The Tsar’s Bride depicts men fighting for the love of the beautiful Marfa. In the story, Gryaznoi, Ivan, and Ivan all try to possess Marfa either through love powders, forced marriage, or voluntary union. The fight of Marfa leads to her poisoning and the death of most of the people involved in the plot. Historically Marfa was also chosen by Ivan, and succumbed to a mysterious ailment, but is suspected of having poisoned by her mother accidentally. The choice to have two men and one of their wives fight over Marfa is a stylistic choice, which I believe was made to illustrate the corrupt nature of the boyars and to depict the gender inequalities between men and women before the soviet era. The film was created in 1966 during the USSR, and hence the consolidation of powers by Ivan was a theme prized by Stalin. Gender inequality is contrasted by the total equality established under communism. The differences between the historic and opera version are meant to determine the vast differences between these two time periods. Also, since the opera version ends in such a tragic manner, I believe this ending was supposed to illustrate the flaws of the boyar and sexist culture of old Russia.
One thought on “The Historic Version of Marfa”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Colby, unfortunately your chronologies are somewhat confused! The opera was written in the late 19th century, long before the Soviet Union existed, and its plot was in fact closely based on a play that was written even earlier, by the playwright Lev Mei (in 1861). So the narrative details have nothing at all to do with the Soviet period, and there is no way that they could be a commentary on purported gender equality in the USSR. As for Stalin, he died in 1953, and the time when the film was made–1965–was actually the tail end of what is known as the “Thaw” period under Nikita Khrushchev, who gave his “secret speech” criticizing Stalin’s cult of personality in 1956, which ushered in the period of de-Stalinization (reforms designed to reverse many of Stalin’s policies). So, here again, your chronology is off and the film has no relation to Stalin at all, as he had been dead for over a decade when it was made. Still, this is an interesting attempt to try to connect motivations and meanings across different historical eras!