With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the walls preventing Russians to leave the country also collapsed, making the West more accessible than it ever was before for a multiple generations. This is represented in Window to Paris, by a magical window allowing Russian inhabitants of an apartment to travel to Paris for a limited amount of time. This is an ingenious device to analyze the modern situation as well as providing a stark contrast between the two countries.

As one would expect, people are much better off in the West and Kolya’s friends are able to make a lot of money when they are able to harness their entrepreneurial skills in Paris. Things are also visually more appealing in the West and the political atmosphere is peaceful. But the film also manages to satirize the capitalism of the West in two ways. The first being the stinginess of people in capitalist societies. They have an excess of products (while the Russians have barely enough to survive), but will waste it if they are not paid for in their full price. The other being this kind of moral decay that comes with excess and too much freedom. This is depicted in the “prestigious” society where they play the great classics but without pants to a nude audience; implying the purity of the classics are being tarnished because of their use in orgies.

This all is contrasted to the moment when the French woman is trapped on the other side of the window and bares witness to the vastly different living conditions in Russia. The beauty and peace you found in Paris is gone, it’s cold, the streets are dirty, there’s political turmoil, and she’s taken advantage of and robbed. Understandably, she wants to get out as soon as possible, she’s a wreck in prison by the end of her experience there. Despite this however, there is something in the Russian adults that tie them to their motherland that prevents them from completing emigrating to France, despite their monetary success.

The most touching scene is when Kolya is talking to the children who have briefly tasted the better life in Paris and want to stay here and leave everything in Russia behind. They argue that with all the opportunity in the West, they will be able to better provide for their families here than in the West. And this is representative of the younger generations who started to leave the country to find better lives in the West in the real world. And Kolya has to tell them that they are the one’s that can make Russia a better place to live in, they are literally the future of the country and they can bring about positive change.

The ending however is Kolya suspecting that there is another window to the West behind this massive wall is trying to break the wall down. This leaves me to conclude that although one must be critical of the West in some aspects, it is in the country’s best interest to change itself as to be more like the West, and be prosperous and peaceful.

Moscow is not Paris, it is not the city of love, on the contrary it seems to be depicted as a city where no one interacts with one another, and no one falls in love anymore. This is quite surprising considering the fact that you would assume under a communist regime, where the group and community is prioritized, members of the community would mingle more and meet one another. The opposite, according to the film and animated short, however, has occurred. What I find extraordinary about the Moscow presented in the film Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, is the place of women in society. There is this newfound upward mobility where women are breaking out of their traditional role as in the domestic spheres, and instead are found everywhere in public. Women are the ones taking advantage of what the city has to offer in terms of amusement, culture, as well as oppurtunity. It comes to a point where women can have a higher ranking in society than man and earn more money. This feminine independence was first seen in Cement, and the same problem remains: men aren’t man enough to handle this shifting society. This however is not the only problem presented in the film concerning men however, it is also challenging to find a decent bachelor. Men are single because they are not being industrious or ambitious, instead they are drinking themselves away and shunning the public sphere, men are failing where women are thriving. And this is a phenomenon left unexplained by the movie, what is happening to the Russian men?

What I found really intriguing was the film’s dialectic concerning the woman role in this new society. The main dilemma being this: the film presents this main character, Katarina, a single mother (because men are dumb and irresponsable), who goes above and beyond, and has achieved a decently high rank in society, raking in a respectable income, that, by the end of the movie, settles with this man that has a old-fashioned and traditional outlook of women and their role in society (who hasn’t achieved half as much as Katarina). If this was Cement, she would never have settled. It was frustrating and not satisfying to what Katarina, who has endured so many hardships to prove her worth, to conform to this patriarchal hierarchy that places her in a traditional gender role that does not leave the domestic space. How can we reconcile these two opposing ideas? Especially when the ending is presented as a happy one, where Georg is the man she has been looking for? Does this undo all the previous narrative, that I perceived as having a certain feminist agenda? Is this movie trying to say that women need husbands to fully find their place in society and are incomplete without him, even if he’s not as accomplished?

A sweeping sense of despair and hopelessness over the unjustifiable and heinous actions committed against the people and the intelligentsia of the times pervades the works of Akhmatova and the Mandelstams. The hopelessness comes from the systematic breaking down of the individual and their sanity, so that the persecuted are waiting for death to be granted to them as a kind of mercy and relief from their present reality.

In Akhmatova’s poems, as we have seen before, uses herself as her own muse and writes of herself in the third person, although to produce a different effect: here this intentional distancing and separation from herself allows for her to write about herself in more general terms, making her character able to encapsulate the plight of other individuals, artists or not. However on a deeper and physiological level, it is in itself a manifestation of trauma. Separating yourself from a traumatic incident is one coping mechanism, in which you are able to deny that it happened to you, imagining another separate entity to be victim of your history. This is exemplified in part III: “No this is not me – someone else suffers. / I couldn’t stand this: let black drapes / cover what happened…” However even this is confused throughout her writings, where her own identity bleeds through, making the identity of the victim unclear, proving that Akhmatova herself is the true inspiration for her works, in part II she writes:  “This woman is sick, / This woman is alone, / husband in the grave, son in prison, / pray for me.” The “me” at the very end betrays the woman’s identity.

A striking component of these writings was the separation of the individual from the outside world, and more specifically the separation from the family. As we see with Akhmatova, what haunts her throughout her imprisonment was the despair of knowing that the regime had killed her husband and had also imprisoned her son. The uncertainty of whether her son would live or die weighed greatly on her and brought her to the point of welcoming death. In Mandelstam’s writing, she wrote about the imprisonment of her husband and how the regime attempted to systematically break him down, by hindering his sleep patters, as well as potentially making him listen to the far off voice of a woman that in his delusional state thought was the voice of his wife. She writes this: “Methods like these are only possible when if a prisoner’s links to the world are broken from the moment of his arrest.” It was also shocking to witness the acceptance of their reality to the point where exiles were longer something to be afraid of since they were subject to them so frequently, and more surprising the attempt at committing suicide by slashing one’s wrist as “being the most natural thing in the world.” This, then is only one of the many effects of trauma produced by Stalin’s harsh regime.

While reading the excerpts from Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, I was constantly confused as to how to read it; I could not rightly discern the stance it was taking in regards to the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing Soviet regime, until at last the very end. I believe that my confusion exemplifies the different views as stated in the history textbook about the drastic and arduous changes occurring in Russia. The text is following the return of Gleb from the front lines as a Red soldier to his home in a factory town. The text sets up the stage that everything has changed by providing the reader with the smokescreen that everything appears to look the same to Gleb. Slowly, however, we begin to realize to what extent things have actually changed beneath the surface: his wife is not the same woman he left three years ago and the factory is devoid of workers. In short, everything this Bolshevik soldier thought he was fighting for is left unrealized or has abandoned him. This first led me to believe that Soviet Revolution, as depicted in the text, failed to deliver what it was seeking to accomplish; this is clearly the thought process of the ex-factory workers. The text however resolves that problem by the end with the simple fact that they needed someone from the party, Gleb, to organize them. It is an interesting move to make, to have the local Soviet soldier be the one to revitalize the community and its workers, when there is a clear disconnect between him and his fellow ex-factory workers and their experiences for the last three years, as well as the entire ideology of the Soviet Party. It is clear from his relationship with his wife that he in himself and on the domestic front is not entirely the embodiment of all the new Soviet ideals. Gleb is very much a character that is ruled by his almost primitive passions, his love for the factory and labor is described as one would describe something innate, primitive, and instinctual. His love for Dasha can be qualified in the same way, it is a love that manifests itself in the dominance of man and the subservience of woman. He does not love Dasha for Dasha, but loves her as a “traditional woman.” This view on woman is an obsolete view in this new Soviet order, but he is not able to come to terms with it, although by the end he knows everything has changed, and that women no longer like they did before the revolution, and are not to be treated in the same manner.

Considering the time this text was written, the positive effects of the Revolution had yet to fully make themselves known. The transition to a new regime after a revolution is without fail always turbulent, and this is what the text manages to portray. Although it is a propaganda text in favor of the Soviet Party, it is still grounded in fact and makes no delusion with itself on the realities and consequences of war. Everything has changed but the work is still not done or complete, not even the Soviet soldier is the perfect example of the ideals of this new world order, but there is still hope and potential, and the firm belief that Soviet Party will lead Russia to better days.

Of all the poets we read for today, my favorite and the one that struck me the most with her language was Anna Akhmatova. She was the one that for me managed to convey great meaning within her poems without getting muddled in a vague and all encompassing language that poets tend to use. She paints a distinct setting for her words to center around, this can be seen in her works, “In the Evening” and “Evening hours at the Table.” She uses the setting of the garden and the dining table in these poems respectively to then elaborate on the themes of disconnect between man and woman in her own personal experience (in the context of the narrative of the poem).

I read many of these poems by Akhmatova to be a continuation of the burgeoning female tradition in writing that we discussed last class with the writing of Zinovieva-Annibal. This, I believe, cam be witnessed by the afore mentioned poems. “In the Evening” provides this contrast of friend and lover, possessiveness and passion. The man in the poem has “no passion in his touch,” despite being her “true friend;” in his eyes, she is merely a possession for his lust, most significantly in the word “horsewoman,” referring to the sexual. The disconnect and the refutation of the conventionalities of traditional gender roles is exemplified in the last stanza: “The violins’ mourning voices, / sing above the spreading smoke, / ‘Give thanks to heaven: / you are alone with your love for the first time.” The pairing of love with the mourning voices of the violin is a clear indication of the true nature of this pairing as an unequal and possessive relationship.

The ideas of decay, passing of time, and the passing from the old to the new is a recurring theme throughout her poems as well. This is present in her poems “I have come to replace you sister,” and “How terribly my body has changed.” The idea of decay that she explores is the gradual loss of the ability to distinguish art and beauty in the world. There is nothing beautiful in this decay, and the old must be swept aside for the new.  In the first poem mentioned, the old can “longer understand the bird’s song,” or “notice the stars or summer lightning.” The new, however, is able to do all those things and “was like a white banner, / … like the light from a beacon.” The theme of there being no beauty in death and decay is also portrayed in the second poem mentioned, where there are no thunderclaps or thunderbolts or a loud joyous voice from the angels to mark her death. This then idealizes youth as being the epitome of beauty and inspiration able to discern true are and beauty and is able to transpose them on the page.

The idea of love lost by the hands of  a stranger or foreigner is a reoccurring theme in Blok’s writing and Stravinsky’s ballet. In Blok’s writings, he is prophesying the coming of dark times for Russia, in which people lose sight of what they once loved and are ultimately deceived. The way in which he portrays this deception is through the imagery of sorcery, witchcraft, and demons, as well as the numbing confusion of the blizzard. Both of these ideas lead to amazing spectacles that can beguile the mind but ultimately lead towards death and the loss of beauty and purity.

The sorcerers seduce and deceive and as a result the beauty of Russia is abused and tarnished, and the pure ideas of faith and love are confused. In this era of tumult and confusion, he does not know what god he believed or the girl he had loved. The blizzard, in all of its chaos overturned nature itself in the form of the sky causing the stars to fall, and with his eyes fixated on the descent, Blok writes about how he forgot about Russia and its landscapes that he loved. This deception by the blizzard distracts the individual from Russia in favor of the pure spectacle offered by the chaos.

The Russia that is being left behind, is in Blok’s eyes the true and right form of Russia as it was earlier in its glory days. In a time where the authority of the tsar is questioned and compromised, with the people seeking to destabilize the status quo through conflict and violence, he hearkens back to the simpler and more peaceful days that did not forebode this apocalyptic feeling. Those that would seek to turn Russia away from what it once was and plunge it into the blizzard are the sorcerers of whom he writes.

The foreign identity of the deceptive entity is seen in the ballet Petrouchka, in which the Moor steals away the girl Petrouchka loves. The Moor stands in sharp contrast to the other figures with his exotic style and dark skin and ultimately kills Petrouchka (I think) and steals away with the girl. Therefore what causes the downfall of Russia is a foreign element.

All three texts are having a conversation with one another about the essence of the Russian identity, and the hope or lack thereof that accompanies it. Could the Madman in both Gogol and Chaadev’s writings be in essence the same person or idea? In my mind, although written before Diary of a Madman, Apology of a Madman seems to be giving a defense for the reason behind the Madman’s insanity. The Madman can be read as your standard Russian state official (most likely in Petersburg) who has been exposed to European customs and represents the group of people that find themselves caught in the gray area between being European but at the same time not being it fully. In The Apology, this Russian identity is superficially tied to that of European culture, and is therefore devoid of all meaning. The European customs that Russia adopts to make itself more European have evolved naturally in Europe’s culture and traditions are therefore full of historical significance and meaning. When Russia merely assimilates those customs they lose their contextual significance and are then devoid of all meaning and are ultimately empty. This therefore leads Russia to chase after superficiality and emptiness to keep up appearances that they are a modern European nation, again making the idea of uncertainty in Russian identity resurface.

Not only is the uncertainty of Russian identity in relation to Europe revisited, but this feeling of inferiority starts to emerge. The contrast is quite stark when Ivanov believes that he only needs to look the part to become it. If he dressed like a man of higher rank he would then ascend the ranks purely based on his appearance, this superficiality is emblematic then of the true nature of the ranks in state service. The ranks were created by Peter the Great in an attempt to modernize Russia by imitating Europe’s state service structures, it did not come from a natural development through the ideas within the country as a whole. The ranks are not authentic but vapid, their only significance in its appearance. One might analyse this constant chase for the superficial to represent the stupidity of the Russian mindset. This stupidity, or in lighter terms, this tendency to find value in appearances only can be seen as a lack of education, an education  which would instruct in things that truly mattered. This is depicted through the books in the director’s study, that whoever possesses them is considered to be a “wise man”. The books however are all in either French or German, books way “above your average civil servant.” It is also depicted through the dogs that are able to write to one another, although one can clearly see the  dogs as being representative of French, or more generally of European culture, with the incorporations of “ma chère” throughout the text. The dogs here are depicted as being more intelligent than humans, however one can make the argument that Gogol is trying to depict the Russians as being less educated than dogs, and thus here comes the feeling of inferiority, echoing the statements made in The Apology.

The response to these ideas of Russian inferiority is then answered by Pushkin with the optimism that Russia will be able to shake off the chains that prevents it from achieving its God given potential.

Alexei Venetsianov, was the first and the single one of his Russian contemporaries to find inspiration in the Russian countryside and in its landscapes and inhabitants. In contrast to Russian painters like Karl Briullov and Sylvester Shchedrin, who seem to have lived in Italy for most of their professional lives and were so heavily inspired by its influences that their identity as Russian painters vs Italian painters seems contestable,  Venetsianov glorifies the seemingly simple and pristine peasant way of life. With him, we see this shift of focus from the exterior and foreign towards Russia and its distinctness, which gives way to feelings of nationalistic pride on the part of the painter. In my mind, this is exemplified in his Spring, Plowland, and in his Summer, Reaping:

In these two paintings, the idea of simplicity is very prominent: there is little to no action occurring in the two works, eschewing a certain sense peace and serenity. The colors are very light and the sky is blue and very clear; although depicting scenes of hard manual labor, the scenes are very lighthearted.

Another observation to be made in this depiction of peasant life, is the tying together of the traditional garb of the peasant to the season: the spitefulness of the pink in spring, and the heaviness of the red in summer. Venetsianov in his paintings shows the strong relationship of the Russian peasant to nature: the peasant’s ties to Russia and its nature becomes an essential part of the Russian peasant cultural identity through the eyes of the painter.

However, the depiction of the Russian peasant in these paintings is incomplete. In attempting to portray the peasant life in his paintings, Venetsianov shows his disconnect to the Russian peasants and their culture, depicting only a superficial ideal of the peasant life. This can be first seen in the way he paints the peasant maidens, though in traditional garb, they are painted in a style strongly resembling neoclassicism; especially in Spring, Plowland, where the form and movement of the maiden is reminiscent of those found in other neoclassical European paintings. The disconnect is further exemplified in the simplicity of the peasant life depicted. When I first listened to the peasant’s folk music, when I read the folktales, and when I first saw the traditional folk dancing, I was struck by its prevalent vivacity and variety; there was nothing simple and peaceful, in the literal sense of the word. Nowhere can we see in these paintings this underlying passion for life that manifests itself in beautiful harmonies, at times full of life and energy and sometimes beautiful and haunting, nor can we see the rich and colorful imagery of the peasant’s folklore.

The confusion surrounding what it means to be truly Russian is again manifested in Venetsianov’s paintings, where he is still too influenced by Europe in his art to perceive or depict a truly distinct Russian identity.

Many of the folk songs here and the songs from Snow Maiden are sung in beautiful four part harmonies with many people in each part, that I find incredibly beautiful. But the harmonies convey this wonderful and lively sense of community that seems almost too perfect in the village setting. Music, song, and dance are such vital components to ones identity in a country, and for the community to be able to sing such beautiful songs together creates a very beautiful imagery. The dancing also conveys this imagery by how many people are involve in the dance, playing off of each other. The range of feeling depicted through these songs, especially in the Cossack songs (I’m listening to the “Now the Sun is Hidden” on repeat while writing this) the range goes from incredibly lively with so much spirit, with the whoops, to incredibly beautiful and haunting harmonies. I think its really easy to think of the peasants as being only miserable and unhappy under the yoke of serfdom; however, that does not take away the fact that the peasants had a colorful, lively, and thriving culture amongst themselves. The breadth of self expression seen through their songs shows us that their is another extensive dimension to the Russian serfs.

After being exposed to their songs, dances, and folktales, it has opened my eyes to another side of Russian culture feels thoroughly Russian. The peasants don’t seem to be concerned with their stance in contrast to European culture, and this ignorance allows for a Russian culture to exist without this constant self-comparison to the West.

Looking at the titles of the songs, many seem to be concerned with nature and Russia’s landscape. This admiration is also seen on the second page of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Liudmila, as a form of introduction for the poem. This distinctly Russian folk culture seems to be inextricably tied to Russian lands. The folktales itself seem to come straight out of nature in Pushkin’s introduction: “Across the wood, across the wave,/ a warlock bear’s a warrior’s brave;/ See Baba’s Yaga mortar glide/ All of itself, with her astride.” This imagery than sends us back to the folktales we read and the illustrations drawn up by Ivan Bilibin. Many of the illustration have lavish depictions of Russia’s landscapes.

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The ability to quite literally make something out of nothing has been a reoccurring theme since we started to discuss the city of Petersburg. In the Bronze Horseman, Pushkin presents us with the idea and image that Peter is this God-like figure that managed to erect this city of majestic proportions from the water and its vast nothingness. This nothingness over time fulfilled the purpose of its creation, and became a window into Europe, bridging Russia to the West, and as a result it became everything, being both Russia and Europe, but not quite able to be distinctly either one of them. This conflict in its identity is fascinating to watch as it is explored by the writers inhabiting it. The origin of the city is in itself a miraculous feat, it having been built in spite of the laws of nature, and therefore, along those lines, should not have existed. With that in mind, the identity of the city is already compromised through its very creation.

The story in The Nose then perfectly encapsulates this idea, where this absurd scenario is most likely dreamt up by the inhabitants of the city and spread around the city as a rumor. This story than becomes a reality in the mind of inhabitants of the city, the same way that a guide to the city would present the monuments of the city along with places of action in famous literary works about the city of Petersburg. All this feeding into the mythical aspect of the city, in which the city is partly defined by fiction and false realities, in other words nothingness. The false story  itself is emblematic of this conflicted sense of identity where the character of the Major loses his nose, a part of the body that is not typically emblematic of the whole of one’s identity, but as a result of losing it has a an identity crisis. This identity crisis at the loss of such an insignificant part of oneself is emblematic of the fragility of the identity of the Major: the identity of the Major is also then based on nothing, like the city. But then the fact that the nose could then in turn gain an identity all of its own is then also testament of the precarious of nature of identity in the city.

The theme repeats itself again in the movie Lieutenant Kizhe, where the entire movie is then based on the non-existence of its main character, made into being to cover the mistakes and inadequacies of some palace guards. Throughout the movie, this non-existant character is recognized as being a real person without corporeal form, and is treated thus. He was whipped, exiled, brought dinner, promoted, married, dies, demoted, and finally buried throughout the course of the film in one extremely short span of time. This character lived through so many experiences without really existing.

The identity of the city is unlike anything I have encountered in literature, where it, though concrete, is yet nothing while also being everything projected onto it. It is a city then full of possibility, more than any other place in the world, but this potential is then also tainted by the idea that the result of that possibility is somehow also fictional.