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josephine woll
Ballet. Yehudi and Hepzibah Menuhin toured the Soviet Union; Shostakovich’s
‘Babii Iar’ Symphony, incorporating the text of Evtushenko’s poetic memo-
rial to Jewish victims of Nazi slaughter outside Kiev, premiered in December
1962. Moscow museums dusted off and displayed canvases by modernists like
Bakst and Larionov. Evtushenko’s ‘Heirs of Stalin’, a passionate and forceful
assault on neo-Stalinism, appeared in the autumn, as did the first half of Viktor
Nekrasov’s account of trips to Italy and the USA, Both Sides of the Ocean (Po
obe storony okeana), in which he criticised isolationist Soviet cultural policies.
Most shocking, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in November’s
Novyi mir, principally thanks to editor Aleksandr Tvardovskii and his shrewd
campaign for Khrushchev’s personal intervention. The top box-office success
of 1962, The Amphibious Man (Chelovek-amfibiia), responded to Khrushchev’s
revelations by presenting a political allegory about a brilliant scientist’s under-
water utopia whose only inhabitant – his amphibious son Ikhtiandr – pays for
the dreams and desires of his father. ‘I wanted to make you the happiest of
men,’ Dr Salvator apologises to his son, ‘and instead I made you unhappy.
Forgive me.’
Conservatives fought back, especially after the humiliation of the Cuban
Missile Crisis, and Khrushchev retreated: he ‘had to give his conservative oppo-
nents something’, and culture ‘was the most disposable part of his reforms’.
30
Throughout 1963, at a series of meetings between party leaders and artists,
Khrushchev and his ideological overseer Leonid Ilichev delivered speeches
(immediately printed in major newspapers) insisting on party control of the
arts, rejecting Western and modernist influences, and shrilly denying any-
thing resembling a generation gap in Soviet society. Khrushchev personally
denounced Nekrasov, for Both Sides of the Ocean and for the writer’s praise of
Marlen Khutsiev’s Ilich’s Gate (Zastava Il’icha), a particularly provoking film.
The three young heroes of Ilich’s Gate come of age in the Moscow of 1961–
2, and Khutsiev chose as his co-author Gennadii Shpalikov, roughly the age
of the film’s protagonists, so as to ensure up-to-date language and mood.
Characters work on actual construction and demolition sites, enhancing
visual/atmospheric veracity; students from the State Institute of Cinematog-
raphy – future stars of Soviet cinema – play many roles; a poetry reading
organised for the film looks as real as the documentary footage of a May Day
parade. (In fact, the actors had to elbow their way through the throng crowding
in to hear such superstars as Rozhdestvenskii and Akhmadulina.) Much about
Ilich’s Gate’s depiction of the relationship between generations exasperated
30 Robert Sharlet, private letter, 9 Feb. 2003.
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Khrushchev, but one scene enraged him. When the twenty-three–year-old
hero Sergei asks the ghost of his father, killed during the war, for guidance on
how to live, his father replies ‘I am twenty-one’, and vanishes. ‘There’s more to
this than meets the eye,’ fulminated Khrushchev. ‘The idea is to impress upon
the children that their fathers cannot be their teachers in life, and that there
is no point in turning to them for advice. The filmmakers think that young
people ought to decide for themselves how to live, without asking their elders
for counsel and help.’
31
Before Khutsiev succeeded in revising and abridging Ilich’s Gate into a ver-
sion finally approved for release in 1965, under the title I Am Twenty (Mne
dvadtsat’ let), well over a year had passed, and Khrushchev himself had been
replaced by the team of Brezhnev and Kosygin (in October 1964). The film’s
sad fate reflects the Soviet Union’s general retreat from Thaw liberalism and
the onset of a process of calcification that later earned the sobriquet zastoi,
‘era of stagnation’. Like the Thaw before it, stagnation proceeded unevenly,
often imposing itself ruthlessly in the cultural sphere but occasionally permit-
ting new voices to join the cultural chorus. Its crudest and most notoriously
repressive manifestations – the trials of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii and
Iulii Daniel’, the arrest of Ukrainian dissidents, the expulsion of Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn from the Writers’ Union and then from the country – conceal a
more complex and less uniformly bleak picture. Ideas, instincts and individuals
nurtured by the Thaw survived into zastoi – indeed, most of them survived into
Gorbachev’s era of perestroika and glasnost’, if not beyond. However, in the gen-
erally inhospitable cultural atmosphere that prevailed between Khrushchev’s
fall and Gorbachev’s ascension, they faced constricting official possibilities and
found themselves compelled to explore alternative channels and outlets.
Stagnation, 1967–85
Official attempts to suppress debate and to reverse the relative openness of the
Thaw dominated cultural life from about 1966 until the early 1970s, with 1967 –
the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution – proving particularly stultifying. In
1965 Mikhail Romm’s Ordinary Fascism (Obyknovennyi fashizm), a documentary
probing the psychology underlying and engendering Nazism, with tacit par-
allels to Stalinism, attracted 20 million viewers during its first year and won
31 Khrushchev’s speech appeared in Pravda, 10 Mar. 1963. See Priscilla Johnson and Leopold
Labedz (eds.), Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1 962–1 964 (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), pp. 152–5.
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a prize at the Leipzig festival.
32
By the end of 1965 censors routinely cut ‘any
parallels, direct or implied, between communism and nazism’, any reference
to the penal units during the war, to Red Army atrocities, to the official policy
that branded as traitors Soviet soldiers imprisoned by the Nazis as prisoners
of war (which among other consequences precluded Red Cross assistance),
even to venereal disease among combatants.
33
Estonian film-maker Kalj
¨
o Kiisk
made Madness (Bezumie)in1968, setting its action in Nazi-occupied Estonia and
suggesting parallels between Nazism and the Soviet domination of his country:
the film was banned until 1986. These proscriptions remained broadly in force
until the early 1980s.
The same strictures applied to de-Stalinisation, the purges and the cult
of personality. In early 1965, lacking explicit guidelines from the new Cen-
tral Committee, the script and editorial committee (GSRK) overseeing film
production reacted warily to scripts on these subjects. Gradually committee
members gained confidence, vetoing one script based on the wartime diary
of a girl whose father spent seventeen years in the Gulag, another whose pro-
tagonist investigates the rehabilitation cases of those unjustly accused. ‘The
theme of the cult of personality’, they explained, ‘is unacceptable at the present
time.’ By late July, GSRK reacted to a proposal from Armenia’s studio with a
flat assertion: ‘This film should not be about the era of the cult of personality,
for there was no such era.’
34
In May 1967, with domestic publication of Cancer Ward (Rakovyi korpus)
bogged down indefinitely, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn mailed 250 signed copies
of a thunderous denunciation of censorship and of the literary establishment
whose members were about to gather at the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writ-
ers. He sent them to ‘all the people whom Solzhenitsyn regarded as honest
and genuine writers’, and to prominent members of the Writers’ Union (the
two categories rarely overlapped).
35
‘Literature’, he wrote, ‘cannot develop in
between the categories of “permitted” and “not permitted,” “about this you
may write” and “about this you may not”.’
36
Eighty-three members of the
Union signed a collective letter to the congress requesting open debate on
32 For attendance figures on Soviet films, see Sergei Zemlianukhin and Miroslava Segida,
Domashniaia sinemateka: otechestvennoe kino 1918–1 996 (Moscow: Dubl-D, 1996).
33 Ermolaev, Censorship,pp.206–7.
34 Valerii Fomin, ‘Nikakoi epokhi kul’ta lichnosti ne bylo . . .’, in Fomin (ed.), Kino i vlast’
(Moscow: Materik, 1996), pp. 292–9 and passim. Originally appeared in Iskusstvo kino 1
(1989).
35 Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (New York and London: Norton, 1984),
p. 584.
36 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Letter to the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers’, in John B.
Dunlop, Richard Haugh, Alexis Klimoff (eds.), Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and
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the subject, but the congress resolutely ignored the letter, the author and the
issue.
Nevertheless, people like Solzhenitsyn – members of the ‘disaffected intel-
ligentsia’ – constituted an ‘extremely powerful intellectual subculture that
challenged the official culture through the power of moral persuasion it exer-
cised . . . through nonofficial channels’.
37
By 1967, official control over culture
had substantially shifted from doctrine to praxis, from the once-powerful, now
attenuated dogma of socialist realism into the bureaucratic structures that reg-
ulated distribution of the arts as a means of regulating what actually reached
the consumer. Those structures proved both effective and durable, particularly
when manned by orthodox bureaucrats. The unions exercised control over
pensions,housing,lecturetours, travel funds: infringement of unwrittenrules –
whether signing a petition in defence of an arrested human rights activist or
writing about a proscribed subject – could entail serious financial hardship.
The State Committee for the Press, parallel and complementary to the Writ-
ers’ Union, expanded its powers, devising a production plan to fulfil economic
goals and a thematic plan to fulfil ideological ones.
The system encouraged both conformity and hypertrophy, meeting its goals
by producing a certain number of books (movies . . . paintings . . . plays) rather
than by satisfying readers or audiences. Production figures, not sales figures,
measured success, although studios and publishing houses faced close ques-
tioning when ticket sales fell or books gathered dust on shelves. (Since the
number of copies printed determined royalties, rather than the number of
copies sold, publishers authorised large print runs of ‘safe’ books – includ-
ing Brezhnev’s ghost-written war memoir My Little Homeland (Malaia rodina).)
Censorship processes – as opposed to self-censorship – began within the intri-
cate hierarchies of journal, publishing house, theatre or film studio, long before
a work ever reached official censors.
Vladimir Makanin came of age professionally during the Brezhnev years.
He described the unwritten pact:
As a member of the Writers’ Union you got all sorts of advantages: they looked
after you if you were ill or disabled...theymightappealonyourbehalfto
the Moscow City Council to get you an apartment or a kindergarten place
for your child; they guaranteed a good rate of pay for your writing, provided
Documentary Materials, 2nd edn (New York and London: Collier, 1975), p. 544; I have
modified the translation.
37 Adele Marie Barker, ‘The Culture Factory: Theorizing the Popular in the Old and New
Russia’, in Adele Marie Barker (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society
since Gorbachev (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 20–1.
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writers’ retreats and so forth. . . . But of course the Union of Writers, like any
other trade union, had a political edge to it: it guaranteed all these material
advantages, but in exchange you had to write as they wanted you to . . . Under
such circumstances it’s an enormous labour to go your own way and remain
an individual.
38
Nevertheless, even the most repressive years – 1968, 1970, 1972, 1979 – reveal
inconsistency and a growing multivocality. Non-conformists willing to remove
themselves from the central Moscow–Leningrad axis sometimes found havens
in provincial cities.A workproscribed in one city might be published in another.
Plays occasionally sneaked onto theatre stages without official permission.
Films (like Irakli Kvirikadze’s The Swimmer (Plovets), made and shelved in 1981)
might be shown in clubs if not in commercial theatres. Texts by safely dead,
once-proscribed writers – Marina Tsvetaeva, Ivan Bunin, Mikhail Bulgakov –
reached Soviet readers for the first time, in part to compensate for the dis-
appearance of living writers who, forced into emigration, lost their status as
authors along with their citizenship: their books vanished from library shelves,
their names from literary history. (Dancers who defected and musicians who
transgressed – as Rostropovich did by helping Solzhenitsyn – were similarly
erased from officially recorded Russian culture.) When publication was fore-
closed, writers often chose to circulate their work unofficially, via samizdat,
underground distribution of typed or occasionally mimeographed copies of
manuscripts, or to send it abroad (tamizdat).
39
Liudmila Petrushevskaia, whose
unpublished plays were performed in private apartments during the early and
mid-1970s, recalled the cachet of illicit art: ‘If a play was widely advertised it
meant it wasn’tworth seeing, no one went. Whereas crowds and crowdswould
turn up for something that hadn’t been advertised at all; everyone would hear
about it by word of mouth . . . It would be announced as a “creative evening” or
“a meeting with young actors”, without mentioning the author or the name
of the work.’
40
Individuals in positions of responsibility often consciously (and occasionally
inadvertently) shielded artists. A publishing house held on to Fazil Iskander’s
story ‘Tree of Childhood’ (Derevo detstva) for years rather than rejecting it out-
right, simply because the director wanted to avoid controversy, and eventually
the story appeared.
41
The editors of Novyi mir, although unable to publish
38 Sally Laird, Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 65.
39 For a survey of samizdat published in the West, see Josephine Woll, ‘Introduction’, in
Josephine Woll and Vladimir G. Treml, Soviet DissidentLiterature: A CriticalGuide (Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1983).
40 Laird, Voices of Russian Literature,p.31. 41 Ibid., p. 11.
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Petrushevskaia for many years, ‘fed me, gave me work, all through the most
difficult and hungry times they gave me reviews and book reports to do.
They . . . read me and gave me their opinion – always . . . And when the time
came [under Gorbachev], they did publish me.’ Similarly, her play Three Girls in
Blue (Tri devushki v golubom) appeared in the journal Contemporary Drama in 1983
‘thanks to the courage of a few people who’d simply taken the responsibility
on themselves’: specifically, the chief editor of the journal and an apparatchik
in the Ministry of Culture who said, ‘This play is about me!’
42
In what amounted to an ongoing tug-of-war between two unequal forces,
state and artist, the artist had surprising if insecureresources. The state expelled
beyond its borders incorrigible cases, but it did so reluctantly, fully aware of
the negative publicity resulting from the departure of some of its most creative
individuals. (When authorities bulldozed an outdoor exhibit of paintings by
non-conformist artists in 1974, the ensuing negative publicity won a degree
of freedom for the artists involved.
43
) Andrei Siniavskii, himself one of those
miscreants compelled to emigrate, described the resultant situation:
With the appearance of ventures which the state interprets as hostile to itself –
samizdat, the activities of the dissidents and so on – the censorship has tended
to be more lenient with certain official writers, who are therefore permitted
to deal quite boldly with subjects which, although not the most burning in
social and political terms, are nonetheless of considerable peripheral interest,
like the subject of the Soviet past and individual destinies . . . The state is
obliged to tolerate them, because if they banned them completely they would
all go straight into samizdat or emigrate to the West.
44
Artists who chose to remain within the system during zastoi adroitly cap-
italised on their knowledge of its personalities and institutions to evade its
constraints. Anatolii Rybakov had never sent his manuscripts abroad for pub-
lication, thereby sustaining a reputation for ‘loyalty’. Nonetheless, several
journals rejected his 1978 novel Heavy Sand (Tiazhelyi pesok) depicting a Jewish
family’s life in the Ukraine from about 1900 until 1942, primarily because of
its depiction of Belorussian complicity with the Nazis in the destruction of
the local Jewish ghetto. He then submitted it to Oktiabr’, a journal known for
its conservatism, in the hopes that the new editors might want to ‘raise the
journal’s respectability by publishing a daring, sensational work’. Moreover,
he knew the censors were less likely to read ahead of time an entire work
42 Ibid., pp. 32–3.
43 Alison Hilton and Norton Dodge, ‘Introduction’, in New Art from the Soviet Union (Wash-
ington and Ithaca, N.Y.: Acropolis Books, 1977), p. 10.
44 Andrei Siniavskii, ‘Samizdat and the Rebirth of Literature’, Index on Censorship 9, 4 (Aug.
1980): 9.
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scheduled for serial publication in Oktiabr’ than one scheduled for a known
liberal monthly like Novyi mir. ‘Thus the first, relatively harmless portion of
Heavy Sand passed through censorship. But the next installment described
Soviet repressions of the 1930s and the Nazi’s [sic] “final solution” . . . The
censors were dumbfounded, but deemed it too awkward to interrupt the
novel’s serialization.’
45
The same tactic enabled Iurii Trifonov to publish House
on the Embankment (Dom na naberezhnoi) in another ‘conservative’ journal,
Druzhba narodov.
Writers frequently relied on Aesopian language, embedding sensitive ideas
in a code of allusions, manipulating rigidly defined and instantly recognisable
images and topoi in order to suggest parallels to current moral dilemmas and
to alert readers to a very different set of values from those officially authorised.
‘Since Stalinist socialist realism offered writers a ready-made system of signs
with fixed political meanings, it had the potential to be used as . . . a medium
for [post-Stalin] writers to express themselves – even if only in a very tentative
way – on politically delicate subjects.’
46
Such codes, requiring ‘respondents’
who share information, point of view or values with the artist,
47
need not be
exclusively verbal. In theatre, for instance, an actor’s inflected delivery of ‘inno-
cent’ lines might cue the audience to a coded meaning; in film, juxtaposition
of image and sound can signal satiric intent.
The past continued to serve as a template for the present, regardless of the
artist’s particular politics, but emphasis increasingly shifted to contemporary
life. Conservative Iurii Bondarev and liberal Vasil Bykov both chose to link the
Second World War with contemporary Soviet life by following ‘the behaviour
and actions of former soldiers and officers . . . through several decades after
the end of the war, and [juxtaposing] the reactions to past events by represen-
tatives of different generations’.
48
The revolutionary and Stalinist past ‘enters
into every facet’ of Trifonov’s characters and informs – indeed, determines –
the moral universe they occupy in the present.
49
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Tri-
fonov, Georgii Baklanov and a handful of others succeeded in publishing fiction
about the cynicism and consumerism of the urban intelligentsia, the degraded
state of ‘that handful of ideals in which scions of the intelligentsia still believed
45 Ermolaev, Censorship,pp.209–10.
46 Katerina Clark, ‘Political History and Literary Chronotope: Some Soviet Case Studies’,
in Gary Saul Morson (ed.), Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case
Studies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 239.
47 Lev Loseff, The Beneficence of Censorship (Munich, 1984), p. 110.
48 N. N. Shneidman, Soviet Literature in the 1970s: Artistic Diversity and Ideological Conformity
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 59.
49 Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism,p.190.
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but were unable to act on’, and to link the moral expediency of the nation’s
past with the spiritual degeneration of subsequent generations. Others –
Shukshin, Valentin Rasputin – wrote about the ‘victims of the transforma-
tion of Soviet society, people who had little understanding of and less control
over their own lives’. Trifonov wrote from inside the transformation process
itself, from ‘the point of view of those members of the urban intelligentsia
who had “made” the Soviet Union and must live with the results’.
50
With the present pushing out the past as art’s primary focus, village prose
diminished in importance, although it remained popular among readers. The
phenomenon of literatura byta, the literature of everyday reality, expanded,
despite consistent official denigration of bytopisanie as trivial. (Attacks on byt
included film: Marlen Khutsiev fielded similar charges against Two Fyodors
(Dva Fedora, 1958), as did Tengiz Abuladze the same year for Someone Else’s
Children (Chuzhie deti).) Over time, ‘this generally small-scale literature, with
its focus on the everyday and the mundane (especially the domestic), carved
out a niche for itself within the mainstream of Soviet literature while declining
to link the individual with the universal, to resolve personal as well as more
general problems, or to comment on ideological or philosophical matters’.
51
While by no means gender-specific, the literature, drama and cinema of byt
came to be identified with ‘women’s themes’ and with women artists, espe-
cially writers, whose numbers increased dramatically in the Brezhnev years.
In films like A Sweet Woman (Sladkaia zhenshchina, 1976), A Strange Woman
(Strannaia zhenshchina, 1977) and A Wife Has Left (Zhena ushla, 1979), and in
the fiction of many women writers, a throng of lonely women work and
raise their children in a feminised world in which men play little part, and
that part seldom constructive. The characters live in ugly apartment blocks in
neighbourhoods devoid of shops and greenery, miles from the nearest metro
stop. They spend inordinate amounts of time acquiring basic foodstuffs and
traversing mud- and rubble-filled streets to get to work. ‘It is precisely the
domestic aspect of life, with its inequitable distribution of labor, its family
pressures, the inadequate social and economic services, and above all the
necessity of living with alcoholism, that immediately and on a very basic level
distinguishes women’s lives from those of men.’
52
(That distinction is eroded
in later fiction by younger women.) Often enough, these writers treated
50 Josephine Woll, Invented Truth: Soviet Reality and the Critical Imagination of Iurii Trifonov
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 13–14.
51 Nicholas Zekulin, ‘Soviet Russian Women’s Literature in the Early 1980s’, in Helena
Goscilo (ed.), Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women’s Culture
(Armonk, N.Y., and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), p. 36.
52 Ibid., p. 43.
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themes – such as the impact of drunken husbands on family life – that coin-
cided with official concerns (the economic cost of ubiquitous alcoholism). As
a result, ‘they were able to graft themselves onto a mandate that was actively
being promoted’ by the authorities.
53
Given the cost and logistical complexity of film-making, making films
required working within the system. Rewards included access to scarce
resources like imported film stock, larger shooting budgets, more leisurely
schedules, opportunities to shoot co-productions abroad and well-paid man-
agerial positions within the Union of Cinematographers, the studios and the
Soviet Union’s premier cinema training centre, the State Institute of Cine-
matography (VGIK). The state stringently controlled distribution: reluctant
to ban products that represented substantial financial outlays, the system pre-
ferred to limit their impact. With movies, that meant controlling the number
of prints made and the venues in which they were shown (in, for instance,
central versus outlying locations).
In the 1970s, as cinema attendance sagged in inverse proportion to the rise
in TV ownership, the regime tried to encourage the release of entertaining
films. (Central TV went over fully to colour programming in 1978.) To that
end Filip Ermash, an admirer of Hollywood, replaced the ideological and anti-
commercial Aleksei Romanov as head of Goskino, the State Department of
Cinema. Ermash ran Goskino from 1972 to 1986, and encouraged a tilt towards
‘mass, lightweight film aimed at everyone’,
54
like the extraordinarily popular
slapstick (and skilful) comedies directed by Leonid Gaidai.
Films became more homogeneous, though generically more diverse, and
decidedly less individualistic, especially towards the end of Ermash’s tenure.
However, not all successful Brezhnev-era film-makers were opportunists,
ready to conform to the party’s priorities. Eldar Riazanov and Vasilii Shukshin,
two significant exceptions, believed no less strongly than Andrei Tarkovsky
that film-making should be free of control and dedicated to improvement of
society, but they ‘rejected formal experimentation in favour of an aesthetic
of maximum (or at any rate, widespread) popular accessibility’.
55
Each had
occasional difficulties: for years Shukshin fought (unsuccessfully) to make a
film on the seventeenth-century Cossack rebel Stenka Razin, and local party
chiefs banned Riazanov’s bleak 1980 satire Garage (Garazh), even though it had
53 Ibid., pp. 34, 37.
54 Val S. Golovskoy with John Rimberg, Behind the Soviet Screen: The Motion-Picture Industry
in the USSR 1972–1982 (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986), p. 143.
55 George Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers: The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy and the Fall of the
Soviet Film Industry (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 98.
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been approved for general release. Still, most of their films played in first-run
theatres to huge audiences. Fifty million viewers saw Shukshin’s Snowball Berry
Red (Kalina krasnaia, 1974) in its first year; seventy million saw Riazanov’s Irony
of Fate, or Have a Good Sauna! (Ironiia sud’by, ili s legkim parom!) a year later.
Lenfilm’s exceptionally gifted Dinara Asanova made eight films in ten years as
well as a series on juvenile delinquency for TV. While party leaders censored
Asanova’s ‘portrait of a generation, puzzling in its taste for Western music
and punk attire and its search for a new identity’,
56
and relegated her films
to second-run or run-down theatres, they held none back, and Kids (Patsany,
1983) won prizes at several Soviet festivals.
After 1967–8 film-makers faced increasing resistance to experimental, folk-
loric and stylistically inflected films, with structures based on ‘analogical
images rather than narrative logic’.
57
Nevertheless, both central and repub-
lican studios managed to produce such films until roughly 1975, when local
and national pressures combined to promote pedestrian and derivative cin-
ema. Ukraine’s studio tried to perpetuate the legacy of Dovzhenko and the
beleaguered Sergei Paradzhanov, at least until the latter’s arrest in 1974 on
fabricated charges. Iurii Ilenko’s highly stylised Spring for the Thirsty (Rodnik
dlia zhazhdushchikh, 1965) was shelved for twenty years, but two later films, On
St John’s Eve (Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala, 1969) and the award-winning White
Bird with a Black Mark (Belaia ptitsa s chernoi otmetinoi, 1971), ran in theatres, if
only briefly. The explosion of cinematic energy that distinguished the studios
of Central Asia in the late 1960s continued for several years, with Ishmukhame-
dov’s Sweethearts (Vliublennye; Uzbekistan, 1970), Mansurov’s She was a Slave
(Rabynia; Kazakhstan, 1970), Narliev’s The Daughter-in-Law (Nevestka; Turk-
menia, 1972), Okeev’s The Fierce One (Liutyi; Kirgizia, 1974), and two films by
Kirghiz director Shamshiev, Red Poppies of Issyk-Kul (Alye maki Issyk-Kulia, 1971)
and White Steamship (Belyi parokhod, 1976), both award-winning, though the
latter minimally distributed.
Of the republics, only Georgia managed to produce a consistently interest-
ing body of work throughout zastoi: poetic and visually stunning explorations
of Georgia’s national past; ‘philosophical comedies’ that examine ‘the incon-
gruity between dream and reality, between the desires of the natural man
and the structure of a society founded on mechanics and regulations’;
58
subtle
56 Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), p. 24.
57 Ibid., p. 32.
58 Anatoly Vishevsky, Soviet Literary Culture in the 1970s: The Politics of Irony (Gainesville,
Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1993), p. 34.
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