The Icon and the Axe

The new dramas on contemporary themes clearly provide both the best entertainment available in the USSR and some of its most effective social criticism. The old dream of Schiller and so many others of restoring to the theater the quality it once possessed as an educational and moral force in society seems, indeed, closer to realization in these new Soviet plays than in the avant-garde theater of the West. However, in view of the straggle still required to gain official consent for any theatrical production in the USSR, the day is probably still far away when the stage can serve-as Tovstonogov put it-as "a great exponent of public thinking … a huge operating table where the actor, the surgeon, can sense the throb of the human heart and brain."52

New movies, like new plays and poems, illustrate the "interrupted renewal" of Russian culture. Not only has the recent Soviet cinema recaptured some of the creative vitality of its precocious infancy in the 1920's, it has added as well new dimensions of disinterested humanism and psychological introspection.

Many of the outstanding films of this cinematic renaissance have dealt with the event that has the deepest meaning for the younger generation: the Great Fatherland War (as World War II is known in the USSR). Whereas the many war movies of the late Stalin era emphasized the glory of Soviet victory and the wisdom of the dictator's leadership, the new war movies focus on the impact of this most destructive of all wars on ordinary Russian people. Beginning with Michael Kalatasov's The Cranes are Flying of 1957, Russian films began to portray war as devoid of all constructive purpose. The war became an unwelcome intruder into the world of personal and family relationships, which suddenly seemed somehow more real and appealing than the public world of the "new Soviet man." "The fate of a man" is made to seem as important as ultimate victory or defeat in the cinematic version made in 1959 of Sholokhov's short story of that name. The following year appeared Ballad of a Soldier, the first of the great films of Gregory Chukhrai, which portrays with photographic skill, heartbreaking

simplicity, and a complete absence of propaganda the accidental heroism, brief leave, and return to death of a childlike young Russian soldier. Chukhrai's Clear Skies, which provided the occasion for an emotional demonstration of approval at its first performance in Moscow in 1961, contrasts the honor and suffering of Soviet prisoners of war with the brutality of the system which suspected and humiliated them in the post-war period. The picture which makes the most daring technical innovations and at the same time the most moving indictment of war is My Name Is Ivan, which appeared in 1962, introducing dream sequences along with documentary excerpts into its tragic tale of a young orphan.

This new cinematic emphasis on the integrity of the individual rather than the nature of his cause has also altered the traditional method of representing the Civil War. Just as Hollywood has introduced "good Indians" into its melodramatic Westerns-partly out of a need to break the monotony and partly out of a belated sense of justice-so Soviet films have begun to find traces of humanity and even nobility in the White opposition. Indeed, audience sympathy is ultimately on the side of an individual White guardsman in two widely admired recent films of the Civil War: Chukhrai's Forty-First of 1956 and Vladimir Fetin's The Foal of i960.

Finally, it is interesting to note the return of film makers to those classics which especially fascinated the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century. Thus, Gregory Kozintsev has moved on from his sensitive Don Quixote of 1956 to his film version of Hamlet in 1964. In contrast to Turgenev's "Hamlet and Don Quixote" of almost exactly a century before, Kozintsev depicted Quixote as a psychologically disturbed and tragic figure, and gave to Hamlet a certain quiet nobility. Like Pasternak (whose translation of the play was used for the script), Kozintsev seemed to be vindicating Hamlet from the symbolic opprobrium heaped on him by Turgenev (and the lesser critics of the Stalin era). The message that the new Soviet drama as a whole is conveying to its interested if often perplexed audiences is essentially that which Hamlet conveyed to the loyal but two-dimensional Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy."53