In the film Leviathan, a family and town are thrown into disarray as the society around them slowly decays. The movie is named after Thomas Hobbes work of political theory where he argues that the only way in which a society functions is through its citizens agreeing to respect a social contract in which they act rationally, basically arguing that society as an entity can quickly erode if those within it choose not to respect its legitimacy. In the film, modern Russia is presented as a society that is slowly eroding due to the nihilistic corruption omnipresent in every sector of life. A corruption that stems from a country that doesn’t seem to care whether it lives until the next day, probably because it has been falling apart for approximately the past half-century. It is a country that is constantly drinking itself sick, a country where Ak-47’s are used for fun at barbecues while depressed women try to protect their kids, and a country that tells those kids their future won’t be any different.

The twenty-first century Russia presented in the movie is a Russia that doesn’t believe in itself anymore. Not one of the characters genuinely thinks the world can get better. Dima, the Muscovite lawyer, and the only character that seems to attempt to follow the law is quickly shown the futility of respecting norms when he is kidnapped by the mayor, and afterward flees to Moscow defeated. He also finds it perilously easy to sleep with his best friend’s wife, showing how quickly a personal ethical code can crumble. This lack of faith in a better Russian future shows just how far the ethos of the country has fallen since the fall of the Soviet Union. A society that, for its many flaws, inspired a strong faith in its citizenry that it was working for a brighter future, a factor that modern Russia is sorely missing.

The unsatisfying end of the movie is what truly shows how fragile it all is. It is extraordinarily easy to frame someone for a murder, especially if the person doing the framing is someone with power (even the measly power of a small town mayor). When normal citizens stop choosing to be beholden to laws and to truth, anarchy, and injustice quickly come out. The only way for a society to function is for the citizen to be inspired by the society’s ideals, and that is something sorely missing from the Russia portrayed in Leviathan. 

Leviathan depicts a very different notion of religion and the church than we’ve previously seen so explicitly in other works. We read a handful of works from the time of transition into the Soviet Union, in which, on the surface, we saw how the state conveyed the message that people must turn away from tradition and religion in order to pursue a new society based on communal hard work and reason. Of course, in reality, those works (such as Engelgardt’s Letters from the Country, and Platonov’s “The Motherland of Electricity”) showed us how complicated this transition away from religion was for people.

Whereas in the short film, “Bezhin Meadows,” we saw how the film itself supports religion by showing peasants denouncing it, in Leviathan, we see how the filmmakers denounce religion by showing the state supporting it. In “Bezhin Meadows,” the surface-level destruction of religion actually has an underlying suggestion that religion is a necessary part of those peasants’ lives. Leviathan achieves the opposite effect. In Leviathan, we see that the post-soviet transition back toward a nonsecular government changes how we should perceive religion. Toward the beginning, we see three icons on the dashboard, not far from three stickers of sexualized naked women. For me, this was the first visual hint that we, as viewers, are supposed to be suspicious of the ways in which people (particularly the state) turn to religion. Later, when asked by both Vadim and Lilia whether he believes in religion, Dmitri, as (arguably) the most sympathetic character, responds, “I am a lawyer. I care about facts.” These moments set up the idea that religion and facts are mutually exclusive, similarly to the surface-level contrast between religion and reason which we saw in Platonov and Engelgardt’s works.

As the film progresses, these hints of doubting religion turn into a clear denunciation of religion. The Bishop himself tells Vadim, “I am in the same business as you,” (paraphrased), which indicates how interwoven the state and the church are, not only with one another, but with notions of corruption. When we ultimately discover that the destruction of every aspect of Nikolai’s life and home are for the purpose of building this new church, we learn just how different the role of religion is now, compared with during the transition into the Soviet Union. According to this film, if anything, religion encourages corruption by the state, because it serves to atone the government officials from any possible feelings of guilt. The priest’s monologue is brutally ironic, because it centers around the necessity of truth for ultimate freedom. The filmmakers thereby masterfully suggest that this new post-soviet state is devoid of truth.

With space, I would talk more about how images of nature complement these ideas. I’d also like to think more about the Leviathan itself.

“Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream” is a dream narrative by Viktor Pelevin about lavatory attendants in the Moscow transit system. Much of this piece focuses on the perspective of storytellers, including but not limited to the observations of attendant Vera and her colleague Manyasha. The voice of the narrator in this text is also Vera but expressed as she looks back on her dream. Understanding perspective is important in determining the intentions of certain characters within this piece. For example, Pelevin characterizes Manyasha as “Vera’s oldest friend” and “mentor” (Pelevin 37). Manyasha is superior to Vera that gives her guidance. Small epithets like these are vital because they establish characters in relation to one another.

There is a group of characters that Pelevin does not characterize at the beginning of the piece. This stylistic choice implies ambiguity and leads us to believe that they are irrelevant, having no relation to Vera. However, they nonetheless strike Vera’s interest. Pelevin describes the leveler that they bring with them as “one of those special things on a tripod stand” (41). We get this roundabout description simply because “Vera didn’t know what it was called” (41). This is the first hint that Vera is also the narrator of this story; the narrator does not know the name for the level because Vera does not know the name for it, and it is perhaps because the narrator is Vera. Pelevin initially foreshadows this connection amidst this scene of ambiguous men.

I question the relationship between ambiguity and greater truth in this piece. I think it interesting that such an under-characterized scene causes Vera to express not only her position in this narrative but also display Vera’s perceptiveness to the “smiles on” the men’s “faces” (41). Before this, Vera’s interactions with Manyasha and the proletarians did not do much in terms of characterization (38, 39). She had simply listened to her superior and reacted to the bathroom fight amongst the men. Those specific references had not left much space for Vera’s characterization, while Vera’s observations of the ambiguous men reveal both Vera’s ultimate identify, and express Vera’s perceptive side, rather than simply labeling her as a listener/reactor.

In Voices from Chernobyl, several victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster share how their notions of life, death, and love are all inescapably intertwined. In the preface, these storytellers are referred to as survivors. The inexplicably awful contradiction that these victims are survivors mirrors the fact that death hangs over every aspect of these people’s lives. 

Each storyteller either directly ponders, or at least tells stories of how life and death are one in their lives. One person describes the door that is used in family rituals for death, but also has etch-marks of him and his children growing up. His “whole life is written down on this door” (35). This man is the only person who suggests how life and death, in this case, were beautifully and meaningfully connected, even before the Chernobyl incident. However, after Chernobyl, life and death forcefully become one and the same.

One pregnant woman recalls from her memory as follows: “The baby starts crying, it’s just come out… So they grab the little baby, it’s been on this earth for maybe five, ten minutes, and they throw it out the window…. How are you supposed to live after that? How are you supposed to give birth?” (57). Another woman who stayed in her village and watched all of her neighbors around her die, says, “you can talk to the dead just like you can talk to the living. Makes no difference to me. I can hear the one and the other. When you’re alone… And when you’re sad” (33). And yet another reflects,  “Back then I thought of death just as I did of birth.” (26).

The prevalence of these piercing images and reflections of life and death shows us how much this incident psychologically killed these “survivors.” They however yearn to return to a reality in which life and love are oppositional to death. The first woman captured this in asking,  “Why are these things together – love and death…. No one wants to hear about death. / But I was telling you about love. About my love…” (23).

The concepts of how nature and individuals and society are in a war with one another– as discussed by our classmates’ blog posts — resonates with me. However, I found it difficult to focus on the portrayal of nature in this work. There are certainly passages that are rich with commentary on how the animals responded to the incident. However, I found, in reading these narratives, that the human emotional destruction is so strikingly horrific that I didn’t even have any emotional capacity to think about nature. In my next read, I will try to hone in more on this, but ultimately, how could these people even think about nature, when their friends and family are being destroyed?

Throughout this class, we have looked at cases of humans going up against the natural world. Whether it be them attempting not to freeze in a raging blizzard, or attempting to dig a canal through difficult terrain, the natural state of humans existing in nature seemed to be one of conflict, specifically, a conflict that humans were often winning. However, throughout the parts of Voices from Chernobyl that we read, I was struck by how this terrible tragedy of a nuclear meltdown flipped that script, and put humans in the weaker position.

This shift in dynamic is shown all throughout the book, mainly in how the residents begin to interact with each other and with the land. Their fears manifest themselves through the humans suddenly being on the defensive, always seeming to be worried that their actions would lead to illness or death. This existential fear, the fear that something terrible is just waiting to happen and without any provocation is the opposite of how nature and humans usually interact. Normally, nature is the more passive entity, with humans being the aggressors, spontaneously attacking the natural world which has no mechanism to defend itself.

And what exactly happens when humans start losing this war? The whole way they have structured society begins to erode. They start to lose trust in each other (the soldiers in conflict with the residents simply trying to survive), their sustenance (the food that is keeping them alive is also what is killing them), and generally their normal way of life. It makes one realize how fragile human society really is, and how it completely hinges on man’s domination over nature.

“The Mermaid” portrays the complexity of the relationship between religion (the father) and nature (the mermaid). The mermaid’s physical and emotional transformations over the course of the film parallel the changes in seasons and natural surroundings. (Side note: the mermaid’s intertwined characteristics with nature remind me of Sofya’s parallel to the earth, and Trofim’s parallel to the Neva in “The Flood.”) In the beginning, we see the mermaid reflect winter’s classically beautiful, yet dangerous characteristics; she appears to struggle in the icey river, and the first view of her shows her beautiful, pale face. As spring comes, we see her face become more colored, and her liveliness reflects the vibrance of her surroundings. These very transformations with nature allow her to draw the young man’s attention. While we run the risk of imposing our conception of the siren, I do think that the mermaid’s workings on the man emerge from a place of cunning, rather than love, because she seems to instantly have control over him. Counter to mermaid’s representation of nature and cunning, the young man’s father (who I believe is a priest) seems to stand for religion.

Once the young man has fallen for the mermaid, he goes to his father, but it seems that he does not kiss his hand or accept his father’s blessing. In other words, the mermaid seems to have tempted the man away from faith, blinding him in awe and love (of sorts) for her. If I understood correctly, the mixing and melding of images of the father to the young, naive, man seem to imply that the father had also, long ago, fallen for the mermaid. The key turning point is when, during a flashback, as the father is getting married, he sees the mermaid in church. The mermaid’s presence in the church creates extreme conflict (which is clear when she creates a literal storm outside), because she represents temptation. This flashback shows us why the father tries to keep his son from the tempting and beautiful mermaid.

However, Petrov’s ultimate message is complicated. When the mermaid finally brings about a storm and playfully tips the young man into the water, we see a flash of his cross: the first sign of his own faith. However, the father, as the image of faith, and the mermaid, as the image of cunning, ultimately die, while the young man survives. One one hand, we could interpret, that by having to bury both his father and his love, the young man is punished, and forced to reflect on his sin. Therefore, we see him repairing the church in the last seen, perhaps as a renewed commitment to religion. On the other hand, his survival of the storm seems to imply that his position between his father/religion and the mermaid/temptation, is what prevails over the other two characters’ polarized values.