The Magical Chorus

Rublev, like Ivan’s Childhood, was made in record time— filming began in mid-1965 and ended in November, and despite the later legend, the bureaucrats accepted it with a cheer. The film was headed for Cannes when, as Tarkovsky told it, a denunciation from the influential film director Sergei Gerasimov led the Party culture curator Demichev to bring back Rublev from customs at Sheremetyevo Airport. Thus began Tarkovsky’s misfortunes.

Tarkovsky was not an admirer of Eisenstein. His idols were Robert Bresson, Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, and Akira Kurosawa. Their influence on Rublev is evident, but the unconscious resemblance to Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible is remarkable: both directors focus on the tragedy of an outstanding personality, with the historical events as mere background.

Eisenstein was intrigued by the philosophy of power, Tarkovsky by the mysteries of creativity. His painter monk, naturally, is autobiographical, and Tarkovsky can be seen in some of the film’s other characters, as well. This is particularly true in the episode of the bell casting, the best in the film, when the young apprentice desperately takes on the leadership of a whole army of adult subordinates—an allegory for filmmaking—and using only his intuition, against all expectation, creates his masterpiece—a bell with a marvelous peal that unites the Russian nation, increasing the prestige of the prince and stunning the imagination of foreigners (an obvious parallel with the unexpected success of Ivan’s Childhood).

The bell episode shows that Tarkovsky had no intention of fighting his Soviet masters. He wanted to serve Russia and glorify her. That is why the director was so stung by the demands to cut and re-edit Andrei Rublev, which was suddenly declared to be anti-Russian and unpatriotic. He was also accused of animal cruelty: during the filming of the Tatar attack on a Russian city, a horse was thrown from a belfry and a cow was burned alive (Tarkovsky always denied the latter, while arguing that the horse was going to be slaughtered, anyway).

Tarkovsky resisted in every way he could. In the end, the authorities put Rublev on the shelf for five and a half years, stating: “The film works against us, against the people, history, and the Party’s cultural policy.”⁹ The Soviet audience only heard rumors about Rublev, but the film was sold to France, where Tarkovsky’s Western fans organized its showing out of competition in Cannes. It was a sensation (a banned film!) and won the Fipressi Prize.

The Soviet authorities pushed Tarkovsky away with their own hands, turning him into an international cultural hero in the Western press. Once again, they found themselves in a ridiculous situation, as they were accustomed to using the ideological cudgel that worked more or less inside the country but was useless against foreign public opinion.

The Iron Curtain was becoming more permeable, the Western media were more aggressive in reporting the harassment of Soviet cultural figures, and all that information seeped back into the USSR, leading to unexpected results.

The ossified Leningrad authorities embarrassed themselves when they put Brodsky on trial in 1964, charging the twenty-three-year-old with “malicious parasitism.” They meant that at the moment Brodsky was not holding down any official job. This was prosecuted under a law passed on Khrushchev’s initiative, as the Leningrad authorities were clumsily trying to show fealty to their Moscow boss.

It was intended to be a show trial, and indeed it was, but not as planned: it turned Brodsky, little known even in his own city, the author of complex, often sorrowful, but never political poems, into a symbol at home and abroad of the coercion of independent poetry by an ignorant and repressive apparatus.

Frida Vigdorova, a journalist, managed to make secret notes of the trial and smuggle them abroad. She artfully shaped the real questions and answers of the judge and the defendant into a parable play on the resistance of a lone genius against the cruel system (a dramatic version was later performed on the BBC).

The harsh sentence—“exile Brodsky to a remote region for five years with mandatory labor”—was the final touch. Akhmatova, Brodsky’s mentor and great master of self-creation, clucked ironically: “What a biography they’re creating for our red-haired one! It’s as if he hired someone to do it.”¹⁰ The “martyr” biographical context magnified the resonance of Brodsky’s sometimes elliptical poetry.

The Brodsky affair elicited a storm of outrage, which yet again came as a total surprise to the slow-witted Soviet authorities. Shostakovich, Akhmatova, the critic Chukovsky, and the poet Samuil Marshak all appealed on his behalf, but they were “homegrown” celebrities, and the Party functionaries ignored them.

It was a different story when they got a letter in 1965 from Jean-Paul Sartre, at the time an influential friend of the Soviet Union. Sartre hinted that the new leadership (Khrushchev had been sent off into retirement) could show generosity toward the young poet to avoid being suspected of “hostility toward the intelligentsia and of anti- Semitism”¹¹ (which in fact was the main charge in the Western media).

The authorities yielded, releasing Brodsky early, but that did not reduce tensions, and in 1972, Brodsky left the country, pushed out by the KGB. He wrote a letter to Brezhnev that was obviously meant to be historic: “Ceasing to be a citizen of the USSR, I do not cease being a Russian poet. I believe that I will return; poets always return: in the flesh or on paper.”¹²

The friends (and even enemies) of Brodsky and Tarkovsky always characterized them, with delight or condemnation, as maximalists who behaved freely in an unfree society. In the beginning their differences with the Soviet state were, to use Andrei Sinyavsky’s formula, stylistic rather than ideological: different language, a rare preference for brutal and pessimistic imagery, and an unwarranted tendency to philosophize. But in that unusual style, the authorities sensed an ideological threat and reacted accordingly.

Both Brodsky and Tarkovsky wrote letters “upstairs,” trying to speak to the leaders as equals, like two high- ranking negotiating sides, but the rulers merely filed the letters, considering them pretentious babble from immature young men. Yet both Brodsky and Tarkovsky were consciously creating the appearance of a dialogue between artist and state, fitting themselves into an old Russian tradition.

In Brodsky’s case, it is clear that he had studied Pasternak’s letter to Khrushchev. The difference is also obvious. Pasternak appealed to Khrushchev, hoping to defuse the tense situation that arose over the Nobel Prize. Brodsky’s letter to Brezhnev is a different matter. This is a purely rhetorical gesture, a page of writing that was intended from the start to be included in a future academic collection of the author’s works. In that sense, Brodsky, who did not borrow Akhmatova’s stylistics or aesthetics (he was more influenced by Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, and Boris Slutsky), turned out to be her best student in the field of self-mythologizing.

Tarkovsky was no less adept than Brodsky at creating his own legend. When he began keeping a diary in 1970, he called it his Martyrology, that is, a list of suffering and persecutions. Of course, Tarkovsky like Brodsky had sufficient material: the officials of the State Committee on Cinematography sucked a bucket of blood out of the director, continually finding fault with his screenplays and his finished films (as happened with Andrei Rublev, which was not released in the Soviet Union until 1971, almost six years after it was made). But on the other hand, Fedor Ermash, chairman of the Cinema Committee, allowed Tarkovsky in 1977 to start over on his almost completed Stalker (in form, science fiction, in content, a Christian parable), writing off the expenses (300,000 rubles) for the material that Tarkovsky did not like and wanted to reshoot.

In his Martyrology, Tarkovsky demonized Ermash, creating a grotesque image of a Soviet culture boss whose