Tolstoi and Protazanov

Tolstoi and Protazanov PETER ROLLBERG George Washington University 1 Iakov Aleksandrovich Protazanov (1881-1945) belonged to the sizeable cohort of Russian filmmakers who viewed cinema as intrinsi- cally linked to literature and for whom the classical literary heritage al- ways was the most noble challenge to the new art of moving pictures.1 In the early phase of Protazanov's career, his ability to respond to literary masterpieces with both creative inventiveness and faithfulness earned him the reputation of a serious artist working in an otherwise du- bious medium; in its last phase, Protazanov's loyalty to the aesthetic standards of the 19th-century classical heritage secured his popularity with audiences but also made him a pariah in the eyes of admirers of So- viet avant-garde films. Iakov Protazanov was an enormously prolific director. The 100 feature films he completed in the course of three decades include adaptations of works by Aleksandr Pushkin (The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, 1911; The Queen of Spades, 1915), Fedor Dostoevskii (Nikolai Stavro- gin, 1915), Anton Chekhov (A Work of Art, 1914; Ranks and People, 1929), and Leonid Andreev (Anfisa, 1912; The White Eagle, 1928). The masterpiece Girl Without a Dowry (Bespridannitsa, 1936) based on Aleksandr Ostrovskii's drama, was one of the most influential films of the 1930s, indeed one of the signature films marking the neoclassical turn in Russian-Soviet sound cinema. But no author was as important to Protazanov as Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi. Beginning with the early drama 191 The Devil (D'iavol, 1914) and continuing with a large-scale adaptation of War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1915), Family Happiness (Semeinoe schast'e, 1916), and Father Sergius (Otets Sergii, 1918), Protazanov time and time again turned to the works of Tolstoi, regardless how dif- ficult to adapt these works were. Protazanov joined the Russian film industry in 1907 when it was still in its infancy and heavily dependent on foreign investment and tech- nology. The first Russian "movies" were produced on the cheap, in the course of a few days, or weeks at best; directors routinely churned out twenty pictures and more per year. As the industry had an insatiable craving for narratives, the classical literary heritage proved a welcome source of plots that were well known, loved, and free of charge as well. Moreover, the popularity of Pushkin, Chekhov, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi was so immense that film companies specializing in adaptations attract- ed viewers' attention simply by using the writers' names in their adver- tisements. Another aspect was cinema's need to gain respectability: "kinemo," as the early silent cinema was called, emerged as a technical sensation and the medium of choice for the culturally unassuming, most- ly illiterate strata of the population; when it began to mature, cinema had to strive for recognition by discriminating middle class audiences, in particular the urban intelligentsia. Literary adaptations were regarded as one legitimate way to achieve recognition. To Russian producers, Lev Tolstoi's oeuvre seemed especially well-suited to meet a variety of ex- pectations - its artistic status was beyond doubt, as was its commercial potential - Tolstoi's works were sold in millions of copies all over the world, while the writer's controversial persona was surrounded by an air of dissidence and even a whiff of the risque. Thus, between 1909 and 1918, Russian companies produced 27 films adapted from 18 works by Tolstoi,2 targeting both domestic and foreign markets. A telling example for the simplistic narrative techniques of early silent literary adaptations and their minimal aesthetic standards is the screen version of Resurrection that was produced by the Russian branch of Pathe Freres in 1909: it reduced the novel to a film of less than 15 minutes! However, within a few years, Russian viewers began to de- mand more adequate "film illustrations" - as literary adaptations were called - and the quality levels of casting, set decorations, acting, as well as of the overall production values grew accordingly. In 1915, the writer Lev Nikulin witnessed how audiences at a screening of Iakov Pro- tazanov and Vladimir Gardin's War and Peace whispered in awe during 192 a number of magnificent scenes filmed by cinematographer Aleksandr Levitskii.3 Indeed, within a few years, Russian silent cinema was in- creasingly respected as a legitimate medium capable of visualizing, translating, and, to some degree, interpreting canonical literary texts. Although some purists continued to view any adaptation of classical literature as sacrilege, there is reason to believe that Lev Nikolae- vich Tolstoi might have taken a more generous position. In the last years of his life, Tolstoi revealed a lively interest in cinema, reflecting upon its negative features as well as its positive sociocultural potential. In a conversation with Leonid Andreev, he even expressed an interest in writing for cinema. "You know, I have been thinking about cinema all the time. Even at night I woke up and thought about it. And I decided to write for cinema. Of course, there has to be a reciter who will read the text."4 In the last years of his life, on several occasions Tolstoi agreed to be filmed for newsreels. The most tenacious entrepreneur in getting Tolstoi in front of a camera was Aleksandr Drankov who secured the writer's permission to film the celebrations marking Tolstoi's 80th birthday. The result was the short documentary The Day of Count LJV. Tolstoi's 80th Birthday (Den' 80-letiia grafa L.N. Tolstogo, 1908). Four years later, to mark the second anniversary of the writer's passing, Pathe Freres released on 6 November 1912 In Memory of the Second An- niversary of LJV. Tolstoi's Death (V pamiat' dvukhletiia so dnia smerti L.N. Tolstogo). The film was compiled from footage shot by French cinematographer Georges Meyer in 1909 and 1910 and supplemented by new documentary footage from Iasnaia Poliana.5 More than any other Russian filmmaker of the silent period, Iakov Protazanov embodies cinema's eagerness to unite forces with classical literature.6 The first two screenplays that he wrote for the company "Gloria" were The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (Bakhchisaraiskii fontan, 1909),7 based on Pushkin's poem and May Night, or the Drowned Woman (Maiskaia noch', ili utoplennitsa, 1910), based on Gogol's short story. In 1911, working for the "Torgovyi dom 'Timan i Reingardt'" (Thiemann and Reinhardt), Protazanov penned a screenplay based on Lev Tolstoi's comedy The First Distiller (Pervyi vinokur). (Unfortu- nately, it is impossible to assess the quality of these five to fifteen- minute long films since none have survived). That same year, Pro- tazanov embarked on a full-fledged directing career making his debut with a drama based on a folk song, Pesn' katorzhanina, followed by a literary adaptation, The Song of the Vatic Oleg (Pesn' о veshchem 193 Olege), based on Pushkin's poem. For the next thirty years, Protazanov would alternate unabashedly commercial pictures with ambitious literary adaptations that required a keen sense of compatibility of classical texts with the narrative specifics of cinema. Protazanov possessed this sense like few others. He also had an exceptional intuition in regard to the public's taste, including the ap- peal of sensational topics. His third film as director was again a literary adaptation, Leonid Andreev's drama Anfisa (1912), for which Andreev himself wrote the screenplay. Its success was reassuring, and when pro- ducer Paul Thiemann was approached with the idea of making a bio- graphical film about Lev Tolstoi's last years, he entrusted this daring project to his young protege, Iakov Protazanov. The resulting picture, The Departure of a Great Elder, although not a literary adaptation, dealt with the power of literature and the dramatic circumstances in which it was created, as well as with the ideals that it conveyed and their consequences. Protazanov's daring and directness in approaching the personal drama of Lev Tolstoi caused a sensation - and a scandal. 2 At the film's beginning, we see Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi briskly walking in the forest: an imposing elderly man in peasant garb display- ing youthful energy despite the cane in his hand. This first shot from Iakov Protazanov's The Departure of a Great Elder8 (Ukhod velikogo startsa) looks so authentic that one can easily mistake it for a documentary shot. Indeed, the film's set designer, Ivan Kavaleridze,9 a gifted sculptor with great enthusiasm for cinema, devoted enormous skill to creating Tolstoi's appearance with a maximum believability. The au- thenticity was supported by the two cameramen's skillful emulation of well-known documentary images of the late writer. Indeed, one of them, Georges Meyer, had shot a documentary at Astapovo station in 1910 and in Iasnaia Poliana in 1912. Thus, it is sometimes impossible to tell whether one sees staged or live images, especially since some documentary footage was edited into the film. The Departure of a Great Elder was a large-scale project. With its roughly half hour duration (800 m),i° it exceeded the typical length of a feature film in those years.11 The screenplay was written by Isaak Ten- eromo, a "third-rate writer"12 (according to film historian Semen Ginzburg), who had, however, met Tolstoi in person on several occasions and talked to him about the cultural potential of cinema. It was 194 Teneromo who initially approached Thiemann with the idea of a feature film that would thematize Tolstoi's escape from Iasnaia Poliana and his death at Astapovo station. The proposal was artistically tempting and, from the point of view of genre, pioneering. Although some silent pictures already had been made in the genre of the so-called biopic,13 i.e., fictionalized biographies of famous historical figures, none had dared to include characters that were still alive.

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