Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears is a great movie that encapsulates the core of Soviet ideals, where Moscow stands unchanged in its prominent morals of hard work, necessary suffering, and resilience. As we have discussed in class, Moscow has been around for centuries, enduring years of war and feuding to stand as it does today. In this way, Moscow serves as a representation for Russian identity, where Moscow symbolizes endurance and tradition. As the title of the movie suggests, Moscow is embodied to be strong and resilient in the face of hardship. This also includes the song “Aleksandra” by Sergei Nikitin. The lyrics, “All things took time to get settled in, Moscow took more than a day to build, Moscow did not believe in tears, but it believed in love” further emphasizes the importance of the setting of the movie.  

In addition to this, Moscow’s symbolism also extends to the characters in the movie. I noticed that there is a sort of tension between Muscovite and foreigner. I noticed this in association with the good fortune of the characters.  For example, Sergei and Rudolph have relatively negative lives compared to Katya and Antonina. Rudolph’s stray from traditional Russian ideas stems from his fascination with television and western media. For Sergei, he simply has had no former ties to Moscow until he was signed to a famous team. Additionally, these characters are marked with their non-traditional Russian names. Their relatively bad experiences are also contrasted with the successful career of Katya and the happy marriage of Antonina and Nikolai. 

Katya’s character embodies the symbolism of Moscow, particularly in her hard work. Returning to Sergei Nikitin’s song, the lyrics: “The hope of the city’s not in vain, all will be dressed in verdant green, and Moscow, will find an edge of land, that’s perfect for a tree” also encapsulates Katya’s life. Although Katya experienced hardship with her failed university exam, her failed relationship with Rudolph, and her struggle to excel in her profession, she was resilient in the end. She found her ideal soviet man in Gosha, found success in her career, and raised her daughter. Her story represents the power of grit, especially in a city that believes in love and hope.   

Coming into this class, I’ll admit, I didn’t think we’d be watching many cartoons. Especially cartoons made for kids, which I assume this is. That being said, I found Cheburashka to be reminiscent of the socialist realist genre, in the sense of unity through work and overcoming struggle.

The story of a little furry ball of mystery, a crocodile, and a little girl caught me a little off guard. I wasn’t quite sure what the message was until they started building, but then the theme of unification of work was readily apparent. Not only do those three meet and decide they want to build a house for others, but they want to build that house for anybody who needs a friend. It’s clear that this is a message to children about the values of friendship, but the fact that they met that larger group of people through building that house makes me think that there’s a message just beyond the surface. That message regards how work can build a community, which was a major feature of previous socialist works. I also saw the emphasis regarding the ambiguity of the little fur ball as meaning that anybody can meet others, casting out a wider net to inspire more people to work, and possibly find friendship and unification.

In addition to the friendships gained by building the house, the group of friends manages to turn an ill-mannered, cruel woman into a person who is remorseful of their actions, sparking growth in those with more malicious intents through their work. The character growth was seemingly only brought on by the completion of the project and the unity she saw it bring to all those involved. I read into this as an allusion to the toxic environment that was pervasive in socialist realist stories. In those stories, the hero overcame the negativity and all that was weighing them down to achieve something great, and the apology from the woman at the end signified Gena the crocodile’s defeat of evil.

In the end, it’s a fun kids story about friendship, but there are some hidden layers that harken back to the older days of story telling. I’m not sure when socialist realism was un-codified, but this story shares many similarities, so I imagine that this was at least somewhat intentional. Do you guys think that’s the message the filmmakers were sending?

“Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears” is one of my favorite Russian films and a thorough re-watch helped expand my appreciation from it. However, this time through I had boundless more context going in. Since “Burnt in the Sun” and the discussion of fatherhood and Mother-Russia are still percolating in my thoughts I thought it would be interesting to look at the maternal and paternal figures in the movie. Firstly the females I think all show different phases of the Russian maternal figure. Atonina shows the working class family and the past of Russia especially highlighting the rural living that is far removed from the booming industrial city. Katya is the modern soviet woman/ representation of the country. A persevering character that underwent severe struggles but emerged as an industrial icon and powerhouse. Finally you have Lyudmila. Lyudmila is hard to place as she is the laziest out of the three main females who has aspirations of marrying into wealth and fame. This reminded me of the Rouge text we read earlier in the semester and I could see this being a representation of an earlier more aristocratic Russia. I read these three females as representations of Russia overtime but I could easily be wrong. It could be a commentary on the right way to live in a soviet society or about the different modes of thought in one. What I find real interesting are the paternal figures in the movie. If the question is “Who’s the father of Russia?” then the film portrays a Grimm realization of that question. We have Rudolph, a man of great promise that is destroyed by his alcoholism, Nikolay, the rapist, victim blamer, abandoner, and egotistic ass. Finally you have Gosha, who seems to be great for Katya, except he is narcissistic, he beats up kids, and he is sexist which seem to contrast everything Katya stands for. It is also important to note that Katya has an sexual relationship with a cheating husband, but I don’t know what the meaning of that could be in the metaphorical sense. Overall, I don’t see any father-figure particularly good. I think the film purposefully does this to highlight the fact that it is Katya who single handedly raises a child and fend for herself. It is Katya, a possible stand in for Mother Russia, who was the mother and the father of the future (Alexsandra). I most likely thought too outside of the box, but there are is probably something I said that was actually intended in the movie. Either way, it’s a fascinating subject.

The frequently whimsical, though percussive,  instrumentation contrasted with Vysotsky’s heavy vocals in interesting ways. Artistically, Vysotsky seems to lean into the roughness of his voice as he sings. This makes songs like “Morning exercises” rather humorous, since Vysotsky  pronounces bits such as “tri, chetyre” with a jocular sort of bounce. It almost sounds like he’s reciting some kind of nursery rhyme, which is wonderfully entertaining.

The lyrics of “Morning exercises” were very interesting to me because they were describing a very common scene in daily life of a person. And yet, they describe the events with a suprising amount of gusto and excitement, and Vysotsky sings them with a similar sense of flamboyance. In fact, many of his lyrics describe common events in the lives of common people, and all paint these happenings as not mundane, but as epic and sometimes even a bit heroic.

Perhaps, Vysotsky’s work is paying respect to the lives of average, or proletariat, people. His style and subject matter both seem  ooze commonality as much as the ooze character. I recall in some previous class discussions that Russian poetry in the soviet age began to move towards a form more reflective of the Russian proletariat, away from lofty subject matters glorifying the natural world. Perhaps, Vysotsky’s work partakes in this movement.

Brodsky reflects a lot about the power of the Russian language in his work “Less Than One”. However he contrasts the intricacies of his native language with the reality around him. Interestingly, he argues both that the Russian reality is a pale imitation of the beauty of the Russian language but also that these same words do not fully express the human experience. One of my favorite quotes in this piece makes this first point:

“This country, with its magnificently inflected language capable of expressing the subtlest nuances of the human psyche, with an incredible ethical sensitivity (a good result of its otherwise tragic history), had all the makings of a cultural spiritual paradise, a real vessel of civilization. Instead, it became a drab hell, with a shabby materialist dogma and pathetic consumerist gropings” (26).

This quote struck me because, in my mind, the phrases “shabby materialist dogma” and “pathetic consumerist gropings” describe the US far more than they describe the Soviet Union. Either way, Brodsky seems to believe that even the “magnificent” Russian language could not prevent their society from being a “drab hell”. In this quote, Brodsky gives the reasons why Russia should have turned out differently, but does not explain why it did not reach this ideal. Perhaps he does not know. I would be interested in hearing other’s thoughts about Brodsky’s musings about the significance of language throughout this piece.

Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales explores the theme of coping with the horrors of the Gulags.  “A Pushover Collection,” the first in the sample we were given, introduces the theme of reducing one’s surroundings to their instrumentality. The narrator comments on how he “had long since come to understand and appreciate the enviable haste with which poor northern nature chawed its eager wealth with equally indignant men, blossoming for him with every variety of flower” (21). We can see from the manner in which the quotation is introduced that this is an outlook imposed through hardship, while the theme of exploitation and indignity likely owes to dialectical materialism. More importantly, a message of nature being a means to an end emerges. The cedar tree functioning as an indicator of the seasons (22) also references this imposed instrumentality. However, we do not see the true foundation for this view until “In the Night.” In this story, Glebov and Bagretsov exhume the corpse of a guard. In some sense, the act is Tolstoyan: a dead man has no use for accumulated material wealth, even if said wealth merely takes the form of a pair of boots or underwear. On the other hand, there is clearly a difference between claiming the boots of a recently deceased man and prying the underwear from a frozen corpse. Despite having the trappings (and maybe even internal justification) of an institutional Russian belief, the act is better understood as a physical and psychological defense agains the camp environment.

Another defense that emerges is the prisoners’ endorsement of irrational beliefs. The most striking example is when crowds of starving prisoners ravage a drum of machine grease on the pretense that it is “American butter,” drawing an analogy to the nourishment offered by “American wheat” despite resembling an inedible industrial product (175–6). Here, the belief serves as a reaffirmation of hope against the prevailing gloom of the camp. Another important sequence is the camp’s broader attitude toward the dwarf cedar needles in “A Pushover Job.” In that story, the narrator endorses collecting the needles in spite of failing to gather enough to receive compensatory meat and vegetables (25) and the extract from the needles likely harming the prisoners who inject it. This particular belief works as a defense of the narrator against returning to the traumatic mines (24). Shalamov makes it clear that the irrational beliefs do not meaningfully aid the prisoners outside of facilitating interactions between prisoners. More generally, he shows the weakness of the mechanisms when the narrator is rendered distraught by a child’s drawing in the eponymous story (137). If anything, the belief that the Gulags can be endured through any particular strategy short of change is made out to be the ultimate irrational belief.

I found this film to be very powerful. The tension between Kotov and Mitya, whether about Maroussia or Mother Russia, was very interestingly done. The fear of going against Stalin’s government caused deep trouble among citizens, even though Kotov was a revolutionary war hero. The fact that this alone was not enough to protect him from the government highlights the danger of being a prominent person in the 1930s. It is striking how Mitya can get back into Kotov’s family, and cause so much trouble.
A scene I found particularly striking was the scene with Kotov and his daughter Nadia on the boat. The chaos and insanity on the beach are juxtaposed with the tranquility on the water. The purity of Nadia, added to this pure tranquility of drifting on the water, gives Kotov a tenderness he may not have gotten otherwise. Initially seen as a hardened (albeit respected) war hero, the emotion and evident love he has for his daughter humanizes him. Rather than be brusque with Nadia, they are allowed to be together calmly, for maybe one of the last times ever. His daughter telling him the simple phrase “I adore you” gives a childlike air to the scene. This statement creates even more sympathy towards Kotov, especially as the movie progresses, and we see his family torn apart by Stalin’s violence. I interpreted this scene to be interrupted by Stalin’s violence in a less obvious way: when Mitya jumped into the water and brought the chaos of the beach and his allegiance to Stalin into the peaceful water. He brought Stalin’s presence into one of the few places where Kotov and Nadia could simply be father and daughter.

In Soviet times, there certainly does seem to be a tension between the natural world and human existence which was less apparent in pre-soviet literature and poetry. I first noticed this in the Mayakovsky Poem “Great Big Hell of a City,” where liquid is described as “oozing” from the “Sun’s hurt eye.” There is something terribly perverse about this image. The poet is applying a sense of illness, and therefore, imperfection to the natural world.

This is taken to a whole new level in the Kolyama tales. Here, the season of spring and the advent of natural life are described in beautiful, yet similarly visceral terms at certain point. The description of how “The slender fingers of the larch with their green fingernails seemed to grope everywhere” and how “the omnipresent, oily freweed carpeted the scenes of former forest blazes” both invoke intensely lively images with strangely sinister imagery. Nature is “omnipresent,” and “gropes.” It reaches about, glutting itself on the carnage of “former forest blazes.” In a sense life is being painted as a scavenger in the way it persists in the wake of a changing landscape, or worse, as being something cannibalistic.

Weirdly enough, the way nature is described here in subtly unnerving ways is actually reflected by the human characters in In The Night. They pull a dead body out from a pile of rock after dining of “breadcrumbs” which are described as being coated “greedily in thick layers of saliva.” They eat a meal which is described in dehumanizing, animal terms, and proceed to scavenge off of a dead human being. They, like the natural world, are being ensnared by the writer in a state of devolution.

I’m not sure what exactly these artistic choices mean. However, I did some research on Shalamov, and found that he spent time in the Gulag and was a supporter of Trotsky. Considering his political leanings, he couldn’t have been a fan of Stalin. Perhaps then that the way he depicts mother nature and human nature as being degraded into a state of scavenging could be a metaphor for the Stalanist regime reduces human beings to the state of frightened animals desperate to survive.

Despite its short length, “In the Night”, is an immensely powerful and unsettling story.  Throughout the story’s narration, Shalamov’s attention to detail, use of sensory, and tone causes the story to deeply impact and resonate with the reader.

The first image in the story, that of “Glebov lick[ing] the bowl and brush[ing] the bread crumbs.. into his left left palm…Without swallowing, he felt each miniature fragment of bread in his mouth coated greedily with a thick layer of saliva” is explained in such methodic detail, that the image Shalamov describes can be easily imagined by the reader.  Moreover, the comment that “taste was an entirely different thing” further inserts the reader into the narrative  by activating both senses of sight and taste.  This use of sensory through Shalamov’s detailed narration creates and intimate experience for the reader, drawing him or her in, allowing the remainder of the story to further impact the reader.

As the story progresses, Shalamov uses a rather dry, “matter of the fact” tone which is particularly haunting given the circumstances that the characters currently face.  This tone highlights the ‘new normal’ of the gulag and the alarming way in which prisoners become accustomed/indifferent to their way of life.  In particular, Glebov questioning his own past and commenting “not only the habit of judgement was lost, but even the habit of observation” demonstrates how the prison has stripped the characters of their individualism and that they are now consumed by their new reality.

The matter-of-factness that Shalamov projects is most haunting then the corpse is introduced to which Bagretsov simply remarks “he’s a young one”.  It is almost has if the scenario, finding and essentially pickpocketing and robbing a corpse is a mundane, everyday aspect of life in the story.  The feeling of normalcy is most obvious when Glebov is carrying the dead man’s underwear in an attempt to sell it in order to smoke.  The fact that an act as mundane as smoking is juxtaposed to an image as drastic as taking a corpse’s underwear demonstrates to the reader the dire circumstances being experienced.

As the ending credits of Burnt by the Sun rolled onto the screen, a single tear also rolled down my right cheek. This film really pulled at my heart strings. By the end, I had forgotten that it was based on historical figures, but the ending reminded me just how pervasive and cruel Stalin’s rule over the Soviet Union. The characters in the film were not just fabricated for the plot but real people that suffered. Like a hot sun in the sky, the revolution did not discriminate when it came to persecution, all victims of its constant siege. The scene with Colonel Kotov and his young daughter, Nadya, stood out to me.

The director uses feet to illustrate the emphasis and need for youth in Stalinist Russia. While caressing his daughter’s soft foot in his own calloused hands and with a hint of sadness in his eyes, Kotov says, “Because we’re building up Soviet power for that… so, that all their lives… people will have feet like yours”. The phrase ‘all their lives’ demonstrates that real Soviet potential can only be attained by young people untainted by the hardships of the revolution and hard life. Those that know only the joys and fruits of the revolution can survive. ‘Building up power for that’ reveals that even the general knows his work and the efforts of other revolutionaries are not meant to celebrate in the country that helped create. They simply serve as steps for those with soft feet to walk on to reach Soviet greatness. Nadya’s young foot at the center of the frame amplifies these sentiments.