The writer Leonid Borodin suggested, with tongue only partially in cheek, that “the unparalleled endurance of the Mikhalkov clan is nothing less than a signal of Russia’s ‘unsinkability,’ even if the country were to be in the worst possible state both in spirit and in flesh,”63 announcing that “were our people on the level of a monarchist worldview, I personally would have nothing against a Mikhalkov dynasty: Russia’s age-long goal has been to stupefy the world.”64
Nikita Mikhalkov, who considers himself an enlightened conservative, also prefers a constitutional monarchy for Russia, maintaining that a monarchy “is the only way for our country, no matter how loud the liberals laugh,”65 but demurs when asked if he means a return of the Romanov dynasty.66
In such films as Oblomov (with Oleg Tabakov in the eponymous role) and The Barber of Siberia (where the director pointedly appeared as Tsar Alexander III), Mikhalkov consistently presents a nostalgic view of the sweet life of old Russia.
Tall, charmingly mustachioed, and terrifically charismatic, Mikhalkov cuts a prominent political figure, chairing for many years the post-Soviet Filmmakers’ Union of Russia and the Russian (formerly Soviet) Cultural Foundation, created by the late first lady Raisa Gorbachev. Back then the foundation, with enormous funding and actually an alternative to the staid Ministry of Culture, was headed by the more authoritative academician Dmitri Likhachev. Mikhalkov’s proclaimed goals are modest: to support cultural life in the provinces, where he believes the true Russian spirit still lives, uncorrupted by Western influences.
His popularity is not due so much to his public profile (he is criticized fiercely by many for his moves in that area) but to his movie work: three of his films were nominated for the Oscar: the Chekhovian pastiche Black Eyes in 1988; the Eurasianist manifesto East of Eden in 1993; and the anti-Stalin melodrama Burnt by the Sun, which won the award for best foreign film in 1995. This impressive thriller, once again strangely imbued with Chekhovian nostalgia, nevertheless pales as a cinematic depiction of the horrors of the Stalin era in comparison to Alexei Guerman’s masterpiece, Khrustalev! Bring the Car! (1998), a brutal black and white phantasmagoria about the twilight days of the Stalin regime.
Guerman’s film, which passed unnoticed in the West, was perhaps equal to the best works of Eisenstein or Tarkovsky, summarizing the entire post-perestroika period of Russian film. Guerman rejected nostalgia for the Soviet past, but that past—horrible for some but still attractive for many others—permeates his Khrustalev like a nightmare from which you can’t wake up.
In Khrustalev, Guerman poses the eternal Russian question: is Russia capable of freeing itself from the vestiges of totalitarianism while overcoming the allure of anarchy? And what will happen with its national identity? In cinematic form, Guerman paraphrased Solzhenitsyn’s anxious statement that “our highest and most important goal is to preserve our nation, which is totally exhausted, to maintain its physical existence, its moral existence, its culture, and its traditions.”67
Another important artistic commentary on Solzhenitsyn’s message was The Russian Ark, a cinematographic tour-de-force by Tarkovsky’s protege Alexander Sokurov, in preproduction for four years but shot in one day, December 23, 2001. It is a melancholy, poetic meditation on the zigzags of Russian culture and state in the last three hundred years, compressed into ninety minutes and shot in the halls of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in a single, continuous take.
Reserved and almost tongue-tied, Sokurov—the polar opposite of the high-strung and voluble Guerman—has always argued that culture meant more for Russia than for any other nation. One of the film’s characters maintains that the authorities only want to have acorns from the oak: they don’t care if the cultural oak is dead or alive. But if the oak were to fall, any and all authority will perish with it. Sokurov also describes The Russian Ark as a film about the meeting of Russia and the West after the end of the Cold War. “The West should regret that it treats Russia with such cold indifference and arrogance.”
Sokurov’s philosophy (in the West he is best known for his trilogy about twentieth-century political leaders— Lenin, Hitler, and Emperor Hirohito of Japan) is expressed in the final words of The Russian Ark: “We will sail forever and we will live forever.” That idea at the end of the twentieth century, an era of national catastrophes and unheard-of upheavals, sums up the subconscious fears and hopes of the majority of Russians, both the common people and the cultural elite. The country faces grave cultural and demographic challenges that threaten its very existence. There are no easy answers. Once again, as it was at the start of the twentieth century, Russia—anxious, brooding, enigmatic—is at a crossroads, choosing its way.
NOTES
Introduction
1. To see reviews of a typical work in that sense, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes: The Times Literary Supplement, October 5, 2002; Lynn Garafola, Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance (Middletown, CT, 2005), p. ix.
2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, V kruge pervom [First Circle] (New York, 1968), p. 320.
3. Solomon Volkov, Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim [Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky] (Moscow, 1998), p. 198.
4. See David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford, 2003).
5. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Bodalsia telenok s dubom: ocherki literaturnoi zhizni [The Calf Butted the Oak: Sketches of a Literary Life] (Paris, 1975), p. 314.
6. Abram Efros, Profili [Profiles] (Moscow, 1930), p. 75.
Part One: THE GATHERING STORM
Chapter One
1. Maxim Gorky, Literaturnye portrety [Literary Portraits] (Moscow, 1983), p. 175.
2. Quoted in: Russkaia literatura kontsa XIX–nachala XX v., 1908–1917 [Russian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: 1908–1917] (Moscow, 1972), p. 467.
3. Quoted in: L. N. Tolstoi v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [L. N. Tolstoy in reminiscences of his contemporaries], in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1978), p. 458.
4. V. I. Lenin o literature [V. I. Lenin on literature] (Moscow, 1971), p. 108.
