Warped Mourning by Etkind Alexander

Author:Etkind, Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

8

The Tale of Two Turns

In what is arguably the most important film of post-Soviet memory, Khrustalev, My Car! by Aleksei German (1998), the military surgeon Klensky is arrested and then raped on his way to the gulag. Suddenly, his tormentors dress him in a pristine uniform, sprinkle him with perfume, and take him to the ailing Stalin. As Klensky regains his military posture and clinical focus, Stalin dies in his arms, producing a final expulsion of flatulence. At one stroke, Klensky reverts from the stinking, bare life of a prisoner to the sublime condition of a professional, dutiful citizen. In the same X-shaped movement, the dictator departs from his duty and, quickly passing through the stage of stinking, bare life, is annihilated forever. The central scene of the film occurs when the sovereign and the abject meet and their positions swap.

A disciple of Grigory Kozintsev, the author of the Soviet Hamlet (see chapter 7), Aleksei German based his previous film, My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984), on novels that were written by his father, the writer Yury German, who glorified the secret police and survived the terror untouched. Khrustalev was a fantasy, said German, about what would have happened to his father if he had been arrested. “It all comes from my childhood—the faces, the feelings, everything.”1 A son narrates both films, but Lapshin presents a father who admires the Soviet regime and glorifies its police, while Khrustalev mourns a father who became a victim of that same police. Working through these Hamletian themes, German’s films also borrowed their sharp movements across the social space from the picaresque novel, in which both Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin noted a capacity to change statuses, unsettle the routine, and mourn the victims of history. Thinking about the connection between Stalin’s gulag and Bakhtin’s carnival, I began to notice these picaresque constructions in other Russian films about the Soviet past. Like Khrustalev, some of these films, probably the most remarkable ones, also develop in two turns: the first from citizen into victim, the second from victim into citizen.

. . . but not sacrificed

A remarkable example of these two turns is the story of General Kotov in Nikita Mikhalkov’s epic trilogy, Burnt by the Sun (1994, 2010, 2011). The first and most successful episode ends when Kotov, a dashing Red Army commander played by Mikhalkov himself, is arrested and beaten by agents who, in an instant, turn him into a bleeding, bare-living body. Fifteen years later, the Russian public watched the opening of the second episode in which the same Kotov, featuring his gleaming parade uniform and triumphant smile, greets Stalin at his stately dacha. Kotov is still played by the tireless Mikhalkov, but a different actress has been brought in to play Kotov’s wife, as handsome as she was sixteen years earlier. She has baked a huge cake for Stalin: a chocolate Stalin face floats on top of white cream. Stalin is eager to taste it, but nobody dares to cut into his chocolate portrait.

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