The Magical Chorus

premature glee that the noise around the writer’s expulsion and publication of volume one of The Gulag Archipelago was quieting down and “the opinion is more frequently expressed that Solzhenitsyn as an emigre will have a very difficult time preserving ‘the glory of a great writer.’”⁵

Andropov’s agency had overestimated the perspicacity and effectiveness of its methods of combatting dissent. True, the exile of Solzhenitsyn and other prominent dissidents and emigration in general had let off some steam from Soviet society. But this was a short-term effect; in the long run, moving all those people abroad had created the worst threat possible for a totalitarian system—a cultural alternative.

For a long time the authorities could label any manifestation of cultural independence “anti-Soviet.” This tactic intimidated people from sympathizing with nonconformist ideas, and it worked domestically and in the West.

The emigres hastened the process of transforming the binary opposition “Soviet/anti-Soviet” into a ternary system with a new element, “non-Soviet.” This development, which began inconspicuously back in the mid-1950s, gave rise to several important figures, among them the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, the poet Joseph Brodsky, and the composer Alfred Schnittke.

The three are rarely grouped together, yet they had much in common, beyond the obvious differences. As far as I know, they had never collaborated, although Schnittke (who wrote scores for dozens of films and worked with the best directors of Tarkovsky’s generation—Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, Elem Klimov, Larissa Shepitko, and Alexander Mitta) once used Brodsky poems as a sort of phonetic layer in his short piano cycle “Aphorisms”(1990).

It is interesting that all three were “infected” by the West from childhood, by its culture and lifestyle, even though their family backgrounds differed. The oldest was Tarkovsky, born in 1932; Schnittke was two years younger, and Brodsky, eight. But Tarkovsky and Brodsky both were stilyagi: they loved to wear elegant Western clothes (even though they didn’t have the money for it) and sit in fashionable cafes, sipping cocktails and listening to Western music, primarily jazz (later they both developed a love of Bach and Haydn).

Their longing for the West was influenced by literature and movies. (Brodsky always spoke of his admiration for American films, especially the Tarzan series.) Only Schnittke got to spend some time as a youth in the real Europe: in 1946 his father, a military interpreter and Party member, was sent to Vienna, where he worked for two years on a propaganda newspaper published in the Soviet occupation zone. Vienna had a magical effect on the provincial twelve-year-old boy from the Volga, and he described this as the “best time” of his life.⁶

Of the three, only Alfred was a diligent student; he was in the top of his class in grade school, music school, and the Moscow Conservatory, where he, like his classmate Sofia Gubaidulina, won the Stalin scholarship (a high honor indeed). Tarkovsky, rather short and with a chip on his shoulder, was a bad student and a troublemaker; red-haired and importunate Brodsky dropped out in eighth grade, where his formal education ended. Tarkovsky and Brodsky both found work in geological expeditions, wandering around the Siberian taiga. The expeditions attracted declasse elements, hoboes, and adventurers, but also future poets. For Tarkovsky this period was “the best memory” of his life, as he later insisted; Brodsky recalled his geological work (they were searching for uranium) rather skeptically.

Cultural education in the USSR from the purely professional point of view was always highly effective, despite the required courses on Marxism-Leninism, which, in fact, talented students were permitted to ignore. The conservatories, still based on solid, prerevolutionary traditions, were particularly good. They graduated highly skilled performers, the best of which easily won the most prestigious international competitions. They also gave thorough grounding for composers. If a student demonstrated talent, the road to the Composers’ Union, which conferred substantial privileges, was open.

The same held for the Moscow All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). The Moscow Literary Institute, which prepared (as it does to this day) diploma-bearing writers, poets, and translators, was more hard- line. But even there, a “good fairy” could help out a student: in 1952, at the height of Stalinism, the Literary Institute accepted Yevtushenko, even though he had been expelled from school (on charges of vandalism and hooliganism) and did not have the required diploma.

Brodsky did not have influential mentors like Yevtushenko did; the way to the Literary Institute was closed to him. He became an auto-didact. But Tarkovsky and Schnittke received the best professional education, and for free.

There is a legend that in 1954 when the venerable Mikhail Romm went “upstairs” for approval for the freshmen he had selected for his course on directing, he was told that two of the candidates would not be accepted at VGIK: Tarkovsky and Vassily Shukshin, who became a film actor, director, and writer, and the best-known representative of the “village” school in Russian culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

A secretive Siberian peasant, Shukshin showed up for the oral admissions examinations in a striped navy shirt (he had just been demobilized), and he did not please the high cinema board with his alleged lack of education (“He’s a total ignoramus, he doesn’t even know who Leo Tolstoy is!”). The dandified Tarkovsky, on the contrary, struck them as being “too smart.”⁷ But Romm knew how to get what he wanted, and both the stilyaga Tarkovsky and Shukshin, who proudly showed off his calluses, were accepted (and disliked each other instantly), going to the top of their class at VGIK.

Tarkovsky, like Schnittke, graduated from his school with honors. Tarkovsky was immediately hired as a director at Mosfilm, and Schnittke, after graduate school, went on to teach at the Moscow Conservatory. Schnittke was also accepted at the Composers’ Union, and started moving up the ladder there: he became a member of the board and was even groomed to become one of the secretaries, an important bureaucratic position.

Yet the first performed works by Schnittke—Violin Concerto No. 1 and the Nagasaki Oratorio (about the Japanese city hit by U.S. atom bomb)—while basically well received (Shostakovich and Georgy Sviridov were among his admirers), did not cause the sensation created by Tarkovsky’s first full-length film, Ivan’s Childhood, made on a shoestring budget in five months in 1961.

Introducing Ivan’s Childhood to its first audience at Dom Kino, the Cinematographer Union’s club in Moscow, Tarkovsky’s visibly nervous teacher Romm said, “Friends, today you will see something extraordinary, nothing like this has appeared on our screens before.” The influential critic Maya Turovskaya recalled, “Two hours later we came out of the theater—agitated, bewildered, still not knowing whether to berate the filmmaker for that confusion or to set aside our usual perceptions and accept the strange world that had appeared and vanished on the screen.”⁸

In Tarkovsky’s hands, the banal plot (a teenage army scout heroically sacrifices himself during World War II) was transformed into an existential parable, receiving high praise from Jean-Paul Sartre and in 1962 winning the Gold Lion of St. Mark at the Venice Film Festival. Venice made Tarkovsky famous at thirty.

The black-and-white Ivan’s Childhood, which subtly blurs the lines between reality, dream, and memory, is arguably Tarkovsky’s most perfect work. But his most famous film is Andrei Rublev, an epic narrative of more than three hours about the great monk icon painter of the fifteenth century. No one had attempted a project as ambitious as this since Eisenstein’s day, but Tarkovsky was then the darling of the cinematographic establishment, so they gave him what he needed, 1,250,000 rubles.