone than with Suprugov’. Earlier, the shift in orientation surfaces in a sequence in which Panova’s commentary intervenes to point out that she has mis-remembered one detail and the film obligingly ‘corrects itself’ by replaying the scene as it should be. This metatextual gesture draws attention neither to the war, nor to the source text, but to the author’s subjective memory of war. Cinema’s proximity to the levers of power explains why Thaw-era films appear on occasion to be more ideologically conventional than literary

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works from the Stalin period. But the urge of the cultural elite which emerged under Stalin to celebrate their own achievements, coupled with the ekranizatsiia’s internal logic, conspire to transform Panova’s novel into a work ridden with highly irregular, subjective tendencies. The word–image encounter here reveals that notions of the succession of Stalinist rigidity by Thaw-era permissiveness require revision at both ends.

Temporality and national self-concsiousness in Konchalovskii’s Nest of Gentlefolk The contradictory trends in Thaw cinema continued to be foregrounded within post-Thaw film adaptations which served as the flashpoint of conflict between the relative literary freedom that had accumulated under Khrushchev and cinema’s tendency to respond more subserviently (albeit far from universally so, and not immediately) to changes in government policy. Thus calls by the new leadership to tone down criticisms of Stalinism were reflected in the release of films based on the works of Polevoi and Fedin, as well as in redoubled efforts to construct a war mythology. A film of Simonov’s You’re not Born a Soldier (Soldatami ne rozhdaiutsia) was released to great acclaim in 1967, which also saw the banning of, amongst other films, Askol’dov’s Komissar, a visually stunning version of a Grossman story in which the Red Army’s brutalization of human emotions during the Civil War is contrasted with family relationships in a Jewish village, and of Gennadii Poloka’s stylized adaptation of Lev Slavin’s play, The Intervention (Interventsiia), set in Odessa under allied occupation during the Civil War. Meanwhile, the growing cultural might of the Soviet film industry and the independent talents it was attracting at its peripheries facilitated the cinematic rehabilitation of suspect writers to continue almost unnoticed. Olesha’s Three Fat Men (Tri Tolstiaka) and Bulgakov’s The Race (Beg) were filmed in 1966 and 1970 respectively. Adaptations of Il’f and Petrov’s NEPera satires The Golden Calf (Zolotoi telenok) (1968) and Twelve Stools (Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev) (1971) became popular favourites. The screening of groundbreaking fiction was not immediately stymied by political change (though some adaptations were banned). Such, for example, was the success during the 1960s and 70s of film versions of Shukshin’s stories exploring the lives of suppressed creativity in rural Russia that the writer became a mass phenomenon. Shukshin, who directed and acted in his films, encapsulates the challenge posed by cinema during the 1960s to the hierarchy placing literature at its summit. Official voices began emphasizing Soviet culture’s non-elitist character and extolling cinema’s mass appeal, especially in the field of comedy.10 Liberties were taken with the canon for popular effect. In 1967, Prisoner of the Caucasus, Or, The Further Adventures of Shurik (Kavkazkaia plennitsa, ili novye prikliucheniia Shurika), a hilarious mockery of the ‘Prisoner of the Caucasus’ motif in Russian literature, was a huge hit. Meanwhile, directors

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like Iosif Kheifits issued a steady stream of subtle adaptations of nineteenth- century classics. (Kheifits’s 1960 version of ‘The Lady with the Dog’ is exemplary.) Moreover, the cinematic purism which several directors began seeking in parallel with these trends continued, paradoxically, to require the literary stamp of authentication. Sergei Bondarchuk’s lavish production of War and Peace (1966) was notable for its use of striking, slow-motion battle scenes. Grigorii Kozintsev revitalized the Soviet cinematic avant garde by adapting Shakespeare’s plays; his Hamlet (1964) remains amongst the most visually arresting screen versions of Shakespeare. Even Tarkovskii’s Mirror (Zerkalo), released in 1975, and the epitome of auteurism, centred on a complex dialogue between the director and the poetry of his father. Just as Tarkovskii’s formalism hid an ideologically loaded effort to reconcile Soviet cinema with Western high art, so Kozintsev’s formally inventive Shakespeare adaptations masked an urge to leapfrog the Stalin years to rediscover a pre-revolutionary domestic heritage. Despite the waning of experimentation resulting from the clampdown, the early Thaw had set in motion an unrestrainable search for alternatives to an official ideology in terminal decline. The return to Leninist ideals was superseded by an insidious resurrection of mystical nationalism. With its ability to bridge the past in which the new ideals were sought, and the present upon which they are called to act, the ekranizatsiia was ideally placed to host such a movement. This function was enhanced by the genre’s propensity to combat the rhetoric of collective endeavour espoused in non-literary films by ‘contribut[ing] a human scale of behaviour’ (Woll 2000: 62), and by accommodating the lyricism which surfaced even in conformist Stalinist films.11 The ekranizatsiia’s broader contribution to the fostering of alternative ideologies was further aided by the infiltration into the industry of a breed of director lacking conventional Stalinist class identities. The MikhalkovKonchalovskii brothers belonged to a family with impeccable credentials (their father was Head of the Writers’ Union and author of the words to the Soviet National Anthem), yet an aristocratic lineage which would earlier have marked them as ‘enemies of the people’. Through the post-Stalin period, the directors boldly exploited their official credentials to assert their pride in this heritage. Nikita Mikhalkov (Andrei added the name Konchalovskii to distinguish himself from his brother) pursued this trait to its conclusion in the post-communist period.12 Before emigrating to the USA, Andrei MikhalkovKonchalovskii directed a landmark film in this process: his 1968 version of Turgenev’s Nest of Gentlefolk (Dvorianskoe gnezdo). Nest of Gentlefolk sparked on the pages of the cinema journal Iskusstvo kino a debate whose intensity underlines the importance of the film’s contribution to the emergence of the counter-culture. On the face of it, the film was merely one example of the tendency to authenticate communist ideology within the norms of a Soviet kulturnost’ grounded in the highest achievements of Russian and world culture (another reason for the importance of the ekranizatsiia to the higher echelons of the film industry).13 The

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film begins predictably with the title shot in old script to highlight the literary source it venerates. But, like many post-Stalin adaptations, Nest also displays the formula ‘Based on motifs from Turgenev’s novel’, indicating that it promotes a meaning relevant to its own context, rather than opting for slavish obedience to its original. The action opens with a shot of the country manor belonging to the hero, Lavretskii, followed by an animated sequence presenting stylized drawings of the European capitals around which Lavretskii has travelled prior to his return to Russia, contrasting (authentic) Russia with the (artificially stylized) West. The film was made at a time when, with increased opportunities for travel among the privileged, and the slow infiltration of mass-produced images of Western wealth, the lack of such opportunities among ordinary Russians had highlighted contradictions in Soviet attitudes to capitalism.14 This was also the time when intellectuals began questioning Marxist platitudes regarding Russia’s relationship with the West. Viewers were struck by the lush beauty with which MikhalkovKonchalovskii shot the country estate scenes.15 The hero’s return is filmed from the audience’s viewpoint. A sequence in which Lavretskii’s voiceover question (‘Can I really have returned? Am I really home?’) is heard against the backdrop of a beautiful tree-lined alley becomes a recurring motif. The combination of the photographic presence of the trees and the viewer’s adoption of Lavretskii’s viewpoint conflates the hero’s return to Russia with the Soviet audience’s return to the pre-revolutionary past. Later, nostalgic desire merges with sexual desire, as the alley becomes associated with Lavretskii’s burgeoning feelings for the heroine, Lizaveta. The metatextual play continues when Lavretskii, and the camera, linger over the old eighteenth-century objects that he finds on returning to his mansion. The nostalgic eye that Lavretskii casts over the objects of a distant era metatextualizes the nostalgic eye that the viewer casts over the rendition of Turgenev’s Russia, similarly distant, yet now recovered. The persistent, wistful balalaika music further supports the linking of the Turgenevan period with traditional images of Old Russia.16 Throughout, the camera switches between the mansion’s dark, dusty interiors and the sunlit exterior, binding the antiquarian past of Turgenev’s Russia with contemporary Russia’s photogenic beauty. Konchalovskii’s selective reading of Turgenev highlights the plight of characters uprooted from their native soil; apart from Lavretskii, the old German piano teacher, Lembke, who has never recovered from the separation from his motherland, has a prominent role. The film also intensifies Turgenev’s treatment of memory when Lavretskii recalls his childhood and, later, his time in Paris with his wife, in lyrical sequences accompanied by selfconscious devices designed to reinforce the tension between temporal disjunction and the desire to overcome it: slow-motion shots prolonging the viewer’s sensuous gaze; freeze-frames and speeded-up sequences recalling old films to underline the status of these scenes as photographically recorded

128 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere objects of desire. These devices structure the viewer’s nostalgia into the film’s poetics. By simultaneously presenting Turgenev’s Russia as an object of nostalgic desire, and as photographically present, Konchalovskii provocatively implies that the recreation of the past is achievable within the Soviet present. This temporal binding of past and present is emblematized in the seemingly redundant motif of a pigeon (external nature in all its present contingency) flitting around the interior of the Lavretskii mansion (the lost culture of the past). The temporal (past-present) axis is linked with the spatial (East–West) axis. Lavretskii’s return to Russia is a return from the exotic capitals which, for Soviet viewers, constitute the forbidden object of desire. Thus, Lavretskii’s decision to leave his wife in Paris and return home precipitates a reversal in the Soviet viewer’s mind: the sought-after exotic object that is the West is replaced by a sought-after Old Russia. When, true to Turgenev, Lavretskii’s wife returns from Paris to seek him out, having earlier been pronounced dead, the past literally re-enters the present. But, whereas for the viewer it is pre-revolutionary Russia which displaces the anti-Western, Soviet present, for Lavretskii, a suppressed Western past intrudes upon the nineteenth-century Russian present. Past links with present, and the West with both rural Old Russia and an urbanized Soviet Union, in a complex chronotope in which the temporal terms attach themselves to each of the spatial terms in turn to create opposing sets of values. Finally, Lavretskii’s wife returns to Paris to the sound of balalaika music. Her abandonment of an authentic Russia in favour of the false charms of an idealized Paris is underscored through the juxtaposition of the monochrome images of oppressive Parisian interiors with rural Russia’s vivid natural colours. The end of the film marks a departure from Turgenev who devotes more attention to the Lizaveta–Lavretskii relationship than to the national theme. In one scene, Lavretskii rebuffs the suggestion that Russia should Europeanize itself with the recollection that he once knew a Europeanized Russian who could not speak Russian. As he in return is reprimanded for mystification, Lavretskii drifts, with the viewer, out of the conversation, as Russian folk-singing fills the soundtrack.17 Konchalovskii exiles Lizaveta to the background; her decision to enter a monastery on learning that Lavretskii’s wife is still alive is glossed over in favour of a sequence depicting Lavretskii’s musings over his original decision to return home. The reverential, literary voiceover in fact enables the subjective voice of Turgenev’s main character to usurp the authority of the writer’s third-person narration. Accompanied by luscious images of the Russian landscape, Lavretskii speculates as to whether his homeland is imagined or real, and whether he would ever adjust to it, concluding merely that at the time he made the fateful decision, he could not have known. Mediated through the voiceover’s intimate tones, his speculations merge with those of the Soviet viewer, who is also impelled to ask whether the pre-revolutionary Russia before him is imaginary (a function of the fictional word) or real (an effect of the documentary

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image), and whether aristocrats like Lavretskii could have known what was to become of Russia in the post-revolutionary present. In self-consciously exploiting its status as a cinematic transformation of a literary classic, Nest exposes the contradictory structure of late Soviet national identity. Konchalovskii treats the Russian country estate as a foreign land whose vague, long-suppressed familiarity must be reanimated. This feat is accomplished in a process which begins when the desired foreign other of the Soviet present is projected back onto a pre-revolutionary landowner who has lived in the West. He then detaches himself from that existence to locate a more authentic self in an Old Russia which, for Soviet viewers, displaces Paris as the site of the desired other. When the West reintrudes to tempt Lavretskii anew, he re-enacts the original act of purification, achieving an inversion by which the alien world of aristocrats and landowners – the world now cast out into the capitalist wilderness – is re-appropriated as familiar and intimate. But the return of Lavretskii’s wife leaves him permanently sceptical as to whether the Russian self with which he has locked himself in embrace is anything more than a utopian illusion.

Fictional truths, truthful fictions: allegory in Zakharov’s That Same Munchausen Through the 1970s and 80s, the function of the ekranizatsiia as locus of an incipient longing for an idealized pre-revolutionary Russia generated a stream of lush adaptations of Turgenev, Leskov, Tolstoy, Kuprin, Chekhov, to whom Iosif Kheifits returned repeatedly, and Goncharov, lavishly travestied in Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oblomov (1979), where the eponymous hero’s inability to accommodate Western utilitarianism and naive innocence is associated with a poeticized Russian spirituality. The tendency to read Soviet films as allegories of other times and places suited the context of a cinema newly constrained by a regime bent on closing the door on liberalization. As a result, directors layered subtle allegorical meanings onto otherwise ‘innocent’ movies. Since they deal in spatio-temporal alterity, and since, rather than merely mimic an unmediated reality, they proffer hitherto unarticulated mediations of texts, screen adaptations lend themselves to allegorization. However, stagnation-period adaptations did not consist solely of subversive allegories. Like all films, ekranizatsii reflect the socio-political climate of their era. The Brezhnev period was characterized both by attempts to consolidate Soviet claims to a place in the pantheon of world culture, and by efforts to achieve détente with the West. These twin aims were well served by adaptations of canonical Western texts. Defoe was adapted in 1972, Dumas and Priestley in 1978, Jerome K. Jerome in 1979, Maugham in 1980, Twain in 1981 and Conan Doyle repeatedly, to name a few. The majority appeared as television serials, as the newer medium began to feature more prominently in the adaptation process. As a result, the ekranizatsiia mutated into a more self-consciously domestic genre oriented towards the

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living room rather than the cinema hall.18 As well as peddling a comfortingly eccentric stereotype of the English gentleman who inserts ‘Sir’ into every sentence, the 1979 TV adaptation of Three Men in a Boat, for example, featured a narrator who began each programme by exhorting parents to send their children to bed (it aired at nine p.m.). State-controlled television was as a prime resource in combating the accumulated effect of the slow penetration into Soviet culture of Western music and mass entertainment. In the 1970s the role of genres like the film comedy, the musical and the light romance was reassessed. This occurred at a time when, despite the absence of political freedom, the cinema industry had become swollen with independent-minded intellectuals with sufficient talent (and resources) to make their unorthodox voices heard at the core of official culture. The Trojan Horse effect was exemplified by Mark Zakharov, who came to prominence through theatre, the least closely regulated Soviet art form, and who, since 1973, has been director at the Lenkom theatre. Zakharov’s satirical acumen and accessible production values eased his path into cinema. In 1977 he directed a television version of Il’f and Petrov’s Twelve Stools. In 1980 Central Television broadcast the work that made his cinematic reputation, That Same Munchausen (Tot samyi Miunkhauzen), an ekranizatsiia combining romantic comedy, satirical allegory and television’s intimate domesticity. That Same Munchausen is adapted from Grigorii Gorin’s play, itself based on Rudolf Erich Raspe’s eighteenth-century comic novel about Baron von Munchausen’s incredible adventures.19 Like Nest of Gentlefolk, it is an historical novel with a foreign setting, and like Pavel Korchagin, it mediates its original through an accumulation of myths surrounding the central character.20 Like both previous films (and all ekranizatsii), it exploits the interplay between fiction (past) and truth (present). By supplying the stylized eighteenth-century setting with a contemporary musical soundtrack, Zakharov establishes the basis for a fictional allegory on the Soviet present. In That Same, the fictionality–truth relationship is expressed as a battle of literary word against visual image. The film, we are informed initially, tells of ‘the hero of many jolly books and tales’, confirming Munchausen’s status as a composite myth. The action commences in the middle of a story narrated to sceptical listeners by a hero bathed in mist, establishing the film simultaneously as a further retreat into the mist of Munchausen legends, and a revelation of the truth behind the mist, a manifestation of ‘that same Munchausen’. In one Munchausen story, a deer he shoots with a cherry stone appears with a cherry tree growing from its antlers. His listeners’ mockery is silenced by the deer’s emergence in full cinematic glory. The question posed to us (Munchausen’s listeners are a figure for Zakharov’s viewers, just as the inventive Munchausen is a figure for Zakharov) is: ‘Is this the truth, or a lie?’ Onto that dilemma is superimposed another: we know what we see is a cinematic fiction, yet also that the meaning allegorizes latter-day Soviet reality. The interplay between these two dilemmas is the key to Zakharov’s film.

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One level on which the interplay works is that of the German setting. The film was made at a time when Soviet citizens became increasingly envious of their Western counterparts. Munchausen’s assertion that he ‘speaks only the truth’ and its visual counterpart (the camera never lies) provides an ambiguous commentary on Soviet perceptions of Western marvels: it is, contrary to official denials, true because we see it, yet, in keeping with those denials, it is false since it belongs to a cinematic fantasy. Uncomfortably, such an interpretation supports Soviet claims that tales of untold Western wealth are as tall as Munchausen’s tales of people picking themselves up by the hair, one of several blatant cinematic lies involving the literalization of figures of speech. But these tricks belong to the context of a plot portraying a maverick ostracized as a madman. Munchausen’s refusal to bow to pleas for him to ‘become like everyone else’ resonates with Soviet attempts to suppress cultural eccentrics.21 The authorities eventually certify the Baron insane. Zakharov’s camera supports the Baron’s claims, but is ultimately a weapon of the creative ‘lie’. If visual truths cancel verbal lies, then the ‘truth’ of creative fantasy confronts the mendacious banality of believing only what is visible. The Baron’s prime accuser is his wife, who supports the Catholic establishment in forbidding the divorce which would allow him to marry his lover, Marta.22 Part 1 ends with Munchausen renouncing his (truthful?) exploits in exchange for the right to re-marry and ‘destroy the falsehood’ which he hates. Defeated by the banal truths of reason, the Baron decides to take his own life. In Part 2, Munchausen’s hypocritical family strives to restore his reputation following his faked death. The widow insists that they should feel no shame, since they have ‘released the Baron’s collected works’. (The sanitization of artists via their absorption into the canon was a standard Soviet ploy.) Even as the authorities argue over the nature of a monument to his adventures, his cult is undermined through his reappearance in the flesh. To the incredulity of his onlookers, who now object that as ‘a legend and a myth’ he no longer ‘belongs to himself’, the hero explains that he ‘resurrected himself’ in order to correct the exaggerations perpetuated by his collected works. If the Baron’s earlier task was to prove the creative truth of the imagination against the establishment’s mundane rationalism, then now he must expose its mendacious fantasies. The splitting of the hero into mythic cult and concrete image is doubled in the differentiation of an original Munchausen from a secondary re-incarnation of ‘that very same’ figure. The doubling recurs at the level of plot. Part 2 also ends with a trial and an ambiguous death. Once the astonishment over the Baron’s reappearance subsides, the hero is tried as an imposter as a court disproves what we know to be true (the Baron – played by the instantly recognizable Oleg Iankovskii – is just as real as the one we saw in Part 1), yet on another level must concur cannot be so (resurrection is impossible). Zakharov subverts the Soviet propensity to claim truth-value for the blatantly false, whilst undercutting that subversion.

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Renounced by his son (a betrayal with Stalinist echoes), the Baron agrees to be shot from a cannon to the moon to prove his identity. The irony that the authorities are now using his exploits as the standard of veracity recalls Stalin’s ideological contortions. Finally, all concede that Munchausen has already been to the moon, but he insists that he must fly since the claim that he had done so before was a lie. The Baron begs everyone not to take his exploits too seriously,23 winking, like Korchagin at the end of Alov’s and Naumov’s film, knowingly into camera, underscoring the allegorical equivalence linking the eighteenth-century setting and the Soviet present, but also confounding the truth-value of what we have witnessed. Munchausen’s fate is suspended in open-ended uncertainty. Reabsorbed into the fabric of apocryphal tales from which it emerged, the film closes the circle of myth and reality. In the final shot, however, the ladder Munchausen is climbing to enter the cannon mutates into a stylized contraption leading infinitely moonwards. The use of twin visual codes (stylized and real) replicates the unstable duality of concrete image and creative word around which the adaptation is structured. That Same Munchausen explores the relationship between image and word, truth and fiction, rationality and creativity. The disjunction between literary and cinematic chronotopes ensures that the exploration is transposed to the film’s context, facilitating an interrogation of literary canonizations of mythic figures. Zakharov acknowledges that a myth’s origin is unattainable and that all retellings are apocryphal – but no less ‘true’ for that. The ekranizatsiia’s relationship to its literary source acquires a Derridean dimension: that of the visual supplement which usurps the position of an originary verbal essence.24 This usurping function links with the context of the unravelling of Stalinism, of which Pavel Korchagin marks the tentative beginning, and That Same Munchausen the dénouement.

Conclusion: in the beginning was the word … Zakharov subsequently filmed other literary allegories about mavericks, including Evgenii Shvarts’s play An Ordinary Miracle (Obyknovennoe chudo) (1978) and a fantasy combining the life of Jonathan Swift with elements of Gulliver’s Travels: The House that Swift Built (Dom, kotoryi postroil Svift) (1982). When perestroika arrived, the ekranizatsiia changed accordingly. Adaptations of recent fiction lamenting the direction of Soviet society flourished. Versions of the works of Shukshin, Belov and Rasputin, leaders of the Village Prose movement which had, since the 1960s, expressed the frustrations of rural dwellers, abounded. Most striking was the 1982 film of Rasputin’s Farewell to Matiora (Proshchanie s Materoi), a critique of the deleterious effects of Soviet industrial policy on traditional rural life. The works of recent modernist writers were also screened; Days of Man (Dni cheloveka), a version of Bitov’s tale, appeared in 1989, Tolstaia’s ‘Sonia’ was adapted in 1991 as The House on Sand (Dom na peske). Cinema also played

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an important role in rehabilitating previously suppressed writers. Versions of Bulgakov’s ‘The Red Crown’ (‘Krasnaia korona’) and ‘Notes of a Young Doctor’ (‘Zapiski iunogo vracha’) were released in 1990 and 1991 respectively (the former under the title The History of an Illness (Istoriia bolezni)); The Art of Living in Odessa (Iskusstvo zhit’ v Odesse), based on Babel’s tales, came out in 1989. A pre-revolutionary story by Leonid Andreev, ‘Ivan Ivanovich’, was screened as In a Certain Familiar Street (V odnoi znakomoi ulitse) in 1988, a year which also saw a version of Zoshchenko’s ‘You mustn’t speculate (‘Ne nado spekulirovat’) entitled Down With Commerce on the Love Front! (Doloi kommertsiu na liubovnom fronte!). Valerii Briusov’s decadent tale ‘The Last Pages of a Woman’s diary’ (‘Poslednie stranitsy dnevnika zhenshchiny’’) was adapted in 1990 with the title I’ll Love Whoever I Like (Zakhochu, poliubliu). The literary film also provided a tool with which to explore controversial social issues. A 1987 adaptation of ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, Tolstoy’s exploration of human sexuality, was much discussed. Though not a literary adaptation, Iurii Mamin’s 1990 film Sideburns (Bakenbardy) used the iconic figure of Pushkin to examine the phenomenon of nationalist extremism which emerged towards the end of the Gorbachev period. Re-adaptations of nineteenth-century classics polemicized with their standard Soviet interpretations. A 1989 version of ‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’, previously treated as an indictment of the mores of the merchant class, recast Leskov’s heroine, Katerina Izmailova, as a langorously sensual woman, sexually frustrated in a barren marriage.25 Ivan Pyr’ev’s Idiot contained in seed form the future role of the ekranizatsiia in undercutting the Soviet official sphere from within. Pyr’ev accomplished this function thanks to his relatively protected position at the apex of the pyramid formed by the powerful cinematic elite. In one sense, this group’s ultimate point of development is represented by Zakharov’s subversive allegories, pitched simultaneously at a mass audience eager for light relief from the dull monotony of Soviet life, and at a critical intelligentsia trained to read hidden meanings into orthodox texts. In another sense, it is best embodied in the auteurist cinema of Andrei Tarkovskii, who abandoned all pretence at film’s subservience either to literature, or to the state, in an effort to reprise the avant-garde voyage of aesthetic discovery, and articulate a pure cinematic vision. Tarkovskii was no more able to eschew ideology than Pyr’ev. That his last films were made with Western money guaranteed that their formal innovation was matched by a political ambiance which, with hindsight, ensured that they marked the end of Soviet official culture from the external space out of which the mainstream of postSoviet mass culture was to spring. Ironically, Tarkovskii’s final film, The Sacrifice (Zhertvoprinoshenie), released in 1986, is itself an adaptation manqué of Dostoevskii’s The Idiot, a work which had preoccupied the director for years. The film includes several references to the novel (the hero, Aleksandr, is referred to as ‘Prince

134 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere Myshkin’, and mocked for his earlier membership of the ‘Idiotists’, a group of actors rehearsing for a stage performance of The Idiot). The Sacrifice echoes Dostoevskii’s philosophical concerns. It, too, is haunted by visions of the end of things – in this case, imminent nuclear war, prefigured, as in The Idiot, by a localized apocalypse (the conflagration at Aleksandr’s house). Like Dostoevskii, Tarkovskii depicts a sacrificial central figure who perceives in a woman (Marta/Nastasia Filippovna) the divine gift of universal salvation, and who ends his life in a mental institution. Tarkovskii’s film, too, aspires iconically to depict the divine in human form. The only words uttered by the talismanic Little Man, Aleksandr’s son, are ‘In the Beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?’ It concludes with a silent take of Little Man sprinkling with the water of life the dead Japanese tree that his father has assured him will bloom eventually (Plate 16). In the dialectic between literature and film, word and image that commenced with Andrei Rublev (1966), Tarkovskii’s vision through to the end becomes simultaneously a vision of a divine origin, as Aleksandr’s image is superseded by that of Little Man and Tarkovskii’s pure cinematic insight becomes the embodiment of what Mandel’shtam called the ‘blessed word’ (‘blazhennoe slovo’) of literature.26 Tarkovskii was attuned to contradiction, and his last work leaves a tangle of loose ends, unresolved from within. Had he lived on, he would no doubt have appreciated a vice-like paradox gripping The Sacrifice from without. For on one hand his celebration of a new, essential vision was released at the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, and of the bondage of the literary word. On the other hand, as intimated by the sinister, flickering television news broadcast conveying Tarkovskii’s eschatological premonition (the equivalent to Dostoevskii’s mechanically reproduced Christ figures), this same period heralded the end of literature’s position of dominance in Russian culture, the demise of the cinematic elite and the beginning of a new era dominated by trends that owed more to Western mass culture than Party doctrine. The catalysts for these trends were technology-led social developments fostering an emphasis on entertainment enjoyed in the intimacy of the family home, thus presaging the end of Soviet collectivism. Prime amongst these was the mass ownership of radios, televisions and tape recorders. Most representative of this phenomenon in its pre-1991 phase is Vladimir Vysotskii, who forms the subject of Chapter 7.

7

Hamlet with a guitar The autobiographical persona of Vladimir Vysotskii as an intermedia phenomenon

The star as intermedia construct Tarkovskii’s assault on the late Soviet official sphere was launched from the high art realm whose essentially aristocratic nature the director always stressed. However, the popular cult that grew around the idiosyncratic persona of Shukshin, and the broad appeal held by Zakharov’s aesopic fantasies, pointed to a danger to the Soviet cultural edifice ‘from below’. As Richard Stites indicates, unofficial mass culture had never been eliminated under Soviet rule, but in the Brezhnev period it acquired a momentum which was to prove far more threatening than Tarkovskii’s elitist cinema.1 On one hand, young people were generating ever more domestic alternatives to the Western mass culture of rock music and fashion fads. On the other hand, an unofficial iconology emerged which, whilst it drew upon the discourse of Western stardom, was grounded in Russian cultural tradition, an iconology capable of ingratiating itself with the official mass culture which film, and increasingly, television, had been charged to promulgate in response to Westernization. The phenomenon is epitomized by the figure of Vladimir Vysotskii. Vysotskii was a threshold figure in late Soviet society. The throngs at his funeral in 1980 marked the point at which the culture of star worship finally burst through the barriers erected to keep such influences in check. The bard who was never recognized as a poet, the actor whose every role was regarded with suspicion by the authorities, was now public property in a way that many officially designated ‘people’s artists’ would never be. Mass culture henceforth acquired an autonomous logic which would lead to the bursting of the cultural (and political) dam overseen by the hapless Gorbachev. Western mass culture influenced Vysotskii’s performance style (his informal dress, de-aestheticized voice and flirtations with street culture) and the accoutrements of star worship surrounding his fans (treasured tape recordings, a host of imitation Vysotskiis, and a proliferation of rumours surrounding his private life). His identity is, none the less, a function of the unique ways in which areas of late Soviet cultural activity were demarcated. Here, Vysotskii’s second liminal role is important. For as a singer-songwriter

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with literary pretensions, an actor and screen star of repute, he worked at the interstices of film, literature, television, underground song and theatre. Like those of Maiakovskii and Shukshin, his intermedia ‘transgressions’ – a feature of Russian culture – indicated shifts in the boundaries between them. They also highlight Soviet attitudes to Western popular culture. Vysotskii scholarship focuses on his guitar poetry.2 As well as redressing the lack of attention to his work as an actor (my centrepiece is an analysis of his role in a film adaptation), this chapter explores the cultural boundary shifts outlined through the prism of Vysotskii’s autobiographical persona – a construct I treat as the product of interaction between the biographical Vysotskii, his texts and performances, public reactions to his work, and roles assigned him in film and theatre. Because Vysotskii covered such a range of cultural activities, as both active producer and ‘passive’ performer, the public persona which attached itself to his name is rich in meaning. The approach I adopt draws on Richard Dyer’s ‘star theory’ and on Lotman’s semiotics. Lotman treats the star phenomenon as a memory system for storing information whose capacity to generate meaning increases with every performance. This means that Vysotskii’s castings not only affected perceptions of his role, but also facilitated the emergence of a dense semiotic field around the space that he occupies. His participation therefore became desirable to directors and producers, and problematic for those policing the limits of the acceptable. Lotman writes: The cinema audience … connects films having a common central actor into one series and views them as a text, a kind of artistic whole … Contemporary artistic cinematography makes use of the mythologization of film actors by the public imagination, but does not become its slave. In the first place the semiotic aura surrounding an actor … is considered by the director when selecting candidates for a particular role. In the second place, such mythologized images may clash among themselves within the limits of a single film and enter into unexpected combinations. (Lotman 1976: 90–1) For Vysotskii, the most significant information-generating mechanism is the most fundamental boundary that he straddles: that between the verbal culture of poetry and song and the visual medium of the screen performance. Vysotskii’s career oscillated between visual and verbal media: theatre, song, film, television. This path shapes the course of my analysis. But since all the components of Vysotskii’s persona are present implicitly from the beginning. I follow the chronology of Vysotskii’s career in only the loosest sense.

Blatnoi culture and the parameters of Soviet literature Vysotskii’s singing career began as inpromptu private performances at the Taganka theatre which, under the direction of the legendary Iurii Liubimov,

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had acquired a reputation for free-thinking experimentation. His informal delivery style reflected this milieu. He insisted that his concerts were intimate dialogues, not polished public performances. One function of his gravelly voice is to mark this absence of a mediatory apparatus dividing the artist from his mass audience. Vysotskii’s informality is affected by the fact that late Soviet culture lacked a means of mediating between the realm of approved discourse intended for public consumption and a semi-illicit realm of private intercourse. In the West, the popular media facilitate private–public communication. In the Soviet Union, such communication was minimal. As a result, what Oleg Khakhordin calls a strategy of ‘dissimulation’ emerged by which people adopted false behaviour modes in public, and other, distinct modes in their own environments (Khakhordin 1999). Because his songs were disseminated through unofficial tape recordings (magnitizdat), Vysotskii, a product of the clash of totalitarianism and the mass ownership of communications technology, owes his popularity to his ability to project private, intimate modes, unmediated, into the public sphere. Vysotskii entered the official orbit when, in 1959, he began his career in cinema, where independent minded, yet officially approved directors such as Kheifits saw in him, with his Taganka ambience, a talent with rich expressive potential.3 Yet Vysotskii’s intimate singing style remains central to his identity. He continued performing live to the end of his life and a feature of the later recordings is his constant effort to de-mythologize his persona, to posit the intimate dialogic mode of the unofficial concert as a realm in which masks are removed and the artist steps outside his public persona and subjects it to metacommentary. A famous 1980 concert includes exhortations to the audience ‘not to believe all the legends about me not liking applause’, protestations that his songs ‘mean nothing beyond what they say’, and assertions that he has ‘given up writing on universal themes, since everyone reads their own meanings into his songs’.4 One myth that Vysotskii wished to debunk was that of his familiarity with the criminal underground. The myth’s main provenance was the prevalence of criminal songs (blatnye pesni) amidst his early output.5 But it was Brezhnev’s ideological squeeze on conventional literary activity that caused the intelligentsia to seek creative outlets in non-literary areas. To develop Bourdieu’s metaphor, portions of the intelligentsia craved to re-invest the symbolic capital they had accumulated in new ‘emergent markets’. This is apparent in Brezhnev-era films like Riazanov’s Irony of Fate, where the Soviet functionary’s sclerotic formalism is contrasted with the spontaneous creativity of the intelligentsia, transposed into guitar poetry, the everyday language of love, and male bath-house culture.6 The blatnoi mode’s strategic function is confirmed by Vysotskii’s denials ‘that [he] experienced and lived through everything [he] describe[s]’ (quoted in Terent’eva 2000: 149). Claiming that, as an actor, he ‘often found himself in the skin of other people’ (150), he presents his songs as attempts to explore states of mind. He maintains that

138 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere his blatnoi period was a search for a new voice ‘simple, conventionalized, but trustworthy’ (154), but that he was also interested in the kind of human suffering ‘when a man is deprived of freedom’, and that the songs helped him ‘in the working out of a normal, human intonation’ (176). Under Brezhnev’s repressive constraints, one of the attractions of blatnoi discourse is that it possesses its own discrete idiom paralleling that adopted by the late Soviet intelligentsia. The blatnoi persona belongs both to an antiaesthetic strategy serving to extend the parameters of literary culture at a time when its traditional territory is under assault from the state, and to conventional literary mask-wearing facilitating the expression of thoughts subject to censorship in other modes. Contrary to Vysotskii’s claims, he did not ‘overcome’ his blatnoi period (Terent’eva 2000: 176). Rather, it was a dormant code ever ready to be reinvoked. Instead of progressing sequentially (first one persona then another), the autobiographical myth behaves according to a cumulative, memory-conserving mechanism. Each enactment is incorporated into the next to form an ever denser semiotic aura against whose background the current reading is constructed, either as a ‘minus device’ (the post-blatnoi Vysotskii is read against the background of the blatnoi period that he now negates), or to be revitalized in a new context, as in the 1978 TV series The Rendezvous-point Cannot be Changed (Mesto vstrechi izmenit’ nel’zia). Here he played a seasoned detective, Zheglov, whose knowledge of the post-war criminal ring he is fighting leads to his adopting a less-than-wholly-legal approach offset by the unblemished enthusiasm of his younger colleague, Sharapov.7 The blatnoi persona is imposed onto the role of police officer and reinvested with officially sanctioned meaning. Vysotskii’s persona possesses both a paradigmatic and a syntagmatic axis. Along the former, a sequence of masks accumulates into a series implicitly cited in its entirety by each member. At the same time, the progression between roles engenders a metonymic process in which one role is displaced onto the next. Thus, well before Rendezvous, the gritty blatnoi persona was displaced onto the harshness of the soldier’s world. A cycle of Vysotskii songs in which he adopts the first-person mask of the soldier is complemented by films like I Came From Childhood (Ia rodom iz detstva) (1966) in which Vysotskii plays a tank driver named Volodia who sings Vysotskii’s songs, cementing in visual mode the tough, post-blatnoi military persona.8 The displacement traces a gradual path from counter-culture to official culture corresponding to the shift from guitar poetry (belonging to the unofficial realm of the disenfranchised intelligent), to film (propagating the values of the centre).9 Initially, Vysotskii’s image was deemed suitable only for negative heroes in films extolling Soviet military values. Later, as Vysotskii disingenuously put it ‘[i]t suddenly dawned on someone that I’m not necessarily a negative or comical character’ (Vysotskii 1989: 215). The Civil War was also central to Soviet mythology. Amongst Vysotskii’s negative roles was that of Brusentov, a White Guard lieutenant, in Two

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Buddies Served (Sluzhili dva tovarishcha) (1968), who, as Vysotskii put it, ‘thought he was saving his Motherland, but was in actual fact fighting against it’ (Vysotskii 1989: 216). But the positive blatnoi qualities of love of freedom and tough masculinity enabled directors to cast Vysotskii in ‘official’ roles such as that of Volodia, who returns from the front, battle scarred, but morally intact. The subversive qualities remained paradigmatically active, as in Gennadii Poloka’s The Intervention (Interventsiia) (completed in 1968, banned until 1987) in which he plays a generally positive role in a film dealing with the contradictions and complexities of life in Odessa under allied occupation during the Civil War. The film’s demythologization of simplistic official platitudes about the Civil War embraces blatnoi-related countercultural values displaced from Vysotskii onto the film in which he plays. Vysotskii was eventually approved for the role of Zheglov in Rendezvous, owing partly to the character’s official status as a police officer, partly to his popularity.10 The penetration of Western genres into unofficial Soviet culture was addressed through the proffering of patronage to ‘safe’ versions of such genres. The expansion of the recording company Melodiia into popular music dates from the 1970s, as does Soviet TV’s appropriation of Vysotskii’s unruly talent. At the same time, Vysotskii changed attitudes to the official realm. Despite Rendezvous’s official stamp, Zheglov, who bore a battle-weary blatnoi influence, was the first Soviet screen detective willing to bend the law. The benefits to the authorities of Vysotskii’s involvement in the screen media acted in turn upon his own self-identity. Vysotskii initially considered his songs as a mere adjunct to his acting career. Only with official recognition did he claim for his songs the literary status normally tied to bureaucratic nomenclature. In one of the most (in)famous episodes in Vysotskii’s increasingly public life, his application to join the Writers’ Union was rejected. The star’s son writes bitterly of the resistance Vysotskii met: He applied several times for membership in the Writers’ Union. After Father’s death it became known that his last application was considered groundless – he had no publications to his name, although his songs were seen as literary productions … What he badly needed was … recognition of his personality. (N. Vysotskii 1989, 249–50)11 Vysotskii’s attempt to penetrate the Soviet literary castle failed, yet he helped redefine literary status in such a way that the castle would no longer need to be stormed; his films were, after all, already ‘seen as literary productions’. The borders of late Soviet literary culture entered a process whereby creativity external to it sought both to subvert those borders and to be assimilated within them, whilst those inside appropriated what they could from without to inoculate themselves against uninvited intruders.12

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The semiotics of the Vysotskii persona Vysotskii was not the first Soviet media star. The vibrant Liubov’ Orlova, heroine of Tsirk and Volga, Volga, is an obvious precursor. But Vysotskii was among the first Soviet actors to correspond to Dyer’s definition of the star as someone who ‘collapses [the] distinction between the actor’s authenticity and the authentication of the characters s/he is playing’ (Dyer 1997: 21).13 Sheer singing and dancing talent and general charisma – qualities detachable from their possessor – were at the root of Orlova’s fame. In Vysotskii’s case the convergence of persona and role was evident from an early stage. Shortly after his appearance in a Second World War film, fans asked him whether he ‘remembered’ the Stalingrad trenches (Terent’eva 2000, 23) – an absurdity given Vysotskii’s age. The persona–person conflation eventually fed back into the persona itself. When approaching his peak, Vysotskii received letters begging him not to take the part of weak characters such as that of the morally flabby philanderer in the film The Only One (Edinstvennaia) (1975), to portray anything but weaklings: ‘even villains, but strong ones’ (Terent’eva 2000: 29).14 Directors were then forced to restrict the semantic scope of the roles allotted him. The maxim ‘even a villain, if only strong’ is reflected in Kheifits’s decision that only Vysotskii was suitable to play the harsh, ultra-rational von Koren in his 1973 adaptation of Chekhov’s ‘The Duel’, The Bad Good Man (Plokhoi khoroshii chelovek) (Terent’eva 2000: 35). The multi-faceted authenticity of Vysotskii’s persona is attributable less to the consistency of its references to biographical data, than to the exchange between the two media in which he achieved his fame. The blatnoi figure which informed many of his roles produced a reverse influence on the lyric ‘I’ of his songs.15 An early screen success, Vertikal’ (Vertical) (1966), included songs drawing a parallel between overcoming the loneliness of the mountains and the solitude of the self (Terent’eva 2000: 21).16 It spawned a cycle of songs about mountain climbers, including the famous ‘Rockclimbing Girl’ (‘Skalolazka’), and others with a propensity for living in extreme conditions: highwaymen, tightrope walkers, geological explorers. The image of the solipsistic geologist was re-appropriated by Vysotskii’s screen persona, as in Kira Muratova’s first feature film, Brief Encounters (Korotkie vstrechi) (1967), where the moral ambiguity of Vysotskii’s character (he betrays his partner, played by Muratova, in a liaison with a provincial girl he meets on an expedition) is offset by the spiritual freedom he enjoys by comparison with the pressures endured by Muratova’s character in her party career. Vysotskii’s persona follows a trajectory driven by his intermedia shifts: from counter-cultural rebel, to solipsistic explorer craving freedom, to world-weary cynic, to people’s poet. Vysotskii often expressed bemusement at his selection for parts like that of Don Juan in an adaptation of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies (Malen’kie tragedii) (1979). But, with its ability to invoke contemporary qualities, Vysotskii’s persona is ideally suited to adding semiotic complexity to such

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characters. While introjecting the persona’s paradigmatic depth into his literary parts, directors re-inscribe these parts into the persona. In Little Tragedies, Don Juan is depicted singing with a guitar, a deviation from the original particularly striking given that the adaptation follows Pushkin’s text almost verbatim. Vysotskii’s own explanation is that Pushkin was writing in autobiographical mode, portraying Don Juan as someone, like Pushkin, on the verge of ‘splitting from himself, from the formerly adulterous poet’ (Terent’eva 2000: 44). But the guitar also identifies Pushkin’s Don Juan with Vysotskii, re-associating the Soviet bard with Russia’s national poet. When the Pushkin adaptation, The Tale of How Tsar Peter Married Off His Blackamoor (Skaz o tom, kak Tsar’ Petr arapa zhenil) (1976), was playing, Vysotskii noticed an advert for the film depicting the negroid hero incongruously with a guitar beneath it (Terent’eva 2000: 41). The promotion filters Peter’s eighteenth century through the prism of Vysotskii, according his persona new significance derived from the marginality of Pushkin’s black servant character. The guitar became a metonym for Vysotskii the bard, even when guitar poetry proper was lacking. Equally, the unmistakable singing style signals his presence in films like Sons Go Off to Fight (Synov’ia ukhodiat v boi) (1969), in which the actor does not appear. The title of this epic is that of the theme song punctuating the action. The narrator begins by explaining that the film celebrates the heroic mother’s role in the Belorussian resistance to Nazi occupation. There then follows a sequence depicting the Belorussian landscape, backed with Vysotskii’s title song, whose chorus ‘Who said that the earth has died?’ (‘Kto skazal, chto zemlia umerla?’) semantically links motherhood, the inalienable motherland, and the earthiness of Vladimir Vysotskii, one of the post-war period’s greatest sons. Vysotskii’s voice from the post-war present furnishes a metatextual commentary on the action, binding official mythology with contemporary marginal culture. Unlike bards such as Okudzhava and Galich, for whom the tonality of the voice is incidental to the lyrics, Vysotskii’s vocal inflexions carry a heavy semantic load.17 For Vysotskii, word and image, meaning and embodiment seek to find one another in voice.18 Thus he appears as an incomplete essence whose missing contours are to be completed by the viewer/listener. The play of voice and image echoes the tension between Vysotskii as active artist-performer, and Vysotskii as victim of circumstances beyond his control, a tension echoed in the division of his career between ‘passive’ filmacting and ‘creative’ song-writing, but also played out within each medium. In ‘My Hamlet’ (‘Moi Gamlet’), Vysotskii equates his ‘passive’ theatrical role as Hamlet with the vicissitudes of the character’s life which become his own: ‘I was an alloy smelted by my days/So fragile it broke up before it set/Like all the world I shed blood and, as they/Could not resist revenge – it was too sweet’ (Vysotskii 1989: 93). Conversely, in Tale, the Blackamoor’s apartness from Petrine High Society’s false decadence, his willingness actively to engage in criticism of court mores are emphasized.

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The voice/image tension finds expression in the fact that, for several films, Vysotskii wrote songs which were excluded, but which the singer later released as sound recordings. Gennadii Poloka gives reasons for this: ‘his failure to establish contact with the directors, and the abuse of power on the part of the then bosses of the cinema’ (Poloka 1989: 366–7). Poloka links Vysotskii’s desire to write for the cinema to his attempt to gain literary recognition (Poloka 1989: 365), confirming that the voice–image tension intersects with the high art–popular culture axis.

Vysotskii and the ekranizatsiia: cinema as purveyor of literary value Vysotskii’s appearance in ekranizatsii enhanced his literary credentials. According to Kheifits, ‘Volodia … treated the role of von Koren as a stage in his career … because it legalised him as a film actor’ (Kheifits 1989: 373). Indeed, the star was confirmed in his role only after a group of cosmonauts intervened on his behalf at the highest levels (Kheifits 1989: 370). He attempted to transfer this legitimacy to his remaining cultural output, claiming in an interview: ‘If the great poets of the past lived now, I believe many of their works would be recorded on tape’ (Vysotskii 1989: 210). But the adaptations also enabled him to filter his creative myth through the characters he played. Kheifits suggests that Vysotskii’s approach to von Koren emphasized parallels between Chekhov’s character and contemporary issues, and that his acting style was a compromise between his desire to remain faithful to the negative reading of von Koren as a despot that he, like Kheifits, favoured, and his own opposition to tyranny: We quickly … found a key to von Koren … Rightness founded on wrongness … distant intimations of maturing fascism … a smouldering hatred towards men … I believe that Volodia’s open hatred for tyranny and despotism helped him play that part. In the film he aimed that hatred in the opposite direction, at the characters of ‘Duel’, whom he called ‘macacques’. (Kheifits 1989: 370) Such roles afforded Vysotskii greater opportunity for self-expression than when he played in films based on previously unfamiliar scenarios, where any idiosyncracies appeared to inhere in the scenario, rather than reflect the actor’s interpretation. His performances in these films bespeak a dialogue between the director’s justification for selecting him and his own interpretation of his part. But, equally, his appropriation by state cinema and television enabled official culture to expand the boundaries of canonic high literature into non-literary territory. Vysotskii initiated a struggle between the official and the liminal realms of Soviet culture over the right to possession of Russia’s literary heritage – a struggle in which each sphere uses the other as its medium of expression. Vysotskii’s audio-visual potency estab-

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lishes these films as the site of further interchanges: between the authorial text and Vysotskii’s autobiographical narrative, between the literary past represented in the original and Vysotskii’s Soviet present, between allegorical and literal meanings. Vysotskii radiates a semiotic force-field which re-inflects surrounding material with meaning relating to his persona and the time in which he is located. Thus a popular 1973 animated version of Alice in Wonderland attracted the attention of adult viewers who speculated that Vysotskii’s aural presence imparted to the visual realization of Lewis Caroll’s fantasy hidden anti-Soviet sentiments. Vysotskii strenuously rejected the reading, despite the fact that notions of the Soviet Union as a distorted ‘wonderland’ would undoubtedly have struck a chord with certain Russian intellectuals.19 The force-field phenomenon is given formal expression within the poetics of Aleksandr Mitta’s Tale which, according to the director, marked another landmark in the star’s struggle for official approval (Mitta 1999: 362).

Vysotskii’s adaptation of the narrative of Russian identity Pushkin’s Peter the First’s Blackamoor (Arap Petra Pervogo) relates the life of Hannibal, his eighteenth-century black ancestor. It focuses on Hannibal’s return to Moscow from Paris, where he has been serving as Peter’s emissary, mediating the character’s critical impressions of both Paris and Moscow through the comments of his thoroughly Europeanized Russian companion, Korsakov. Pushkin’s account of the false Europeanization of courtly Russia remained incomplete, breaking off during Peter’s abortive attempt to marry Hannibal to a woman named Natalia who rebuffs the servant’s tentative advances in racist overtones. Apart from completing Pushkin’s narrative (Vysotskii’s initially reluctant bridegroom ends up marrying a reciprocating Natalia), Mitta uses Hannibal’s other name, Ibrahim, and, through the title, shifts the emphasis from the blackamoor to the popular tsar.20 Mitta’s film opens with an animated sequence featuring images of the Firebird (Zhar-ptitsa), placing the narrative in a mythological context. The sequence, which compresses Ibrahim’s early years, is succeeded by stylized shots of the French court, peopled by real actors depicting the court’s mannered behaviour. Against this background, Vysotskii is a beacon of authenticity, semiotically distinct from the fictional events into which he is inserted and capable of articulating a critique of the Petrine past from the Soviet present. Vysotskii is also incorporated into Russian nationalist myths. Ibrahim’s return home is voluntary rather than the result of a summons and acquires a patriotic colouring. Korsakov is replaced by a Russian muzhik called Filimon (Fil’ka) who acts as Ibrahim’s confidant, after having hijacked his carriage disguised as a French highwayman. The European-Russian is transformed from a Russian permanently enriched with French sophistication into an authentic peasant who assumes an outward French appearance for temporary expediency.21

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The notion of Peter as a revolutionary figure can be traced to A. Tolstoy’s Peter the Great, beloved of Stalin, who perceived in Tolstoy’s novel an allegory of his own reforming zeal. Peter’s mocking of Dutch timidity (absent in Pushkin’s text) derives much from the cult of the vigorous leader portrayed in Tolstoy’s novel and its 1937–38 film version. The camera angles emphazise Peter’s towering height, and the building of the Russian fleet, a background detail in Pushkin. Moreover, Peter’s diatribe against shoddy workmanship (brak), again absent from the text, chimed with Brezhnev’s campaign against Soviet brak. Vysotskii’s character acts as Peter’s confidant, serving as the only character to whom Peter’s assertion that he wishes to ‘leave Russia in the hands of reliable people’ could apply. Vysotskii blends three chronotopes: that of Peter, Russia’s first revolutionary; that of Pushkin, initiator of Russia’s literary tradition; and that of Vysotskii, the unofficial Soviet people’s bard. Pushkin featured prominently in Vysotskii’s personal canon. His wife, Marina Vlady, confirms that she ‘didn’t know anyone who could read Pushkin as well as Vysotskii’ (Vlady 1989: 259). He also passed a screen test for the part of Pugachev – a key figure in the Russian national myth – in an unrealized film of Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter, a failure that, according to his friend,Vadim Tumanov, he took to heart (Tumanov 1989: 306). Pointing to his own non-negroid features and to the abundance of Russian-speaking Africans (Terent’eva 2000: 40), Vysotskii asks why the director could not have found a black actor. He recalls that the blacking on his face continually had to be reapplied (Terent’eva 2000: 40), as a result of which its consistency changed during the film, underscoring the function of Vysotskii’s blackness as a mask hiding his true human qualities. At one point, Peter describes his faithful servant as ‘in appearance, a blackamoor, in his soul, a Russian’ (litsom arap, dushoi russkii). Vysotskii’s beacon of authenticity shines upon a surrounding sea of superficial conventionality, some of which becomes attached to the Vysotskii persona as the false ‘mask’ of blackness applied, not by Peter or Ibrahim, but by the prejudicial Petrine courtiers with their blind adherence to protocol. That it is Vysotskii who carries the badge of authenticity accords with the singer’s status as unofficial emblem of late Soviet patriotism. When asked about his attitude to his motherland, Vysotskii averred: ‘I love everything concerning the virtues of my country and reject and hate much that concerns her faults’ (Terent’eva 2000: 197). In this context the ball scene, during which Vysotskii is asked if he understands Russian and answers that it is his native language, is richly ironic. At this moment, Vysotskii supersedes the blackamoor. The surface blacking underlines his presence rather than hides it, highlighting the tension between the Soviet people’s bard and the negroid servant, between Vysotskii’s archetypally Slavic features and the ineffective blacking agent. The tension is resolved through Vysotskii’s own status as the marginalized figure, object of ‘court’ opprobrium, struggling to gain recognition.

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In the film’s climax, Ibrahim is assailed by a group of courtiers dressed in animal costumes. Ibrahim berates them, telling them: ‘You think you are here in masks, but you’re actually in your true state’. For Ibrahim, the mask of blackness imposed by the courtiers obscures his true Russian essence. In the courtiers’ case, an animalistic essence surfaces in the form of masks. False masks hide true, positive essences; true, negative essences take the form of masks of hypocrisy – an appropriate trope for the hypocrisies of Brezhnev’s ‘court’ obliquely referenced by the film. The Vysotskii persona infects not just surrounding semantic space, but also the temporality of that space, projecting it into the twentieth century. The French courtiers portrayed at the beginning of the film, like their Russian counterparts, perceive Ibrahim’s blackness as an essence rather than a mask. However, for them, the blackness connotes non-Frenchness rather than non-Russianness. In referring to Ibrahim as ‘the wild lover from exotic Russia’ (‘dikii liubovnik iz ekzoticheskoi Rossii’), they associate exotic marginality with Russianness. Mitta recognizes that Russian self-identity depends upon its assimilation of Western perceptions of its marginality. Thus we must adjust our interpretation of the negroid mask; Vysotskii’s blackness (like Pushkin’s) marks a subversive difference dividing Russian self-sameness from within.22 Yet it is a false sign of marginality imposed by the Europeanized other through which even Soviet Russia unifies its sense of self.23 Ibrahim’s marginality oscillates between its variant statuses as false sign of other people’s hypocrisy, authentic sign of reality, and metatextual construction revealing the dependence of Russianness on outside perceptions. At each level, Tale focuses on Russia’s assimilation of the marginalized Ibrahim, laying the ground for his indignant dismissal of a reference to his African homeland: ‘This is my Fatherland, here!’ (‘Zdes’ moe otechestvo’).24 The successful outcome of the assimilation is conveyed by the film’s denouement: Mitta’s Peter finally marries off his blackamoor.25 Peter’s role in accomplishing the assimilation both accords with his reputation as an iconoclastic radical, and contradicts his function as official gatekeeper to Russian national identity (Vysotskii is, after all, a mere bard). Yet Vysotskii’s own switch from song to cinema mixes subversion with submission, representing both Vysotskii’s bold penetration into the official realm and his accession to that realm’s attempt to exploit his reputation for its own purposes. Vysotskii’s intermedia transgression activates a paradigm of conflicts surrounding literary culture’s relationship to mass art. Vysotskii, the semidissident thespian, catalyses the late Soviet intelligentsia’s compulsion to allegorize the products of official culture. Despite Vysotskii’s vigorous rejection of allegorizations of his work (Terent’eva 2000: 168), such readings were a ‘literary fact’ in Tynianov’s sense. In a Soviet context, the products of official culture lent themselves to the most productive allegorical readings of all. Yet, in Tale, Vysotskii also fulfils the opposite function, for, through the contemporary associations he invokes, he also serves as the non-literary,

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authentic meaning underlying the Pushkin text in its official appropriation.26 Perched on the boundaries separating high aesthetics from mass art, official ideology from dissident oppositionalism, the intimate world of the intelligentsia from the public realm of cinema, Vysotskii emerges as the fulcrum of late Soviet culture’s attempts to re-validate itself in relation to the mass culture threatening it. The view that Tale is more concerned with Vysotskii than Pushkin gains force from the film’s omission of Korsakov. For with his frequent visits to Paris and his French-speaking wife (the film was made at the height of Vysotskii’s turbulent marriage to Marina Vlady), Vysotskii himself appropriates Korsakov’s mediatory function. Mitta taps into the star’s autobiographical myth to superimpose new layers of ‘naturalized’ meaning onto a literary text, while the media star maps his persona onto a classical literary hero. The autobiographical strand counterbalances Mitta’s attempts to lend Pushkin’s narrative a nationalistic flavour. During the opening scenes, Vysotskii duels with a Count whose wife he loves (she rejects Ibrahim on racial grounds). There is no such duel in Pushkin, nor does race inhibit the blackamoor’s Parisian liaisons. In Pushkin’s tale, it is Natalia who raises the race factor (a problematic gesture corrected in the adaptation). The fact that the French court is perceived through the filter of a pro-Russian patriot of African origin checks Mitta’s rampant russification of Pushkin’s farfrom-nationalistic text in which Russian racial prejudice is savagely mocked. Moreover, Vysotskii’s Paris connection restores Pushkin’s original interrogation of Russianness. Vysotskii’s marriage to Vlady was conducted in the full glare of the unofficial Soviet publicity machine. The tensions the couple experienced from having to travel between Moscow and Paris entered the myths that accrued around them. These factors reinforced Vysotskii’s credentials as a repressed intelligent who imported French values along with French jackets and sweaters. The Paris uprising and the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Prague Spring acquired significance in both French and Russian cultural politics after 1968. Both protests belonged to a single European movement led by charismati anti-establishment figures bent on dismantling the Cold War status quo. Vysotskii was aware of the mythological value generated by this phenomenon; his leather jackets and polo-neck sweaters, acquired courtesy of Vlady, were pan-European badges of sixties and seventies radicalism.

Vysotskii, Hamlet and the end of Soviet culture It is fitting that Vysotskii should wear black jumper and jeans when playing Hamlet in the legendary Taganka production which ran from 1971 to 1980. Liubimov’s Hamlet represented Vysotskii’s return to the literary realm of the theatre, after having imparted to mass culture the aesthetic value attached to his Taganka connection. As the actress Alla Demidova indicates, with the reputation that he had built in film and song, he was now able to impose his

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creative stamp on this high cultural product of impeccable heritage which in turn entered his autobiographical myth: In the two years of rehearsing Hamlet, Volodia proved his right to wear the jeans and sweater, only in the play he wore black – black velveteen jeans and a black handmade sweater with a powerful open neck … He was buried in a new pair of black trousers and a new black sweater which Marina brought over from Paris. (Demidova 1989: 329) In Hamlet Vysotskii invokes a Russian tradition, which began with Turgenev’s Hamlet/Don Quixote distinction, of portraying Hamlet as an alienated intellectual.27 He adds an element of seething anger for which his hoarse voice was ideally suited. It was during the Taganka production that Vysotskii wrote ‘My Hamlet’. The song acquires literary legitimacy through the intertextual reference to Pasternak’s lyrical ‘Hamlet’, appended at the end of Doctor Zhivago whose semi-autobiographical poet-hero is, appropriately, a tortured intellectual. Vysotskii’s selection for the role owed much to his popular reputation. Moreover, his theatrical performance swiftly became legendary because it was never recorded, accruing value as it spread by word of mouth, much like the products of mass culture. The synthesis of oral and literary culture was characteristic of Soviet society, where literature in its vernacular form was well established. The tradition of mass poetry readings, popular since Maiakovskii’s day, reached new heights during the Stagnation, with official support at national and local levels. Cinema helped facilitate the synthesis. Vysotskii’s film performances enhanced the visual embodiment of his autobiographical myth with the vital element of official approval, and, through his roles in literary adaptations, strengthened its claims to participation in national legends such as that of Pushkin. Hamlet, too, features in the litany of national myths into whose value system Vysotskii tapped. The strand of protest added to Turgenev’s ratiocinating intellectual and Pasternak’s Christ-like martyr emerges in ‘My Hamlet’: But I refused to enter the fight For privileges, glory, spoils and booty … Away from wounded quarry I would race, And I would lash at huntsmen and at beaters … I now could see our games with every day Become more crude, outrageous, pitiless. At night, in secret, I would wash away The filth and scum of daytime swinishness ….

148 The shaping of a Soviet official sphere I scorned the age, its men – and I immersed Myself in ancient manuscripts and books. (Vysotskii 1989: 93) Vysotskii’s Hamlet also invokes the 1960s French ‘marginal’ scene symbolized in the black jumper and guitar poetry, combining in one gesture protesting Russian intellectualism and French radical chic, marking the Europeanness of the values it incorporates, and the mediation of Russian self-identity through these values. By clothing a beacon of Western high art in the garb of French youth culture Vysotskii’s Hamlet polemicizes both with Western notions of Shakespeare as the hallowed idol of another, nobler age, and with the Soviet critique of Western popularizations of high art according to which only socialism, untramelled by commerce, can maintain the world cultural heritage. But, by referencing the Western intelligentsia, the modish attire also imparts to Hamlet a gesture of allegorical inversion by which Soviet readings of student radicalism as the death-knell of capitalism turn into a bitter protest against Soviet moral turpitude. Thus, Vysotskii’s Hamlet restores to Russian intellectualism – the province of authentic high culture in its authentic form – both its historical protest mission and its urge to speak with the voice of the long-suffering narod. At one end of the cultural spectrum, Vysotskii’s Hamlet belongs in the same context as Riazanov’s The Irony of Fate which combined light-hearted romance (it is a comedy of errors involving mistaken identities, interspersed with musical interludes, held together by the glue of sentiment) with Soviet kul’turnost’ (the interludes consist of renditions of Tsvetaeva and Voznesenskii’s poetry). Like Hamlet, it deploys Western discourse modes to critique Soviet society (the mistaken identities result from the stupefying conformity of Soviet urban culture; the ‘villain’ is a bureaucrat seduced by the accoutrements of Western commercialism). At the other end of the spectrum, Vysotskii’s performance lays claim to succeed Kozintsev’s 1965 high art film version of Hamlet. Kozintsev’s formalist direction, the ethereally intellectual delivery of Innokentii Smoktunovskii’s Hamlet, and the Pasternak screenplay, identify the film as a cultural product of the period when intellectuals began regathering the threads of their pre-Soviet modernist heritage. With its nuanced protest against the cowardly moral compromise practised by those in the orbit of the powerful, and with its creatively reinflected citations of Western mass culture, Vysotskii’s Hamlet is a supreme expression of 1970s Soviet Zeitgeist, of an official sphere which, having imbibed the alien influences threatening it from without in the vain hope of taming them, is on the point of implosion from within.28 Even as mourners filed past Vysotskii’s coffin, his persona was being inscribed into a new narrative lent new impetus by the collapse of the Soviet project in 1991. With the issuing of previously unreleased Vysotskii songs and poetry, and of scholarly works assessing his aesthetic worth, and

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the re-televising of his films, a veritable revival commenced. One of the new narrative trajectories into which Vysotskii is inserted is that of the line of Russian identity broken by seventy years of Soviet rule. Significantly, Tale was broadcast twice in 1999, the year of Pushkin’s bicentennial, and the peak of the revival of the cult of Peter the Great, to whom a new bronze statute to rival the St Petersburg Horseman was erected by Mayor Luzhkov in the centre of Moscow. Vysotskii’s reputation as an uncompromised hero of the Soviet era who never crossed the boundary separating dissidence from betrayal could not have served the cult better. Vysotskii’s function as an object of post-Soviet nostalgia was confirmed in the repeat showing in 2000 of the entire series of Rendezvous on NTV, accompanied by a retrospective documentary peppered with Vysotskii’s songs, interviews with his contemporaries and images of his face, and tracing social developments from the 1940s, through the 1970s to the present. The documentary was establishing him as the programme’s primary focus. Ironically, Vysotskii gained, at the impoverished academic margins of post-Soviet society, the unqualified literary status that he had sought in vain at the very moment when that society embraced post-literate Western screen culture. Whether this demonstrates that Vysotskii’s peregrinations from word to image, literature to screen, high art to popular culture, achieved the merger they, like numerous other Russian intellectual projects, sought, remains doubtful. It is, nonetheless, to post-Soviet television as the site of Russian literature’s final encounter with the camera that I now turn.

Part III

Televising the word

8

Literature as translation mechanism in post-Soviet televisual representations of Westernness

The word re-sited During his television series celebrating Vysotskii’s life, Riazanov characterizes Vysotskii as ‘the first bird of glasnost’ (‘pervaia ptichka glasnosti ’). By the time the programme was made, television had become the primary medium by which the Vysotskii legend was circulated. Indeed, television was the true hero of glasnost. By the end of the 1980s, the two had effectively fused. Glasnost (which began as a propaganda campaign aimed at consolidating perestroika rather than a magnanimous exercise in democracy) relied upon television’s topical urgency and universal reach. Equally, television would not have captivated millions of viewers had it not been for the remarkable words and images whose presence glasnost facilitated. Although ‘glasnost’ means ‘voicedness’ and is tied to the word, the rhetoric of glasnost was distinctly visual. This is reflected in the flagship television programmes of glasnost, The Glance (Vzgliad) and Searchlight of Perestroika (Prozhektor perestroiki), whose titles connote the notion of penetrating visual insights into Soviet society. Television’s crucial role in ending the 1991 coup had to do with its ability to show Russians the scale of opposition to the takeover, to reveal the trembling hands of the coup-makers as they struggled to justify their illegal actions.1 Initially, this rhetoric of ‘in-sight’ was accompanied by an enhancement of the literary word. Thanks to the new freedoms, literature’s status had never been higher. Hitherto-forbidden texts were published in huge print runs. Caught up in the democratic euphoria sweeping the country, literary figures led the debate (albeit in idiosyncratic directions) over the future of the Union. Gorbachev appointed Valentin Rasputin to a governmental commission. Writers like Belov, Astaf’ev and, after 1991, Limonov, contributed to the political process. One of the first privileges accorded to Solzhenitsyn on his return to Russia in 1994 was his own national pulpit – a short-lived television programme which he used to present his off-beam ruminations on Russia’s tragic fate.

154 Televising the word The abject failure of the ‘Solzhenitsyn show’ indicated that 1991 did not, after all, herald a halcyon era for literature. One rhetoric of vision was substituted by another, more insidious one: that fostered by the imagecentred commercialism adopted by the Eltsin regime with misplaced enthusiasm. What counted now was what sold, and what sold was what appealed to a public craving for instant gratification of the visual senses offered by Playboy and Prada, rather than by the cerebral pleasures of Pushkin and Pasternak. In a spiralling logic, market economics dictated that, since writers no longer sold, and readers, increasingly burdened with the cares of making ends meet, no longer read, serious books were no longer published, causing writers to write still less.2 This situation was precipitated by the removal of state subsidies to a literary community which, like the cinematic elite discussed in Part II, had used those resources to bite the hand that fed it. Whilst an unholy alliance of commercial concerns and an ever more manipulative central government had conspired to secure the position of national television, the predicament besetting literature also afflicted cinema. Production of homegrown films diminished dramatically as Russian cinemas became host to the same Hollywood fare found throughout the West.3 Film was unlikely to provide the beleaguered literary world with the fillip received by its Anglo-Saxon equivalents from the flow of glossy co-productions of Shakespeare, Austen, James and Eliot. None the less, the ekranizatsiia has survived into the post-Soviet era, continuing to function as a word–image encounter point and indicator of societal contradictions. Several directors have revisited the nineteenthcentury literary tradition, polemicizing with both the original texts and their Soviet canonized versions. Valerii Todorovskii’s Moscow Nights (Podmoskovnye vechera) (1994) transposes Leskov’s ‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’ from its nineteenth-century mercantile setting onto the territory of the privileged classes of the post-Soviet period in an oblique critique of New Russian morality. Its self-conscious distortions of Leskov (in the film, Katia Izmailova and her accomplice literally rewrite the ending to their murderous romance which exists both as a sequence of events and as the typescript to a novel written by their victim), and its references to Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina, institute a commentary on freedom and destiny and on New Russia’s relationship with the nineteenth-century tradition in which it grounds itself. In 1996, Prisoner of the Caucasus (Kavkazkii plennik), Sergei Bodrov’s transposition of Tolstoy’s eponymous story from the context of tsarist Russia’s imperial mission in the Caucasus to that of the latterday Chechen crisis, inserted the conflict into the broader postcolonial framework by citing the negro spiritual ‘Let My People Go’ and Hollywood’s Rambo as intertexts. Post-Soviet Russia is identified simultaneously with American oppression of blacks, with the false glorification of the US mission in Vietnam, and with American cultural imperialism (Rambo enjoyed colossal popularity in Russia during the 1990s).

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But the post-Soviet ekranizatsiia has not merely practised cultural critique. By adapting Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter and The History of Pugachev under one title, The Russian Rebellion (Russkii bunt) (2000), Aleksandr Proshkin criticises the canonic Soviet version of the Pugachev narrative (the story was screened three times during the Soviet era) and inserts it into the now consensual interpretation of the revolutionary myth. Unlike the 1958 ekranizatsiia of Captain’s Daughter, which portrays the eighteenth-century uprising as an early precursor of the heroic revolutionary movement, Proshkin emphasizes the uprising’s chaotic savagery (the incorporation of the historical text motivating Proshkin’s focus on the revolt’s gory realities). The title refers to a Pushkin poem characterizing Pugachev’s rebellion as ‘a Russian revolt, bloody and merciless’ (‘russkii bunt, krovavyi i besposhchadnyi’). The use of the proleptical imagery of the black raven, symbol of death, broadens our sense of hindsight to include the ultimate consequences of Pugachev’s revolt: we ‘know’ from the beginning not only the abortive outcome of the peasant revolt, but also that of the revolutionary project implicitly celebrated in the 1958 film. The survival of the ekranizatsiia owes more to the ease with which it has migrated to the small screen where, benefiting from the resources made available to programmes likely to further the agendas of the commercial and political interests funding national television, it has mutated into the subgenre of the serialization. This has not meant a sudden proliferation of Turgenev and Tolstoy adaptations (though, unpredictably, one of the biggest hit serials of 2002–03 was an adaptation of The Idiot). Rather, established versions of the serial such as the detective thriller (detektiv) have accommodated the popular, middle-brow fiction that has transformed the post-Soviet literary landscape.4 From Maslennikov’s 1970s Sherlock Holmes adaptations, the detective thriller provided a popular counterpoint to Soviet television’s dreary diet of political correctness. By continuing this tradition, the 1990s’ serializations of Aleksandra Marinina’s phenomenally successful novels fulfilled the reverse function: that of offsetting the equally monotonous menu of American thrillers peppering post-Soviet TV schedules. With their modest production values, elevated discussions of psychological motives, dresseddown female heroine, and frequent digressions into the trivia of her domestic life, the Kamenskaia serials marked a vivid contrast to the guns and car chases of the American cop shows. Moreover, by tracing much of the criminality under investigation to the Soviet past, and by presenting a sophisticated image of the much-derided police force (in which Marinina herself worked), Kamenskaia served the values of the post-Soviet establishment perfectly.5 The serial’s ‘state-building’ function gains from its status as an ekranizatsiia which accords it gravity, further distinguishing it from its Western ‘rivals’. Even now, Russian adaptations which efface their literary origins are rare, indicating the lingering value attached to literary culture in this supposedly post-literate period. Towards the end of the Eltsin period, a new

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phenomenon emerged in middle-brow Russia: the Fandorin detective novels of Boris Akunin, whose ability to pastiche the ambiances of the nineteenthcentury novel, and to manage parallel narratives and ironic narration within the detective format, flattered the sensibilities of Russia’s new mass readership. In 2003 the government-controlled ORT channel aired an adaptation of an early Fandorin novel, Azazel’, with distinctly ‘high-brow’ tendencies. Each ‘chapter’ begins with a folding book-page featuring a tasteful, stylized drawing which melts into ‘real-life’ action, enabling the serial to tap into not only the nostalgia for literary classics (the hero and heroine are called Erast and Liza, after Karamzin’s eighteenth-century sentimental tale, Poor Liza), but also the longing to reconstitute the values of the period to which the classics belong. In ORT’s film about the making of Azazel’, Fandorin’s moral probity is contrasted with the violent cynicism of Danila, the (anti)hero of Aleksei Barabanov’s post-Soviet gangster movie Brother (Brat) (1997) and its sequel, Brother 2 (Brat 2) (1999) to which Fandorin is the antidote. The serial is punctuated by old love songs linked tenuously to the action, but evoking an idealized image of the time. In keeping with ORT’s efforts to construct from Fandorin a new national mythology, the final scene of the novel in which Fandorin totters around St Petersburg, drunk, following Liza’s death, is omitted from the adaptation which ends with Fandorin lying, corpse-like, face down. Moreover, the serial’s title refers to a pseudo-masonic organization bent on achieving world domination, a plot thwarted by Fandorin who works for the Ministry of Home Affairs’s Third Department, demonized in revolutionary discourse as an instrument of tsarist repression. World revolution as a Jewish–Masonic conspiracy, an article of faith among many Russian nationalists, is thus lightly intimated in the ‘innocent’ context of an adaptation of a feted literary star. To reinforce the serial’s appeal to Russia’s nationalistic establishment, the numerous English cultural references (much of the action takes place in Akunin’s knowledgeably reconstructed London) are omitted. What of the relationship between post-Soviet television and high literary culture proper? Empirical evidence tells a sadly familiar story. In a survey conducted in 2001 in the provincial centre of Ekaterinburg, 71 per cent of respondents said that they read less because of television (a trend exacerbated by the lack of time available to hard-pressed ordinary people in the new Russia).6 Television schedules from the 1990s confirm the impression conveyed by traditionalists the world over that, swamped by trashy US imports, talk shows and Latin American soaps, the medium is at the forefront of ‘dumbed-down’ global culture. In order to counter the dumbing-down effect, in 1997 a group of intellectuals established with Eltsin’s blessing a culture channel, Channel K (Kul’tura) with a schedule of programmes devoted to (primarily Russian) high culture. Writers like Tatiana Tolstaia and Viktor Erofeev have their own discussion shows. Classical concerts and repeats of old Soviet ekranizatsii abound. The schedule is punctuated by ‘Cultural News’ broadcasts which,

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by mimicking standard news bulletins, promote a parallel world in which the vulgarities of war and disaster are displaced by a value system from a more genteel age. This reveals how out-of-kilter Channel K is. The fact that it aims, in the vocabulary of its fans, to provide a cultural ‘fortress’ amidst a sea of global trash indicates the paradoxical bind within which it is tied.7 Channel K is an anti-television television channel, using the camera as a passive means to record and transmit culture in its ‘true’ form (the concert, the play, the pontificating writer), rather than attempting to exploit the potentials of television as an art form in its own right.8 Polls confirm that Channel K viewers are restricted to a segment of the intelligentsia whose use of television, apart from its function as an empty receptacle for the arts, is restricted mainly to ‘serious’ documentaries and the odd subversive comedy.9 Predictions of the death of literature are undoubtedly premature. But it has faced a stiff challenge from the visual turn that has characterized the global age. In Russia’s case the shifting balance of power carries an acutely ideological load, since the Word has been central to the nation’s sense of identity, and since, in Russia, the camera has been perceived as a Western intrusion. This impression is reinforced by the alien rhetoric of commercialism that has accompanied Russia’s latest global import. What we are interested in is the point of encounter between Russian literary culture and its visual other as a generator of cultural meaning. As in the logocentric nineteenth century, that point of encounter was the realist novel, so on the threshold of the visually oriented twenty-first century the borderline is to be found within television. Underlying my argument will be the notion that an intra-televisual word–image border serves as the flashpoint for Russia’s new confrontation with Western commercialism. Moreover, just as the peripheral nature of photography’s presence within Russian literary realism was deceptive, so the newly re-sited literary culture’s influence on post-Soviet television is all the greater for being dissolved within a sea of electronic imagery. The literary culture concerning me is not that of Channel K’s sequestrated artefacts, texts transposed unaltered into an alien environment, but one which has mutated in order to accommodate itself to that environment. The ‘texts’ I analyse belong to specifically televisual genres, rather than literary fictions adapted for the screen. I aim to show that, in acting upon the television culture by which it is absorbed, literature becomes the focus of post-Soviet Russia’s response to globalization, and the basis for an emergent post-Soviet Russian identity.

Literature as translation code The notion that global television necessarily entails Western cultural domination is rejected by two groupings: (i) scholars for whom globalization transcends traditional East/West divisions; and (ii) those who suggest that non-Western societies adapt universal forms to local histories, generating hybridized counter-cultures.10 The debate focuses on programming in

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Western Europe, or in the post-colonial nations, but includes Eastern Europe and former communist countries struggling to articulate an identity aligned with, yet distinct from, Western democracy, and simultaneously to shed the communist ideology in whose shadow they lived for so long. Thus, Slavko Splichal investigates television’s role in developing a civic culture for East-Central Europe (Splichal 1994). Colin Sparks examines the political implications of the fall of communism for the national media of Eastern Europe (Sparks 1998). John Downing looks at how power shifts in Transition economies affect the communications media.11 Apart from Eliot Borenstein’s analysis of Russian television’s ‘marketing of melodrama’ during the MMM Financial Pyramid campaign (Borenstein 1999), the study of non-news programming remains, as Downing claims, a ‘lacuna’ in research on this region (Downing 1996: 86).12 Yet for three reasons, when looking at global television’s impact on cultural identity, a process to which light entertainment broadcasting makes a vital contribution, Russia represents a special case. First, the seventy-year Bolshevik experiment gives Russia, with its dominant position in the communist hierarchy, a perspective on cultural imperialism unique among East European countries. Consequently the psychological break represented by the Soviet Union’s collapse was traumatic for Russia in a way in which it was not for Eastern Europe. Earlier, symbolic previews of the shockwaves that rippled through Russia in 1991 (the furore over the siting of the first McDonalds restaurant opposite Pushkin’s statue) did not prepare people for the proliferation of cultural forms which had hitherto represented the epitome of degeneracy. Second, Russia habitually defines its identity against that of a homogenized West. The very concept of ‘the West’ is traceable to nineteenth-century Russian philosophical definitions of an alternatively idealized and demonized ‘other’.13 Russian history has developed through schisms and realignments with the West. The equation of globalization with Western imperialism thus acquires particular force in a post-Soviet context. Third, there is Russia’s powerful literary orientation. The rage provoked by the McDonalds sign was due to the affront it represented to the literary figurehead of Russian national identity. Thus the clash of East and West represented by globalized TV’s arrival in Russia is above all a clash between traditional logocentrism and the mass-mediated image. This chapter links the television–literature interface to two issues: (i) how Russian television assimilated to its own cultural paradigms the Western genres and programmes by which it was inundated after 1991; and (ii) how this phenomenon has influenced the development of a post-Soviet Russian self. My examples are generally from light entertainment broadcasts recorded between 1999 and 2001 on NTV, until lately Russian TV’s most independent channel.14 I begin by examining relations between foreign and domestic programming within the context of Raymond Williams’s notion that the basic televisual unit of meaning shifts from the discrete text to ‘a flow in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this

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sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose … the real “broadcasting” ’ (Williams 1974: 90). Thus, juxtapositions, contrasts and similarities amongst and between the programmes within the television schedule (repeats of Soviet broadcasts; Western imports; new post-Soviet programmes) form a ‘master-text’ according to which audiences interpret their viewing experience. Modifying Williams’s ‘flow’ concept with more recent television theory and blending it with a similarly updated version of John Fiske’s theory of television culture, I then examine how individual programmes have internalized meanings generated within the post-Soviet televisual flow. I use this as a platform from which to examine the assimilation by post-Soviet television of new generic forms marked as Western, paying attention to the ways in which such forms have been transformed by indigenous viewing modes. My investigation continues to be informed by Mitchell’s and Lotman’s word–image theories. What we are dealing with here, however, is the mutual conversion not of text and image but of one synthetic verbal–imagic discourse (that of Western television) into another (that of post-Soviet television) – a complex process with an intercultural aspect to it. Beneath the overarching word–image paradigm I therefore deploy a second model derived from Lotman’s semiotic explication of intercultural dialogue. Lotman describes such dialogue as a four-stage process by which one culture reprocesses the texts of another. It is at this level that traditional Russian notions of a homogenized West are activated, combined with reinterpretations of a similarly homogenized Soviet past and images of a revalorized, pre-revolutionary Russia. Lotman’s theory was influenced by Bakhtinian dialogism with its emphasis on responsiveness to the word (text, image) of the other. This implies that Western forms are transformed even as they are absorbed. Precisely because television’s centralized production modes incline it towards monopolism, Western broadcasts do not ‘flood’ the Russian ether, but are selected to generate meanings independent of the baggage with which they arrive. Moreover, to talk about a heterogeneous mix of foreign broadcasts as a Western influx is to talk about the phenomenon in Russian terms – those of a homogenized West put to work in an ideological field very different from the one in which the broadcasts originated. In Lotman’s terms, what Bakhtin refers to as reaccentuation of the word of the other (Bakhtin 1981: 293–4) arises from the transposition of messages articulated within one code into those of another. For that transposition to occur, a translation code must mediate between ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’ (Lotman 1990: 11–19). It is, I argue, literary culture which provides the translation code for Russian television’s reception of Western texts, shaping the conceptions of ‘Westernness’ and ‘New Russianness’ it generates. Here, as throughout this book, ‘literary culture’ designates not fixed practices performed by a stable group (writers, critics, officials of the high culture ‘industries’), but a relational construct, a value which shifts from context to

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context, may be accorded to activities that in other contexts lack this value, and is thus constructed on the basis of its changing relationship with the non-literary. This is an important distinction, since I contend that postSoviet television foregrounds the value of literariness (without necessarily citing literary texts), even while deploying overtly visual, Western forms. This confirms Mitchell’s insistence that verbal and visual texts are syncretic in nature, each combining aspects of word and image in varying degrees of tension. To appreciate why post-Soviet television asserts literary values in its outward disposition towards the Western cultural influx, we must recall that Russia’s literary orientation took on a particular ideological force during the Soviet period. From Lenin onwards, ‘print culture’, and, in particular, the Russian literary canon, became what Stephen Lovell calls the ‘main transmitter and emblem’ of ‘culturedness’ (kul’turnost’) – the artificial Soviet middle-brow culture manufactured in order to impose ‘a standard of civilized behaviour and a particular set of social skills’ which would enable the proletariat to acquire the know-how to run a modern state (Lovell 2000: 14–21). Lovell suggests that kul’turnost’ succeeded in conflating the values and relative homogeneity of a bourgeois, educated class with the scale of a mass public (Lovell 2000: 16). In the post-Soviet period, the residue of kul’turnost’ is uniquely well served to manage the accommodation of mass Western forms to native cultural paradigms, without invoking the negative connotations associated with communist ideology. For this reason, I stress that high art/mass culture relations in Russia remain different from those obtaining in the West, where televisual (and other cultural) output is targeted at clearly differentiated ‘high art’, ‘middle-brow’ and ‘mass’ markets. However, awareness of the increasingly uneasy co-existence of ‘literary’ and ‘mass cultural’ values in post-Soviet programming is reflected in a tendency to require ‘high’ literary elements within single broadcasts to perform a metacommentary on their ‘low’ cultural counterparts. Also important is the myth – central to the concept of kul’turnost’ as it developed under communism – of the Soviet nation as the ‘best-read people on earth’ (Lovell 2000: 22) and this provided post-Soviet television with a further motivation for exploiting literary culture to assert values independent from those articulated within imported Western genres, yet untainted by association with outdated Marxist dogmas (hence the high literary register of several post-Soviet game-shows). Via its function as translation code, literary culture in the present usage corresponds to a paradigm of attributes which draw on the general verbal principles articulated by Mitchell (time, linearity, abstraction and difference), but which are by no means exclusively literary: ‘high’ discourse registers and modalities, narrative and metatextual techniques, orientations towards multivalency and irony, examples of theatrical ‘stagings’, paraliterary themes, references to canonic writers. In the context of its inclusion within television formats of marked Western origins, the paradigm articu-

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lates values meaningful only by reference to the image-centred values which are filtered through it, but laying the ground, via this transcoding process, for a distinctive post-Soviet television culture. Mitchell’s word–image threshold asserts itself in two key senses: (i) that of literature’s transgression from print culture into television; and (ii) that of the way in which literature in televisual form transforms the global imagery of the quiz-show, the talk-show etc., into generic hybrids reliant on the narrativity and distancing capacities of verbal discourse. Literature’s related ability to maintain parallel, even opposing, meanings enables television to negotiate the relationships of Soviet, pre-Soviet and Western identities (the ease with which kul’turnost’ can be projected back into the nineteenth century is a factor here). In this context Slavoj ¯i¿ek’s approaches to otherness will be invoked to explore the implications for post-Soviet identity. First, though, a brief insight into post-Soviet light entertainment.

The schedule as flow A survey of Post-Soviet television programming conducted in 2000 over nine issues of the TV schedule Seven Days (Sem’ dnei) yielded 1,555 broadcasts of Western origin, of which 1,119 were serials and 436 were feature films (with a roughly equal spread across the various channels). A focused analysis of the period 14–15 February 2000 revealed that, out of 300 scheduling slots, thirty-five were given to US programming, six to Latin American programmes, five each to France and the UK, four to Germany, three to Canada, two each to Poland and Denmark and one each to Yugoslavia, India and Italy. A quarter (65) were of foreign origin, but if the amount of airtime is taken into account, the figure is above 50 per cent. I turn first to the meaning-generating potential of the TV schedule-asflow. Successors to Raymond Williams have corrected flaws in his original concept. Ron Lembo asks: ‘Does the continual flow of programming always work in the service of normativity’ (Lembo 2000: 69). And John Fiske argues that we must distinguish between (i) the televisual flow planned by the channels to influence the scope of meanings available to audiences, and (ii) the televisual flow as unplanned, audience-driven associative meanings generated when juxtapositions and repetitions in programming schedules intersect meaningfully with the concerns of everyday life over which programmers have no control. Far from inducing passivity, avers Fiske, and because it functions as a stream into and out of which viewers dip at will, television is unique in the level of indeterminacy it encourages through this second mode of flow and provides a locus for the production of counternormative meanings (Fiske 1987: 15). The two modes enter a symbiotic relationship. From the Russian programming policy-makers’ viewpoint, Latin American broadcasts are given prominence owing to their cheapness and the high ratings their escapist plots enjoy among their hard-pressed audiences. But the cult status

162 Televising the word acquired by Mexican soaps like Just Maria (Prosto Mariia) and Tropical Girl (Tropikanka) which foster identification with a non-Russian other who is both exotic and Western, yet, like Russia, an aspiring member of the capitalist world order, exceeded the programmers’ expectations. As Viktor Pelevin’s Chapaev and Pustota intimates, these programmes took on a mythological function which itself became subject to central manipulation.15 A bumper three-programme edition of Tropical Girl was scheduled by the official channel ORT on 2 July 1996 to persuade voters to stay at home to vote for Eltsin in the presidential run-off the following day. The ploy was based on knowledge that uncommitted voters needed a reason not to retreat to their dachas. Genres are more than sets of formal conventions. As Fiske reminds us, they each structure the world differently, soaps, for example, centring on domestic issues, detective thrillers favouring the urban, the masculine and the marginal (Fiske 1987: 215–23). For the post-Soviet viewer, this helps generate paradigmatic links (the perception of groupings and similarities amongst disparately placed programmes) with crucial consequences for the way in which the West is represented. For example, the USA and Britain are clearly favoured sources of crime thrillers, whilst Latin America is a major provider of soaps. Within the audience-driven televisual flow, such paradigmatic patterns encourage a ‘de-homogenization’ of the generic Western other. The US becomes marked as fast-moving and masculine, Mexico as home-oriented and feminine. This stereotyped subdivision is also satirized in Chapaev and Pustota in which the supremely feminine heroine of Just Maria and Terminator’s Arnold Scharzenegger enact in Moscow an apocryphal romance on a phallicized US warplane (Pelevin 1996: 44–58). Meanings resulting from the perception of paradigmatic similarities amongst programmes are balanced by syntagmatic meanings resulting from juxtapositions between programmes as foreign broadcasts enter the syntax of the receptor culture’s televisual flow. Again, we must distinguish viewergenerated meanings arising out of random juxtapositions in the schedule from effects attributable to programming policies such as the ‘tent-poling’ and ‘hammocking’ techniques familiar to Western television designed to ensure that key audiences are retained throughout prime time.16 Throughout 2000, the pan-European NTV crime thriller Eurocop (Evrokop) was scheduled before the domestic crime documentary Criminal (Kriminal). The fiction/fact juxtaposition, common in Western schedules, manufactures a mythical space in which the actions of real policemen acquire the heroic properties of their fictional partners, and the latter become tainted with documentary authenticity. The most significant televisual flow effect on post-Soviet television is the viewer-generated set of meanings arising from the coexistence of Soviet repeats and Western imports. Of the 300 slots in our survey, at least thirty were occupied by domestic programmes produced before 1991 and inserted into the schedule in a haphazard manner. In the NTV listings for 2–3 May

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2000, the American Superman was followed by a Soviet war film one day, and preceded the next by a 1984 Soviet film about a rural doctor. On May 4, NTV peak-time viewing included a post-Soviet mafia thriller, followed first by a documentary about the legendary Soviet comic, Gennadii Khazanov, then by the 1992 US film White Sands. John Ellis stresses that Williams’s idea of the flow of televisual broadcasts should be replaced by one of a flux of segments whose boundaries cut across those of discrete broadcasts and include the commercials and continuity sequences between programmes (Ellis 1992: 118). The blurring of internal boundaries between texts resulting from the horizontal effects of the televisual flow’s syntax (emphasized in Russia by the lack of marked transitions between programmes) is matched by a vertical blurring of boundaries between television and its surrounding contexts characteristic of other ‘lowcultural’ forms like pop music. Thus, television repeats highlight memories of the situations in which the programmes were first broadcast. In the case of re-viewings of Soviet classics, the dramatic post-1991 changes evoke particularly strong associations (nostalgia, relief, regret). But they also reinvoke as part of the same emotive context original Soviet antagonism to Western decadence. Haphazard juxtapositions acquire strong semiotic motivations. A patriotic war film casts a retroactive shadow over the ‘frivolous’/liberating (depending on the viewer) American sci-fi fantasy it follows, just as a Hollywood epic contaminates the comic classics that succeed it, highlighting the hardships/security of their time of making, exaggerating their ‘pastness’. Such affective meanings are omitted in the accounts of theorists like Fiske, who, as Lembo points out, focus on how people orient themselves to normative power and whose analyses consequently remain ‘unnecessarily abstract’ (Lembo 2000: 68–9). August 1991 is the paradigmatic centre of the post-Soviet televisual flow in both its affective and its normative aspects. It is also cited constantly in the syntagmatic juxtapostions – foreseen and unforeseen – created by programming policies. Consequently, television’s grounding in the contemporary is displaced by a polarized temporality of future/past. Soviet broadcasts refer invariably to the future by which their culture of origin was destroyed, Western imports to the nostalgic/dark past on whose eradication their presence in the schedule depends.

Internalizations of the Soviet/post-Soviet divide The ‘1991 effect’ also fulfils a structuring function within individual domestic programmes such as a category of broadcast based on old clips. Thus an NTV programme, Great Parents (Bol’shie roditeli), features individuals with parents prominent during the Soviet era. The logo – a black statue accompanied by large red lettering – connotes the monumentalist culture which the offspring comment upon from their position of hindsight, structuring the rift between pre-Fall and post-Fall, offspring and parent, into the

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broadcast’s very purpose. Another NTV ‘Retro-TV’ regular called Ships Called Into Our Harbour (V nashu gavan’ zakhodili korabli) is dedicated to old songs. Its trailer and opening sequence incorporate black and white footage framed by computer graphics, inviting us to read the contemporary and Soviet eras together through the 1991 rift. In ORT’s The Old Television Set Remembers (Staryi televizor vspominaet), interviews with Soviet stars are conducted against the background of flickering black-and-white televisions. Guests are intermittently framed within a television set and interviews begin with a typewritten dossier, scrolled down an inset screen. Here, Western-style graphics facilitate the preservation of Soviet culture. Through split-screen metatextualizations of the act of TV-watching, viewers identify themselves simultaneously as Westernized, image-literate sophisticates, and members of a privileged group able to recognize the indices of the Soviet past to which they also belong. Television is a key identity-shaper, providing idealized ‘others’ with whom we align ourselves. For Russians, the nostalgized personae of old Soviet programmes and the glamorous stars of Western imports fulfil the function of a temporal and a spatial ‘other’ respectively.17 The Old Television Set consciously internalizes this viewer-generated meaning, illustrating the dialectical nature of the relationship between viewers and programmemakers in post-Soviet Russia. The Soviet experience, a ubiquitously available interpretation code, is overtly exploited within individual broadcasts where it is often reflected in the language used. In one report of an August 2000 NTV documentary called Profession-Reporter (Professiia-Reporter), the Chelsea Flower Show was presented in a tone of ironic bemusement at the English upper-class eccentric’s desire to manufacture the overgrown naturalness which, to quote the reporter, ‘any Russian dacha owner achieves without even trying’. Of special amusement was the fact that some displays were constructed by dayrelease prisoners, prompting references to ‘the English Gulag’. The liberation from Soviet ideology’s obsession with demonizing the West enables the reporter to employ that ideology as the tool of a subtler critique. Repressed features of the discarded Soviet past are projected onto the Western other, who provides the model for a revitalized self now able to present itself as that model’s apotheosis.

The domestication of Western genres The manipulated encounter of Western and Soviet meanings has culminated in new domesticated formats of entire TV genres. In their Russian versions, the various formats retain the worldviews characteristic of their genre, but in a transformed context. Deliberately anglicized titles stimulate wordplay mocking the Western sources of these genres. In NTV’s Dog-Show – Me and My Dog (Dog-shou – Ia i moia sobaka), invited guests enter their pets for a distinctly uncompetitive (non-Western) game testing the guests’ general (and

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canine) knowledge alongside the dogs’ skills. The title is a corruption of the Russian term for another recently imported genre – the ‘tok-shou’. ‘Tok’ is substituted by the phonetically similar ‘Dog’ – a pun which contradicts the show’s downmarket niche by relying upon viewers’ knowledge of the English word ‘dog’. The playful title, however, is accompanied by presenters attired in a style that reflects the premium placed on Western-style informality. The NTV schedule for 2000 contained examples of other post-glasnost genres: the offbeat news satire, the dramatized crime investigation, the Emergency Services documentary, the ‘Don’t Try This At Home’ show, the ‘Candid Camera’ show, and the youth pop programme. The list divides into three categories: (i) Western broadcasts transposed wholesale; (ii) Western programmes translated into a Russian context but with generic features intact; and (iii) Western genres transformed for the Russian market. To the first category belong O Lucky One! (O schastlivchik!), identical with its model Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and Puppets (Kukly), inspired by Britain’s Spitting Image. The second category includes Kriminal (based on the Crimewatch genre), Emergency Services (Sluzhba spaseniia), modelled on Dial 999, and the amateur daredevil-celebrating Extreme Situations (Ekstremal’nye situatsii). The third category includes shows possessing distinctive traits amounting to a transformation of the original genre. The last category has the most bearing on the problem of representing the West, since it best facilitates the re-packaging of the original model necessary for the extraction of a domesticated ‘Westernness’ ready to be combined with native traits. While the first and second categories seem to confirm the centrality of light-entertainment forms to global imperialism, this fails to recognize how each new cultural ‘utterance’ is inflected with the speaker’s values, and with the anticipated audience response. The fact that Puppets appeared on Russia’s first independent station meant that its domestic impact differed from the indiscriminate savagery of Spitting Image. Puppets was either celebrated as a welcome addition of ‘Western free speech’ or condemned as foreign imbecilism. Differences between copy and original even emerge in O Lucky One!; the questions are of a consistently ‘higher cultural’ register than those dominating the Western versions, suggesting a compatibility of capitalism with Soviet intellectualism out of keeping with the populism of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Moreover, a controlled format cannot alter linguistic micro-genres. In an October 2000 O Lucky One! show, a contestant celebrates the national holiday on which the show is going out with an oratorical burst reminiscent of the traditional drinking toast, instantly domesticating the show’s Western ‘feel’.18 Post-Soviet game shows possess multiple semantic layers. The title of How Many Nice Girls There Are (Kak mnogo devushek khoroshikh) recalls a Stalin-era song from Aleksandrov’s first musical, Happy Guys (Veselye rebiata). The show ‘Sovietizes’ a Western genre while inflecting the Sovietization with ambivalence and retaining isolated Western markers. It pits women against each other in ‘feminine’ pursuits, some selected for their

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Russian flavour (in a July 2000 broadcast the contestants had to create rhyming folk quartets), others of Western orientation – dancing to rock classics, throwing balls at English balloons inscribed with ‘I love you’. The girls are given flowers rather than points, and the host closes by celebrating the fact that ‘there are so many nice girls in our country’. The programme carries a post-communist edge, retaining the (now nostalgized) Stalinist view of femininity, yet ‘ironizing’ it through the game’s Western trappings.

Literature as mediator For two reasons literary culture is well placed to mediate between Western imports, Soviet Retro and post-Soviet innovations. First, the multi-layered inversions typified by How Many Nice Girls are ideally encompassed within a literary paradigm with its propensity towards multivalency. Second, Soviet Russia’s logocentric culturedness is one of the few ‘untarnished’ qualities of the communist era that can be redeployed within the present to differentiate the new Russian self from the foreign model underlying it. Literature often performs its mediating function in the form of hidden paraliterary elements contained in popular formats, as with Riazanov’s The Irony of Fate whose poetic misfit-hero establishes literary culture as the forceful difference disrupting the monotony of alienating post-Soviet commercialism (see Chapter 6). When Irony was first shown, the literary emphasis served as a marker of comforting sameness; the film’s scruffy hero appeared closer to the people than his well-heeled bureaucrat-rival. Irony’s continuing ability to achieve this blend of sameness and difference reflects its status as a post-Soviet nostalgia object. Located in a halcyon time, the paraliterary features now turn from a marker of cosy sameness to one of exotic difference. Meanwhile, the bureaucrat’s flickering TVs and French perfumes – earlier a marker of alienating difference – acquire an all-toofamiliar ring, just as Sovietness, once a force of oppressive sameness, mutates into charming difference. Literature is also linked with the beneficial recurrences of oral culture (the drunken bath-house banter in the central episode encapsulates a New Year’s tradition whose repetitions rekindle the aging hero’s unfulfilled passions). The negative repetitions of visual conformity and Soviet convention encounter the revitalizing repetitions of oral tradition. The final twist is that a film about New Year’s ritual itself enters post-Soviet ritual, while the formerly reviled television now fulfils the bathhouse’s bonding function. But the paraliterary mode extends beyond pre-1991 programming. A 1997 TV advert showing a man drinking Coke while telling fairytales to metro travellers had the punch line: ‘Drink a legend’, a paraliterary reference offering a ‘tongue in cheek’ metacommentary on US commercialism. In 1998, ORT used as a silent continuity device a Tiutchev poem about Russia’s spirituality:

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Russia cannot be understood by the mind alone Nor measured by the standard rule Russia has a special standing In her one can only believe. The break in the cacophonous televisual flux equates to Tiutchev’s intuition that Russia lies outside conventional means of expression. Western-style station-logo is recoded as Russian verse, so that literary culture and television remain mutually compatible, and the (Russian) word/(Western) image conflict initiated by their encounter is resolvable in the former’s favour. In 1999, ORT interspersed its programming with a daily countdown to Pushkin’s bicentennial, and a stanza-by-stanza reading of Eugene Onegin, performed by ordinary people. Through the catchphrase ‘Pushkin everyday and forever’, literature’s epic time frames were integrated into the jagged syntax of televisual routine. Pushkin’s value to contemporary culture derives from the fact that the beginnings of the tradition he inaugurated coincide with those of the national self-consciousness which Peter the Great’s Westernizing reforms spawned. But the synthesis of screen image and literary word masks a deep conflict. For when Pushkin enters the play of conformity and difference, his ideological loading shifts as he is incorporated into battles between nationalists and liberals, official and unofficial culture. The 1990 film Sideburns, featuring gangs of pseudo-Pushkins with Pushkinian sideburns bent on eradicating Western decadence, satirizes the misappropriation of a figurehead who now becomes an emblem of mass-produced visual conformity as the literary genius is supplanted by thousands of carbon-copy Western-style hooligans. Pushkin passes from positive, verbal sameness (‘our Pushkin’), through Western difference (the fashion-obsessed gang), to negative, visual sameness (Pushkin as identikit nationalism). The competing meanings attached to Westernness illustrate Bakhtin’s view of referentiality according to which words and concepts are inflected with a myriad past usages and antagonistic voices attempting to secure monologic ownership.

Literature and genre transformation High ‘literary’ modalities mediate between contemporary Western formats and the communist nostalgia encasing them, changing literature’s value from marker of romantic disavowal of convention to one of continuity with the past. They also establish literature as a metacode facilitating commentary on the relationship between traditional culture and popular TV genres. For example, the title of a 1990s ORT talk show, I built a monument to myself (Ia pamiatnik sebe), cites the first line of a Pushkin poem. The studio contains elements of an up-market restaurant and a theatre, the camera frequently panning across the decorated tables from behind, constructing the viewer as a participant in a ritualized event rather than, as in many Western chat shows,

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an onlooker on an intimate encounter between host and guest. Guests are seated on a footlit pedestal and therefore occupy the position of national poet, confirming literature’s role in constructing Russia’s public sphere. In a 1998 interview with the actress Alla Rogovtseva, the programme was divided into three parts covering Rogovtseva’s work on stage and film, and her personal life. The progression enacted a hierarchy, leading from high cultural drama through a cinematic section (closing with a confrontation between Rogovtseva and a caricatured Hollywood director) to her autobiography. The pedestal and the mini-shows enacted between guest and Hollywood star launch a tongue-in-cheek assault on both the trivializing chat show genre and Russian literary pretensions. In a reversal of Ronald McDonald’s affront to Pushkin’s real monument, Hollywood is transformed into a cheap spectacle mocked from the heights of the source of Russia’s literary tradition. Thus, even when the contamination source is not strictly visual, it proves beneficial for the adopting culture to associate it with the realm of spectacle in order to ‘stage’ it from within its own literary framework. However, the fact that the monument is merely a chair on a raised studio platform equally cocks a snook at Russia’s revered literary figurehead. The application of high cultural paradigms to low cultural forms means that imported genres are rapidly transformed into brand new hybrids, such as the ‘concept quiz’ – a classic example of how post-Soviet versions of kul’turnost’ breach the divide between high and mass culture. In such shows, literature’s linear qualities create game formats with narrative components. NTV’s children’s game-show Polundra is set aboard the ship of an eighteenth-century adventurer – a Count Rezanov – whose persona is assumed by the question-master. The contestants shoot at vessels with mock cannons, answering questions of a high-cultural register. The contest is interrupted by an account of Rezanov’s travels which undermines Polundra’s game-show status in favour of the genteel attractions of the historical tale. Finally, the audience is told that the game ‘sets sail’ again in a week. The theatrical staging of the quiz show establishes a critical distance from the competitive instincts the genre celebrates. Based around the post-communist penchant for pre-revolutionary culture, Polundra nevertheless retains Westernizing indices such as the contestants’ American-style sweatshirts emblazoned in English letters. Russia is represented through Western cultural codes in a manner in which neither Russia nor the West remain unchanged. In one NTV game-show, The Haunted House (Dom s privideniiami), concept virtually overrides game. The participants are given elaborate roles, distancing them from the crude game-show mentality. The game is set in a Russian manor house haunted by its nineteenth-century owner, a count, who has concealed the family legacy. The family chosen to take part because they are purportedly the ghost’s descendants must find the treasure by tackling tasks whose completion is rewarded with clues to the treasure’s whereabouts. The family is aided by one of the ghost’s servants, who reports to his master. The game is divided into chapters. The special effects, complete with laughing

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hags and thunderclaps, recall film gothic. But in a deviation from convention, the count converses with viewers about contemporary matters involving witty commentary on differences between then and now. His viewing position before a two-way mirror also places him in an analogous situation to that of the audience, likewise invisible to the contestants, but able to monitor their movements. Thus we, too, view contemporaneity from a nineteenth-century viewpoint, while sharing the contestants’ alienated perspective on the haunted surroundings. The game is conducted as a narrative. After each round the family eats sumptuous nineteenth-century meals, playing both themselves (in their desire to find the treasure) and their Gothic roles. Finally, the count summarizes the ‘story’ and the closing credits refer to the ‘parts’ played. The identities of this typical post-communist family are thus superimposed onto those of their ‘ancestors’, creating a comically idealized pre-revolutionary Russia in communication with its post-communist descendants. The game’s pseudo-literary mode bolsters the pre-revolutionary/post-communist axis central to post-Soviet identity. The Western format and mock gothic narrative are naturalized as inherently post-Soviet, yet originating in prerevolutionary Russia. The nostalgia for old Russia results from the need for homegrown precedents to the recent changes originating in the West.19 In The Haunted House, pre-revolutionary Russia addresses post-communist Russia across the temporal chasm, ensuring that the origins of the competitive urges and the forms in which they are celebrated are displaced from the spatial onto the temporal axis – from the West onto proto-typical, pre-revolutionary Russian capitalism. The Haunted House authenticates its Western feel by grounding it in Russian tradition. This paradox can be accounted for through Lotman’s theory of intercultural dialogue which divides the interaction process into four stages. During Stage One, imported texts ‘keep their strangeness’ within the importing culture and are considered to be ‘of divine origin’ (Lotman 1990: 146). In a post-Soviet context, the cult following acquired by films such as the Terminator series reflects their status amongst young Russians as an embodiment of the ‘divine’ ideal of American masculinity. In Stage Two, imported and domestic texts restructure each other and the new becomes an ‘organic continuation of the old’ (Lotman 1990: 147). Programmes like I Built a Monument and How Many Nice Girls objectify and restructure Western formats via the Pushkin poem (or the Stalin-era song) whose titles they bear, yet Pushkin’s (or Stalin’s) status as the untouchable figurehead of Russian (Soviet) culture is also ‘brought to earth’. With their ostentatious formalities and literariness, the shows represent semi-ironic televisual restagings of traditional Soviet modes of interaction in which competitors are regaled with flowers, not vulgar monetary prizes, and the fetings of popular stars are presented as theatrical performances. In Stage Three, the importing culture assumes that the imported ideas ‘will find their true heartland over here’ (Lotman 1990: 147), as when the

170 Televising the word competitive context of Western game-show culture and mock-gothic film style are reoriginated in nineteenth-century Russian dilettantism. The Haunted House, a concept show which transforms its Western source beyond recognition, also illustrates Lotman’s Stage Four, where imported texts ‘are … dissolved in the receiving culture which begins to produce new texts’ according to ‘an original structural model’ (Lotman 1990: 147).

Television, literariness and the paradoxes of new Russian identity The point at which a culture assimilates the restructuring effects of the imported other is the point at which it articulates a new consciousness of itself. But Slavoj ¯i¿ek reveals the Hegelian contradictions at work in the process when he characterizes the relationship between Renaissance and Classical culture: ‘[T]he Renaissance Zeitgeist had to constitute itself by literally presupposing itself in its … external conditions … it was not sufficient for the new Zeitgeist retrospectively to posit these external conditions (antiquity) as its own; it had to (presup)pose itself as already present in those conditions’ (¯i¿ek 1999: 233–4). We might say that I Built a Monument and Haunted House enable Russia to find its true inner self within those very generic forms which remain its exterior conditions; the (modish, Western) chat show must be truly Russian when actualized via Pushkin, or the tsarist estate. But post-communism’s external conditions are both the spatially exterior Western forms that shape its present and the temporally exterior pre-revolutionary experience which, with its Slavophilism and literary icons, ground its past in distinctly non-Western soil. Post-Soviet Russia finds its entrepreneurial, authentically post-communist self in the authentically Russian other of its tsarist traditions.20 Global forms reinforce the Russian self rather than dilute it by combining heterogeneous imports into an indistinct Westernness templated to perfection during geopolitical isolation, then blended with native tsarist elements. The real ghost that haunts shows reliant on pre-communist nostalgia is that of 70 years of Bolshevism conveniently expunged from memory. Apart from ironically framed retro-TV documentaries, the rare drama set in Soviet times, such as Iron Curtain (Zheleznyi zanaves) which NTV screened in 2000, and the 1950s drama Moscow Windows (Moskovskie okna), shown in 2002, communism tends to be represented in post-Soviet culture via anti-semitism. Although Jewish stereotypes rarely surface on Russian television, the fact that NTV and ORT were formerly controlled by Jewish businessmen (Vladimir Gusinskii and Boris Berezovskii) has encouraged nationalists to view entire channels as representations of Jewishness.21 Despite Berezovskii’s own involvement with ORT, the official channel projected anti-semitic characterizations of the medium as a whole onto its independent rival. When, in June 2000, Gusinskii was arrested for tax evasion, ORT repeatedly cited Gusinskii’s seat on international Jewish organizations. In the interchannel rivalry, NTV

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presents itself as the innovative, Western-oriented channel (it was the first station to corroborate Western reports about atrocities in Chechnia). Open to objectification as the face of the treacherous, cosmopolitan Jewish other, it was nevertheless NTV which generated the most persuasive appropriations of Western televisual forms to post-Soviet identity. The mirror image of Western entrepreneurialism is rootless Jewish cosmopolitanism, which, in the repressions of the (Jewish-dominated) Bolsheviks, also furnishes the nemesis of the expansive Slavic soul. ¯i¿ek explains this paradox as follows: [I]t is not sufficient for the signifier ‘Jew’ to designate [a] series of specific, positive features; one has to accomplish the crucial step further by saying ‘they are like that … because they are Jews.’ The ‘transcendental object’ of Jewishness is precisely that elusive X which ‘makes a Jew into a Jew’, and for which we look in vain among his positive qualities. (¯i¿ek 1999: 237) There is no integration of positive attributes into a coherent whole, but a double-sided logic in which ‘they are greedy, communistic and so Jewish’ and ‘Jewish, therefore communists and greedy Western moneymakers’. As the transcendental ‘X’ exceeding its own predicates, Jewishness resolves the contradictions: ‘It is because he is Jewish that he combines the uncombinable’; likewise the transcendental object of post-Soviet identity (combining market democracy with a seemingly incompatible rootedness in tsarist authoritarianism). The amorphous West is re-fragmented so that the negative features are projected onto Jews, while the positive features are integrated with native traditions. A related technique aimed at authenticating new Russianness involves a version of what Lotman calls the literary ‘intext’. According to Lotman, a text incorporating an image of itself as text fosters the illusion that what lies beyond the internal frame – doubly coded as both part of, yet distinct from, the rest of the text – must correspond to external reality: ‘[t]he dual codedness of those portions of the text identified with artistic conventionality results in the main space of the text being perceived as “real” ’ (Lotman 1992: 156). Lotman’s examples are drawn from high culture (Velasquez’s ‘Las Meninas’, Hamlet). However, if we substitute ‘authentically Western’ for ‘authentically real’, the notion describes post-Soviet television’s complex delineations of (Russian) self and (Western) other in which the act of delineation inverts the values attached to ‘Russian’ and ‘Western’, self and other. Thus a star enhances his (New Russian) credentials by distinguishing himself from a falsely Western (Old Soviet) persona. A July 2000 broadcast of the NTV programme Impossible Twins (Nevozmozhnye bliznetsy) profiled a pop singer styled ‘Mike’ (Maik). The lyrics of Mike’s latest song depict a youth whose speech consists of three swearwords. The youth is given the traditional name Vova and the attributes of the archetypal Russian layabout (he

172 Televising the word visits prostitutes and drinks port wine) combined with those connoting Westward aspirations (the song is accompanied by a video depicting a modishly attired Mike). During the follow-up interview, Mike insists that the youth is based on observations in Moscow. A satire on falsely Westernized youth tied to Russianness in its negative aspect spawns an authentically Westernized persona associated with Russia in its positive aspect. Yet the self-deprecating adoption of the English name ‘Mike’ indicates a further demarcation in which the shadowy figure behind Mike (whose real identity remains unknown) transcends the contradiction ‘Western so not Russian/Western so Russian’. The imported ideal ‘finds its true heartland’ in the persona of the New Russian youth, demonstrating that, at Stage Three of Lotman’s intercultural dialogue, communication with the imported other (the image of Western youth) is transformed into communication with the importing self (every layer of Mike’s persona corresponds to an already existing Russian type). Post-Soviet television’s ability to adapt strategies drawn from high culture is matched by its sensitivity to culture in its ‘mass’ form. Kirill Razlogov has remarked upon the recent boom in literary thrillers with an indigenous flavour (Razlogov 1998). Television has rapidly responded to this trend. Bourgeois’s Birthday (Den’ rozhdeniia Burzhuia), adapted from a popular novel by the Ukrainian writer Iurii Rogoza aired on NTV in 2000. Identified as an NTV flagship, the series was sponsored by Gusinskii’s Mostbank. The title refers to the nickname of the hero (‘Bourgeois’ – ‘Burzhui’), a successful entrepreneur collaborating with an American businessman and opposed by mafiosi. On his birthday, his Euro-chic mansion is burgled, and he and his girlfriend subsequently fend off various assaults and intrigues. The struggle between genuine entrepreneur and corrupt mafiosi is also the struggle of Mother Russia to give birth to the New Russian citizen.22 Appropriately, the hero visits his mother, portrayed as a homely peasant bemused by the mobile phones of her son’s entourage. The visits acquire symbolic motivation when the businessmen engage in traditional pursuits like accordion-playing, confirming that the origins of the newly Westernized bourgeoisie lie in Russia’s heartlands. The name ‘Burzhui’ was originally an abusive corruption of the term ‘bourgeois’, popular during the Bolshevik era. In re-inflecting it with positive new meaning, Gusinskii’s channel responds to the entire legacy of the regime whose death throes became the birth pangs of NTV itself. The villains are drink-besotted Soviet avatars (when one of them joins the side of legal enterprise, he refuses drinks offered him by his former associates, talking of the need to adapt to the ‘new life’). Burzhui’s partner, a genial American, is blackmailed after sleeping with Burzhui’s sister. It is the suavely Europeanized Burzhui who rescues the situation, proving that entrepreneurism is no longer an American prerogative. An ill-defined Europe (with origins in Mother Russia) emerges as the positive incarnation of a Russified (and so genuine) West, and a counterpoint to the devalued American model.

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The reappropriative mechanisms analysed throughout this chapter reconfirm the centrality of literary modes to post-Soviet television. Transubstantiated into televisual form, but drawing sustenance from the indigenous notion of kul’turnost’, literature shapes the ideological issue around which post-Soviet society (like its Soviet and pre-revolutionary antecedents) revolves: the representation of, and response to, the Western forms by which Russia is habitually influenced. Through the ironizing effects of the attributes to which it accords value, the narrativity with which it overwrites image-centred popular genres, and the high cultural values it maintains within this ‘low cultural’ medium, literature’s spectral presence interacts with that other ghost in the televisual machine – the Soviet era which it also dominated. It thus furnishes a post-Soviet take on the idea that local identities are consolidated rather than eroded by proliferating global forms. Post-Soviet television demonstrates the truth of Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that cultures have ‘powerful assimilative mechanisms … that work like enzymes to change the ideological composition of foreign bodies’ (Greenblatt 1992: 4). Our analysis reveals neither an inversion, nor a subversion, of Western signification modes, nor a hybrid admixture of ‘local’ to ‘global’, but rather a nexus in which Western images are homogenized, refragmented and reintegrated with those of the Soviet past and its pre-revolutionary precursor so as to articulate mythic meanings amounting to more than the sum of the nexus’s constituent strands.23 Despite the parlous conditions in which they are produced, these meanings will haunt the future beyond the post-Soviet era with all its historical transience. Paradoxically, therefore, they cast a pall of doubt over the viability of the very term ‘postSoviet’ for the present. The progression of chapters in this study has taken us ever further from literature proper; indeed, ostensibly to the end of the line of Russian literary pre-eminence. In my final chapter, I transform line into circle by returning to literary prose, and to a text whose primary antecedent is the spectre that has haunted this study throughout: Dostoevskii’s The Idiot.

9

In place of a conclusion Television, the end of literature and Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’

Introduction Studies of television audience reception strategies differentiate between ‘realistic’ approaches, in which viewers accept the terms of the programme maker’s representational contract, and ‘metatextual’ strategies in which audiences ‘see through’ such contracts and view in a ‘knowing’ manner (e.g. Morley 1992, Lembo 2000). Succoured by decades of healthy scepticism towards the representational distortions foisted on them during the Soviet period, and by resentment at alien Western images to which they have been subjected since 1991, Russian viewers have readily embraced metatextual knowingness laced with a cynicism rarely seen in the West. As the fanfare surrounding the establishment of Channel ‘K’ demonstrates, the intelligentsia has spearheaded attempts to mark a critical distance from the vulgar banalities of the talk show and the soap opera. None the less, as we saw, literary paradigms have increasingly infiltrated post-Soviet popular television, facilitating an engaged metatextualism akin to what Morley terms the ‘negotiated viewer position’ (Morley 1992: 99) for an intelligentsia operating increasingly on the borders between traditional Russian logocentrism and contemporary visual culture. The Akunin adaptation’s success with the intelligentsia confirms this trend. This engaged metatextualism is to be distinguished from Lembo’s notion of a knowingness founded on intimacy with popular television’s generic conventions. It is, rather, a metatextualism of the outside, one which still perceives Western television forms as strange, alien, deprived of the grounding in the network of everyday references and familiar intertexts available to Western viewers. On the other hand, this very absence renders Western TV forms in Russia open to the kind of playful manipulations and re-mythologizing gestures which would simply not occur to Western viewers. They provide ideal ground for a writer like Viktor Pelevin, who thrives on the borders of Western popular culture and the Russian literary tradition, and whose postmodernist games have, from his first novel, Omon Ra, onwards, possessed an unmistakable mythic subtext. Nowhere is this more true than in his last novel, Generation ‘P’.

In place of a conclusion 175 Generation ‘P’ is all about television. Its hero works in television advertising and the novel concludes with him reduced to his own televisual image. It abounds in, and is structured around, descriptions of images intended for television, just as The Idiot is centred around a single photoportrait. However, whereas Dostoevskii exploits the encounter with photography to inaugurate the Russian literary canon, Pelevin’s encounter seems to spell the end of the line for that canon. This is one reason why we offer this chapter in place of a conclusion, for the novel that it treats itself apparently marks a definitive end: that of Russian literature. But Generation ‘P’ is a fiction of the end in a more straightforward sense. Like The Idiot, it is saturated with apocalyptical references.1 Like The Idiot, Generation ‘P’ associates apocalypse with ultimate meanings but, again, with a difference. For Pelevin writes in the knowledge that the event which preoccupied Dostoevskii throughout much of his life has already occurred twice: once over 80 years ago when revolution first brought Russia to an end, and again in 1991. Pelevin factors this dual ending into his approach to ultimate meaning. My thesis is that Generation ‘P’ is a metafiction which interrogates the status of the literary tradition with which it is allied in the face of the threat to it posed by the commodified camera image. Viewing the word–image relationship through the prism of Russian eschatological consciousness, it dismantles the opposition between the terms, simultaneously exposing the self-negating logic of the modern commodity and creating space for the reanimation of the moribund literary word. I pursue this thesis by linking the two sets of issues outlined: the literary renditions of television images dominating the topology of Generation ‘P’, and the novel’s concern with apocalypse in all its manifestations (apocalypse as the end of the world; apocalypse as the end of Russian literature; apocalypse as the precondition for final meaning). Dostoevskii is central to this project. For I read the eschatological subtext that animates Dostoevskii’s oeuvre, together with its messianic corollary (the notion that Beauty, in the form of the Russian Word, is destined to save the World from apocalypse), as definitive of the literature whose passing haunts Pelevin’s novel. Thus the dual ending signalled by 1991 (the ‘end of the end’) marks the demise of the motivating force driving the Russian literary canon. Furthermore, the dual apocalypse coincides with the advent in Russia of the commodified image which contains within it this double ending. The crisis in meaning occasioned by the rise of commodified images (a theme prevalent in Western postmodernist theory) thus receives a special twist in its Russian manifestation, one which indicates the effects of divergent temporalities on intercultural communication. The questions that Generation ‘P’ addresses are the questions that have dominated this study (a further reason for presenting it as our conclusion): how can literature continue in the face of the ubiquitous influence of the camera (and now the digital) image?; what happens to singular essences and final meanings in light of the victory over originality of the infinitely

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reproducible copy?; how does literature’s encounter with the camera affect the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘mass’ culture?; what are the implications for Russia’s perpetually fraught relationship with its Western other? My approach necessitates a return to the notion of ekphrasis which I continue to interpret as the verbal representation and framing of pictures. For, as in Chapter 1, it is at the point at which verbal art encloses and frames the camera image that it attains metatextual awareness of its own limits and of the nature of its meaning-generating potential. In order to place Pelevin’s version of this awareness in the context of the unique temporality of Russian postmodernism, and of the ties binding contemporary aesthetics to the status of the commodity, I draw on the theories of Mikhail Epstein and Slavoj ¯i¿ek respectively.

From literature to anti-literature Pelevin’s hero, Vavilen Tatarskii, belongs to Russia’s ‘Pepsi’ generation, like Coupland’s Generation ‘X’, lacking both roots in the past and future prospects.2 Emulating his peers, Tatarskii begins a paraliterary career, devoting his free time to the creation of ‘eternal poetry’. But then, thanks to perestroika, the USSR ‘improved so much it ceased to exist’, along with eternity which ‘could only exist thanks to government subsidies, or, which is the same thing, as something forbidden by the state’ (Pelevin 1999: 13). Tatarskii becomes a kiosk salesman until he is hired as a copywriter employed to give Russian spins to American brands. He combines his duties as an advertising krietor with mushroom-induced psychedelic travel and Ouija board communications with Che Guevara.3 Guevara announces that a new species, Homo Zapiens (from ‘zapper’), is taking over humanity, whose oral (consume) and anal (disgorge cash) obsessions explain the species’s alternative name, Oranus (Rotozhopie). Armed with Guevara’s prophecy that ‘the end of the world will be a television programme’ (120), Tatarskii reaches the top of the all-powerful conglomerate that broadcasts a simulated reality of politicians and media magnates. Before becoming a super adman, Tatarskii writes his last poem, echoing Dostoevskii’s musings in Crime and Punishment that post-apocalypse eternity could turn out to be a ‘bathhouse with spiders’ (16). High on mushrooms, Tatarskii is led into the ‘Golden Room’, the name of a television programme that begins at 0.00 hr, where he is introduced to an ancient Babylonian ritual conducted by prominent media figures, dedicated to forestalling an apocalypse, and anointing him as the goddess Ishtar’s husband.4 He is anointed with the blood of the canine god Pizdets, currently sleeping in Russia, but whose awakening spells the End, pizdets (in the vulgar, ‘four-letter’ idiom), or, in modern parlance, ‘Game-Over’. To marry Ishtar, whose bodily form consists of the totality of all advertising images, Tatarskii finds new life as a series of video clips, one of which advertises Coca Cola, with Tatarskii as a New Mexico evangelist trampling an empty Pepsi can, citing the biblical verse: ‘God is with the Righteous Generation’.5

In place of a conclusion 177 Through Tatarskii’s path from eternal poet to commercial copywriter of an anti-eternity consisting of endless video clips, Pelevin enacts the end of literature. Tatarskii embodies the fate of the intelligentsia, killed dead by the dollar, Dallas and digital images.6 However, poetic invention survives in his advertising slogans. He adapts a Sprite advert describing the drink as the ‘Un-Cola’ by conjuring up a Russian Ronald McDonald, Nikolai Spraitov, to accompany the slogan ‘Sprite, The Un-Cola for Nikola’ (36). Progressing from literature to anti-literature, he later invents an Ariel washing powder ad based around Shakespeare’s The Tempest (68–9). Generation ‘P’ resembles a televisual anti-novel, interrupted by commercial breaks consisting of elaborate scenarios for adverts, extracts from a marketing handbook, Che Guevara’s tract, and Tatarskii’s ruminations on his mission to market the Russian Idea.7 Eventually, the entire novel emulates a television scenario. As Tatarskii learns that political machinations familiar to him from TV have been scripted by his media company, and that the figures involved are animated models, Pelevin’s narrative merges with the master scenario: Berezovskii’s squinting eyes reflected a frantically working mind. This was exactly how it was written in the scenario: ‘frantically working mind’ and Tatarskii couldn’t even imagine how technology had enabled the animators to achieve such literal exactitude. (Pelevin 1999: 230–1) Pelevin’s obsessive, market-led desire to align his novel with post-Soviet reality attracted criticism.8 However, by acknowledging his awareness that he is a ‘serious’ writer operating in a commercial environment into his novel through meta-level devices, he avoids the charge of crude commercialism. This is illustrated in the Vagrius cover consisting of two blocks of Pepsi and Coke logos separated by an image of Che Guevara wearing a beret sporting the Nike logo. The novel thus appears as a visually packaged commercial product, rather than a product of the spirit. Playing with publishing conventions, the frontispiece reminds us that the names of products and personalities do not refer to authentic market products, but to the projections of ‘trading-political information space’ (‘torgovo-politicheskogo informatsionnogo prostranstva’). The back cover warns us that ‘any thoughts which enter the mind on reading the book constitute an object of authorial rights and unlicensed reflection on them is forbidden’. The language of commercial copyright mutates into that of totalitarian mind control, as the defunct Soviet Union re-emerges within the discourse of the market.

Frames, metatexts and ekphrases Pelevin’s ploy attests to a careful metatextual framing strategy. By packaging his ‘commercialized’ postmodernism in a cover mocking market culture,

178 Televising the word Pelevin frames the commercial moment from a position outside it, gesturing to evade its corrupting influence. The same strategy operates within the novel. The action at the end is framed by the knowledge that the video sequences originate, not with real people, but in a fictional scenario. By comparison with American scenario writers who limit themselves to Clinton’s ‘fellatio in the Oral office’ (‘minet v Oral’nom offise’), Russian scenarists are ‘ten times better … Just look at Eltsin, Ziuganov, Lebed’ (216). Tatarskii, the ex-poet, ends up as a video clip, itself a literary creation. Anticipating the end of Pelevin’s novel, Che Guevara speculates that ‘in the … future books and films will appear whose main content will be a covert eulogy to Coca Cola, and attacks on Pepsi’ (116). Pelevin’s lurches into meta-level activity correspond to Tatarskii’s progress from writer, to copywriter, to market strategist, a role adopted with verve, due to the intellectualizing it requires. Examining a packet of Iava cigarettes depicting the Russian cigarettes superimposed on a bird’s eye view of New York, Tatarskii scribbles in his notebook: The mass media have long sensed the need to counterpose to American pop culture … something healthy and national in flavour … On the other hand … it is necessary to examine the collective impact of all the symbolism in the ‘brand essence’ … And willy-nilly you begin to reflect on the superiority of western propaganda. (Pelevin 1999: 202–3) Tatarskii’s career path expands into a linear sequence Pelevin’s ambiguous stance throughout the novel: the author is – continuously – writer, participator in contemporary visual culture, and distanced commentator upon it.9 The ambiguity of Pelevin’s position on the borders between literary tradition and the consumerism in which he finds himself has a narrative correlative. Tatarskii literally oscillates from positions inside television, the epitome of consumerism, and outside it. When he encounters an ancient Babylonian deity whose face is a brightly blazing fire (148), the vision is explained by a priest as a witnessing of the biblical Gehenna in which sinners are sacrificially burned by the ‘flame of consumption’ within a television set (155). But framing the entire episode is Tatarskii’s realization that the encounter was an example of the delirium tremens familiar to him from the nineteenth-century classics, a Dostoevskian hallucination recalling Ivan Karamazov’s meeting with the devil (the priest asks Tatarskii if he has read Dostoevskii).10 The border-crossings to and from each side of the television screen are themselves subject to meta-level description. Che Guevara cites the television as the prime example of the subjectivism of the new capitalist dark ages:

In place of a conclusion 179 When … the television disappears as a material object … the viewer acquires the sense that he is present in another space … This is the superimposition of one non-existence onto another, a castle in the air whose foundations are a chasm … Just as, not waiting for the commercial break, the viewer changes channel, the … unpredictable techno-modifications of representation change the channel of the viewer himself. Passing into the condition of Homo Zapiens, he becomes his own television programme. (Pelevin 1999: 103–7) Generation ‘P’’s metatextual moments are articulated at the word–image intersection. The fact that the novel centres around scenarios and ideas for commercials emphasizes the ekphrastic disjunction between the verbal discourse in which they are couched and the visual ‘realities’ they render. This disjunction, and the provisionality of the scenes envisaged, is underlined further through their absurd nature. One of Tatarskii’s far-fetched projects is a commercial for Christ Himself: A long white limousine against the background of The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Its back door is open and light is flooding from it. From the light emerges a sandal, and a hand placed on the handle of the door. We can’t see the face. Only the light, the car, the hand and the leg. The slogan: Christ the Saviour. A solid Lord for solid lords. (Pelevin 1999: 159) In another episode Tatarskii ponders a campaign for Tampax. Referring to the 1993 crisis, he exposes the preposterous vacuity of advertising discourse with the slogans ‘Critical days. Blood might flow. Tampax – Your defence against excesses’ and ‘Tampax Ultra Safe: The Reds can’t get through’ (259).11 Representational fiction is universally ekphrastic (it verbally depicts visual scenes), but openly ekphrastic novels (of which The Idiot and Generation ‘P’ are examples) foreground this principle, promoting a shuttling between narrative and meta-narrative levels. The ekphrastic status of Tatarskii’s video commercials individuates word and image, establishing Pelevin’s own fiction as a verbal objectification of a vacuous, image-saturated culture. Yet it also generates a mise-en-abîme effect fostering the mutual contamination of metanarrative and narrative. The separation out of post-Soviet consumer culture, and the ironic literary scenario in which Tatarskii renders it, highlights that scenario’s framing context: Pelevin’s own verbal representation of imagecentred consumerism. That Pelevin, too, employs slick marketing techniques only confirms the affinities between the internal word–image encounter and the larger ekphrasis to which it belongs.12 Likewise, The Idiot contains ekphrastic images depicting Christ and the ends of lives, and is itself a depiction of a Christ figure and of the end of time.

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Dostoevskii’s ekphrases are all images of the end. Conversely, images of the end are invariably ekphrastic. The end can never be rendered from within, nor historically, from without, only, as in Revelations, through privileged, verbally rendered visions. The Johannine apocalypse is a vision of the end to come, each section of which begins ‘I saw’. Moreover, the first part of the revelation, containing the entire sequence of events in miniature, unfolds in stages corresponding to the Seer’s witnessing of the removal of the seven seals of a book at the Lamb’s throne. The Christian apocalypse is thus doubly mediated – as a vision of the future, and through the opening of a book. Dostoevskii acknowledges the mediatory quality of apocalyptic vision through Myshkin’s ekphrastic paintings and epileptic insights, and by modelling the apocalypse as secular eschatology – Nastasia Filippovna’s murder.13 Pelevin dismantles Dostoevskian eschatology step-by-step. Tatarskii’s televisionary insights result, not from epilepsy, but from magic mushrooms. His secularized end is not a murder, but a television broadcast. Rogozhin’s crime was copied from a newspaper report. Pelevin’s ending consists of infinitely copiable camera images of its hero.14 Dostoevskii constructs his mediatory eschatology around Nastasia Filippovna’s photoportrait, which he locates in the context of the capitalist logic of exchange of infinite copies.15 Pelevin’s eschatology is situated amidst a New Russian consumerism located in ‘the fourth dimension of money’.16 Finally, Myshkin’s salvatory doctrine of the Russian Idea is subjected to the insidious logic of the copy as a ‘Russian Idea’ commercial.

Babylon: confusion of tongues and temporal loops Whilst both writers associate monetary logic with emergent capitalisms, Pelevin identifies pecuniary obsession with the Johannine account of the fall of Babylon. In Revelations, Babylon’s materialist excesses meet their symbolic nemesis in the burning of the Babylon whore (Revelations 18: 10–11). In Generation ‘P’, images of television as the scorching ‘flame of consumption’ coexist with exposés of the limitless power that money holds in Moscow, the new Babylon (Pelevin 1999: 175). The Babylon motif is central to Generation ‘P’, not only because of the pre-Christian deities which provide its mythical substratum, but also through the biblical references it invokes to make (non)sense of the New Russia.17 Tatarskii’s Christian name, Vavilen, is a corruption of Vavilon which is linked with the myth of Moscow as the third and final Rome. Tatarskii’s colleague, Azadovskii, remarks that, by reversing the letters of ‘mir’ in the phrase ‘Tretii Rim’ (Third Rome), the slogan becomes ‘Tretii mir’ (Third World), conveying a sense of the end of Russia’s path as a great nation. Babylon features in Genesis, as the site of the tower of Babel where God unleashed the confusion of tongues (Genesis 11: 1–9). In Generation ‘P’, following Tatarskii’s first mushroom experiences, he finds that his speech has become incomprehensible: ‘Tatarskii was suddenly struck by one thought …

In place of a conclusion 181 So this is the tower of Babel. They probably drank this same mushroom infusion and their words began to fragment … like mine. And they called it the confusion of tongues’ (53). Later, still under the influence of mushrooms, Tatarskii hears a voice announcing in English: ‘This game has no name. It will never be the same’ (56). As he whispers that the place he is in resembles a multi-storey carpark, the voice interjects ‘with hanging gardens’ (a reference to the hanging gardens of Babylon). The fact that the voice now speaks Russian ‘convinced Tatarskii that it was a hallucination, but made him think again of the confusion of tongues’ (56–7). The confusion of tongues is a trope for Generation ‘P’. Beginning with the title, which combines an English word with a Cyrillic letter, the novel copiously mixes English with Russian. Terms such as ‘positioning’ and ‘copywriter’ undergo eccentric Russian reworkings. The advertising scenarios attach Russian text to English-language brand names. Tatarskii’s favourite, however, is one for the Russian Gap, written in English, and incorporating the notion of Western brand names as the end of Russian culture: ‘Russia was always notorious for the gap between culture and civilization. Now there is no more culture, no more civilization. The only thing that remains is the Gap. The way they see you’ (85). Pelevin’s virtuoso interlinguistic punning includes an advert for Sony televisions concluding with the slogan ‘It’s a son’ (a dream) (239). Elsewhere, Tatarskii considers advertising tenders for new bells at Christ the Saviour Cathedral to be sponsored by Coca Cola under the name ‘Coca-kolokol’ (Coca-bell) (162). On one hand, as in Genesis, the linguistic mixing produces a confusion of meanings. When Tatarskii finds that he is to work as an advertising Creator, he translates the term as ‘Tvorets’. A colleague disavows him of the illusion immediately, barking ‘Tvortsy are no … good to us. You’re a Creator, Vava, a Creator’ (91). Cultural syncretism tends, at its positive pole, towards maximum information (successfully integrated paradigms generate copious new meaning), and at its negative pole, towards chaos (incompatible paradigms produce meaninglessness). Yet if incompatibilities are reduced to zero, cultural mixing results in an entropic absence of the differences which make meaning-generation possible.18 The novel’s last ekphrastic scenes depicting Tatarskii in adverts for Coke, Head and Shoulders and Tuborg indicate a collapse of significant difference into universal sameness. Significantly, Tatarskii’s first act as company boss is to replace Pepsi by Coke in the buffet (298). For, whilst the slogan speaks of Coke’s victorious crushing of Pepsi, both brands market the same insipid brown liquid. Soviet Pepsi (which already reflected US global hegemony) is replaced by American Coke, with which it is identical.19 In Tatarskii’s words, the victory was one of ‘red over red’ (11), Coke over Pepsi, capitalism over totalitarianism – no victory at all. Pelevin turns to Babylonian myth to transcend the contradiction between cultural syncretism’s two aspects. While listening to Azadovskii explaining the Babylonian ritual he must participate in, Tatarskii asks if the five-legged

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canine god Pizdets is ‘a transcultural archetype’ (289). But the mythic subtext has another aspect. By returning to Babylon, Pelevin encloses his fiction in a temporal loop, whereby the Revelation Babylon coexists with the Old Testament Babel, reversing the flow of time. Whilst the biblical confusion of tongues spelled the end of universal meaning and heteroglossic chaos, the new Babel spells, potentially, the end of productive heteroglossia and a fall into entropic universality. Superficially, Generation ‘P’ follows Revelations in associating the end with the point when ‘Time will be no more’. Tatarskii enters the ‘Golden Room’ at 0.00 hours, yet this is a time zero not of the end, but of a dimension in which beginnings collapse into endings and endings evaporate into self-perpetuating farce, a temporality characterizing the relationship of the Soviet to the post-Soviet. There are few references to the Soviet past amidst Pelevin’s postmodernist trickery. Yet, the fascination that Western iconography holds for Pelevin highlights the sclerotic shell of Soviet reality onto which the new culture is superimposed. Western media culture’s enstranging function is crucial to Pelevin’s associative wizardry, as in Che Guevara’s suggestion that the word ‘democracy’ derives from the expression ‘demo-version’ (119). Another indication of Pelevin’s looping temporality is the incongruous use of Soviet-era narrative models. Tatarskii’s drug-induced hallucinations, for example, are the culmination of a traditional Russian mushrooming trip. And the revelation that the Eltsin seen recently on Russian television is an animated puppet merely expands upon the Soviet jokes to that effect which began circulating under Brezhnev’s decrepit presidency.

Che Guevara, time after time The novel’s organizing centre comes in the shape of Russia’s Marxist past. Che Guevara occupies a prominent place in the Soviet pantheon of international communist heroes. His tract, ‘Identialism as the Highest Stage of Dualism’, incorporates wickedly satirical versions of Soviet clichés, such as ‘Bourgeois thought’ (114) and ‘Freedom Fighter’ (102), as well as the proverb ‘Man to man is a wolf’ (‘Chelovek cheloveku volk’), re-worked around the market concept of the ‘Wow factor’: Man to man is not an image maker (imidzh-meker), nor a killer (killer), nor a dealer (diler), nor an exclusive distributor (eksklusivnyi distribiutor) … Man to man is a wow (vau), and not to a man as such, but to another identical wow. So, projected onto the modern system of cultural coordinates, this Latin dictum sounds thus: Wow, wow, wow! … the end of the world to which the wowerization of consciousness will lead will be harmless in all respects, for the person who could be threatened by the danger will disappear. (Pelevin 1999: 118–20)20

In place of a conclusion 183 The fact that Che Guevara’s Marxism is couched in the vocabulary of an absurd version of bourgeois idealism means that it is equally a critique of the Soviet past. His nonsensical dictums ridiculing Soviet predictions of the end of capitalism are manipulated by a writer located, albeit ironically, in Russian literature’s messianic tradition, for which the socialist Armageddon anticipated in The Idiot has already happened; Generation ‘P’ is written in a bathetic ‘time after time’, beyond a 70-year-long ‘end’ (Mikhail Epstein cites a Soviet joke in which people claimed ‘we are witnessing apocalypse in one country’ rather than Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ (Epstein 1995: 72).21 Hence, other than The Idiot, the Dostoevskian intertext most frequently cited is Svidrigailov’s eternity as a bathhouse with spiders. Hence, Pelevin’s treatment of the Russian Idea (the salvatory idea mooted by Myshkin) must be subjected to similar ridicule; the Russian Idea manifestly did not save Russia, let alone humanity. However, if the image of the messianic tradition preserved in the cultural memory invoked by Generation ‘P’ is coloured by the knowledge that the imminent apocalypse that animates it has already occurred, then the image of that end is tainted by an awareness that it has now succumbed to a second apocalypse – the end of communism. Thus, the Soviet-era intertexts that Pelevin cites – Pepsi and Che Guevara (both Western brand images) – are inflected with the post-apocalyptic hindsight that the context in which they figure is about to collapse. The Soviet imposition of Pepsi as the definitive Cola brand not only reflected totalitarianism, but also pre-empted the totalizing gestures of new Russian capitalism. As Pelevin writes: ‘The Ideologues of the USSR considered that there was only one truth. For that reason Generation ‘P’ had no choice and the children of the Soviet 70s voted for Pepsi just as their parents voted for Brezhnev’ (9). When Coke crushed Pepsi, the sense of victory as the culmination of a linear trajectory (from totalitarianism to consumer democracy) is short-circuited. From Pepsi to Coke is a non-journey occurring in no time at all, at 0.00 hours.22 Beset by the hindsight that monopoly capitalism eventually prevails, Pelevin’s Che Guevara bears the Nike logo on his beret. His posthumous revolt can only be fought with victorious monopoly capitalism. The year 1991 collapses back into 1917, which is why, when asked to make a company toast, Tatarskii glances at a Coke poster, declaring ‘Comrades! Let’s drown the Russian bourgeoisie in a sea of images!’ (141). The past repossesses the present, pre-apocalypse re-articulates postapocalypse, and Pepsi re-contains Coke. Epstein’s notion of the mutual predication of the post-Soviet present and its Soviet antecedent informs his theory of Russian postmodernism. Indeed, Tatarskii’s slogan illustrates Epstein’s observations on the proximity of Baudrillard’s notion of postmodern reality as a society of ‘hyper-real’ simulacra to that of Soviet communism as a ‘pure ideological simulation of reality’ in which ‘reality was made to coincide with those ideas by which it was described’ (Epstein 1995: 194). Epstein uses this proximity to ground his argument that Russia has known postmodernism for longer than the West. And when he writes that

184 Televising the word Marxist materialism ‘proves to be not a negation of idealism but its most radical and militant form, ruthlessly destructive of materiality’, he could be writing of post-Soviet consumerism which proves to be that idealism’s most militant form. Some Western theorists have generalized the mutuality of communism and capitalism. Susan Buck-Morss writes of the ‘dreamworlds’ that both ideologies aspired to create (Buck-Morss 2000: 31). Baudrillard discusses the catastrophic implications for capitalism of the fall of communism by suggesting that ‘communism had sought out the weakest link in the capitalist chain. Suddenly it discovered that it was the weakest link, and by destroying itself … exported its own economic and political suicide’ (Baudrillard 1994b: 46). Meanwhile, Slavoj ¯i¿ek’s insights into ways in which new ‘narrative registers’ rewrite the past by ‘repressing the traumatic excess of their own violent imposition’ (¯i¿ek 2001: 65) explain the emergence of Russian capitalist democracy, founded on the violent storming in 1993 of Russia’s democratically elected parliament. Pelevin himself expresses this paradox in his account of a Tatarskii slogan for Parliament cigarettes that evokes the shelling of the Russian White House: ‘To Us, Even the Smoke of the Fatherland is Pleasant and Sweet’ (familiar words from Griboedov’s Woe from Wit).

Coke and the place of the end ¯i¿ek forces us to recognize that repetition never amounts merely to replication. As Pelevin demonstrates, by pre-empting the society of the simulacrum and then recontaining that pre-emption, Russian postmodernism adds a new dimension to postmodernism per se. This point is acknowledged by Epstein, who writes of postmodernist dialectics in which ‘[a]ntithesis, pushed to an extreme … proves to be an … intensification of … thesis. Revolutionary negation proves to be … a hyperbole of what is negated’ (Epstein 1999: 25). Yet Epstein’s hypothesis is (as Pelevin understands) over-optimistic, for the notion of Coke and Pepsi as productive antitheses capable of self-transcendence circumvents the fact that each contains an identically nondescript brown liquid; as Pelevin recalls, the sixties generation called their Pepsidrinking children ‘shit-suckers’ (govnososami) (10). ¯i¿ek ties Coke’s excremental nothingness to its status as: … the elusive X we are all after in our compulsive consumption of merchandise.… Coke is … a commodity whose very material properties are already those of a commodity … we drink ‘nothing in the guise of something’ … we drink the Nothingness itself. (¯i¿ek 2001, 22–3) Coke’s ‘apocalyptic’ crushing of Pepsi is a victory of one brown liquid over another, of nothing over nothing.23 We are dealing with neither tran-

In place of a conclusion 185 scendence nor replication, but with repetition. Coke’s triumph paradoxically re-enacts the Soviet nothingness that is the meaningless Western commodity’s negation, but on which it is founded. Western hyper-reality lacks the ‘benefit’ of Russia’s repeated realizations of apocalypse. For it, the end of time amounts to an endless deferral of the end. In Baudrillard’s words, ‘hyper-reality rules out the very occurrence of the Last Judgement … All the ends we have envisaged elude our grasp and history has no chance of bringing them about, since it will, in the interim, have come to an end’ (Baudrillard 1994b: 8). By staging nothingness instead of submitting to it, Generation ‘P’ becomes global postmodernism’s quintessential moment. The staging process affects Generation ‘P’’s aesthetic status. Art as ‘sacred space’ (¯i¿ek) requires eschatology to furnish the site at which objects are sublimated, assigned ultimate meaning. But what if commodification devalues art and the end of time, reducing it to the point of banality? And what if Russian eschatological art is brought to an end through the recurrence of apocalypse ‘time after time’? As Tatarskii realizes, when apocalypse ends, eternity and Russian literature are no more: ‘[W]hen the subject of eternity disappears, so do all its objects … He stopped writing poetry, for with the death of Soviet power, it lost its meaning’ (Pelevin 1999: 14–16). Rather than the end of time capitulating to banal consumer objects, every banal consumer object becomes the harbinger of the ‘end’. By finalizing Russia’s messianic tradition, the new, image-centred culture itself rests on a ‘messianic’ act, ensuring that literature’s eschatological moment persists in haunting the new culture as what ¯i¿ek calls its ‘spectral Other’. The victory of the commodified image is, in Russia, both catastrophe (it spells the end of literature) and bathetic anti-catastrophe (the catastrophe to end catastrophes has already occurred). The truth of this axiom emerges from Tatarskii’s mock-eschatological advertising scenarios. Thus, Parliament cigarettes are advertised with the slogan: ‘The steam from bones is not a lament: Parliament, the Un-Iava’ (‘Par kostei ne lament. Parliament – The Uniava’). And a Nescafé commercial ends with a mafia-style apocalyptic bomb in a café accompanied by the punchline: ‘Nescafé Gold, an explosion of taste’ (63). For ¯i¿ek, modern art attempts to ‘re-establish the minimal structure of sublimation’ to forestall the implosion of meaning that Pelevin dramatizes by placing the banal object in Sacred space: ‘[I]n the double movement of the progressive commodification of aesthetics and the aestheticisation of the universe of commodities … the only way to escape trash is to put excremental trash into the sacred place of the Void’ (38–9).24 ‘No wonder’, ¯i¿ek exclaims, ‘that in Andy Warhol’s work, the ready-made everyday object that found itself occupying the sublime Place of a work of art was none other than a row of Coke bottles’ (¯i¿ek 2001, 40). For Pelevin, ‘re-establishing sublimation’ entails placing the commodified image of Coke bottles in the sacred space of Dostoevskian messianic literature. In the novel’s final ekphrastic gesture, rather than literature framing the camera image, the latter usurps the place from which literature accomplishes its framing

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Televising the word

activity, the better to preserve that space as sacred. Accordingly, Tatarskii’s infinitely copiable television image tapers off in Pelevin’s last sentence into the banal inconsequentiality of Akakii Akakievich’s ghost in ‘The Overcoat’, which is also the terrifying infinity of staring eyes summoned by Gogol’s self-reproducing, demonic portrait: ‘Rumours circulated that another version of this clip was shot in which 30 Tatarskiis … are walking along the road, but it is impossible to establish whether this is so or not’ (Pelevin 1999: 301). The descent from (literary) word to (commodity) image whose path we have traced from Gogol’s ‘Portrait’ becomes a re-ascent from (commodity) image to sacred word.25 Pelevin mirrors another author in Russia’s eschatological tradition who, writing on the eve of 1917, dismisses conventional literature (literatorstvo) as fatally contaminated with puffed-up vanity occasioned by its subservience to the mass-mediated, anonymous other. Vasilii Rozanov claims that, by taking literature’s desire to confer the other’s universality on the singularities of the ordinary to its conclusion (publishing the hyper-trivial ‘fallen leaves’ of his intimate everyday life), he can ‘dissolve literature within his self’, substituting life (the negation of literature) as true literature (literatura) (Rozanov 1970: 220). When, in 1918, in the aftermath of his The Apocalypse of Our Times (Apokalipsis nashego vremeni), Rozanov found himself at starvation point, his ‘dream’ of literature as the intimate communication of self to self, free from the other, is realized as ‘nightmare’ as he appeals to his readers to send him food, pleading ‘Reader, preserve your writer’ (Rozanov 1970, 492–3).26 With the merging of the 1917 and 1991 apocalypses, Rozanov’s flour and eggs are replaced by Pelevin’s Coke can, as true ‘literature’ accommodates the sloughed-off trash of the mass-mediated consumerism of the other whom Rozanov so despised. Pelevin’s novel emerges in the place of sublimation, that of the literary tradition whose conclusion it marks with a spot designated, not ‘X’, but ‘P’.

Notes

Introduction – the scope of the task: in the beginning was the word 1 2 3

4 5 6

7

8

9

Anthony Olcott notes that the number of books printed in Russia dropped from 1,553 million in 1990 to 422 million in 1996, and that the number of Russians who never buy books reached a quarter of the population in 1996 (Olcott 2001, 1). The Stockton to Darlington Railway line was opened in 1825. Samuel Morse invented telegraphy in 1837. Photography can be dated from 1829. Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin was first published in 1833. See Condee and Padunov 1991, Wachtel 2002, Gillespie 1999, Dobrenko 2001, Sparks 1998, Kelly 2001, Lovell 2000, and Stites 1992. The list is far from exhaustive. Other relevant work in the field will be cited at the appropriate point in each chapter. Russell is completing a monograph on Russian prose fiction and the cinema in the 1920s. An example of this principle in operation is to be found in Iurii Lotman’s definition of an event (i.e. a culturally meaningful happening) as ‘the traversing of a limit forbidden by a plot-less structure’ (Lotman 1971: 288). Arguably, for example, the depth of meaning inscribed in Balzac’s minor tale ‘Sarrasine’ became fully apparent only after Roland Barthes’s path-breaking study of the text’s semiotic codes. And the cultural significance of seemingly ephemeral disaster movies like Towering Inferno is being reassessed after the events of 11 September 2001 in New York. For example, the 1939 film adaptation of Aleksei Tolstoi’s novel, Peter the Great, beloved of Stalin, and Sergei Bondarchuk’s lavish six-hour version of War and Peace, receive only brief mention. Nikita Mikhalkov’s film of Goncharov’s Oblomov, which set the standards for the late Soviet film adaptation and met with international acclaim, meanwhile, cedes place to his brother’s less wellknown film of Turgenev’s Nest of Gentlefolk. I would likewise endorse Sennett’s reservations about the exhaustive history: ‘This empiricism, based on exclusion by the exhaustion of evidence, is … opposed to any real notion of intellectual honesty. We arrive at intellectual honesty by admitting, precisely, the reality of contradiction … The canon of exhaustion of evidence is … tied to an increasing miniaturization of focus … Anaesthetization of the intellect is the … product of this form of proof’ (Sennett 2002: 43). Bakhtin’s differentiation of the exact and the human sciences is instructive here: ‘The exact sciences are a monologic form of knowledge: the intellect scrutinizes a thing and describes it. But the subject as such cannot be apprehended as a thing, since as a subject he cannot remain voiceless. He can only be apprehended dialogically … The outer limit of precision in the exact sciences is identification (a=a). In the human sciences, precision is the overcoming of the alien element in

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15

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the other, without transforming it into the pure property of the self’ (Bakhtin 1986: 383, 392). Thus, in the Timaeus, Plato defines images as ‘fleeting shadows’ of their real objects, anticipating his famous Cave of Shadows metaphor (quoted in Barusch 1992: 28). The distinction is internalized within language. As even Saussure acknowledged, words can have the iconic relationship with their denotates first recognized by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue, as well as the standard, arbitrary one. Linguists like Roman Jakobson, and, more recently, George Lakoff, have developed more general theories of iconicity in language. Derrida shows how the second, supplementary term in a rhetorical hierarchy turns the tables on the dominant term, claiming primacy. Speech’s predominance over writing, for example, is inverted when we recognize that the principle of the absence of the signified which enables the linguistic signifier to accomplish its work is embodied most effectively in the written word. Likewise, the primacy of literary originals over visual adaptations is subverted when the latter’s superior capacity for conveying contingent detail usurps the orginal’s claim to be the definitive incarnation of an essence (see Derrida 1974). The ancient ut pictura poesis tradition dates to Horace, who coined the phrase. It was further developed by Simonides of Ceos. Benjamin writes: ‘To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction’ (Benjamin 1999: 75). I refer to C. S. Peirce’s typology of signs distinguishing the index (the physical trace or effect of an object) from the icon (which substitutes for its object on the basis of likeness) and the symbol (whose relationship with its object is established by convention). An example of the ‘congealment’ of things into signs might be the consumerist obsession with ‘branding’ everything from underwear to children’s toys. The ‘penetration’ of discourse into things is illustrated by the way in which television extracts narrative drama out of the most intractably quotidian of routines (the ‘Reality TV’ phenomenon). For this reason, Mitchell posits the word–image problematic as ‘a shorthand way of … mapping and organizing the field of representation’, arguing that ‘issues like “gender, race and class”, the production of “political horrors”, and the production of “truth, beauty and excellence” all converge on questions of representation’ (Mitchell 1994: 3). The titles of the two flagship TV programmes of the Gorbachev period betray this visual logic: ‘The Searchlight of Perestroika’ (‘Prozhektor perestroiki’) and ‘The View’ (‘Vzgliad’). This example illustrates how the interpenetration of word and image ensures that it is never simply a case of ‘word’ representing ‘ideology’ and ‘image’ standing for ‘nature’: glasnost was launched in the name of the power of the liberated word to dismantle the Soviet world of false appearances, yet to naturalize its own ideological underpinnings it was obliged to shield itself with the rhetoric of vision. For other accounts of ekphrasis, see Krieger 1992, and Smith 1995. The great ‘baggy monsters’ of Russian realism like War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov and, later, Solzhenitsyn’s novels, breach aesthetic propriety by seemingly importing journalistic polemic, philosophical discourse and religious moralizing into works of artistic fiction. As will become clearer in my analyses, the metatextual moments I treat are never of the purely ludic kind promulgated in some popularizations of the self-referential, modernist text. Rather, they are bound up with (though not mechanically condi-

Notes 189 tioned by) the conditions in which they are produced and constitute an intervention into charged cultural conflicts, an attempt to ‘reach the high ground’ of metalevel in order to impose a highly partial viewpoint on those conflicts.

1 Russian realism and the camera: out from under Gogol’s ‘Portrait’ 1 Poe wrote: ‘[T]he Daguerreotyped plate is infinitely more accurate in its representation than any painting … the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. The variations of shade, and the gradations of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth itself’ (Rabb 1995: 4–5). 2 For details of the Gogol photograph, see Elliott 1991: 34–5. The production of negative images to generate positive images on paper began in 1841 with the patenting of what William Fox Talbot, the inventor of the process, called the ‘calotype’ (Frizot 1998: 61). 3 The person credited as the earliest photographic pioneer, Joseph Niépce, began his experimental work within lithography. Unable to find the limestone necessary to further his experiments, he began substituting metal plates and using sunlight in place of the lithographer’s crayon (see Freund 1980: 24). 4 Michel Frizot describes this drawback to the otherwise superior daguerreotype as the ‘trump card’ of Fox Talbot’s English process involving reproducible images from negatives (Frizot 1998: 27). 5 Belinskii’s impassioned assault on Gogol’s reactionary Selected Passages From Correspondence with Friends established the notion of the Russian writer as bearer of the people’s conscience, a role he claimed that the previously progressive Gogol had abandoned. 6 In his diatribe against western Catholicism, Myshkin asks his audience to consider the possibility of ‘the renaissance of the whole of mankind in the future, and, perhaps, its resurrection by the Russian Word alone, by the Russian God and Christ’ (Dostoevskii 1955: 551). 7 Developing photography’s connection with the commodity fetish and the collapse of the gold standard, Nancy Armstrong associates it also with the advent of pictorialism in painting, ‘the standardization of the act of seeing landscape so it could be reproducible’ (Armstrong 1999: 144). 8 Freund writes: ‘By having one’s portrait done an individual of the ascending classes could affirm his new social status both to himself and to the world at large. To meet the demand for portraits, art became more and more mechanized. The photographic portrait was the final stage in this trend’ (Freund 1982: 9). 9 Chartkov’s vision bears close similarities with Walt Whitman’s depiction of a photographic exhibition in New York in 1846: ‘In whatever direction you turn your peering gaze you see naught but human faces. There they stretch from floor to ceiling – hundreds of them … a great legion of … human eyes gazing silently … Phantom concourse – speechless and motionless, but yet realities’ (quoted in Rabb 1995: 21). 10 Nadar, nineteenth-century France’s pre-eminent photographic portrait-taker, who knew Balzac, writes: ‘According to Balzac’s theory, all physical bodies are made up of layers of ghost-like images … laid one on top of the other. Since Balzac believed man was incapable of making something material from an apparition, he concluded that every time someone had his photograph taken, one of the spectral layers was removed from the body and transferred to the photograph. Repeated exposures entailed the unavoidable loss of subsequent ghostly layers, that is, the very essence of life’ (quoted in Rabb 1995: 8).

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11 Nathaniel Hawthorne gave a glimpse in his novel, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), of photography’s future potential for forensic science. The daguerreotypes of the photographer-hero are instrumental in determining the cause of a murder and saving an innocent character from conviction for the crime (Hawthorne 1986: 306). 12 For Lotman, ‘[t]he dual codedness of those portions of the text identified with artistic conventionality results in the main space of the text being perceived as “real” ’ (Lotman 1992: 156) 13 The invention in 1851 of the wet-plate collodion technique which used increasingly sensitive emulsions on glass rather than metal was followed in 1860 by the development of carbon paper that ensured the permanence of positive prints (Freund 1982: 96) 14 There is a brief discussion of Dostoevskii’s attitude to photographs in Barsht 2000. 15 Nemirovich-Danchenko’s comments come in a sketch entitled ‘Photography, Promising to Kill Painting’ (‘Fotografiia obeshchaiushchaia ubit’ zhivopis”) published in a travel book based on his journeys along the Volga (NemirovichDanchenko 1877: 31–5). 16 Baudelaire linked photography’s exactitude with the stupidity of the masses: ‘A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of [the] multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah and now the faithful says to himself, “Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire … then Photography and Art are the same thing” ’ (quoted in Rabb 1995: 66). 17 Andrew Wachtel, who also focuses on Nastasia Filippovna’s portrait, acknowledges the appeal to Dostoevskii of photography’s affinities with icons, but does not trace the camera’s infiltration into the novel’s narrative structures, its metatextual function, or its interpenetration with verbal discourse, concluding that Dostoevskii dismisses photography as a ‘Western … mechanical medium’ (Wachtel 2002: 213). 18 See Bethea 1989: 104–45. Bethea’s book accounts for the apocalypse theme in Dostoevskii. 19 See Belknapp 1997: 91–117 (110). 20 For an account of the importance of the new Russian mass media for Dostoevskii’s novels, see Klioutchkine 2002. 21 The novel was originally published in 1869 in four instalments of the journal Russkii vestnik. 22 Jackson suggests that Dostoevskii regarded the novelistic word as superior to the artistic image in its ability to render the formless chaos of modern life (Jackson 1978, 120). For another treatment of the word–image theme in Dostoevskii which responds to Jackson’s argument, see Emerson 1995: 245–67. 23 The collodion-on-glass technique, which replaced the calotype method, functioned with exposure times as little as a second – a huge advance on daguerreotypes which required exposures of several minutes. 24 I am grateful to Kirill Sokolov for pointing out that peasant types had long been a popular subject for engravers of woodcuts, one of the earliest forms of mass reproduction in Russia. 25 For accounts of the intellectual roots of Populism, see Venturi 1960. For an interpretation of its role in Virgin Soil, see Budanova 1983. 26 Turgenev 1883: 260–1. 27 Most Turgenev commentators condemn Virgin Soil as the author’s least successful novel (for example, Freeborn 1960, and Allen 1992). 28 Citing the metatextual link between the puzzlingly ‘tired’ superficiality of Turgenev’s characters and the seemingly calculated superficiality of the author’s own narrations, Allen writes: ‘Perhaps paralleling the desire voiced by Marianna

Notes 191 to become “simplified”, Turgenev strips his discourse in Virgin Soil down to referential simplicity – and thus denies it the beneficent obscurity that veils demoralizing detail’ (Allen 1992: 214). 29 W. S. Gilbert, author of the Gilbert and Sullivan librettos and keen amateur photographer, highlighted the instability of the photographic image differently. In his ‘Tale of a Dry Plate’ (1865), a young man is developing his last photos of the woman he loves, now tragically dead. Just as the image forms, his valet opens the darkroom door and a flood of light ruins the photograph (Rabb 1995: 83). 30 For detailed analysis of self-referentiality in Rudin, see Hutchings 1998. 31 Hawthorne expressed surprise after seeing himself in a photographic portrait: ‘I was … a little startled at recognizing myself so apart from myself … There is no such thing as a true portrait. They are all delusions’ (quoted in Rabb 1995, 41).

2 Objectivity, alienation and the fragmentation of the subject: the camera as midwife to modernity 1 Gisele Freund writes: ‘Press photography owes its development to many discoveries besides the mechanization of production: the invention of dry gelatin-bromide plates that can be prepared in advance (1871), improvements in lenses (the first astigmatic lenses were made in 1884), roll film (1884), and the perfection of telegraphic transmission of photographs (1872)’ (Freund 1982: 104). 2 For examples of Sophia Tolstoy’s photography, together with an account of her work, see Sophia Tolstoy 1991. 3 Morson writes: ‘The work is addressed directly to the reader because it is about the … act of reading. This story is a satire on the second person’ (Morson 1991b: 382). But so, too, are numerous physiological sketches by Saltykov-Shchedrin and Uspenskii. Morson is, however, on fertile ground when he argues that ‘tourism is the central metaphor’ of the story and that, through Tolstoy’s voyeuristic technique, the reader-tourist becomes ‘implicated in a death’ (Morson 1991b: 387) 4 In the 1850s, 60s and 70s numerous exhibitions were held in Russia to document the ethnography of the Russian empire. Responding to such exhibitions, V. V. Stasov commented as early as 1855 that ‘not a single part of our State has previously been so systematically represented’ (quoted in Elliott 1991: 42). 5 The cult of album-gazing spread across Europe like wildfire. A few years earlier, in 1871, Emile Zola, another avid photographer, published La Curée, in which the hero, Maxime, keeps an album of his friends, male and female: ‘Whenever it rained, or whenever one was bored, this album proved a great subject of conversation’ (Rabb 1995: 94). 6 For an account of Tolstoy’s philosophy of alienation, see Gustafson 1986. 7 In Volume Five, Marcel repeatedly describes both his pursuit of Albertine as his object of desire, and the artificial demeanour she presented to him, using photographic metaphors: For I possessed in my memory only a series of Albertines, separate from one another … a collection of snapshots, and so my jealousy was restricted to a discontinuous expression, at once fugitive and fixed … Albertine … smiled into the empty air, with the same air of feigned spontaneity as if she were posing for somebody to take her photograph, or even seeking to assume before the camera a more dashing pose. (Proust 1996: 163)

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Notes Later, Marcel introjects this photographic paradigm of fragmentation, inauthenticity and discontinuity inside his own personality, revealing the model by which Proust constructed the Marcel persona: In order to picture to itself an unknown situation the imagination borrows elements that are already familiar and, for that reason, cannot picture it. But the sensibility, even in its most physical form, receives, like the wake of a thunderbolt, the original and … indelible imprint of the novel event … if I had foreseen [Albertine’s] departure, I would perhaps have been incapable of picturing it to myself in all its horror.… [T]hus, at every moment, there was one more of those innumerable and humble ‘selves’ that compose our personality which was still unaware of Albertine’s departure and must be informed of it. (Proust 1996: 483, 490)

However, Proust’s counter-image to this camera-like figuring of mediation and inauthenticity is itself a photographic metaphor of imprinting and fixing reality. 8 In La Curée, Zola elaborates upon his obsession with photography’s transformation of human vision: … she tarried long over the portraits of the fast women, and inquisitively studied the exact microscopic details of the photographs … One day she even procured a magnifying glass … and the glass revealed a slight golden thread which had strayed from the eyebrows down to the middle of the nose … Renee … found some unknown wrinkles, rough skins, cavities imperfectly filled up with rice powder … declaring that ought not to disgust oneself with the human face like that. (Quoted in Rabb 1995: 95) 9 In a letter to Suvorin of 1894, Chekhov wrote: ‘Tolstoy’s philosophy moved me deeply and reigned over me for six or seven years. What affected me were not his basic positions … but Tolstoy’s manner of expression, his judiciousness, and, probably, a kind of hypnotism’ (Chekhov 1979: 274). 10 In his essay ‘The Salon of 1859’, Baudelaire contends: I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius … If photography is allowed to supplement art … it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally. (Quoted in Rabb 1995: 67) 11 Ruskin enthuses: ‘A power of obtaining veracity in the representation of material and tangible things … has now been placed in the hands of all men, almost without labour’ (quoted in Rabb 1995: 112). 12 We might therefore talk of a new chronotope ushered in by late-nineteenthcentury mass communications technology. 13 The opportunity for manipulating others at a safe distance offered by the carte de visite is also satirized in Zola’s La Curée, where the characters seated around Maxime’s photograph album invent a new game: ‘They asked this question: “With whom would I willingly spend a night?” and they opened the album,

Notes 193

14 15 16

17 18

which was entrusted with the duty of replying. This gave rise to some strange couplings … But there was never so much laughter as when luck coupled two men or two women together’ (quoted in Rabb 1995: 95). Roman Jakobson commented on Uspenskii’s tendency towards metonymic overkill in his famous essay on metaphor and metonymy (Jakobson 1956: 80). Morson writes: ‘Poised between metafiction and didactic fiction, Russian literature is the literature of frame breaking. It is, in fact, not so much literature as counter-literature, governed by an anti-aesthetic’ (Morson 1991b: 394). At the same time, John Ruskin, whose attitude to photography became more positive as he recognised its liberating potential, remarked how the camera facilitated the enjoyment of distant treasures by those to whom such opportunities would not otherwise have been open: ‘Wholly careless … I saw nothing in the Daguerreotype to help … me, until now at Venice I found a French artist producing exquisitely bright small plates … which contained, under a lens, the Grand Canal or St Marks Place as if a magician had reduced the reality to be carried away into an enchanted land … The little gems of picture cost a napoleon each, but with two hundred francs I bought the Grand Canal from the Salute to the Rialto, and packed it away in thoughtless triumph’ (Rabb 1995: 112). See Popkin 1992 for the epistemological problem besetting Chekhov’s Sakhalin project. In In Search of Lost Time, the narrator, Marcel, writes: [A]ppearing to us only in a succession of momentary flashes, a person has never been able to reveal to us more than one aspect of himself at a time, to present us with more than a single photograph of himself. A great weakness no doubt for a person, to consist merely of a collection of moments; a great strength also: he is a product of memory, and our memory of a moment is not informed of everything that has happened since; this moment which it has recorded endures still … and with it the person whose form is outlined in it … [T]his disintegration does not only make the dead one live, it multiplies him or her. (Proust 1996: 546).

19 Daguerreotypes were used to preserve images of corpses in their freshly deceased state – an association which has continued down to Roland Barthes’s essay on photography based on his reaction to a snapshot of his dead mother (Barthes 1984).

3 Photographic eye as poetic I: dialogues of text and image in Maiakovskii’s and Rodchenko’s Pro eto project 1 For accounts of the role of mass communications technology in the development of modern culture (including modernism in art), see Thompson 1995, Walker 1983 and, particularly, Crow 1983. 2 The classic Frankfurt School work on modernism and commodification is to be found in Adorno 1991. 3 For an analysis of Rozanov’s artistic persona, see Hutchings 1993. For Remizov’s persona in the context of his autobiographical work Whirlwind Russia (Vzvikhrennaia rus’) see Hutchings 1997: 194–220. 4 For further details see Rudy 1955. 5 In his autobiographical work Not a Day Without a Line (Ni dnia bez strochki), Olesha juxtaposes the marvellous transformations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with

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14 15

Notes

what he saw as the no lesser miracle of Maiakovskii’s striking, poetic metaphors comparing ‘the human heart with a church’ and enabling one to ‘leap out of one’s frame by leaning on one’s ribs’ (Olesha 1974: 138). Such a fascination with metamorphosis was to form the mainspring of Olesha’s own, acutely metaphoric vision. The book was published by the state publishing house, Gosizdat. It was reprinted in facsimile form by Ardis in 1973. Swedish publishers Bokomotiv issued the work in 1980, along with two extra photomontages not included in the original published edition. In 1994, the German specialist publishers Ars Nicolai published the most comprehensive version of the project. The Ars Nicolai edition includes a facsimile of the original Gosizdat book, Russian, German and English-language versions of Maiakovskii’s poems, a very helpful commentary on the project by Aleksandr Lavrent’ev (again in Russian, German and English), and glossy copies of all the photomontages. See Maiakovskii 1994. It is from this edition that subsequent page references to Maiakovskii’s poem are taken. Maiakovskii and Lily Brik were known for their use of affectionate animal nicknames and for drawing each other as bears, cats, etc., a trait that the poet plays upon throughout Pro eto and which Rodchenko exploits in his photomontages. For details of the relationship, see Charters and Charters 1986. Along with the likes of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, Rodchenko was among the pioneers of Soviet montage theory. From an early stage in his experimentation with photography, Rodchenko insisted on the importance of dynamic movement and sequence. See Gassner 1979. The poem was written between December 1922 and February 1923 during a period of voluntary separation between Lily and Maiakovskii occasioned by Lily’s growing frustration with the poet’s fits of jealousy. Maiakovskii’s emotions during this period are well conveyed in the letters he wrote to Lily, published in 1958. See Anisimov 1958. See Maiakovskii 1994: 7. As demonstrated in the earlier cited quote from his days as a constructivist artist, Rodchenko had resisted what he saw as naive bourgeois beliefs in the passive representation of objects in favour of the rational organization of reality for human purposes in such a way that ‘objects receive a meaning’. It was linguist Emile Benveniste who introduced the distinction between subject of enunciation (sujet de l’énonciation) and subject of discourse (sujet de l’énoncé). See Benveniste 1966. The landscape is self-evidently that of an American city, probably Chicago. Maiakovskii had earlier visited the USA and returned with a mixture of admiration, fascination and contempt conveyed well in a cycle of poems that includes the famous ‘Brooklyn Bridge’. The first section of the poem to which this image refers is entitled ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ in a semi-ironic citation of the famous Oscar Wilde poem written from a prison cell after his arrest for homosexual misdemeanours. Lavrent’ev offers a different interpretation of the cut-out effect, suggesting it confers on the objects represented a symbolic significance: All the telephones, chairs … human beings and animals are divorced from their accustomed context … so that they ‘hover’ in a world with laws of its own, taking on a metaphorical dimension and conveying a message. The situations are constructed and transposed. They do not serve as a literal illustration of the text, but are its equal in terms of tension and dramatism, in the playful tone … in the human personality they invoke. (Maiakovskii 1994: 76)

Notes 195 16 Maiakovskii was not the only writer of the Modernist generation to link teadrinking with the routine and everyday. In Whirlwind Russia, Remizov poses the choice faced by the intelligentsia during the momentous Civil War period as one of impassioned engagement with the forces of revolution, or leisurely detachment and tea-drinking. The phrase ‘Revolution or a cup of tea’ (‘revoliutsiia ili chai pit’) runs like a refrain through the work. See Remizov 1991. 17 Maiakovskii and Rodchenko were best known for their collaboration on posters for Rezinotrest, the national rubber-production company. They saw the project as an opportunity for political agitation no less important than the earlier Bolshevik propaganda campaign. One famous example is an advertisement for Soviet galoshes in which a lithographed image produced by Rodchenko is accompanied by Maiakovskii’s slogan ‘Protector in rain and slush. Without galoshes, the whole of Europe will sit down and weep’. For further details of the ROSTA project, see Brown 1973: 190–219. 18 There is a strong tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy, which Maiakovskii intuits, to equate the second hypostasis of God with the Logos, and to speak of Christ and the Word interchangeably, or as the Son-Word (Syn-Slovo). 19 The intention was for the entire population to add to and improve on the anonymous poem. Maiakovskii soon realized the device had failed, advising his publisher: ‘But nobody did add to it and anyway everybody knew who wrote it. What’s the difference? Publish it now under my name’ (quoted in Brown 1973: 204). 20 According to Lavrent’ev, the device in the background is ‘intended to breathe new life into the unconscious which Rodchenko put together from an electric motor, a car horn, the wheel of a dynamo and engineer Shukhov’s water tower’ (Maiakovskii 1994: 76). 21 Rodchenko made three different versions of this montage, which, as Lavrent’ev suggests, seems to suggest that he had difficulties in conveying the right impression (Maiakovskii 1994: 76–7). 22 Other than the specially commissioned shots of Maiakovskii and Lily taken by Sheterenberg, and snapshots owned by the poet, the photographs used by Rodchenko are likely to have come from German youth magazines he often bought in Moscow. Lavrent’ev mentions Junge Welt, Moderne Illustrierte Zietschrift and Die Woche, all of which carried high-quality photographs on a wide range of topics (Maiakovskii 1994: 76). Maiakovskii’s idea of illustrating Pro eto through photomontage is thought to have originated during a trip to Western Europe which included a visit to a graphic art exhibition in Berlin in October 1922. 23 In the original patristic writings, and indeed in the Gospel of St Paul, the church is referred to as the Body of Christ. 24 Maiakovskii’s oft-cited words form part of his last, unfinished, poem ‘At the Top of My Voice’ (‘Vo ves’ golos’)

4

The Stalinist ekranizatsiia as embodied word

1 Peter Kenez confirms that ‘Soviet leaders … had a prescient and impressively clear appreciation of the possibilities inherent in the medium’. He also argues that, because of the literary vestiges of its pre-revolutionary origins, early Soviet cinema was not entirely successful as a propaganda medium (Kenez 1985: 196). 2 For a discussion of this theme, see Dunham 1976. 3 There were several Soviet studies of ekranizatsii during the Thaw and post-Thaw period; see Vartanov 1961, Kuznetsov 1965, Gornitskaia 1965, Manevich 1966 and Gural’nik 1968.

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4 For discussions of adaptations of literary classics in the context of the English Heritage industry, see Vincendeau 2001. 5 The dispute between the iconoclasts, who opposed the depiction of divine beings, and the iconodules, who defended it, raged throughout the eighth and ninth centuries and was eventually decided in favour of the iconodules, on the strength of St Irenaeus’s formula that ‘the Father is that which is invisible about the Son, the Son is that which is visible about the father’ (quoted in Pelikan 1971: 229). 6 For accounts of canon formation and political power see Ross 1998, Guillory 1993 and Gorak 1991. 7 Vekhi (Landmarks), published in 1909, was the name of a collection of essays on the Russian intelligentsia by seven authors: N. Berdiaev, S. Bulgakov, M. Gershenzon, A. Izgoev, B. Kistiakovskii, P. Struve and S. Frank. 8 One of the earliest Russian feature films was an adaptation of a Lermontov poem. According to a catalogue of pre-revolutionary films compiled by Beniamin Vishnevskii, prior to 1917 there were forty-eight Pushkin adaptations, forty-three of Chekhov, twenty-five of Gogol, twenty-four of Tolstoi, fifteen of Lermontov, fourteen of A. Ostrovskii, twelve of N. Nekrasov, eleven of Turgenev and ten of Dostoevskii and Andreev. Of foreign literature, Maupassant was the most frequently screened, with nine films (statistics cited in Lipkov 1994: 122). For a catalogue of Russian film adaptations of literature from 1900 to the present, see Vernitski 2003a. 9 The former is illustrated by the film Red Gas (Krasnyi gaz), based on Zazubrin’s novel Two Worlds (Dva mira), which treats the struggle of Red partisans against Kolchak, and by Vanished Treasure (Propavshie sokrovishcha), based on Morskii’s novel, about the acquisition of a treasure for the benefit of the Soviet regime – a theme later developed in Vainshtok’s 1937 Treasure Island (Ostrov sokrovishch), discussed in Chapter 5. The latter is exemplified in How Petiunka travelled to Il’ich (Kak Petiunka ezdil k Il’ichu), based on Dorokhov’s short story in which Lenin is presented as a children’s role model. 10 The notion of literature as ‘handmaiden’ to other disciplines is attributable to Shklovskii. In 1923, Dziga Vertov, the radical film theorist and director, commented similarly on cinema’s subordination to literature: ‘Every motion picture is a mere literary skeleton covered with a film skin … we have no film objects. We have the cohabitation of film-illustrations with theatre, literature, with music … at any price’ (Vertov 1984: 36). 11 Amongst the writers ‘nationalized’ in 1918 were Tolstoi, Chekhov, Gogol, Pushkin and Nekrasov. 12 For the literary influences on Eisenstein’s film theories (including the grounding of his montage theory in Pushkin’s metaphors), see Eisenstein 1986. 13 For an account of Room’s film Strogii iunosha and its relationship with Olesha’s scenario, see Michalski 2000. 14 For a reading of Aelita’s relationship with Tolstoy’s original, see Christie 1991. 15 Evgenii Dobrenko describes the systematic way in which the literary classics were fragmented to ‘structure children’s reading’ according to key Marxist-Leninist categories – ‘the oppressive conditions on the country estate’, ‘the impoverished working class’, etc. – suggesting that literature under Stalin acquired the function of ‘normative centre’ in the entire education system. See Dobrenko 1999: 147–8. 16 In 1927 Sovkino released a film called ‘Ania’, based on two stories by S. Grigoriev, and Mezhrabpromfilm released in 1928 ‘Chiny i liudi’ (‘Ranks and People’), directed by Protozanov and based on three separate Chekhov stories. 17 Georgian State Cinema produced a version in 1928, and Mosfilm followed suit in 1955. 18 Other than Pudovkin’s Mother, the Andreev film White Eagle (Belyi orel), together with a version of his The Tale of the Seven who were Hanged (Rasskaz o

Notes 197

19

20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29

semi poveshennykh) (1920), both treat the 1905 revolution, as does A Lone Sail Gleams White (Beleet parus odinokii) (1937). Numerous adaptations, particularly those based on originals from the nonRussian republics, such as Poem in the name of Freedom (Poema imeni Osvobozhdeniia) (1931), set during the Civil War in Belarus’ and adapted from Andrei Aleksandrovskii’s poem of the same name, fulfilled both spatial and temporal requirements. Adaptation theory has recognized that the relationship between classical text and film version is necessarily one of ‘constant negotiations and contestations within any social order’. See Uricchio and Pearson 1993: 8. This culture of self-propagation is also reflected in the development of individual visual motifs repeated from adaptation to adaptation – stock images which enable the genre to identify itself to the Stalinist viewer: the soon-to-be-violated Russian birch forest at the beginning of Second World War adaptations; prototypical revolutionary heroes staring into the glorious future beyond their deaths. Writing of the role of the 1952 celebrations of the centenary of Gogol’s death, Steven Moller-Sally comments: ‘In the epoch of High Stalinism the classical author … performs the function of a cultural hero who embodies the spirit of the people … Gogol corresponded perfectly to the main direction taken by postwar ideology … In these conditions the Ukrainian tales of Gogol took on special significance’. See Moller-Sally 2000: 514, 516. For Russian literature’s ‘intergeneric dialogues’, see Morson 1991a: 336–81. For an account of Anna Nikitichna’s role in the film, see Leyda 1960: 314. Analyses of the socialist realist content of the film are given in Crofts 1977 and Ferro 1976. This aspect of the cinematic medium is treated in Ellis 1992: 40. Shumiatskii writes that ‘Chapaev depicts … the fate of individual heroes and it is through them that the mass is vividly and graphically revealed’ (Shumiatskii 1988: 361). In another scene, a mutinous soldier gives a speech aimed at fomenting sedition. His wild gesticulations are exaggeratedly false, by contrast with the subsequent reprimand issued by Chapaev which is natural and understated. Here the equation of outer gesture and inner truth is confirmed in a negative sense. The classic work on Socialist Realism’s mythologizing qualities is Clark 1981. Aspects of the folklorization of Chapaev in the 1920s and 30s are covered in Miller 1990.

5 Shooting the canon: ekranizatsii and the (de)centring of Stalinist culture 1 Bellen Vidal Villasur argues that ‘[t]he marks of temporal distance in the mise-enscène have turned into an integral part of the distinctive aesthetics of the classic adaptation, making inevitable a certain degree of reflexivity’ (Villasur 2002: 6). 2 Commenting on Soviet film of the 1930s, Maia Turovskaia writes that ‘entertainment value’ became ‘an essential element of the new paradigm’. She quotes Boris Shumiatskii, Stalin’s film czar, who maintained: ‘By the entertainment value of a film we mean the emotional effect it exacts and the simple artistry that rapidly assimilates its ideological content and its plot to the mass audience’ (Turovskaia 1993: 44) 3 According to Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Stalin was the father of them all and the bestower … of all bounties. This ideological scenario was repeated endlessly in the Stalin era and in the process Soviet citizens were infantilized’ (Buck-Morss 2000: 196).

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4 The director of Volga, Volga, Grigorii Aleksandrov, made several spectacularly successful musical film comedies in the 1930s starring his wife, Liubov’ Orlova, and including Happy Fellows (Veselye rebiata) and Circus (Tsirk). 5 An equivalent in Western cinema exists in the treatment of phenomena like Dracula and Frankenstein in which the original novels (by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley) are filtered through popular myth before reaching the screen, which is why recent ‘faithful’ adaptations adopt titles like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula to distinguish themselves from the norm. 6 This contradicts Stevenson’s original in which Jim Hawkins tells us at the end of the adventure: ‘All of us had an ample share of the treasure, and used it wisely or foolishly, according to our natures’ (Stevenson 1962: 245). 7 The Stalin-era film adaptation developed a distinct line in ‘knowing winks’ to the viewer which identify him/her with a position of knowledge of which the characters are deprived. Freed from its sublimating function, this autotelic tendency was developed to subversive effect during the Thaw, as we shall see in Chapter 6. The oscillation of subject position between child and parent is well served by the prevalence of adaptations of books with mixed-age audiences in mind, such as Fadeev’s Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia), Polevoi’s Tale of a Real Man (Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke), both Second World War stories, and Ostrovskii’s How the Steel was Tempered (Kak zakalialas’ stal’). Commenting on this phenomenon, L. Geller refers (like Buck-Morss) to the ‘infantilization of the Stalinist reader’ and the ‘mixing of age criteria’ (Geller 2000b: 442). 8 As Maria Enzensberger argues, the difference between Hollywood and Stalinist musicals is that, whereas ‘the latter … transpose their Utopias in time and space to some sort of “Golden Life” … the Stalinist musical enacts its Utopia in … present-day Soviet reality in which everyone works’ (Enzensberger 1993: 97–8). 9 Mikhail Epstein argues that, during the Stalin era, ‘a standard ideological device is to designate the same or similar phenomenon with opposite evaluative signs and extract ideological surplus value from the evaluative difference of their meanings’ (Epstein 1995: 162–3). 10 Mother was adapted three times during the Soviet era. It is listed on what Katerina Clark calls her ‘Official Short List of Model Socialist Realist Novels’ (Clark 1989: 261–3). 11 Donskoi had already co-directed with M. Averbakh the 1929 film In the Big City (V bol’shom gorode). Following the trilogy, he made one of the key Soviet war films, Rainbow (Raduga) in 1944, also directing adaptations of How the Steel was Tempered (1942), and Gor’kii’s Mother (1955). Katerina Clark notes that biography became ‘the most typical genre of socialist realism’, and that Gor’kii himself launched a book series called ‘The Lives of Great People’ (Clark 2000: 786). Examples of the Stalinist biopic include films about historical rulers and generals in the 1930s, and about writers, scientists and popular composers like Glinka and Rimskii-Korsakov in the late 1940s. 12 A Pravda reviewer claimed that Detstvo Gor’kogo ‘is not only for children’ (Kol’tsov 1938: 6). 13 1932 marked the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of Gor’kii’s literary career. On September 17, the Communist Party passed ‘Measures to mark the fortieth anniversary of M. Gor’kii’s Literary Work’, including the establishment of the Gor’kii Institute, and the renaming of Nizhnii Novgorod as Gor’kii (see Yedlin 1999: 196–7). 14 The problem that this familiarity produced for Donskoi is reflected in Konstantin Paustovskii’s review of My Apprenticeship, criticising the ‘excessive one-sidedness’ of the screen Gor’kii, noting that ‘Gor’kii is so close and dear to us that we are especially demanding when it comes to his portrayal on the screen’ (Paustovskii 1940: 4).

Notes 199 15 Paustovskii’s review describes My Apprenticeship as shot through with ‘a presentiment of imminent liberation’ (Paustovskii 1940: 4). 16 Vera Dunham mentions this requirement in her discussion of the Stalinist public hero, in whom ‘simplicity and extraordinariness were to be blended … a completely simple person was a person who performed inspiring deeds in the shop and factory’ (Dunham 1976: 78). 17 Gunther remarks of nationalist tendencies in the 1930s: ‘In the transition from a class to a nation-based programme, revolutionary power expresses the urge to overcome its status as “a foreign element”, the desire to root itself in native soil’ (Gunther 2000: 377). 18 In the book, Just the Job is merely presented as Peshkov’s soulmate, not as a political model around which he bases his future life as a revolutionary writer. His departure is rendered in a downbeat tone: ‘In the evening he departed, having said his farewells to all and having warmly embraced me … Thus ended my friendship with the first person from a sequence of people alien to their own native land’ (Gor’kii 1962: 90). 19 The classic account of the socialist realist novel is Clark 1989. 20 In his address to the 1934 Writers’ Union Congress, Gor’kii insisted that the Union’s task was ‘not to restrict individual creation, but to furnish it with the widest means for continual powerful development’ (quoted in Garrard and Garrard 1990: 67). 21 Dmitrii Pisarevskii, a Soviet film critic who had been writing since 1940, argues that ‘the director consistently renders the life of Aleksei Peshkov as the life of a typical self-made man of the people’ (Pisarevskii 1967: 96–7). 22 As the Pravda review of the film noted, episodes from other stories are added to the plot action of the film (Kol’tsov 1938: 2) 23 The conversion of imperfective literary past into singular cinematic present is a key issue for any film adaptation. 24 Pisarevskii compares the final scene of the vast steppe with the image of the wide river Volga at the beginning, characterizing the former as ‘an infinitely wide expanse and a horizon that summons one to it’, symbolizing the fact that ‘Russia and its people are immortal’ (Pisarevskii 1967: 97). 25 O. Bulgakova suggests that this scene, like similarly quintessential Russian landscapes in films of the thirties, was shot in a studio with an artificial backdrop so that ‘space was subordinated to the fantasy of the scenario-writer’ (Bulgakova 2000: 158). 26 Paustovskii’s review criticises Donskoi for the fact that Gor’kii was not so much an inquisitive youth as a doctrinaire teacher, adding that words put into Peshkov’s mouth from other Gor’kii stories ‘sound sententious’ (Paustovskii 1940: 6). Yet M. Iliushin, a reviewer of Donskoi’s previous film, Amongst the People, admonished him for the opposite mistake, that of ideological understatement: ‘the nascent protest in Alesha is insufficiently revealed and … this aspect should have been brought to the fore in the film’ (Iliushin 1938: 6). Paustovskii’s grudge may have been occasioned by the attacks to which he was subjected for his mannered style. See Baudoin and Geller 1991: 307. 27 ‘In the older type of film, images and written signs still alternated with one another and the antithesis of the two lend emphasis to the image–character of the image. But this distinction like every other was unbearable to mass culture. It has expelled writing from film as an alien presence’ (Adorno 1991: 81). 28 Geller explains the emphasis on episodes in which workers are instructed as standard to socialist realist texts because ‘adhering to the doctrine of party-mindedness (partiinost’), it is at that moment that the chasm between physical and intellectual labour is bridged’ (Geller 2000b: 435).

200

Notes

29 ‘In so far as the individual images have played a part in an uninterrupted photographic series on the screen, they have already become mere objects … they pass us impotently by’ (Adorno 1991: 62). 30 This familiarity is illustrated by the rumour that, on returning to Moscow from the West, Gor’kii travelled in heavy disguise, to find out how ordinary people were living (see Yedlin 1999: 185). 31 In the book, he shoots himself in the heart ‘but only penetrates a lung’, then declaring that he has no idea why he decided to kill himself (Gor’kii 1962: 479). 32 These words are taken from Gor’kii’s short story ‘The Birth of Man’ (‘Rozhdenie cheloveka’). For Paustovskii, they ‘sound like a thesis’ (Paustovskii 1940: 6). 33 Gor’kii’s famous revolutionary poem is called ‘The Storm Petrel’ (‘Burevestnik’). 34 Richard Hare points out that, after his contribution to the 1934 Congress, Gor’kii virtually severed his ties with the Writers’ Union (Hare 1962: 143). 35 Pushkin was adapted four times in the 1930s, Krylov’s fables once, Gogol’s ‘Sorochinskii market’ (‘Sorochinskaia iarmarka’’) once, Chekhov’s stories four times and Saltykov-Shchedrin’s satirical novel The Golovlev Family once. Ostrovskii’s plays were also adapted in the 1930s. 36 The early 1950s, for example, saw several Chekhov adaptations, including ‘Lawlessness’ (‘Bezzakonie’) directed by K. Iudin (1953), ‘Anna on the Neck’ (‘Anna na shee’) directed by Isidor Annenskii (1954), and ‘The Grasshopper’ (‘Poprygun’ia’) directed by S. Samsonov (1955). 37 Grigorii Roshal, a prominent adapter and director of the 1930s, claimed: ‘All creative potential should be mobilized for one purpose, namely to interpret the original from the standpoint of socialist realism … to reveal its deep-seated progressive tendencies’ (quoted in Dobrenko 2001: 62). 38 Dobrenko points out that ‘the screen Belikov is almost copied word for word from a descriptive passage in one of Lenin’s articles’ (Dobrenko 2001: 73). 39 The other stories are ‘The Gooseberry patch’ (‘Kryzhovnik’) and ‘About Love’ (‘O liubvi’). 40 ‘He oppressed us all … and we gave in … Under the influence of such types, people began to fear everything’ (Chekhov 1977: 44). 41 As Dobrenko writes, ‘All Annenskii did was to develop the officially approved interpretation of Chekhov’s story one stage further, taking it to the point of absurdity’ (Dobrenko 2001: 71). 42 This dual generalizing/particularizing approach has a temporal aspect. E. Levin writes: ‘The removal of distance between past and present facilitates a maximally active psychological contact with the screen action. At the same time, the opposing tendency breaks the personal, intimate contact with the screen, replacing it with an ideologized social-reflective contact, dissolving the individual in the mass’ (Levin 1994: 82–3). 43 Richard Stites and James von Geldern comment that, ‘despite claiming an eternal and undying ideology, the makers of mass culture were constantly tacking with the sea breeze of fashion … Soviet socialism was not the inflexible ideology it claimed to be; it was a set of social practices … in constant flux, which hid its intentions not only from the outside world but from itself’ (Stites and von Geldern 1995: xxviii). 44 Villasur writes of the adaptation genre as ‘navigating between art cinema and popular culture’ (Villasur 2002: 7). 45 Gunther identifies the 1930s as socialist realism’s ‘canonization phase’ (Gunther 2000: 283). 46 As Birgit Menzel argues, the mid-1930s saw the beginnings of a subjective-lyrical trend across Stalinist culture (Menzel 2000: 954).

Notes 201

6 Metatextuality in the post-Stalinist ekranizatsiia: the official sphere unravels 1 Shumiatskii’s scheme, which projected a rate of production of 800 films per year, was known unofficially as Sovetskii Gollivud, and officially as Cine-City (Kinogorod). See Taylor 1991: 214. 2 Alla Latynina has analysed the Stalin Prize’s role in consolidating the socialist realist canon (Latynina 1996). 3 Commenting on the film Young Guard, Richard Stites and James von Geldern note that ‘the tough kid Sergei Tyulenin (played by Sergei Gurzo) became a cult hero for urban youth’ (Stites and von Geldern 1995: 387). 4 Lary considers that Pyr’ev ‘saw Dostoevskii as a naturalistic genre writer … limited by his epoch’, and ‘Nastasia Filippovna as a victim of a money-crazed capitalist society’ (Lary 1986: 112–14). 5 Lary notes Pyr’ev’s work with Eisenstein in Proletkult in connection with his use of montage (Lary1986: 113). 6 It was adapted for a third time by Nikolai Mashchenko in 1975. 7 Grigorii Chukrai’s Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o soldate) (1959), for example, locates some of its wartime action in an intimate train compartment into which a young soldier has smuggled his girlfriend in breach of protocol. See Barta and Hutchings 2002. 8 Alov’s and Naumov’s ‘excessive’ subjectivism was instantly recognized. The veteran director, Iulii Raizman, complains that Korchagin ‘stops being a representative of a young, emerging class, an expression of the ideals of the Komsomol, and becomes simply an individual personality who happened to have bad luck in these harsh … times’ (quoted in Alov and Naumov 1989: 43). 9 Ivan Pyr’ev objected vehemently to the film: ‘Filth, lice, typhus. No brightness. We knew how to take pleasure in life, we didn’t go off like people doomed to suffering’ (quoted in Alov and Naumov 1989: 36). 10 For an analysis of Mercy Tsach as a socialist realist text, see Vernikski 2003(b). Faraday notes the resentment harboured by populist film-makers of the 1960s, such as El’dar Riazanov, against the ‘Aesopian’ elitism of Tarkovskii, who once characterised art as, by nature, ‘aristocratic’ (Faraday 2000: 103). 11 Woll sums up the legacy of Thaw cinema by stating that it ‘legitimized the private lives and emotions of individuals, even within highly ideologized political contexts, such as the civil war and the Second World War’ (Woll 2000: 227). 12 Inverting the values espoused by Sergei Mikhalkov and promoting a deeply nostalgic Russian nationalism, Nikita Mikhalkov, now Head of the Russian Cinematographers’ Union, has recently risen to a level of prominence which exceeds that of his father. 13 See Kelly 2001 for an analysis of the Russian conception of ‘culturedness’ (kulturnost’). 14 A 1960s joke about a man who wants to travel to Paris again revolves around an ambiguity in emphasis; the man means that he wants again, rather than that he wants to travel again. 15 In a review in Iskusstvo kino, L. Anninskii suggests that Mikhalkov-Konchalovskii took from Turgenev the ‘captivating, evanescent life of the country estate’, characterizing his approach as one of ‘hanging out for display an old beauty’ and ‘ lovingly lifting antiquity from the dust … taking delight in the dust itself’. His evaluation speaks later of a ‘weaving together of the beauty of the human soul with the beauty of the old trees’ (Anninskii 1969: 46, 51). 16 Anninskii criticises the director for superimposing a false ‘folksiness’ (prostonarodnost’) on Lavretskii, and for introducing a superfluous scene at a gypsy market

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17

18 19 20 21

22

23

24 25 26

Notes

at which Lavretskii barters for a horse, complaining that ‘the admiration of the old world is becoming something of a bad fashion today’ (Anninskii 1969: 50). V. Ol’gin’s more hostile review attacks Mikhalkov-Konchalovskii for indulging in a ‘modish slavophilism’ which is simply ‘thrown onto the screen without any attempt at making sense of it’. Ol’gin is less impressed than Anninskii by the nostalgic detail which he dismisses as ‘playing with materiality’ (igra s veshchnost’iu) (Ol’gin 1969: 44–5). The changing nature of the Soviet ekranizatsiia in the television era is treated extensively in Lipkov 2000. Zakharov attributes to Gorin’s play the notion of Munchausen as a ‘creative personality working in extreme conditions’ (Zakharov 1988: 134). Fostered by Kornei Chukovskii’s re-telling of the story for children and a 1938 animation called The Liar (Lgunishka), Munchausen served in Soviet popular culture as an emblem of the phenomenon of creative lying. Zakharov writes: ‘an unusual personality, such as that of our hero, is not required to live according to the rules and norms of a careful society.… Bad laws have created careful and short-sighted people and a great artist’s struggle with them is a happy struggle’ (Zakharov 1988: 135). Elsewhere, he characterizes him as a ‘rebel’ (buntar’) (132). In his exposition of the allegorical aspects of Zakharov’s film, Kevin Moss notes amongst the numerous Aesopian allusions to Soviet contemporaneity the bombastic clichés used on the occasion of the Baron’s death, the ‘shoddy goods’ phenomenon that Munchausen exposes when a bell handle comes away in his hand, references to Bulgakov’s banned satirical novel The Master and Margarita, the show trials, and the German authorities’ faith in ‘the power of the document’ against all visual evidence. Moss remarks on the film’s disorienting inversion of fiction and truth and links its Aesopianism with its title: Gorin’s Sovietized hero is ‘the same Munchausen’ as Raspe’s. See Moss 1993. Zakharov’s account stresses that the Baron’s ‘ability to laugh at himself’ is a ‘difficult art’ that he ‘teaches us, though not always successfully’ (Zakharov 1988: 132). He also links Munchausen with other clown-like rogues in Russian literary culture, such as Il’f and Petrov’s NEP-era fraudster, Ostap Bender. Derrida bases his theory on the idea of writing as a ‘dangerous supplement’, always liable to invert the hierarchy subordinating it to the spoken word (Derrida 1974). There were two earlier versions of Leskov’s ‘Lady Macbeth’, one silent one from 1926, and a 1966 adaptation of Shostakovich’s opera based on the novella. Natasha Synessios writes ‘Tarkovskii’s relationship to the word was a complex one … The image was for him the supreme embodiment of the absolute … He always maintained, however, that the director’s work resembled that of the poet and the writer, taking place in the stillness of the inner self’. Synessios also notes that part of Tarkovskii’s interest in adapting The Idiot for the screen derived from his lifelong desire to realise in cinematic form Dostoevskii’s axiom that ‘Beauty will save the world’ (Synessios 1999: xv, xviii).

7 Hamlet with a guitar: the autobiographical persona of Vladimir Vysotskii as an intermedia phenomenon 1 Stites writes: ‘Even in [the] repressive years, there were alternatives … to Stalinist culture … Unofficial culture was dynamic, vivid, often coarse … it carried on an internal dialogue within society’ (Von Geldern and Stites 1995: xxv–xxvi). 2 The definitive account of Vysotskii is given by Gerry Smith in his book on Russian guitar poetry (Smith 1984). Smith touches only briefly on Vysotskii’s theatrical work, and his films are barely mentioned. In Russia, Kanuchkov’s is

Notes 203

3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10

11

12

13

one of several critical autobiographies concentrating on the songs/poems. The Vysotskii museum established in Moscow by the star’s family and intended to consolidate Vysotskii’s literary reputation issues compilations of scholarly essays which treat issues such as imagery, metre and literary influences in the poetry (see Sokolova 2000), though Sviridov 2000, dealing with musical tonalities in the songs, and Tokarev 2000, treating Vysotskii as an example of modern folklore, are exceptions. The only extended accounts of Vysotskii’s films are Blinova 1992 and Kienia 1992. There is a section on Vysotskii and the cinema in Terent’eva 2000, but it comprises mostly biographical data rather than critical analysis. Vysotskii’s first film was Female Peers (Sverstnitsy), (1959). Between 1959 and 1990 he contributed, as an actor or a composer of songs (sometimes posthumously), to thirty-nine films. The remarks were made during an extended concert Vysotskii gave at the Paris Commune Drama Club in Moscow on 27 March 1980, four months before his death (Vysotskii 1998). Typical of Vysotskii’s early blatnoi output is the song ‘The One who Was With Her Before’ (‘Tot, kto ran’she s neiu byl’), in which the lyric persona threatens reprisals against a gang who have beaten him up out of sexual jealousy. The title of a later Riazanov film, Office Romance (Sluzhebnyi roman) (1977), in which a female bureaucrat is liberated by love from her formalistic approach to life, provides a more vivid instance of the challenge posed by romantic modes to late Soviet official culture. During the 1970s, the television genres of the detektiv and the spy thriller experienced popular success. The latter is illustrated by the legendary 17 Moments of Spring (Semnadsat’ mgnovenii vesny), a serial repeated incessantly on Russian television, and one which reputedly caused the Central Committee of the Communist Party to reschedule meetings which would otherwise have clashed with key episodes. ‘It is I who didn’t return from battle’ (‘Eto ia ne vernulsia iz boia’) is the most famous of Vyotskii’s war songs. More properly dissident bards like Iulii Kim, who contributed lyrics to the songs in numerous films, rarely appeared in person, indicating the ties between visual prominence and normativity in Soviet society. The difficulties are described in Blinova 1992: 138–40. The proposition that Vysotskii play Zheglov was originally rebuffed by Gosteleradio (Vysotskii 1989: 383). The intervention of the Deputy Minister of the Interior and the Chief of Staff of the Soviet Army, indicating Vysotskii’s support at the highest levels of officialdom, eventually secured him the role (see Vysotskii 1989: 385). In Four Meetings With Vysotskii (Chetyre vstrechi s Vysotskim), a 1988 television series celebrating Vysotskii’s creative life, El’dar Riazanov remarked on Vysotskii’s resentment about never appearing on television as a poet. In the same programme, Evgenii Evtushenko notes that a poetry reading in Paris in which Vysotskii appeared alongside Evtushenko, Rozhdestvenskii and Voznesenskii, was broadcast with Vysotskii’s contribution excised. Riazanov linked Vysotskii’s inability to publish as a poet with the Soviet regime’s repressiveness, also recalling Vysotskii’s disappointment at being rejected in favour of Evtushenko for a film about Cyrano de Bergerac which required a poet for the leading role (the film was never made). Describing a different aspect of this dialectic, MacFadyen describes how the popular singer, Alla Pugacheva, used songs based on Mandel’shtam, Tsvetaeva and Shakespeare to alter the official canon of the Soviet popular song. See MacFadyen 2001: 210. MacFadyen also discusses the ‘decreasing distance between the actor and the role’ as a phenomenon of late Soviet culture, but in the context of the popular

204

14 15

16 17

18

19

20

21 22

23

24 25

26

Notes

songs of Sofiia Rotaru and Irina Ponarovskaia, whom Vysotskii precedes by a decade (MacFadyen 2001: 203). MacFadyen comments that, during the Brezhnev period, ‘audience tastes and their degree of support begin increasingly to dictate the repertoire of an artist’ (MacFadyen 2001: 34). During informal monologues in the pause between songs at his Paris Commune concert, Vysotskii attributed the variety of personas adopted in his lyric songs to his dramatic ability to ‘enter the skins’ of other people (Vysotskii 1998), confirming that the intermedia influences on his art were multi-directional. The role was criticized in an official Krasnodar journal convinced that the film was ideologically suspect (see Terent’eva 2000: 21). Tokarev also makes this point (Tokarev 2000: 309). Many of Vysotskii’s performances follow a path of increasing intensity, as his delivery becomes ever more frenetically hoarse, according the songs shades of meaning that cannot be conveyed in textual form. Quoting Lotman’s comments on the theatrical pose of carelessness as ‘the ostentatious rejection of [public] signification’, MacFadyen stresses the importance of embodied meaning such as a singer’s dynamic use of gesture ‘as an expression of idiosyncracy’ in the Soviet popular song’s undermining of ‘static’ Soviet official culture (MacFadyen 2001: 60). The notion of the Soviet Union as a distorted wonderland was first articulated by Andrei Siniavskii in his ‘On Socialist Realism’ (‘O Sotsialisticheskom realizme’), published in the West in 1959. This, however, would not have been familiar in the Soviet Union in 1973. In 1977 two records of Vysotskii songs relating to Alice in Wonderland were released under the title Alice in Wonderland – A Record-Spectacular (Alisa v strane chudes – Diskospektakl’). They included songs such as the famous ‘Parrot’s Song’ (‘Pesnia popugaia’) and ‘The Song of the March Hare’ (‘Pesnia Martovskogo zaitsa’). On the sleeve, Vysotskii himself suggests that the songs may be of equal interest to adults and children. Petra Scandali notes that Pushkin had intended to make neither Hannibal, nor Peter, but Russia itself the focus of the novel, a view reflected in the epigraph: ‘Russia transformed by Peter’s iron will’ (‘Zheleznoi voleiu Petra preobrazhennaia Rossia’). See Scandali 1999: 142. Scandali suggests that Pushkin’s Korsakov is mocked for his European preciosity (Scandali 1999: 165). Mitta’s Filemon, by contrast, is a salt-of-the-earth muzhik. At the end of the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin writes of flight to ‘My Africa’ to ‘sigh for gloomy Russia’. As Thomas Shaw argues, Pushkin attributed great importance to this stanza and provided a footnote explaining the significance of the phrase ‘My Africa’ (Shaw 1993: 125). Vysotskii’s own comments are instructive: ‘The film’s meaning lies in the fact that this man, in spite of his colour, is profoundly Russian. He is a little unlike others, and for this reason there is an air of unpleasantness … around him’ (Terent’eva 2000: 40). The idea of Ibrahim-Hannibal as the true embodiment of Russian identity was implicit in Pushkin’s text in which, according to Scandali, ‘Ibragim represents Peter’s ideal more than does Peter himself’ (Scandali 1999: 170). Scandali stresses Ibrahim’s role as mediator in Pushkin’s original: ‘Ibragim emerges as … an emblem of the syncretism of Russian culture during the reign of Peter … Gannibal with his African origin and European education could be viewed as a symbol of Petrine Russia with its “dark” and unknown past and forced Europeanization … The idea of mediation between Russia and the West was very dear to Pushkin’ (Scandali 1999: 151–2) Vysotskii embraced the ‘folklorization’ of Pushkin’s text in his remarks about the songs omitted from the film (Vysotskii 1989: 210).

Notes 205 27 Turgenev’s 1860 essay entitled ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’ (‘Gamlet i Don Kikhot’) contrasts Hamlet’s reflexivity and introversion, linked to Russian literature’s ‘superfluous men’, with the action-oriented hero of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 28 In 1999, the up-market NTV talk-show ‘Hero of the Day’ broadcast an interview with Konstantin Raikin who was playing in a new Russian version of Hamlet. The production met with great acclaim and Raikin was presented as Russia’s ‘Hamlet of the Nineties’, a worthy successor to Vysotskii and Smoktunovskii, with whom he compared himself.

8 Literature as translation mechanism in post-Soviet televisual representations of Westernness 1 For an account of television’s role in ending the 1991 coup, see Bonnell and Freidin 1995. 2 The number of books printed in Russia dropped from 1,553 million in 1990 to 422 million in 1996, and the number of Russians who never buy books reached a quarter of the population in 1996 (Olcott 2001: 1). 3 Film production in the former Soviet Union declined from 300 in 1990 to 46 in 1995, though it has recovered since (Segida and Zemlianukhin 1996: 6). 4 Nearly two-thirds of Russian readers now prefer either romances (27 per cent) or mystery thrillers (ostrosiuzhetnaia literatura) (32 per cent) (Olcott 2001: 3). 5 For a contextualization of the Marinina phenomenon, see Nepomnyashchy 1999. 6 The survey was carried out by Anat Vernitski. It was based on questionnaire returns from 70 respondents aged between 15 and 83. The results are available on the internet at 7 Olga Sobolevskaia describes Channel K as an ‘unassailable fortress’ for the ‘triteness’ and ‘low-standard mass products’ of other channels, praising its ‘adherence to … the high traditions of Russian and world culture’ (see Sobolevskaia 2003). Dmitrii Ukhov claims that it has ‘watered down the monotony of our commercial broadcasting’ (in Donets and Karakhan 2000: 45). 8 Kirill Razlogov suggests that ‘there is no place on “Kultura” for culture as a phenomenon which penetrates … daily life’, characterizing it as an example of ‘Imperial culture’ (in Donets and Karakahan: 48). 9 Sobolevskaia suggests that 10–12 per cent of the TV audience in Moscow and 6–8 per cent in the rest of Russia watch Channel K. She quotes the channel’s Director, Aleksandr Ponomarev, as saying that ‘the intelligentsia, or those people who want to be intellectual’ are true admirers of the TV channel (Sobolevskaia 2003). The Ekaterinberg survey reveals that the intelligentsia has a predilection for NTV’s politically risky satirical programme Turn Out the Light (Tushite svet), based on the Soviet children’s programme Good Night Little Ones (Spokoinoi nochi, malyshi), which in the wake of Putin’s coup against NTV, switched to TV6. See 10 Anthony Giddens is the prime exponent of the first trend, whilst Edward Said and Homi Bhabba represent the second. Featherstone and Lash refer to the former as ‘homogenizers’ and the latter as ‘heterogenizers’ (Featherstone and Lash 1995: 4). 11 See chapter 4 in Downing 1996. 12 Kelly’s work on post-Soviet consumerism also touches on television culture (Kelly 1998). 13 Christopher Gogwilt links Conrad’s adoption of the concept of the West to his familiarity with formulations of Western-ness advanced by the Russian Slavophile philosophers of the mid-to-late nineteenth century (Gogwilt 1995).

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14 In April 2001, NTV was seized by a group loyal to Putin and headed by Boris Iordan, an associate of the Gazprom energy giant. 15 In the novel, Maria from the soap opera arrives in Moscow, aware that she is ‘a conventional being woven by thousands of individual Russian consciousnesses’ yet ignorant of her ‘subconscious identification with Russia itself’ (Pelevin 1996: 39, 47) 16 Tent-poling consists of ‘placing a strong popular programme at the peak of prime time and hanging less popular ones on either side of it’, and hammocking consists of ‘suspending weaker or newer programmes between two … established ones’ (Fiske 1987: 102). 17 Natalia Ivanova discusses recent Russian television’s nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past, recognizing, however, that such nostalgia changes the values of the Soviet phenomena recalled, ‘mak[ing] them stranger, developing its own plot from those clichés and stereotypes’ (Ivanova 2002b: 63). 18 In 2001 ORT began broadcasting another version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ with a Russian title that reads as an exact translation of the English. 19 The longing for tsarist times was controversially expressed in Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1990 documentary film, The Russia We Have Lost (Rossiia, kotoruiu my poteriali) and more recently in Mikhalkov’s cumbersome 1998 film epic The Barber of Siberia (Sibir’skii tsiriul’nik). 20 A good illustration of this principle is to be found in the reintroduction in shop signs and product names of pre-revolutionary Russian orthographic rules. A chic new restaurant in St Petersburg has been given the name ‘Restoran’, but with a hard sign added to the last consonant according to the pre-1918 rules. (The name is doubly effective because it also subverts the Soviet penchant for naming shops after the name of the product they sell.) 21 As early as 1988, the manifesto of the extreme nationalist Pamiat’ group referred to the late Soviet media as a stronghold of parasitic cosmopolitanism. 22 Such a view of the New Russia is opposed in the two Brother (Brat) films, 1 and 2, in which entrepreneurism, foreignness and mafia criminality are conflated and resisted by the true-Russian war hero, fresh from Chechnia. 23 What I am proposing fits neither of what Jan Nederveen Pieterse defines as the two opposing categories of hybridity – the ‘assimilationist’ that ‘leans towards the centre … and mimics the hegemony’ nor the ‘destabilizing’ that ‘reverses the current, subverts the centre’ (Pieterse 1995: 56–7). The features of post-Soviet identity I have discussed are not assimilated to a Western centre, but nor do they turn it inside out; rather they transform it into a new myth capable of claiming centrality in its own right – a consequence of Russia’s hegemonic past.

9 In place of a conclusion: television, the end of literature and Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’ 1 Apocalyptical sensibilities were widespread in early post-Soviet culture. Masha Gessen refers to the eccentric Nikolia Moiseev, who made a career of predicting apocalypses (Gessen 1997: 27). 2 Douglas Coupland’s novel, Generation X: Tales For an Accelerated Culture, was published in 1991. 3 The psychedelic elements in Generation ‘P’ were a feature, too, of his previous novel, Chapaev and Emptiness (Chapaev i Pustota), where they were linked to Pelevin’s interest in Buddhist mysticism. 4 Gessen argues that a return to the mythic and the pagan characterizes attempts in sections of the post-Soviet intelligentsia to find new paradigms in the wake of the collapse of the certainties (negative and positive) of Soviet times. She refers

Notes 207

5 6

7

8

9

10

11 12 13

14 15

16

to Konstantin Kedrov, who combines this mythological bent with a kind of ultra-subjectivism according to which ‘the space outside you is your inner space’ (Gessen 1997: 71). The verse is from Psalms 14: 5. Tatarskii’s path is one from the intelligentsia to the emerging class of New Russians. The myth of the New Russians has preoccupied some commentators who see them as the negative ‘others’ of the old Soviet intelligentsia, their function to mediate between the pre- and post-Soviet eras (Lipovetsky 2003: 71), or as the target of post-Soviet intellectual satire (Graham 2003: 40). Helena Goscilo labels them ‘a travestied encapsulation of the Soviet intelligentsia’s unsaid’ (Goscilo 2003: 3), conveying the notion that New Russian mentality lay dormant within that of the old intelligentsia. Mélat notes this feature of the novel, suggesting that its poetics follows the laws of economics: ‘Generation ‘P’ is an accumulation of capital in the form of advertising slogans and scenarios, and witty sayings’ (Mélat 2001: 219). Lev Rubenshtein called Generation ‘P’ a ‘montage of clips’ (Rubenshtein 2000). Vladislav Ivanov accuses the publisher, Vagrius, of attempting to squeeze the last drop of profit out of Pelevin, whom he describes as indulging in ‘pulp fiction’ (Ivanov 2003). Mikhail Berg suggests that Pelevin is popular with young people ‘because he is uncomplicated and tugs at the strings to which young people are most sensitive: Death, Freedom, Love, the Meaning of Life’ (Berg 2000: 300). As Mélat indicates, Generation ‘P’ is the most autobiographical of Pelevin’s novels (a fact consonant with its self-reflexive, metatextual turn). Pelevin, like Tatarskii, graduated from a literary institute and worked as an advertising copywriter (Mélat 2001: 227). The importance of the border in Pelevin’s poetics is treated by Alexander Genis, who writes that in Pelevin ‘everything takes place on the boundary between different worlds’ (Genis 1999, 217). Pelevin’s attachment to high literary intertexts is noted by Keith Livers, who describes The Life of Insects as ‘remarkably traditional in its refusal to ‘throw overboard’ the legacy of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature’ (Livers 2002: 23). Natalia Ivanova characterizes Generation ‘P’ as ‘one of the first militantly antibourgeois postmodern novels’ (Ivanova 2002a: 46). Mélat describes Generation ‘P’ as Pelevin’s ‘self-advertisement’, showing how the novel cites (and promotes) the writer’s previous works (Mélat 2001: 227). Frank Kermode writes of the ‘secularization’ of eschatological narrative: ‘No longer imminent, the End is immanent … it is not merely the remnant of time that has eschatological import; the whole of history, and the progress of the individual life have it also, as a benefaction from the End, now immanent’ (Kermode 2000: 25). Tatarskii’s merger with his image corresponds to Baudrillard’s depiction of the postmodernist period’s domination by the ‘simulacrum’, the image without origin or object (Baudrillard 1994a, 2: 22). Mélat notes the connection Pelevin makes between millennial forebodings and the dehumanizing effects of the capitalist exchange system, writing of the ‘derealization of man characteristic of the economic process at the end of the 20th century’ which is allied to ‘Pelevin’s favourite device of virtualization’ (Mélat 2001: 221). Lipovetsky perceives in Generation ‘P’ an awareness of the unreality of postSoviet monetary logic, of the fact that the rules of New Russian capitalism are based not on any rational categories, but on the rituals of potlach, excess and expenditure similar to those described by George Bataille as ‘non-sumptuary production and consumption upon which wealth depends and thus appears as a relative value” (Lipovetsky 2003: 62).

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17 Seeking to transcend the dead ends of Soviet/post-Soviet reality, Pelevin has turned to myth before, most strikingly in his first novel, Omon Ra, in which the hero imagines himself as the falcon-headed Egyptian God, Ra. Mark Lipovetsky suggests that a group of Russian postmodernists including Pelevin is characterized by its desire ‘to re-mythologise cultural ruins and fragments’ (Lipovetsky 2001: 41). The turn to myth as a means of grounding meaning in a world dominated by the slippery uncertainties of virtual reality observable in Western popular cultural versions of postmodernism, such as the film The Matrix (1999), which bears similarities to Generation ‘P’ and has, like Pelevin’s work, been linked with gnostic dualism and Buddhist mysticism. 18 For an account of cultural meaning as the balance of information and entropy, see Lotman 1971: 36–44. 19 Pepsi arrived in the Soviet Union in 1959 (Freidin 2000). 20 The title of Che Guevara’s tract is a corruption of Lenin’s famous essay, ‘Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism’. 21 Livers refers to ‘Pelevin’s pet technique of allowing past and present to interpenetrate’ (Livers 2002: 8). 22 Mélat perceives an ‘aesthetics of the short circuit’ at the root of Pelevin’s fiction (Mélat 2001: 223). 23 Epstein associates negation of negation with Russia’s binaristic tendency to develop through radical ruptures with the Westernized past: ‘In Russia, “nothingness” comes to light, not in its primordial “Eastern” emptiness, but as the self-erasure of a positive form … borrowed from the West. The futility of positivity itself … forms the core of Russian religious experience’ (Epstein 1995: 198–9). 24 Epstein interprets excrementalism in contemporary art in terms of the death of both realism (in which art attempts to correspond to reality) and the avant garde (in which art aspires to anticipate reality), and the resulting need for art merely to serve as a crater ‘into which the overdone excrements of the earlier majestic forms and grandiose ideals are to fall’ (Epstein 1995: 89). The ‘excremental poetics’ of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Fat (Goluboe salo), in which the language of both nineteenth-century Russian literature and Soviet socialism are dismantled, leaving a vacuum to be filled with the scatological, should also be mentioned in this context. For an analysis of Sorokin in this light, see VladivGlover 1999. 25 Lipovetsky interprets postmodernism’s self-destructiveness as the ‘temporary death that one must undergo in order to be born again’, and Russian postmodernism as ‘an attempt to reconstruct the edifice of humanism in the space of chaos’ (Lipovetsky 1999: 240, 247). 26 See Hutchings 1997: 168–94.

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Index

adaptation 1–3, 9–11, 72–3, 77–146; see also ekranizatsiia Adorno, T. 75, 106–7 Aksenov, V. 124 Akunin, B. 155–6, 174 Aleksandrov, G. 100; Happy Guys 165 allegorization 87, 130, 145 Allen, E. 34 Alov and Naumov 121–4, 132; see also Ostrovskii, N., Pavel Korchagin Andreev, L. 53 Annenskii, I. 109–10, 112 apocalypse 27, 29, 175, 180, 183–5 Armstrong, N. 36 Askol’dov, A. 125 Astaf’ev, V. 153 Austen, J. 154 Babel, I. 83, 133 Bakhtin 4, 8, 159, 167, 187n.9 Balzac, H. de 21 Barabanov, A. 156 Barthes, R. 68 Baudelaire, C. 190n.16, 192n.10 Baudrillard, J. 183, 185 Bauer, E. 82, 87 Bazin, A. 79 Belinsikii, V. 29 Belov, V. 153 Belyi, A. 58 Benjamin, W. 7–8, 44, 50–1, 69 Berezovskii, B. 170 Bitov, A. 132 blatnye pesni 137–9; see also Vysotskii Blok, A. 58 Bodrov, S. 154 Bondarchuk, S. 126 Borenstein, E. 158 Bourdieu, P. 87, 115, 137

Brezhnev, L. 116, 129, 135, 137, 144–5 Brik, L. 64, 69, 71–2 Brik, O. 84 Briusov, V. 133 Buck-Morss, S. 57, 66, 184 Bulgakov, M. 125, 133 Bulgakova, O. 113 Bunin, I. 11, 19, 36, 54–5, 57 calotype 34 camera 2–4, 7–8, 11, 21–3, 37, 42–4, 48, 51, 55–7, 60, 62–3, 66, 68, 70, 72, 75, 77–78, 83, 89–90, 93, 94, 99, 106, 108, 114–15, 120, 122–3, 127, 131–2, 144, 149, 157, 165, 175–6; culture 2, 39; and democratization 42, 47–8, 51, 56; and documentary 37, 92; eye 62, 65–6, 69–70, 120; image 1, 7, 10, 18–19, 47, 53, 55, 59, 61–2, 72–3, 175–6, 180, 185; and imperialism 30; and literature 3–4; media 13; and objectification 66; technology 18, 38; and war 37; and voyeurism 38, 66; see also calotype, daguerreotype, image, photography canon 12, 48, 72, 78, 81–2, 84, 86–8, 90, 94, 98–9, 102, 109, 112–120, 123–5, 131, 144, 160, 175; see also literary canon Chambers, R. 7 Chapaev 3, 12, 90–7, 102–03, 114; see also Furmanov, Vasil’ev Brothers chat show 168, 170; see also talk show Chekhov, A. 3, 11, 19, 36, 42–7, 51–3, 57–8, 68, 109–10, 114, 129; ‘Man in the Case’ 89, 109, 111; ‘About Love’ 111; ‘The Duel’ 140, 142 Christ 25–7, 29, 71, 134 Christie, I. 77

222

Index

cinema 3, 9, 10–12, 58, 72, 77–8 80, 82–6, 88–90, 99, 105–6, 110, 113, 117, 121–2, 124–6, 129–30, 132–3, 135–7, 142, 145, 146–7, 154; see also adaptation, ekranizatsiia, film, image cultural capital 78, 115, 117–8 cultural imperialism 158 daguerreotype 17, 21–2, 32, 34, 43; see also camera, photography decadence 55 Demidova, A. 146 Derrida, J. 132, 188n.12 Dickens, C. 84 Dobrenko, E. 110, 113, 115, 196n.15, 200n.38, n.41 Donskoi, M. 102–8, 112, 121; see also Gor’kii Dostoevskii, F. 11–12, 20–22, 43, 45, 60, 62–3, 72, 119–20; The Adolescent 23; The Brothers Karamazov 119; Crime and Punishment 82, 84, 154, 176; Diary of a Writer 28; The Devils 25, 87; The Idiot 10, 18, 23–9, 41, 47, 118–19, 133–4, 155, 173, 175, 178–80, 183, 185; The Insulted and the Injured 23; ‘A Nasty Story’ 123 Downing, J. 158 Dyer, R. 136, 140 Eagleton, T. 81, 115 eidos 4–5, 8 Eikhenbaum, B. 84 Eisenstein, S. 77, 83 ekphrasis 8–10, 18, 20, 27, 32, 41, 72, 179–81, 185; reverse (inverse) 11, 81 ekranizatsiia 11–12, 77–8, 80–134, 154–6; and socialist realism 88–96; see also adaptation Eliot, T. 154 Ellis, J. 168 Eltsyn, B. 154–5, 162 Epstein, M. 183–4 Erofeev, V. 156 eschatology 23, 27, 29, 47, 62, 180, 185–6 Fadeev, A. 88; The Young Guard 121 Faraday, M. 117 film 10, 82; and literature 80; see also cinema, adaptation, ekranizatsiia Fiske, J. 158, 161–3 Formalism 82–4, 87 Foucault, M. 6

framing 9, 45–6, 48–50, 111, 114–15, 177, 185 Frankfurt School 58 Freund, G. 19 Furmanov, D. 81, 90–6, 102; see also Chapaev, Vasil’ev Brothers Gaidar, A. 86, 89, 118 Garshin, V. 11, 19, 57; ‘The Encounter’ 53–4; ‘Night’ 54 genre 10, 12–13, 30, 38, 48, 52, 63, 68, 78, 80, 91, 96, 98, 100, 102, 113–15, 126, 129–30, 139, 157–8, 160, 162, 164–5, 167–8, 173; see also photography glasnost 165 globalization 18, 51, 157–8; and culture 156; and television 158 Gogol, N. 10, 36, 82–4; ‘The Portrait’ 17–21; Dead Souls 20, ‘The Overcoat’ 186 Gorbachev, M. 135, 153 Gor’kii, M. 12, 43, 77, 85, 86, 89–90, 102–9, 114; trilogy (Childhood, My Apprenticeship, Amongst the People) 104–14; Mother 121; see also Peshkov, Donskoi Greenblatt, S. 173 Grossman, V. 125 Gulliver’s Travels 132 Hamlet 146–8 Hardy T. 40 Hawthorne, N. 21, 190–1n.11; House of the Seven Gables 35–6 Henry, O. 84 high culture 79, 156 Holbein 23–4 Hollywood 58 Holmes, O.W. 55 Iankovskii, O. 131 icon 25, 81; word as 70; see also image iconography 119, 182 iconology 135 iconotexts 9–11 Il’f and Petrov 125, 130 image 1, 3–13, 19, 21–2, 24, 26–7, 31–7, 40–4, 47, 49, 50–6, 70–73, 78, 80, 82–3, 90–2, 94, 97, 106–9, 113–15, 127–32, 134, 136, 138, 140–43, 149, 153–61, 164, 167, 171–7, 179–80, 182–3, 185–6; iconic 5, 13, 119–20;

Index 223 mass-produced 60, 63; and objectification 68; photographic 7, 13, 17, 25–6, 34, 61, 63, 65–9, 86; reproducible 18, 20, 24, 29, 32, 42, 47, 56, 57, 66; and text 69, 159; see also camera, cinema, photography, word imperialism 86 intelligentsia 95, 145, 157, 177 intercultural dialogue 6, 159, 169 intermedia 10, 135, 145; dialogue 11 intertitles 114 Iskusstvo kino 126 Jackson, R.L.J. 29 James, H. 154 Jay, M. 72 Jerome, J.K. 129 Karelin 25–6, 29 Kassil’, L. 89 Khakhordin, O. 137 Kheifits I. 126, 129, 137, 140, 142 Konchalovsky, A. 125; Nest of Gentlefolk 126–9; see also Mikhalkov, Turgenev Kriuchenykh, A. 89 kul’turnost’ (culturedness) 148, 160–1, 168, 173 Kuprin, A. 123 Latynina, A. 88 Lavrent’ev, A. 64, 70 Lembo, R. 161, 163 Lenin 80 Lermontov, M. 18, 82, 85–7 Leskov, N. 127, 133, 154 Levitskii 38, 52 Limonov, E. 155 literary canon 12, 18, 48, 72, 81, 84, 86, 90, 97, 113, 120, 124, 131–2 160, 175 literary classics 113, 115; nineteenthcentury 112 literary culture 1, 3, 12–13, 72, 77, 89, 138–9, 145, 147, 155–7, 159–60, 166–7, 170; Russian 157; Soviet 139 literary tradition 2–3, 7–10; Russian 9–10, 92; nineteenth-century 154, 159 literary word 2, 105; see also word lithography 17, 19, 45 logocentrism 2, 18, 158, 165, 174 Logos 24–7 London, J. 84 Losev, A. 9

Lotman, Iu. 6, 22, 72, 136, 159, 169–72 Lounsberry, A. 20 Lovell, S. 160 MacFadyen, D. 203–04nn. 12–14 McFarlane, B. 89 Mcluhan, M. 46–7 Maiakovskii, V. 11, 136; About That 11, 57–73, 77, 83; see also Rodchenko Mamin, Iu. 133 Mandel’shtam, O. 134 Marinina, A. 155 Martinsen, D. 28 Marx, K. 19 Maslennikov, I. 155 mass culture 53, 107, 135, 160 mass media 22, 28, 178 see also mediation mass production 69 mass readership 62 mediation 46–7, 56, 58, 64, 66, 129, 166; mass 22, 28, 65, 158, 186; see also camera, photography media persona 67 media stars 51, 66, 145 Merchant-Ivory films 78 Merezhkovskii, D. 44, 55 messianic tradition 183 metaphor 63, 67 metatextuality 8–9 12–13, 24, 32, 54, 65, 113, 115, 117, 120, 123, 127, 137, 141, 145, 160, 164, 166, 174–5, 177–9, 188n.21, 190n.28 Mezhrabpromfilm 86 Mickiewicz, E. 8 Mikhalkov, N. 126; see also Konchalovsky, Turgenev Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, A. 126 Mitchell, W.J.T. 6, 8–9, 80, 159, 188n.17 Mitta, A. 143 modernism 57 montage 61–6, 83 Morson, G.S. 38, 191n.3 Muratova, K. 140 Naremore, J. 79 national identity 6, 10, 113; post-Soviet 3, 157, 161, 169–70; Russian 143, 148–9, 158 ocularcentrism 46 official culture 12, 101, 115–16, 118, 130–33, 138, 142, 145

224

Index

official ideology 109 official sphere 11, 12, 78, 81, 103, 133, 135, 148; see also public sphere Olesha, Iu. 61, 84, 125 originality 28, 45–7, 56; see also Dostoevskii Ostrovskii, N. 12; How the Steel Was Tempered 12, 121–3, 130; see also Alov and Naumov, Pavel Korchagin Panova, V. 123–4 Pasternak, B. 147–8, 154 Pavel Korchagin 120, 121, 130, 132; see also Ostrovskii Pelevin, V., 162 Generation ‘P’ 13, 174–86; Chapaev and Emptiness 95 perestroika132 Peshkov, A. 103–8; see also Donskoi, Gor’kii Petrov, V. 117 photography 2–3, 6, 7, 9–11, 13, 17–19, 21–5, 28–9, 31–45, 47–8, 51–4, 56–8, 61–2, 66–8, 71–2, 77, 119, 157, 175; and anti-aestheticism 38; as carte de visite 43, 47; and contingency 112; and death 68, 70; and democratization, 57, 60; and duality 56, 70; and epistemological contradiction 51–3; genre in 30; and indexicality 55–6, 59; and lying 65; and mechanical reproduction 58, 66, 70–1, 79; and mediation 39–41; and painting 23, 25–6, 30–2, 41–6; and representation 60, 65, 68; and reproduction 7, 23, 29, 35, 42, 44, 61, 66–7, 71; and surveillance 51–2; and time 53–4, 58, 61–2, 65, 67–8, 70–1; see also camera,genre,mediation, image Platonov, A. 121 Poe, E.A. 17, 21, 85 Polevoi, B. 125; ‘Tale of A Real Man’ 125 Poloka, G. 125 Popkin, C. 53 popular culture 142 postmodernism 182–4, 208nn.17, 25 Pravda 111 Proshkin, A. 154 Protazanov, Ia. 85 Proust, M. 42 191–2n.7, 193n.13 public sphere 3, 11, 18, 72, 88, 97, 103, 137, 168; and private sphere 18, 69, 72, 122; see also official sphere Pudovkin, V. 85, 97

Pushkin, A. 1–2, 12, 18, 60, 83, 88, 110, 133, 140–1, 143, 144–7, 154–5, 158, 167–9, 170; ‘The Captain’s Daughter’ 82, 86, 89, 114, 155 Pyr’ev, I. 118, 120; The Idiot 119–20, 133; White Nights 120 Raspe, E. 130 Rasputin, V. 132 Razlogov, K. 172 realism 20, 22, 29, 30, 35, 42–3, 57–60, 72, 105, 109, 114, 157; Russian 10–11, 20–1, 29–30, 36–7, 39, 48, 53; see also socialist realism Remizov, A. 58, 195n.16 representation 5, 29, 42, 68, 71, 91, 94, 110, 112; see also photography Revelation 180 Riazanov E. 137, 148, 166 Rodchenko 11, 57–73; see also Maiakovskii Room, A. 82 Rozanov, V. 58, 186 Ruskin, J. 5, 44, 192n.11, 193n.16 Saltykov-Shchedryn, M. 30, 48 scenarios 60–1, 93, 100, 113, 124, 142, 175, 185 Sennett, R. 4, 187n.8 serials 155–6 Shakespeare, W. 154 Shklovskii, V. 82–3, 84, 92, 97 Sholokhov, M. 88 Shukshin, V. 124–5 Shumiatskii, B. 94, 117 Shvarts, E. 132 Slavin, L. 125 socialist realism 3, 12, 48, 60, 77–8, 80, 88–9, 94–5, 97, 102, 105, 108–9, 113–15, 120, 123–4; see also cinema, ekranizatsiia, realism Soiuzdetfil’m 86, 102 Soiuzmul’tfil’m 86 Sollogub, V. 21 Sologub F. 11, 18, 36, 55, 58 Solzhenitsyn, A. 153–4 Sontag, S. 7 Sparks, C. 158 Splichal, S. 158 spontaneity see stikhiinost’ Stevenson, R.L. 102; see also Treasure Island

Index 225 stikhiinost’ 90–1, 93, 105–6,114; see also Chapaev Stites, R. 135 supernatural 20–1 Swift, J. see Gulliver’s Travels Talbot, F. 21 talk-shows (tok-shou) 165; see also chat show Tarkovskii, A. 12; The Sacrifice 12, 133–5; The Mirror 126 Tatlin V. 59 telegraphy 32–3, 46 television 1, 8, 10, 129–30, 134–6, 142, 153–76, 174–9, 180, 182, 186; culture 13, 157, 159, 161; flow 159, 161–3; genres 157, 164, 167; global 88, 157; Russian 3, 13, 158–9, 170, 182; postSoviet 3, 149, 155–7, 159–63, 171, 173 see also adaptation, ekranizatsiia text and image 6; see also word and image Thaw, the 120, 124 Tiutchev, F. 167 Todorovskii, V. 154 Tolstaia, T. 135, 156 Tolstoy, A. 85; Aelita 85, 87; Peter the Great 117, 144 Tolstoy, L. 11, 19, 36–39, 41, 53, 82–3, 121, 129, 133, 144, 154–5; Anna Karenina 39–41, 154; ‘Cossacks’ 85, 89; ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ 133; and photography 37; ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’ 38, 125, 154; ‘Sevastopol in December’ 38; Resurrection 121; War and Peace 82, 121 totalitarianism 102, 137 transcoding 161 Treasure Island 12, 97–8, 102, 112–13, 115–16; see also Stevenson Tret’iakov, S. 59–60 Turgenev, I. 11, 29, 53, 58, 126, 128–9, 147, 155; Virgin Soil 15, 31–2, 35–6, 126, 128–9; Fathers and Sons 22;

Smoke 32–5, 41; see also Konchalovsky, Mikhalkov Twain, M. 89 Tynianov, Iu. 83–4, 87 Uspenskii, G. 3, 11, 18, 47–52; ‘Straightened Out’ 48–51 Vainshtok, V. 98 Vasil’ev Brothers 88, 90–7; see also Chapaev Verbitskaia, O. 58 Verne, J. 89 Vertov, D. 60, 83, 92 Volga, Volga 98, 100 Voynich, L. 88, 90, 114 Vysotskii, V. 12, 134–153; see also blatnye pesni West, the 1–3, 8, 12–13, 59, 78, 127–9 137, 154, 158, 160, 162, 164–5, 168–9 171–2, 174, 183, 192nn8, 13; 159, 167; and commercialism 148; democracy in 81, 158; and global formats 167; high art in 145; mass culture of 134–5, 148; and the other 164; popular culture of 136; postmodernist theory in 175; television genres in 164–5; cultural domination of 57 Williams, R. 158–9 Woll, J. 126 word, the 19, 153; of God 69; and image 3, 6–10, 12, 18, 45–8, 64, 72–73, 80, 90, 92, 94, 113, 141, 149, 154, 159, 161, 175, 179; 186, 190n.22; literary 88 Zakharov, M. 129–31, 135 Zhdanov, A. 77 zhiznetvorchestvo (life-creation) 61 Zizek, S. 4, 115, 161, 170–1, 184–5 Zola, E. 42 Zoshchenko, M. 133

1

Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘Christ in the Tomb’ (oil on wood, 1521)

2

Daguerreotype of the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna illustrating early photography’s tendency to imitate the conventions and poses of figurative painting (Charles Bernasco, 1870)

3

Woman fetching water, from Ethnographic Album of Little Russia, Iosif Kordysh, 1870s

4

Seventy-year-old bandura player, from Ethnographic Album of Little Russia, Iosif Kordysh, 1870s

5

Severely deteriorated daguerreotype of a painting depicting a horse, Anonymous (1850–55)

6

‘Tatar Woman in Ceremonial Dress’ (hand-tinted print), from Photographs of People of Orenburg Region, Mikhail Bukar (1872)

7 Portraits in Russian pull-out album kept in decorated wooden case, Anonymous (1870–85)

8

Carte de Visite of Vladimir Korolenko, Andrei Karelin, Nizhnii Novgorod (1890)

9

Prisoners chained before work in Duibiskaia Jail (from Chekhov’s private collection), J. J. Pavlovskii, Sakhalin

10 Cover design and photomontages for Vladimir Maiakovskii and Aleksandr Rodchenko, Pro eto (About that), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1923)

11

A scene depicting NEP-era reality from Aelita (1924)

12

Chapaev demonstrates battle tactics using potatoes

13

Chapaev viewed from below on his white battle-steed

14

The heroicized image of Peter the Great, from Vladimir Petrov’s 1937 film adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel

15

The staring eyes of the money-obsessed Rogozhin in Pyr’ev’s The Idiot (1956), one of many such images in the film

16 The end of Tarkovskii’s The Sacrifice