My Stepbrother Frankenstein by Valery Todorovsky The
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WAR AS THE FAMILY VALUE : M Y STE PBROTHER F RANKENSTEIN BY VALERY T O D OROVSKY The symbiosis of the theme of war with the representation of fatherhood in Soviet and post-Soviet culture is persistent but not logically self-evident. In the wake of such films of the 1960s as Sudʹba cheloveka (Destiny of a Man, 1959, dir. Sergei Bondarchuk), Kogda derevʹia byli bolʹshimi (When the Trees Were Tall, 1961, dir. Lev Kulidzhanov), Mir vkhodiashchemu (Peace to Him Who Enters, 1961, dir. Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov), and Otets soldata (Father of a Soldier, 1965, dir. Rezo Chkheidze), the understanding of the Great Patriotic War as a backdrop in which to beatify the father figure was solidified in Soviet culture. All these and many similar movies and books arose during the period of the Thaw, which had, on the one hand, deposed the supreme patriarchal authority of Stalin and commenced the task of scouring its cultural vestiges, yet, on the other hand, affirmed the nation’s victory in World War II as the most important if not the sole legitimization of the Soviet regime. Invoking the valorous war as the cornerstone of paternalistic authority, feature film directors of the sixties strove to replace the crumpled and debunked father figure of Stalin with a markedly less godlike image of the nuclear father and thus, in the same stroke, marshaled the totalitarian mythology of the war into a more democratic and humane mythology of the collective nation- al suffering that was instigated by the war. 195 196 F i l m Although the war significantly depleted the Soviet male population and inevitably transferred to women the principal responsibility for familial well-being, war films of the 1960s unanimously neglected to undermine or even to question patriarchal authority, and, moreover, rarely ventured to examine the correlation between the war and women’s changing social roles.1 It is well known that the core of totalitarian culture was shaped by the prioritization of society’s interests over the interests of the nuclear family as well as by the mandatory sacrifice of individual values for the sake of collectivist ideologies. In contrast, the sixties’ reorientation from societal “fathers” to private father-child relationships reflected the comprehensive problematization of the entire system of Soviet values, a problematization that was generally indicative of the Thaw-era culture. Yet despite the anti-Stalinist ideology of the aforementioned films, the connection drawn in them between the war and its culture of violence and suffering with the symbolic capital of the father(ing) was merely a manner of rewriting Stalinist totalitarian mythologies. As Aleksandr Prokhorov argues, “The Thaw culture has inherited from Stalinism a family trope— as a symbolic image of the Soviet society, and a war trope—as the symbolic image of this society’s main form of existence” (2007, 152). In Thaw-era cinema, the elementary structure of the totalitarian Great Family was preserved in the realm of the nuclear family—it was domesticated and divested of imperial grandeur, but it at least maintained, and arguably increased, its sacredness. Thus, the war theme tilled a unique discursive field in the culture of the 1960s–80s, one in which the official state and alternative liberal discourses frequently merged, or at least tolerated one another. The mythos of the war—invariably held as the triumphal equinox of patriotism in which the interests of the state were no different 1 Symptomatically, the texts that demonstrate how the war undermined and problematized the father’s role in the family and society—for instance, Andrei Platonov’s magnificent short story “Vozvrashchenie” (“The Return,” 1946)— were consistently marginalized. Among these marginalized exceptions, the films Krylʹia (Wings, 1966, dir. Larisa Shepitʹko) and Dikii med (Wild Honey, 1966, dir. Vladimir Chebotarev; based on the eponymous novel by Leonid Aiskii) should also be mentioned. My Stepbrother Frankenstein by Valery To d o r o v s k y 197 from the interests of an individual or a single family—allowed the perpetuation of a balance, however fragile, between society and the individual of post-Stalinist Soviet culture. Moreover, the association of war themes with the father figure, or more precisely with the idealization of patriarchal values and corresponding models of social order, constituted the foundation of this poise. The mythology of the Great Patriotic War not only retained its symbolic currency into the post-Soviet period but has been richly reinforced during the years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. Cultural historian and sociologist Lev Gudkov, having analyzed numerous poll data from VTsIOM (the All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion), argues that since 1995 and up to the present, “An extremely structured social attitude towards the war is incarnated and consolidated in the main symbol that integrates the nation: victory in the war, victory in the Great Patriotic War. In the opinion of Russia’s inhabitants, this is the most important event in their history; it is the basic image of national consciousness. No other event compares with it” (Gudkov 2005, 4). Gudkov convincingly suggests that the post-Soviet perception of the war, notwithstanding the newfound access to a wealth of formerly banned historical sources, still respires all the key features of the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War: • the virtual repression of all traumatic aspects of the war and postwar experience (i.e., the Holocaust, the coercive labor, the chronic hunger and poverty, the ethnic repressions, etc.), combined with an emphasis on ecstatic victory celebra- tions; • xenophobic overtones in the war mythos—victory in the war serves as proof of the superiority of Russia and Russians over the entire world: “Russians are not willing to share their triumph with anyone else in the world. Sixty-seventy percent of those surveyed [in 2003] believe that the USSR could have won the war even without the help of the allies. Moreover, as Russian nationalism is intensifying and the war is receding further into the past, it has gradually begun to be integrated into the traditional idea of Russia’s ‘mission’ and its ‘rivalry with the West’” (Gudkov 2005, 7); 198 F i l m • “a number of unpleasant facts [. .] repressed from mass consciousness: the aggressive nature of Soviet regime, Communist militarism and expansionism [. .] the fact that World War II began with a joint attack of Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union; the human, social, economic, and metaphysical cost of war . .” (ibid., 8); • the justification of an extremely low valuation of human life: “The idea that mass losses were inevitable and that millions of victims somehow ‘are unavoidable’ are a constituent element of the general semantic complex of national exploits and general heroism. [. .] Russians’ mass consciousness is unable to imagine a war where the military leaders would aim to save the lives of their subordinates at any cost” (ibid., 10); • the legitimization of “people’s view of themselves as victims of aggression” (ibid., 9), which, Gudkov further notes, “was also expressed in a readiness to justify (but not to support!) any aggressive or repressive state police against other countries or territories withstanding the USSR or Russia” (ibid.), ranging from Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to Afghani- stan in 1979 and Chechnya in the ’90s and 2000s. Bolstered by lavish jubilee celebrations of the victory in 2000 and particularly in 2005, and, moreover, fueled by the ceaseless media bashing of the Baltic countries and former Soviet satellites (Poland especially) that allegedly overslaughed the memory of Soviet “liberators” for the glorification of the Nazis, the Great Patriotic War myth in the twenty-first century, as Gudkov demonstrates, serves as the main basis for negative self-identification (“we” vs. “them”), which, in turn, emerges as the formative impetus for the mainstream of post-Soviet culture: “This confidence [in being constantly victimized by ‘enemies’] was routinized in an extra- moral, socially primitive, archaic, almost tribal distinction between ‘our people’ and ‘not our people’ as a basis for social solidarity” (2005, 9). It naturally follows that today “the repression of the war [myth] keeps spawning state-sponsored aggression—the Chechen war and the restoration of the repressive regime” (11). Furthermore, the potency of the war myth elevates the wartime condition of normalized violence to “a norm of symbolic self-identity” (10): of My Stepbrother Frankenstein by Valery To d o r o v s k y 199 present-day Russian citizens, 77 percent share the conviction that “Russians display their national character and mental qualities at the fullest in times of crisis, trial, and war [. .] rather than in calm and happy times” (ibid.). These phenomena certainly help to illustrate the ties between Great Patriotic War mythology and the father figure as the symbolic reification of the “very principle of a ‘vertical’ construction of society, a mobilization, command- hierarchical model of social order” (11). In this context, exceptional significance befalls the engagements of contemporary Russian culture that problematize and deconstruct the symbiosis between the war myth and the myth of the patriarchal authority. Moi svodnyi brat Frankenshtein (My Stepbrother Frankenstein, 2004)2 by Valery Todorovsky (b. 1962) exemplifies the cinematic breed of this rare species.3 Todorovsky’s film won three honors, including the Grand Prix, at the Kinotavr film festival in Sochi, was recognized as the best film of the Russian program at the Moscow Film Festival, and received the FIPRESCI award at Karlovy Vary 2 Produced by Prior-Film and Rekun TV, producer Leonid Iarmolʹnik, director of photography Sergei Mikhalʹchuk, production designer Vladimir Gudlin, music by Aleksei Aigi. 3 Another important example is Svoi (Our Own, 2004) by the director Dmitrii Meskhiev and the famed screenwriter Valentin Chernykh.