Some of the most vivid impressions of Russia have been shaped by the creative works of the country’s writers and movie-makers. Although they really only got going in the 19th century, Russian writers wasted little time in carving out a prime place in the world of letters, producing towering classics in the fields of poetry and prose. In the process they have bagged five Nobel Prizes and frequently found themselves in conflict with the Russian establishment.
The great collection of works produced during the 19th century has led to it being known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Russian literature. This was the time of the precocious and brilliant Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), who penned the poems in verse The Bronze Horseman and Eugene Onegin, and Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41), author of A Hero of Our Time. Both were sent into exile by the authorities for their seditious writings; and both died young in duels, securing their romantic reputations for a country enthralled by doomed youthful heroes.
Continuing the tradition of literary criticism of the powers that be was the novelist and playwright Nikolai Gogol (1809–52), whose novel Dead Souls exposed the widespread corruption in Russian society. Gogol created some of Russian literature’s most memorable characters, including Akaky Akakievich, the tragicomic hero of The Overcoat, and Major Kovalyov, who chases his errant nose around St Petersburg when the shnozzle makes a break for it in the absurdist short story The Nose. His love of the surreal established a pattern in Russian literature that echoes through the works of Daniil Kharms, Mikhail Bulgakov and Viktor Pelevin in the next century.
More radical writers figured in the second half of the 19th century. In Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), the antihero Bazarov became a symbol for the antitsarist nihilist movement of the time. Before penning classics such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, which deals with questions of morality, faith and salvation, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) fell foul of the authorities and was exiled for a decade from St Petersburg, first in Siberia and later in what is now Kazakhstan.
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) sealed his reputation as one of Russia’s greatest writers with his Napoleonic War saga War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, a tragedy about a woman who violates the rigid sexual code of her time. Such was his popularity that he was effectively protected from reprisals by the government, who did not approve of his unorthodox beliefs in Christian anarchy and pacifism.
The phrase 'Pushkin is our everything' – uttered by cultured Russians – provides the title for an insightful 2014 documentary (www.pushkinfilm.com) about the national bard by American writer and director Michael Beckelhimer. Today, it is rare to meet a Russian who cannot quote some Pushkin. However, for several years after the writer's untimely death in 1837 at age 38, following a duel fought over the honour of his wife, his works languished in relative obscurity.
Beckelhimer's documentary reveals how Pushkin's reputation was revived by 1880, when the first of what would be many statues of the nation's poet across Russia was unveiled in Moscow by the likes of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky. That status was enhanced and solidified in Russian consciousness during the Soviet era when, in 1937, Stalin orchestrated major centennial celebrations of the poet's death, emphasising his alleged atheism and his protocommunist politics (neither of which was entirely true).
Flat English translations of Pushkin's lyrical, witty and imaginative works, which range from classical odes and sonnets to short stories, plays and fairy tales, can often leave non-Russian speakers wondering what all the fuss is about. It is clear that Pushkin has had a strong influence on language spoken by Russians today. The enraptured Russians interviewed in the documentary talk of the lightness and beauty of Pushkin's words, and how they continue to resonate for them today, nine generations after they were first written.
From the end of the 19th century until the early 1930s, the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian literature produced more towering talents. First came the rise of the symbolist movement in the Russian arts world. The outstanding figures of this time were philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900); writer Andrei Bely (1880–1934), author of Petersburg, regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century; and Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), who is considered to be the founder of socialist realism with his 1907 novel Mother, written during a Bolshevik Party fundraising trip in the US.
Alexander Blok (1880–1921) was a poet whose sympathy with the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 was praised by the Bolsheviks as an example of an established writer who had seen the light. His tragic poem ‘The Twelve’, published in 1918, shortly before his death, likens the Bolsheviks to the 12 Apostles who herald the new world. However, Blok soon grew deeply disenchanted with the revolution and in one of his last letters wrote that his Russia was devouring him.
The life of poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was filled with sorrow and loss – her family was imprisoned and killed, her friends exiled, tortured and arrested, her colleagues constantly hounded – but she refused to leave her beloved St Petersburg. Her verses depict the city with realism and monumentalism, particularly her epic Poem Without a Hero.
Another key poet of this age who also suffered for his art was Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), who died in a Stalinist transit camp near Vladivostok. Akhmatova’s and Mandelstam’s lives are painfully recorded by Nadezhda Mandelstam in her autobiographical Hope Against Hope.
The work of the great satirist Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940), including The Master and Margarita and Heart of a Dog, was banned for years, as was the dark genius absurdist work of Daniil Kharms (1905–42). Kharms starved to death during the siege of Leningrad in 1942; it would be two decades later that his surreal stories and poems started to see the light of day and began to be circulated in the Soviet underground press.
Although best known abroad for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) is most celebrated in Russia for his poetry. My Sister Life, published in 1921, inspired many Russian poets thereafter. Doctor Zhivago, first published in an Italian translation in 1957, secured him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, but Pasternak turned it down, fearing that if he left Russia to accept the award he would not be allowed to return.
One writer who managed to keep in favour with the communist authorities was Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–84), with his sagas of revolution and war among the Don Cossacks – And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965.
Few writers’ lives sum up the fickle nature of their relationship with the Russian state better than that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008). Persecuted and exiled by the Soviet Union, he returned to a country that considered him, in his latter years, both a crank and its conscience. Embraced by Vladimir Putin (whom Solzhenitsyn praised as ‘a good dictator’) for his nationalism, staunch belief in Russian Orthodoxy and hatred of the decadent West, the one-time dissident was given what amounted to a state funeral.
Decorated twice with medals for bravery during WWII, the young Solzhenitsyn first fell foul of the authorities in 1945 when he was arrested for anti-Stalin remarks found in letters to a friend. He subsequently served eight years in various camps and three more in enforced exile in Kazakhstan.
Khrushchev allowed the publication in 1962 of Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a short tale of Gulag life. The book sealed the writer’s reputation and in 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, although, like Boris Pasternak before him, he did not go to Sweden to receive it for fear that he would not be allowed to re-enter the USSR. Even so, he was exiled in 1974, when he went to the US. He finally returned to Russia in 1994.
To the end Solzhenitsyn remained a controversial figure. He was detested by many Gulag survivors, who accused him of collaborating with prison authorities. They looked suspiciously on Solzhenitsyn’s ability to gain sole access to the archives that allowed him to write his best-known work, The Gulag Archipelago, which describes conditions at the camps on the Solovetsky Islands, even though he was never imprisoned there himself. In his final book, 200 Years Together, about the history of Jews in Russia, he laid himself open to accusations of anti-Semitism.
The relaxing of state control over the arts during Khrushchev’s time saw the emergence of poets such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who gained international fame in 1961 with Babi Yar (which denounced both Nazi and Russian anti-Semitism), as well as another Nobel Prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), who wrote mainly about life in the Gulag system.
Some believe the camp experience as related in Kolyma Tales by the great literary talent Varlam Shalamov (1907–82) is even more harrowing than that depicted by Solzhenitsyn. Also gaining critical praise was another former Kolyma inmate Eugenia Ginzburg (1904–77) for her memoir Into the Whirlwind, initially published abroad in 1967.
The fiercely talented poet Joseph Brodsky (1940–96), also a Nobel Prize winner, hailed from St Petersburg and was a protégé of poet Anna Akhmatova. In 1964 he was tried for ‘social parasitism’ and exiled to the north of Russia. However, after concerted international protests led by Jean-Paul Sartre, he returned to Leningrad in 1965, only to continue being a thorn in the side of the authorities. Like Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky was exiled to the US in 1972.
Preceding glasnost (openness) was native Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin, who is best known for his stories decrying the destruction of the land, spirit and traditions of the Russian people. His 1979 novel Farewell to Matyora is about a Siberian village flooded when a hydroelectric dam is built.
Recent years have witnessed a publishing boom, with the traditional Russian love of books as strong as ever. One of the most popular novelists is Grigol Chkhartishvili, who under his pen name Boris Akunin has authored an internationally successful series of historical detective novels, including The Winter Queen and Turkish Gambit, featuring the foppish Russian Sherlock Holmes, Erast Fandorin.
Viktor Yerofeyev's erotic novel Russian Beauty has been translated into 27 languages. Tatyana Tolstaya's On the Golden Porch, a collection of stories about big souls in little Moscow flats, made her an international name when it was published in the West in 1989. Her 2007 novel The Slynx is a dystopian fantasy set in a post-nuclear-holocaust world of mutant people, fearsome beasts and totalitarian rulers.
The prolific science fiction and pop-culture writer Viktor Pelevin has been compared to the great Mikhail Bulgakov. Several of his novels, including The Yellow Arrow, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf and S.N.U.F.F., have also been widely translated. Vladimir Sorokin established his literary reputation abroad with his novels The Queue and Ice. In Day of the Oprichnik, he describes Russia in the year 2028 as a nationalist country ruled with an iron fist that has shut itself off from the West by building a wall.
Dmitry Bykov is one of the biggest names currently in Russian literary circles; he published a well-regarded biography of Boris Pasternak in 2007. His 2006 novel, ZhD (entitled Living Souls in its English translation), a satirical, anti-utopian, conspiracy-theory-laden tale of civil war set in near-future Russia, caused furious debate because of its Rus-phobic and anti-Semitic themes. Mikhail Shishkin has won all three of Russia's major literary awards. His books, including Maidenhair and The Light and the Dark, have been translated into English.
Even though there were a few Russian films made at the start of the 20th century, it was really under the Soviet system that this modern form of storytelling began to flourish. Lenin believed cinema to be the most important of all the arts and along with his Bolshevik colleagues saw the value of movies as propaganda.
Vast resources were pumped into studios to make historical dramas about Soviet and Russian victories such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), a landmark of world cinema, and his Alexander Nevsky (1938), which contains one of cinema’s great battle scenes. However, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1945), a discreet commentary on Stalinism, fell foul of state sponsors and was banned for many years.
The 1936 hit musical Circus was typical of the kind of propaganda movies were forced to carry at the height of Stalinism. The plot concerns an American circus artist hounded out of the US because she has a black baby; she finds both refuge and love, of course, in the Soviet Union. The lead actress, Lyubov Orlova, became the Soviet Union’s biggest star of the time. She also headlined Volga, Volga (1938), another feel-good movie said to be Stalin’s favourite film.
Of later Soviet directors, the dominant figure was Andrei Tarkovsky, whose films include Andrei Rublyov (1966), Solaris (1972) – the Russian answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – and Stalker (1979), which summed up the Leonid Brezhnev era pretty well, with its characters wandering, puzzled, through a landscape of clanking trains, rusting metal and overgrown concrete. Tarkovsky died in exile in 1986.
Winning an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (1980), directed by Vladimir Menshov, charts the course of three provincial gals who make Moscow their home from the 1950s to the 1970s. It's said that Ronald Reagan watched this kitchen-sink drama to get an idea of the Russian soul before his meetings with Gorbachev.
Glasnost brought new excitement in the film industry as film-makers were allowed to reassess Soviet life with unprecedented freedom and as audiences flocked to see previously banned films or the latest exposure of youth culture or Stalinism. Notable were Sergei Solovyov’s avant-garde ASSA (1987), staring rock-god Viktor Tsoy and the artist Afrika (Sergei Bugaev), and Vasily Pichul’s Little Vera (1989), for its frank portrayal of a family in chaos (exhausted wife, drunken husband, rebellious daughter) and its sexual content – mild by Western standards but startling to the Soviet audience.
Soviet cinema wasn’t all doom, gloom and heavy propaganda. The romantic comedy Irony of Fate (1975) has a special place in all Russians’ hearts, while a whole genre of ‘Easterns’ are epitomised by White Sun of the Desert (1969), a rollicking adventure set in Turkmenistan during the Russian Civil War of the 1920s. Still one of the top-selling DVDs in Russia, this cult movie is traditionally watched by cosmonauts before blast-off.
In 1932 the Communist Party demanded socialist realism in art – a glorified depiction of communist values and the revolution in society. Henceforth, artists had the all-but-impossible task of conveying the Party line in their works, yet not falling foul of the notoriously fickle tastes of Stalin in the process.
The composer Dmitry Shostakovich, for example, was officially denounced twice (in 1936 and 1948) and suffered the banning of his compositions. Strongly opposed to socialist realism, theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold had his theatre closed down; in 1939 he was imprisoned and later tortured and executed as a traitor. He was posthumously cleared of all charges in 1955.
Writers were particularly affected, including Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide, and the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose life was blighted by persecution and tragedy. Many, including Daniil Kharms, had their work driven underground, or were forced to smuggle their manuscripts out to the West for publication, as Boris Pasternak did for Doctor Zhivago.
By the time Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun won the best foreign-language movie Oscar in 1994, Russian film production was suffering. Funding had dried up during the early 1990s, and audiences couldn’t afford to go to the cinema anyway. The industry was back on track by the end of the decade though, with hits such as Alexy Balabanov’s gangster drama Brother (1997) and Alexander Sokurov’s Molokh (1999). Sokurov’s ambitious Russian Ark was an international success in 2002, as was Andrei Zvyaginstev’s moody thriller The Return the following year.
The glossy vampire thriller Night Watch (2004) struck box-office gold both at home and abroad, leading to an equally successful sequel, Day Watch (2006), and to Kazakhstan-born director Timur Bekmambetov being lured to Hollywood. Stilyagi (2008; entitled Hipsters for its international release) is a popular musical that casts a romantic eye on fashion-obsessed youths in 1950s Russia. Another international success, How I Ended This Summer (2010) is a tense thriller about the deadly clash of temperaments between an older and a younger scientist working on an isolated meteorological station off the coast of Chukotka.
Leviathan (2014), directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev, is a bleak tale of one man’s struggle against official corruption in northern Russia. Even though it was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language movie and won awards at the Golden Globes and in Cannes, the movie initially struggled to secure a wide release across Russia's cinemas. All that changed after an estimated 1.5 million Russians downloaded the film illegally, prompting cinema chains to take a chance on a movie critical of the current regime.
Nine out of 10 movies made in Russia receive government financing. Although Putin has said he does not favour censorship, he has also said he is interested in Russian films that promote patriotism, and values such as a healthy lifestyle, spirituality, kindness and responsibility, along with meeting the strategic goals of Russia. Such propaganda movies include the 3D war epic Stalingrad, a 2013 box-office smash in Russia.
Made with no government funding was Zvyagintsev's Loveless, which premiered at Cannes in 2017. It's another raw slice of contemporary Russian life that is unlikely to go down well with the authorities. Also attracting controversy is the costumed drama Matilda, directed by Alexey Uchitel, about Nicholas II's affair with Polish ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska. There have been calls for it to be banned since it is seen as disrespectful to the last tsar, who was canonised in 2000 by the Orthodox Church.
Little known outside Russia is the country’s great contribution to the art of animation. Two years before Disney’s Snow White, stop-motion animation was used for New Gulliver (1935), a communist retelling of Gulliver’s Travels featuring more than 3000 puppets. And rather than Disney’s films, it was actually Lev Atamanov’s beautiful The Snow Queen (1957), based on the Hans Christian Andersen story, that inspired young Hayao Miyazaki to become the master Japanese animator that he is today.
One of Russia’s most respected animators today is Yury Norshteyn, whose masterpiece, Hedgehog in the Mist (1975), is philosophical and full of references to art and literature. The current master of the medium is Alexander Petrov, who paints in oil on glass sheets using his fingertips instead of brushes. He photographs one frame, modifies the picture with his fingers and photographs the next; this painstaking approach takes around a year of work to create just 10 minutes of film. The Cow (1989), his first solo work, displays Petrov’s trademark montage sequences, in which objects, people and landscapes converge in a psychedelic swirl. Petrov won an Academy Award for The Old Man and the Sea (1999), based on the Hemingway novella. He was also nominated in 2007 for the dazzling My Love, an animated short set in prerevolutionary Russia.
The blog Animatsiya (http://niffiwan.livejournal.com) includes many clips from Russian animation films.