The Magical Chorus

only goal was to humiliate and trample the filmmaker. But there is evidence that Ermash sympathized with Tarkovsky and often supported him, while Tarkovsky had snit fits and behaved rather aggressively. A friend of Tarkovsky’s, the Polish film director Krzysztof Zanussi, thought that no American producer would let Tarkovsky get away with such behavior, and used to tell him: “You would never have been allowed to make your Rublev in the West.”¹³

But Tarkovsky felt stifled and hindered in the Soviet Union. According to his calculations, in more than twenty years of work in Soviet film, he was “unemployed” almost seventeen years. That is shaky arithmetic—in those years he made five major films (besides Ivan’s Childhood and Rublev, there were Solaris, The Mirror, and Stalker)—but it helped Tarkovsky cement his image as a suffering and persecuted artist.

Tarkovsky’s imagining that he could have made many more films is probably self-delusion. He spent several years preparing for each movie (except the spontaneous Ivan’s Childhood), thoroughly planning each scene and detail, and then during filming trying to re-create exactly not only the outward appearance but the spiritual essence of pictures he had imagined: this was the source of the meditative, contemplative nature of his works, oversaturated with intuitive visual gestures. Every Tarkovsky film is “one-of-a-kind,” they could never have come off a conveyor belt.

Tarkovsky’s other misapprehension was thinking that his hermetic, autobiographical works could have had box office success if not for the sabotage by the State Cinematography Committee, which allegedly did not release enough copies of the films or give them the proper publicity. In fact, the circulation of Ivan’s Childhood, Tarkovsky’s first full-length feature, was quite impressive—fifteen hundred copies. True, The Mirror played in only seventy-two houses. But Ivan’s Childhood, for all its refinement, is his most accessible work while the subtle, almost plotless Mirror, an extended cinematographic Freudian self-analysis, was unlikely to become popular with a mass audience under the best of circumstances.

On the contrary, the dissident reputation of Tarkovsky’s films increased their appeal in the Soviet Union. When they were shown, the theaters were full: forbidden fruit is sweet. The same effect worked for the intellectual and baroque poetry of Brodsky; after the Russian-language Western radio broadcasts about his trial, numerous typewritten copies of his poems began circulating in samizdat.

The greatest success of Schnittke’s avant-garde music came in 1983, when his long-banned Faust Cantata at last was performed at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. The premiere was in doubt until the last second, the concert hall was surrounded by police on horseback, and a large crowd waited outside, with people begging for tickets blocks away. Here, the excitement was fueled by the rumor that the contralto part of Mephistopheles in Schnittke’s philosophical work was to be performed by the biggest pop star of the Soviet Union, the wild redhead Alla Pugacheva. Pugacheva, scared off by the music or the authorities, did not sing in the Faust Cantata, but the scandalous atmosphere helped to put Schnittke on the national cultural map.

Brodsky started trying on the exile’s toga early. At the age of twenty, he wrote poetry with references to the fate of Ovid, and in 1962, he wrote: “Thank God that I am left without a homeland on this earth.” The pose of exile, fugitive, or emigre ideally suited Brodsky’s poetics; one of its central themes from the start was alienation, separation, emotional and philosophical distance. Later, Schnittke would speak of the same feeling: “There is no home for me on this earth, I understand that.”¹⁴

On the other hand, Tarkovsky’s works were always firmly rooted in Russia. Is there a more national film than Andrei Rublev? (Schnittke approached the Orthodox intensity of Rublev in his four instrumental Hymns, composed in 1974–1979, one of which is based on the traditional church Trisagion chant.)

But Rublev was criticized for being an “anti-Russian” film both by the Soviet cultural bureaucrats and Solzhenitsyn (joined in this by the ultranationalist artist Ilya Glazunov). They all must have felt something profoundly antipathetic in the film. What was it?

The film director Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, who had worked with Tarkovsky on the screenplays for Ivan’s Childhood and Rublev, recalled how their trip to Venice in 1962 turned their lives around: “I will never forget that sense of lightness, joy, light, music, holiday. All my subsequent ideological waverings and unpatriotic behavior came from there.”¹⁵ Aksyonov confirmed that even though at first no one from the artistic generation of the sixties thought about emigrating, internally many of them were prepared for it because of their “openness to the world.”¹⁶

The idea that he could go abroad and make movies there was first formulated by Tarkovsky in his diaries in 1974, when Brodsky had been living in the United States for two years. The Martyrology makes clear that Tarkovsky always fell into a deep depression after a bout with the cinema bosses. Meanwhile, his new admirers in Italy were offering him work in the West, promising creative freedom, fame, and money—the last was not unimportant to the director, who was always complaining about being without funds.

(Brodsky, who had been rather stoic about his poverty in Leningrad, focused on financial problems in conversations with friends in America, where his salary as a college professor should have guaranteed him a comfortable existence. His worries over income must have stemmed from his late marriage and birth of a daughter—now he had to care not only for himself, but a family: “I have two girls on my hands,” he would say.) ¹⁷

When Tarkovsky finally ended up in the West, it did not happen as traumatically as it had for Brodsky: the Soviet authorities officially sent the director to work on his film Nostalghia in Italy. When he completed it, Tarkovsky did not return to Moscow, even though he commented ominously in his Martyrology: “I am lost. I can’t live in Russia, but I can’t live here, either…”¹⁸

Tarkovsky had always insisted that he was not a dissident, he had never attacked the regime in his films, because political issues did not interest him as an artist. But when he called a press conference in Milan in 1984 and publicly renounced his Soviet citizenship, it was an openly political move that the KGB qualified as “treason to the Homeland in the form of refusal to return from abroad and abetting a foreign state in implementing hostile activity against the USSR.”¹⁹ His films were banned in the Soviet Union and his name disappeared from the press and even from books on cinema.

After Nostalghia (which came out in 1983), Tarkovsky made only the Bergmanesque Sacrifice, in Sweden, where he was well liked and where Bergman praised him highly. (So came to pass the prophecy Tarkovsky heard at a seance in his youth from the spirit of the late Pasternak that he would make only seven films, “but good ones.”) Some consider Sacrifice the peak of Tarkovsky’s spiritual journey, while others deplore it as self-indulgent and too slow, verging on self-parody.

The film director Alexander Sokurov, a protege of Tarkovsky, thought that the master had been on the brink of unheard-of artistic discoveries. But in 1985, while editing Sacrifice, Tarkovsky learned that he had lung cancer. He died in a Paris hospital on December 29, 1986. Until the end, when he was heavily sedated by morphine, he had hoped to survive.

Tarkovsky’s death was especially painful for the Russian emigre community. Another exile, Yuri Lyubimov (he renounced his Soviet citizenship at the same press conference in Milan with Tarkovsky), was in Washington, D.C.,