 |
  |
People and events:
T.Karpekina
November 28th marks 125 years to the birthday of Alexander Blok, a glamourous representative of the Silver Age in the Russian art. At the turn of the 20th century Silver Age produced a whole host of remarkable poets, among them Konstantin Balmont and Andrei Bely, Marina Tzvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev and Maximilian Voloshin. Alexander Blok occupies a particular place in this constellation of poets. His contemporaries regarded him a prophetic poet with a rare feeling for any kind of upheavals and changes.
At 17 as he filled in a family questionnaire and came to the question
of where he would like to live Alexander Blok pronounced one word only:
Shakhmatovo. 
Shakhmatovo
was an estate near Moscow belonging to the poet’s grandfather, in his time
a rector at the University of St. Petersburg. Alexander Blok first visited
the estate when he was a baby and then came every summer throughout the
whole of his 35-year life span. In the estate he rediscovered Russian nature
and folk life, started to write poetry and met his fiancée, Lyubov
Mendeleeva, whom he dedicated his first collection of poems “Verses about
A Beautiful Lady”. In his verse an ordinary country lass is elevated to
the unattainable and an encounter with her is portrayed as that of a knight
with a lady out of this world.
Professor Amina Gazizova, who has been doing research into the poet’s work, is reflecting on how the poet saw Shakhmatovo.
In Shakhmatovo Blok saw the idea of his own garden, a model of perfectly harmonious life. For years he cultivated the garden toiling day and night as a person and as a poet. Blok dreamed of a life close to people, nature, land and creative work and he spared no effort planting trees, digging the soil, mending the fence and creating something new with his own hands. He was building a warm home for his family, for his mother first of all, and then for his fiancée and wife.
After moving to Petersburg in 1905 Alexander Blok takes an active part in its cultural and public life. In those days artistically-minded intellectuals gather for regular meetings at the place of a symbolist poet, Viacheslav Ivanov. Alexander Blok comes regularly too, and it was at Ivanov’s that he first presented one of his most popular poems “The Unknown Lady”. A contemporary recalls that the poet as he read his verse was dressed in a long frock coat with a soft tie carelessly draped round his neck. In the halo of ash-gold hair he looked romantically beautiful then, the contemporary recalls. Also during those gatherings originated the project of a new theatre, which gripped Alexander Blok completely. The poet wrote several plays defining the genre as lyrical drama. Those were “The Song of Fate”, “The Rose and the Cross”, “The Fair Show Booth”. Blok’s plays had little in common with the usual theatre repertoire, which largely explains why they seldom if ever saw successful stage productions. In the poet’s lifetime the only successful production of his plays was “The Fair Show Booth”, which was directed by the famous theatre reformer Vsevolod Meyerkhold.
At the time of radical change in the Russian history – after 1917 – Russian intellectuals were faced with a difficult dilemma: to accept the Bolshevik regime or oppose it and defend the interests of tsarist Russia. Alexander Blok made his choice through the following motto: “With body, heart and mind – listen to Revolution!” He then writes his landmark works – the poems “The Twelve” and “The Scythians”, in which he voices a nearly sacred attitude to the Revolution and sees it as the only possible future for Russia.
Blok saw the Revolution as imminent, - Amina Gazizova goes on to say, - so it wasn’t by chance that he wrote the feature “Katilina” and other texts in which he drew a close parallel between the age of Russian Revolution and the arrival of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Blok thereby spoke of the imminent coming of a new world, new ideas and a new religion. A poet and a spiritually inspired personality, Blok thirsted for transfiguration of the world on the basics of spirituality and religious strength.
Despite the ordeal Russia had to go through Alexander Blok never
lost faith in a better future for his country. He never forgot that there
had been such periods in the Russian history before, when Russia seemed
to be on the verge of death. And every time it stood the test of time.
Today Blok’s poems sound as words of love and endless faith in Russia coming
to us through the centuries.
L.Lobanova
A new film by Stanislav Govorukhin, “Not by Bread Alone”, hits
the Russian screens on November 24th. Stanislav Govorukhin, one of the
cult names in the history of Russian cinema, is turning 70 next year. Though
believed to be a master of genre cinema, Govorukhin was equally successful
at adventure and detective stories, which include number 1 
hits.
These are “The Vertical”, the criminal series “Can’t Change the Meeting
Place” and the screen version of Agatha Christie’s novel “Ten Little Niggers”.
In the last few years Stanislav Govorukhin has been after non-profit productions. His recent films “Bless the Woman” and “Not by Bread Alone” are devoid of intrigue, special effects, costly entourage, erotic scenes, bloody shootings and happy end. Instead, the director has opted for a quiet honest recounting of the life of people for whom kindness, consciousness, duty, loyalty to friends and in love and service to Motherland are intrinsic.
The pictures are all reflecting the moral and civil stance of the director himself. Stanislav Govorukhin is also known as a politician and publicist. For 10 years the director has been member of the State Duma, so the participants in a news conference on the forthcoming premiere spoke of the director as an MP also.
I acted in the interests of culture, art and the film industry as a whole, - Stanislav Govorukhin says. – We’ve passed a bill on state support for the film industry. We’re now making more films than in pre-perestroika Russia. What is left is to wait for the quantity to pass into quality. There are films that incorporate high artistry and high moral standards and at the same time are highly spectacular productions.
Stanislav Govorukhin is convinced that a film director ought to be aware of the importance of his work both on the state and educational level. For him filming is an instrument for the director to manipulate the collective consciousness of the masses. Films form the young minds too, so the priority for today, Mr.Govorukhin says, is to feel responsibility, first of all, before the young generation. The artist’s credo should be like the doctor’s : Do no harm.
The film “Not by Bread Alone” was made after the same-name novel by Soviet author Vladimir Dudintsev. The novel, published in 1956, sent the first message of the political thaw that came after Stalin’s death. The honest story of an inventor enthusiast who with the best of intentions tries to help the domestic industry but runs against the bureaucratic system produced the effect of a bomb and became a bestseller. But freedom of expression was still unacceptable on such a scale in those days, so Dudintsev soon found himself in the doghouse and the book was banned. The novel appears somewhat outdated in the reality of the day. For this reason Stanislav Govorukhin had to change the finale to be close to historical truth.
The film is all black and white to replicate the exact atmosphere of the late 1940s. The leading parts, played by representatives of the young generation, Mikhail Eliseev and Svetlana Khodchenkova, recreate in the tiniest detail the psychological portraits of the day and both live through their characters’ feelings on the screen.
Govorukhin’s films, even though so successful with the audiences,
never won a single award at the festivals and film experts and critics
ignored them. But “Not by Bread Alone” has become an exception and won
Grand-Prix at the recent “Window to Europe” Festival in Vyborg, where the
jury was made up of viewers. And the viewers of Vyborg (a city near St.
Petersburg) were supported by film lovers from New York. The film demonstrated
at Week of Russian Cinema in the US cultural capital got the warmest of
acclaim from the American public.
12/04/2005 BACK TO MAIN PAGE
