NATASHA

of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, with which it is so frequently compared. Whereas Kubrick's film looks at the cosmos from the earth, Tarkovsky's looks from the cosmos at the earth. It is a film about the human values in which every Christian culture, even Soviet Russia's, sees its redemption.

In his cinematic credo, Sculpting in Time (1986), Tarkovsky compares the artist to a priest whose mission it is to reveal the beauty that is 'hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth'.²⁰² Such a statement is in the tradition of the Russian artist stretching back to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and beyond - to the medieval icon painters such as the one whose life and art Tarkovsky celebrated in his masterpiece, Andrei Rublev (1966). Tarkovsky's films are like icons, in effect. To contemplate their visual beauty and symbolic imagery, as one is compelled to do by the slowness of their action, is to join in the artist's own quest for a spiritual ideal. 'Art must give man hope and faith', the director wrote.²⁰³ All his films are about journeys in search of moral truth. Like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, Andrei Rublev abandons the monastery and goes into the world to live the truth of Christian love and brotherhood among his fellow Russians under Mongol rule. 'Truth has to be lived, not taught. Prepare for battle!'

Tarkovsky said that Hermann Hesse's line from The Glass Bead Game (1943) 'could well have served as an epigraph to Andrei Rublev'.²⁰⁴

The same religious theme is at the centre of Stalker (1979), which, in Tarkovsky's own description, he meant to be a discourse on 'the existence of God in man'.²⁰⁵ The stalker of the film's title guides a scientist and a writer to 'the zone', a supernatural wilderness abandoned by the state after some industrial catastrophe. He is straight out of the Russian tradition of the Holy Fool. He lives alone in poverty, despised by a society where everyone has long ceased to believe in God, and yet he derives a spiritual power from his religious faith. He understands that the heart of 'the zone' is just an empty room in a deserted house. But, as he tells his travelling companions, the basis of true faith is the belief in the Promised Land: it is the journey and not the arrival. The need for faith, for something to believe in outside of themselves, had defined the Russian people, in their mythic understanding of themselves, since the days of Gogol and the 'Russian soul'. Tarkovsky revived this national myth as a counter to the value system of the Soviet regime, with its alien ideas of rational materialism. 'Modern mass culture', Tarkovsky wrote, 'is crippling people's souls, it is erecting barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.'²⁰⁶ This spiritual consciousness, he believed, was the contribution Russia might give to the West - an idea embodied in the last iconic image of his film Nostalgia (1983), in which a Russian peasant house is portrayed inside a ruined Italian cathedral.

It may seem extraordinary that films like Stalker and Solaris were produced in the Brezhnev era, when all forms of organized religion were severely circumscribed and the deadening orthodoxy of 'Developed Socialism' held the country's politics in its grip. But within the Soviet monolith there were many different voices that called for a return to 'Russian principles'. One was the literary journal Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard), which acted as a forum for Russian nationalists and conservationists, defenders of the Russian Church, and neo-Populists like the 'village prose writers' Fedor Abramov and Valentin Rasputin, who painted a nostalgic picture of the countryside and idealized the honest working peasant as the true upholder of the Russian soul and its mission in the world. Molodaia gvardiia enjoyed

30. 'The Russian bouse inside the Italian cathedral'. Final shot from Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalgia (1983)

the support of the Party's senior leadership throughout the 1970s.* Yet its cultural politics were hardly communist; and at times, such as in its opposition to the demolition of churches and historic monuments, or in the controversial essays it published by the nationalist painter Ilya Glazunov which explicitly condemned the October Revolution as an interruption of the national tradition, it was even anti-Soviet. The journal had links with opposition groups in the Russian Church, the conservation movement (which numbered several million members in

* It had the political protection of Politburo member Mikhail Suslov, Brezhnev's chief of ideology. When Alexander Yakovlev attacked Molodaia gvardiia as anti-Leninist on account of its nationalism and religious emphasis, Suslov succeeded in winning Brezhnev over to the journal's side. Yakovlev was sacked from the Party's Propaganda Department. In 1973, he was dismissed from the Central Committee and appointed Soviet ambassador to Canada (from where he would return to become Gorbachev's chief ideologist).

the 1960s) and the dissident intelligentsia. Even Solzhenitsyn came to its defence when it was attacked by the journal Novy mir (the very journal which had made his name by publishing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962).²⁰⁷ In the 1970s Russian nationalism was a growing movement, which commanded the support of Party members and dissidents alike. There were several journals like Molo-daia gvardiia - some official, others dissident and published underground (samizdat) - and a range of state and voluntary associations, from literary societies to conservation groups, which forged a broad community on 'Russian principles'. As the editor of the samizdat journal Veche put it in his first editorial in 1971: 'In spite of everything, there are still Russians. It is not too late to return to the homeland.'²⁰⁸

What, in the end, was 'Soviet culture'? Was it anything? Can one ever say that there was a specific Soviet genre in the arts? The avant-garde of the 1920s, which borrowed a great deal from Western Europe, was really a continuation of the modernism of the turn of century. It was revolutionary, in many ways more so than the Bolshevik regime, but in the end it was not compatible with the Soviet state, which could never have been built on artists' dreams. The idea of constructing Soviet culture on a 'proletarian' foundation was similarly unsustainable - although that was surely the one idea of culture that was intrinsically 'Soviet': factory whistles don't make music (and what, in any case, is 'proletarian art'?). Socialist Realism was also, arguably, a distinctively Soviet art form. Yet a large part of it was a hideous distortion of the nineteenth-century tradition, not unlike the art of the Third Reich or of fascist Italy. Ultimately the 'Soviet' element (which boiled down to the deadening weight of ideology) added nothing to the art.

The Georgian film director Otar loseliani recalls a conversation with the veteran film-maker Boris Barnet in 1962:

He asked me: 'Who are you?' I said, 'A director'… 'Soviet', he corrected, 'you must always say 'Soviet director'. It is a very special profession.' 'In what way?' I asked. 'Because if you ever manage to become honest, which would surprise me, you can remove the word 'Soviet'.'²⁰⁵

8

From beneath such ruins I speak,

From beneath such an avalanche I cry,

As if under the vault of a fetid cellar

I were burning in quicklime.

I will pretend to be soundless this winter

And I will slam the eternal doors forever,

And even so, they will recognize my voice,

And even so they will believe in it once more.²¹⁰

Anna Akhmatova was one of the great survivors. Her poetic voice was irrepressible. In the last ten years of her long life, beginning with the release of her son from the gulag in 1956, Akhmatova enjoyed a relatively settled existence. She was fortunate enough to retain her capacity for writing poetry until the end.

In 1963 she wrote the last additions to her masterpiece, Poem without a Hero, which she had started writing in 1940. Isaiah Berlin, to whom she read the poem at the Fountain House in 1945, described it as a 'kind of final memorial to her life as a poet and the past of the city - St Petersburg - which was part of her being'.²¹¹ The poem conjures up, in the form of a carnival procession of masked characters which appears before the author at the Fountain House, a whole generation of vanished friends and figures from the