SRSC 4 (1) pp.

45-63 Intellect Limited 2010

Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema Volume 4 Number 1 @ 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/srsc.4.1.45_1

ALEXANDER ETKIND University of Cambridge

The tale of two turns: Khrustalev, My Car! and the cinematic memory of the Soviet past
ABSTRACT
The essay offers a reading of Aleksei Iu. German's film Khrustalev, My Car! (1998) as a memory event. Khrustalev, My Car is discussed together with two other films about the Soviet past, The Cold Summer of 1953 (Aleksandr Proshkin, 1987) and Island (Pavel Lungin, 2006). Showing deep but reversible transformations of the central characters, each of these films develops in two turns: first from citizen into victim, then from victim into citizen. Crucial to this reading of Khrustalev, My Car! is a narratologicalanalysis that distinguishes between several levels of narratedreality: what the narratorclaims has happened in his fictional world; what he suggests could have happened; and what he could not possibly know but dreams about. Starting with the narrator'swet dream, culminatingin the imagined scene of the gang rape of the father and ending with the wishful dream of the father's (and others) return from the camp, the film develops as an articulated, analytically unfolding work of mourning.

KEYWORDS
post-Soviet film memory mourning Stalinism Aleksei Iu. German narratology

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For cinematic memory and mourning, see Santner (1990), Rosenstone (1995) and Grainge (2003). For an excellent discussion of poetic and cinematic allegories as the means of representing catastrophic experiences, see Lowenstein (2005).

2, Joseph Brodsky altered Adorno's statement into 'How can one write poetry after the Gulag?' and added, 'and how one can eat lunch?' (Brodsky 1995: 55). 3. For critical analyses of Agamben's thought, see Edkins (2003: 211-15), Ross (2008) and Mazower (2008). For a recent attempt to apply Agamben's theorizing to nineteenth-century Russia, see Ruttenburg (20081 For testing these ideas in the context of the Gulog, see Etkind (2008).

In what is arguably the most important film of post-Soviet memory, Khrustalev, My Car!lKhrustalev, mashinu! (Aleksei Iur'ievich German, 1998), the military surgeon Klenskii is arrested and then raped on his way to the Gulag. Suddenly, he is redressed, perfumed and taken to the ailing Stalin. As Klenskii regains his military posture and clinical focus, Stalin dies in his hands, producing a final expulsion of flatulence. In one moment, Klenskii reverts from the stinking, bare life of a prisoner to the sublime duty of a citizen. In the same moment, the dictator departs from his duty and, quickly passing the stage of the stinking, bare life, is annihilated forever. The central scene of the film occurs when the sovereign and the abject meet and their positions swap. Thinking about this cinematically powerful but historically improbable scene, I began to notice similar constructions in other Russian films about the Soviet past. Some of them, probably the most remarkable ones, also develop in two turns: the first from citizen into victim, the second from victim into citizen. This essay tests my findings within post-Soviet cinematic memory against certain philosophical concepts that were devised to understand the Holocaust.'

... BUT NOT SACRIFICED

The provocative statement by Theodor Adomo that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, has led to a prohibitive dictum that representing the horror of the 2 Holocaust is impossible. Inspired by the literary representations of Auschwitz by its survivor Primo Levi and seeking a philosophical means of representing its horror, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben developed the concept of homo sacer, defined as 'life that may be killed but not sacrificed'. Not protected from murder and not eligible for sacrifice, the bare life of the victim is exempted from any legal or religious order. Oscillating between social and biological deaths, bare life is deprived of any political meaning or value. Essentially, it is a survival on the brink of death, which, due to humiliation, hunger and disease is hardly self-conscious and barely remembered. In his analysis, Agamben focuses on those prisoners of the Nazi camps who were exhausted and desperate to such an extent that they did not express their pain, did not communicate with their peers, and did not tell them their stories. In Auschwitz these people were, curiously, called Muselmann (Agamben 1995, 1999). In the Soviet camps, they were called dokhodiagi ('the soon-to-be-dead') and fitili ('wicks'). Their bare life and death in the camps had no value or meaning. These victims were killed but they were not sacrificed. However, Agamben's notion of sacrifice is challenging. It relies on the religious concepts of the ancient Greeks and Romans for whom the idea of human sacrifice was accessible; for modems, this is a very ambiguous concept. In secular terms one could speculate that sacrifice requires acknowledgment from the public sphere. In other words, sacrifice is public and meaningful to the public; killing is not. When the soon-to-be-dead were killed, murders were routinely executed by guardsmen or fellow prisoners. More often, victims died of disease or starvation. With no public participation, life in the camps could be only killed, not sacrificed. In Agamben's words, 'the atrocious news that the survivors carry from the camp to the land of human beings is precisely that it is possible to lose dignity and decency beyond imagination, that there is still life in the most extreme degradation' (Agamben 1999: 69). The former is definitely true; as we will see, the Russian film-makers do their best to show what goes beyond imagination. However, if the latter is also true, if there was 'still life' at this 3 level of decay, a bare life can rebel.

The tale oF two turns

In Aleksandr Proshkin's film The Cold Summer of l953IKholodnoe leto 53-ego (1987), the central character is an army captain who, after many battles with the enemy, finds himself in the Gulag. In 1953, after Stalin's death, the former captain lives in administrative exile in a northern village, refusing to work and barely surviving on the leftovers that some locals give him out of pity. Everyone calls him by his nickname, Lusga; his actual name and his past are irrelevant. Still alive, he is a typical soon-to-be-dead, exhausted, apathetic and silent. But when a gang of bandits (former prisoners who left the camps due to the chaotic amnesty of 1953) enter the village to rob and rape the locals, Lusga heroically saves the village. 4 The armed officials who were appointed to discipline the helpless Lusga and his peers submit to the bandits. Finding himself in a Hobbesian state of nature produced by the random violence of bandits, Lusga occupies a position of sovereignty and restores civil order in the village. The 'soon-to-be-dead' is defined from the outside; however, it is morally wrong to accept this external definition because it is imposed by the perpetrators. It also leads to misjudgement. The victims' ability to conceal their subjective lives under the pathetic mask of the soon-to-be-dead is crucial for their survival. The heroic captain shows that the external definitions are wrong. He was judged as a dying object of power; actually, he is the heroic subject of his own life. This somersault is as implausible as it is moving. The lowest of the low becomes, even though for only a moment, the embodiment of power. In the course of the action, Lusga's fellow exile, a typical Soviet intelligent known as Kopalych, perishes in a fight with the bandits. They also kill Lusga's brief object of infatuation, Shura. At the end of the film, the surviving, released and soon-to-be-rehabilitated Lusga visits Kopalych's family in Moscow to tell them about the death of their husband and father. Lusga learns that while Kopalych's wife mourns him, his son had betrayed his father. Now the son is struck by the idea that his father had not been 'guilty' because accepting this idea would result in an unbearable guilt. The last shots of the film show Lusga in Moscow, strolling the boulevards and meeting his peers, the returnees. Lusga is bitter but complacent. His feelings about his broken life and lost friends do not ascend into anything reminiscent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's or Primo Levi's hatred towards perpetrators. Even though it is clear that the regime threw Lusga into the camp in the first place, in the film he actually fights not with the regime but with the bandits, enemies of the regime who enjoy the support of the pitiful leaders of the local soviet. Relying on the popular conventions of British and American spy films, The Cold Summer of 1953 presents a central character who demonstrates perfect integrity and is essentially foreign to his environment. But unlike James Bond, Lusga belongs to the same political community as the villagers and the bandits. Their differences are presented as moral, not political. We can say with some confidence that Lusga would disagree with Agamben on two accounts. First, Lusga did make sacrifices for the sake of his struggle. Lusga's friend and his love were such sacrifices, unintentional of course. They were lost in a battle that he could mourn but also be proud of. 'He was lost in action,' Lusga said about Kopalych. However, the very concept of sacrifice barely survives these examples. Second, Agamben invests much effort in the discussion of the 'symmetry' between homo sacer and the sovereign, who both live in the state of exception from law. But he does not discuss the possible transformation of the former into the latter or an exchange between their respective positions. In Proshkin's fim, there is no symmetry between the soon-to-be-dead Lusga and those who personify the Soviet regime in the village. But in the state of emergency that is depicted in the film,

4. For an illuminating account of the historical context, see Dobson (2006).

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5, In an official praise for the film, Aleksii II

it is Lusga who stops random violence and restores legal order. In the micropolitics of this story, the homo sacer becomes the sovereign of the domain that said: 'People are tired he pacifies by killing his enemies and sacrificing his friends. of those films that spill blood and produce It is not quite plausible that an exhausted, chronically underfed man could propaganda for hatred defeat a gang of professional bandits with his bare hands. However, the [...I Films tell us too little senseless suffering of Lusga, an officer of World War II who was rewarded about positive things in life. ('Patriarkh for his heroism on the battlefield with many years in the camp, also tran2009). scends the limits of plausibility. His situation is incomprehensible, but we know that it occurred on a mass scale. Along with a dynamic plot and the excellent work of Valerii Priemykhov who plays Lusga, the success of this film was secured by this clash between the fundamental improbability of the Gulag and the public knowledge of its historical reality. We do not see the first turn, of a brave officer into the Gulag's soon-to-be-dead, but we know that it happened to Lusga. In contrast, his second turn, from a victim into a hero, is developed in great detail. This transformation is the Gulag version of old tales about Aladdin, Brer Rabbit, Ivan the Fool, the Prince and the Pauper, which show the magical ascendance of the lowest of the low to the highest of the high. Anthropologists and historians interpret such folk stories as mental 'weapons of the weak', hidden transcripts that the oppressed compose to disavow their dependencies and to produce mental drafts for future rebellions (Scott 1985; Levine 1993). However, we are not dealing here with camp folklore but with a commercially successful product that reflects and defines popular ways of understanding and mourning the Soviet era, the past as opposed to the future.

... NO SALVATION WITHOUT REPENTANCE

Twenty years later and in a dramatically changed political context, Pavel Lungin's Island/Ostrov (2006) deals with the Soviet memory in a very different way. Island was shot in Kem, which is mainly known as the collecting hub for the nearby Solovetsk camp, but one finds in this film surprisingly few references to the Gulag, Stalinism or other recognizable features of the Soviet period. The action starts with a war-time scene in 1942 and ends in an Orthodox monastery in 1974. Unusual connoisseurs such as Patriarch Aleksii 5 II applauded the film. But critics also attacked Island for suppressing historical truth. Mark Lipovetsky (2007) noted that there were no monasteries in northern Russia in the 1970s and that the characters and conflicts in this historical film are conspicuously relevant to religious debates in contemporary Russia. This is all true, but a deeper theme of the film has escaped the critics of both flanks. This theme is the radical transformation of characters who change, in the course of the film, from one polar end of the human spectrum to the other. In 1942, the protagonist, Anatolii, appears as a pathetic coward, a sailor who, under torture, betrays his captain to a Nazi and then kills the captain in exchange for his own life. Since the film begins in the familiar black-and-white idiom of Soviet military movies, this betrayal provokes a well-conditioned disgust. Jumping to 1974, we gradually recognize the same Anatolii as an ascetic, pious and funny elder who works miracles, speaks truth to power and gains respect and awe from his fellow monks and the larger community. Although in this film we watch a number of smaller wonders such as miraculous escapes, fortune-telling, healing by prayer and exorcism, this character transformation is the most remarkable of the miracles. Both the script and the director heavily

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emphasize this transfiguration. The script skips the formative years of Father Anatolii and shows only the moment of his betrayal and then, 32 years later, his triumph and death. The viewer recognizes the traitor in the monk only because Anatolii talks and thinks recurrently about his great sin, the murder of his captain. The central scene of the film presents both of the characters that we met in 1942, encountering each other once again. The former captain, now an admiral, delivers his hysterical daughter to the famous elder for healing. After a successful exorcism, the two men, Anatolii and Tikhon, recognize one another, though neither in the least resembles his former self.6 The actors who play these two old men are deliberately chosen to look the opposite to those who played the same men in their youth. As a young sailor, Anatoii was played by the boyish, practically unknown Timofei Tribuntsov; as the revered monk, he is played by the charismatic, ironical and, sometimes, very powerful Petr Mamonov (an actor who underwent an unusual transfiguration from a rock star to a religious recluse). Tikhon, the captain, was played by the handsome, hyper-masculine Aleksei Zelenskii; the older admiral is played by lurii Kuznetsov, an experienced actor who specializes in the hapless, heavy-drinking officials of postSoviet soap operas. Two life trajectories have crossed and all but swapped. A traitor turns into a saint; a hero who met his death with a cigarette in his lips evolves into a suffering father and nervous bureaucrat. 'Do not be afraid,' says Anatolii to Tikhon. Thus Anatolii learns that he did not kill his captain. Having committed no mortal sin, he is ready to die and he dies fearless. Curiously, the narrative capitalizes on two motifs of unequal stature which one does not expect to find combined in a film. The first motif, very well known to the post-Soviet public, grows out of the old Soviet values of military duty and loyalty that made betrayal under torture a major moral issue. 7 Another motif comes from the Russian Orthodox Church. It suggests that even mortal sins can be effectively redeemed; that genuine virtue comes only from repentance; that there is no salvation without repentance; and therefore, it is the worst sinners who might become the most blessed and virtuous. Father Anatolii works miracles and dies like a saint precisely because his sin was so grave and he repented of it so profoundly. With some grounds, critics have compared Father Anatolii to the holy fools (iurodivye) of the Russian Middle Ages (Lipovetsky 2007). He resembles much more, however, Grigorii Rasputin who preached and practised a theology of salvation that was based on sin and repentance and not on abstinence and virtue.8 But in one respect, Father Anatolii is different from Rasputin. Though in his magical practice, Father Anatolii deals with female sexuality constantly (he urges an adolescent girl against abortion; helps an aged woman to realize her love for her husband; and heals a classical case of hysteria), he commits no sexual sins. Unlike the decadent society of Rasputin's era, contemporary Russian society would not be shocked by such sins. The sin that feels so grave to the contemporary viewer that it justifies the twisted moral of the film grows out of the military ethos of unconditional loyalty. Rather than 'dissident' representations of the Gulag that were popular during the years of perestroika and depicted in Cold Summer, or 'decadent' stories about prerevolutionary debauchery that were popular during the last years of the Soviet empire and were depicted in Elem Klimov's RasputinlAgonia (1974, released 1981), a story of war-time betrayal and life-long repentance promised sufficient empathy among the public.

6. The classical anagnorisis,the plot of recognition, reappears in this post-Soviet tragedy;

for this concept, see

Cave (1988). 7. The literature and cinema of socialist realism eromoted the idea of eroism as the ability to withstand torture and die loyal to authority. Classical examples are the children's tale by Arkadii Gaidai 'Skazka o o Mail'chishoKibal'chishe ... ' (1933) and its screen version (1964); and Aleksandr Fadeev's novel Mokodoia gvardiia (1945) and its screen version (1948). For broader contexts, see Lievers (2004) and Kaganovsky (2008). 8. For an analysis of Rasputin's stories, see Etkind (1998: 585-630).

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9. In this respect, Island and the other films analysed here converge with the category of historical melodrama described by Larsen (2000).

The swift action of Island decelerates with the ethnographic depiction of the life in the monastery and Father Anatolii's relations with its administration. Though devout monks and holy fools are not supposed to be particularly competitive, in the monastery we see a personal fight. Two powerful men, the abbot and his secondary, compete with Father Anatolid for leadership; eventually, both of them recognize the authority of Anatolii. He attains this position due to a number of holy miracles and funny tricks that entertain the viewer. However, the deepest reason for his victory in this race of virtues seems to be the fact that he is the worst sinner. In a spiritual disguise, the film follows the trajectory from the lowest to the highest, from homo sacer to sovereign. At the 9 same time, the film skips over the entire world in between these two poles. The commonality of this self-refashioning in post-Soviet films about the past, which occurs in religious as well as in secular contexts, leads me to suggest that these miraculous transformations are not only a part of a new Russian piety, but belong to a broader pattern of memory.

... WILL ALWAYS BE LIKE THIS

Aleksei German's Khrustalev, My Car!also tells the improbable story of a citizen who is turned into an outcast and then elevated to the very top of power. However, I will demonstrate that, in this film, the two turns of the story are performed in a different context from that above, more plausible historically and satisfying aesthetically: the personal narrative of memory. Critics have argued that German's film possesses a 'dream-like nature' and a 'disorienting quality' and that its different parts work in different ways (Vasil'eva 1999; Wood 2001; Lawton 2001). I submit that the film is a coherent narrative of mourning that makes full sense when properly read. Aleksei Klenskii, a man who lost his father in his adolescence, tells the story from off the screen. He mourns his late father, admits his guilt towards him, and fantasizes about his survival and return. Aleksei is 12 years old when the action of the film starts, but he narrates the story as an old man. On the

Figure 1: Still from Khrustalev, My Car!

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screen, we see Aleksei as a boy, never as an adult. Throughout the film, however, we hear his aged voice sporadically commenting on the film's action. The gap between two stages of one person, which in Island is represented by two remarkably different actors, is suggested here via the unbridgeable difference between the face of a boy and the voice of the same man 45 years later. In this situation, there is no way to attribute the voice and the face to the same person, unless the voice tells you so. The viewer would not recognize the continuity of the person if, behind the chaotic action on the screen, Aleksei's aged, bitter voice did not affirm his identity with Aleksei's young, insecure face. The story as Aleksei tells it is a mixture of reminiscences, conjectures and fantasies.1" The film is grainy black-and-white with a barely comprehensible soundtrack, requiring interpretation, like a dream. The distance between Aleksei Klenskii, the protagonist and narrator of the film, and Aleksei German, its creator, is intentionally short. Klenskii bears German's first name and matches his age. He also shares German's fascination with the father figure. The film is autobiographical and historical, but this is a history in the subjunctive mood. German said in an interview that this film is a fantasy about what would have happened to his own father if his father had been arrested. 'It all comes from my childhood - faces, senses, everything,' said German." His previous film, My Friend Ivan LapshinlMoi drug Ivan Lapshin (1984), was based on novels that were written by Aleksei German's father, the writer lurii German (1910-67). Set at the time of the father's youth and also narrated by the son, this film depicts the Soviet secret police of the 1930s. While this earlier fim presented a father who admires the Soviet regime and glorifies its police, Khrustalev, my Car! presents a son who mourns his father as a victim of the same police."2 In both fims, German realizes his intuition that 'memories have no colour' and that when people visualize their dead, they see them in black-and-white (German 1999a: 127; see also Berezovchuk 2005).13 We see Aleksei and his family in 1953; we also see large chunks of the action that Aleksei could not possibly have seen. He is the narrator of the story but not its witness or camera-man. Like narrators of modern (say, Vladimir Nabokov's or Philip Roth's) novels, Aleksei Klenskii realizes his power to combine what he saw and what he imagined in one complex narrative, which is now unfolding before our eyes. This is the way of memory. From this distance in time, memory is not precise but it is not arbitrary. It is not innocent either. The film begins with four rhymed lines that the narrator reads over the scene of an empty Moscow street: It is all, all as it used to be And it will always be like that. A little horse and a little boy 4 Neither finds the cold sweet.' The narrator says that he used to attribute this poem to his grandmother, though she did not write verses. Then he shifts to the theme of memory and says that on 'our street', which we are watching, 'a Persian lilac' grew but nobody remembers it anymore. In this film dedicated to memory, this remark is 5 the only moment of nostalgia.1 This long, static scene ends with a dog strolling along the street and an arrest of a certain Fedia, whose sad fate is entirely unrelated to the story. Playing the role of an epigraph to the whole film, Aleksei's monologue focuses the viewer on his memory, which is bright and unreliable at once. To be sure, the stanza was not penned by the grandmother.

10. Mikhail lampolski (1999) formulated it well: 'German's films do not pretend to be a reconstruction of history, they present a remembrance' (emphasis in the original); he compares My Friend Ivan Lapshin and Khrustolev, My Carl to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. In contrast, Valerii Podoroga (2000) emphasizes the dream-like quality of narration, ignoring the consistent, even stubborn voice of the mourner behind the screen. Addressing the same disconcerting problem, Larisa Berezovchuk (2005) speculates about divergences between 'historical memory' and 'personal memory' in German's films. 11. 'Aleksei German', a documentary film directed by Petr Shepotinnik, Channel Rossiia, (2005). 12. On German's deconstructive technique of performing and subverting his father's novel on the screen, see
Rifkin (1992).

13. InMy Friend Ivan Lapshin, black-andwhite scenes from the post contrast with the coloured scene that shows our contemporary, the aged narrator. In Khrustalev, My Car! we never see this narrator and the whole film is in black-and-white. Having no narrator, Island also exploits a contrast between the black-andwhite distant pest and the coloured, relatively recent pest. 14. Vse, vse po staromu, byvalomu,/l budet kak vsegda: /Loshadke i mal'chike malomu/Ne sladki kholoda. 15. Stating that the film is a 'necio-realist' depiction of 'the hell which is Russia', Akosh Silodi (1999) contrasted Khiustolev, My Carl against Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by

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the Sun/Utomlennye solntsem (1994): the

latter contains 'nice nostalgic lies', the former is non-nostalgic. 16. Lechu, lechu k mal'chishke malomu,/
Sred' vikhria i ognia ... Vse, vse po staromu,

Following a reference that German (1999b) gave in an interview, Nancy Condee (2009) and Roman Timenchik (2009) identified this poem as the fourth quatrain of Aleksandr Blok's 'In October' (1906; Blok 1960, vol. 2: 193-94). Like German's film, Blok's poem is written from the perspective of an aged narrator looking at himself as a boy. In the poem and the film, the narrator singles out a particular moment of his cold, uneasy boyhood as the symbolic centre of his passing life. In the last stanza of the poem Blok writes: I fly and fly to this little boy Among the storm and fire. It is all, all as it used to be But only, without me!16 Like a distant country, the past exists whether remembered or not; the task of remembrance is understood by analogy with a journey. Introducing the film with an unrecognized poem by a famous poet, German offers a bitter experiment on memory. Viewers do not remember the Persian lilac; they do not remember Blok's poem. In this film, the father is a dazzling general, a military neurosurgeon and a cheerful alcoholic. His huge body, beautiful uniform, funny tricks and success among women provide a striking contrast to his son's adolescent ordeals. Immediately after the title, we observe a scene in which the 12-year-old has

byvalomu,/Da tol'ko bez menial

Figure 2: Still from Khrustalev, My Car!

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apparently had a wet dream; having soiled his underpants, he rinses them, looks in the mirror, and spits at his reflection. 'This is me,' comments his voice 45 years later. For the next couple of hours, we watch the father enjoying himself with power, cognac, women and physical exercise. The film is the story of General Klenskii's arrest. It is set in 1953, immediately before and after Stalin's death. Running his military hospital at the time of the 'Doctors' plot', General Klenskii foresees disaster.' 7 In an unusual attempt to help him, a foreign journalist in Moscow tries to pass on a message from Klenskii's relatives in Stockholm. While Klenskii pretends to ignore the message, the journalist is seduced by a seemingly crazy Muscovite, evidently an agent. The journalist is stubborn and pursues his task of warning Klenskii until agents murder him. While Aleksei does witness the journalist's visit and subsequent murder, he does not see the long and particularly bizarre scene of the journalist's seduction by the agent, which is Aleksei's fantasy. Having received this foreign message, General Klenskii flees, eluding his pursuers and leaving his wife a note. His apartment is immediately searched and confiscated by secret agents. One of them asks Klenski's son, Aleksei, to report on his father if he comes home. Soon, Klenskii is captured by those whom he hoped to escape. He is put into a covered truck with other prisoners, who gang rape him anally and orally. The scene is unbearably long and horrifying; it evokes a visceral response of disgust and fear. Addressing the literary imagination of the Holocaust, Michael Rothberg (2000) coined the concept of 'traumatic realism', which does not reflect a traumatic past in the act of passive mimesis, but reproduces traumatic events in order to transform a reader or a spectator, forcing them to develop their own attitude toward the re-enacted trauma. To be sure, events in a book or on the screen are safe and secure, which makes them differ from actual trauma. However, the most powerful of these representations verge on causing real harm, psychological if not physical, in the viewer. The rape scene in Khrustalev,My Car!is such an event. In its course, a suave general turns into a bleeding, vomiting and weeping victim, an ordinary soon-to-be-dead who can be killed but not sacrificed because his life is not worth living. By the force of art, after watching the scene we feel something similar about ourselves. The rape scene is obscene and revolting. With unprecedented force, it embodies the fear that the Stalinist regime provoked amongst its actual and potential victims. Interestingly, it also demonstrates the pleasure of the rapists, primordial and collective at once. The scene also works as the realization of the formula of Russian mat, but with a gender shift. 'Eb tvoego ottsa'- this is the hidden but central thought of Aleksei-the-narrator's self-hating fantasy. It is as if Aleksei is punishing himself for his betrayal of his father by addressing this formula to himself and visualizing it. Homosexual gang rape as an emblem of the horror of the Gulag merges two literary traditions of representing communism. The anti-utopian oeuvres of Evgenii Zamiatin, Aldous Huxley and many others have connected the idea of communism with the dissolution of marriage, family and traditional ways of love. A different but interdependent tradition connects the twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorships with homosexual violence. In Russian literature, Vasilii Rozanov in The People of the Moon LightlLiudi lunnogo tsveta (1911), Vladimir Nabokov in Bend Sinister (1947) and Vladimir Sorokin in Day of the Oprichnikl Den'oprichnika (2006) pursue this line, which merges, in a peculiar way, homophobia with liberalism. But Klenskii's story does not finish there. Bleeding and stinking, Klenskii is suddenly abducted by a new group of officials. They wash Klenskii, uniform

17. For a historical account of 'the inverted world' of 1953, see Brent and Naumov (2003).

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Figure 3: Still from Khrustalev, My Car! him and bring him to Stalin. The soon-to-be-dead dictator is dirty, unconscious and pitiful. Providing help, Klenskii finds Stalin dying in his hands. In gratitude, Lavrentii Beria releases Klenskii who returns home to his family. Upon seeing his father, Aleksei calls the police to denounce him and Klenskii leaves his family forever. 'I never saw my father again,' reports the voice of the aged Aleksei behind the screen. In Agamben's precise words, 'the bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything [... I It is absolutely immanent' (Agamben 1999: 69). It cannot be further reduced, or justified, or redeemed, or compensated. Suffering was senseless and absurd in the most profound, existentialist meaning of the word. However, to live with this absurdity, to inherit it and to identify oneself as its heir is unbearable. Out of this tension, the second turn of the tale emerges. In the final frames, we see Klenskii as a conductor of a train. Drinking, working out and playing tricks, Klenskii seems as comfortable in his new circle of drivers and prostitutes as he was among generals and academicians. His new job is no less important than his former one, operating on brains. His train transports those who have been released from the dissolved camps back to their homes. In the last frame, Klenskii's train brings home the pathetic Fedia, an average dweller of the Gulag whose ordeal in the first frame launches the story. There are three axes in this film. The psychological axis is formed by the disparity between the father and the son and the son's tortured feelings. The historical axis is shaped by the representation of the Stalinist terror, which deprived millions of sons of their fathers and which, therefore, imbues the idiosyncratic events on the screen with broader meaning and verisimilitude. The narratological axis is defined by the relations between the narrated reality (what the narrator assumes and the viewer perceives as representing the actual life-world of the narrator), the narrated fantasy (what the narrator and viewer

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agree to accept as the narrator's fantasy), and the zone of indistinction, in which reality claims are dubious or contested." These axes structure Aleksei's life-long melancholia, an incomplete and never-to-be-completed mourning for his father that mixes love, guilt, self-hatred and obsessive fantasy. The son remembers his father as he knew him, and imagines his ordeal, grandeur and, most importantly, survival. The father's return would mean the redemption of the son's guilt. The son is melancholic but he is not mad. He knows (and he tells us) that his father has not returned; but the passing decades have not soothed his loss, guilt and fantasy. The son's guilt is the centre point of these three axes. In Aleksei's case, the universal guilt of the son merges with the historically specific guilt of the survivor. Aleksei tells and shows us how he betrayed his father by attempting to denounce him. In this hyper-emotional film, the highest tension occurs in the scene that follows this attempt, in which the son and the father weep together before the father leaves the son forever. Accompanied by the commentary of the aged Aleksei- the-narrator, the viewer believes that this scene belongs to his memory. However, much of what happened before and after the scene is his fantasy. Psychologically, Aleksei's feelings are structurally similar to Anatolii's in Island. Both men feel remorse for their betrayal of the paternal figure that, as they (dis)believe, caused his death. Both are trying to invent routes to redemption, magical or artistic; and both discover that, even though their guilt and repentance give them unusual energies, their accomplishments do not alleviate their guilt. Both men live in the hope that, actually, their victims survived their ordeal and will come back, bringing mercy by the very fact of their survival and also, by their forgiveness. Anatolii achieves this mercy, Aleksei does not; but Aleksei keeps his father alive for as long as he tells his story. Historically, Aleksei German convincingly reconstructs the miserable and chaotic hife of the Soviet 1950s. A large part of the film documents unmotivated and largely incomprehensible outbursts of aggression that the exhausted, frightened adults direct at each other and Aleksei. His mother participates in this; his father does not. In the hysterical world of late Stalinism, Aleksei remembers his father as the embodiment of sanity and masculinity. In a long close-up at the beginning of the film, we watch the tense face of General Klenskii upside down while doing a gymnastic exercise. In the last frame of the film, we see him, also in a long close-up, balancing a glass of wine on the top of his head. Performed by the extraordinary lurii Tsurilo who combines physical power with inexhaustible irony, this memorial image of the father is highly unusual, tragicomic and subtly uncanny. Though the historical background and, for a sympathetic viewer, the psychological conflict seem the most remarkable features of this film, they are both incomprehensible without a careful analysis of the narrative structure. Since we watch and hear the first-person narration, we assume that only those events in which the narrator participated as a witness, and those events about which he could hear from other credible witnesses, constitute his memory. The other events that he narrates - though he could not possibly have seen or heard about them - constitute his imagination. Memory parts of the film feel plausible, detailed and even precise; imaginary parts feel weird and outlandish though no less detailed. Here different axes interact and curve. Only those parts of the story that, in the narratological analysis, belong to the narrator's memory are historically true; those parts which are

18. These formulations are mine. For classical accounts of narratology in literature and film, see Booth (1961), Bordwell (1985) and Shmitt (2003).

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19. According to the original script (German and Karmelita 2006: 579), Aleksei also sees his father's double during the search of their apartment. He takes him for his father, but soon realizes his error. Inthe film, however, events are shortened and the appearance of the double in Klenskii's apartment is omitted.

told as figments of imagination are not. In this film like in any human reality, boundaries between memory and imagination are sometimes evident and sometimes vague. A task of the critic is to map these boundaries.

... A TEAR AS HOT AS FIRE

At the centre of the story, when the shift from victimization to valorization occurs, we observe the fateful meeting between the rehabilitated victim and the soon-to-be-dead sovereign, in which they exchange their positions in respect of power and death. When does the narrative make the shift from the assumed reality to the admitted fantasy? Aleksei could not possibly have seen the scene in which his father attends to the dying Stalin. Neither could he have heard about this scene from his father, because they did not talk during his return. Immediately following Aleksei's denunciation, Aleksei-the-narrator says, 'I never saw my father again.' In doing so, Aleksei reveals to the viewer that the visit to Stalin's dacha never happened to his father. Evidently, the boy's adoration does not cease with his father's disappearance and with the son's betrayal. In fact, the reverse seems to be the case. The more guilt the son feels, the more remarkable an image of his father he produces. Now, is the gang rape also a fantasy of the son? For many years, Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1970: 386) had a painful, persistent nightmare: she stands in line to buy food and her arrested husband stands behind her; but when she looks back, he is not there. She runs after him to ask, 'What is being done to you "there"?' The rape scene is Aleksei's answer to this inescapable question. He could not possibly have witnessed or heard about this scene. Horrifying as it is, Aleksei's fantasy is not crueller or more senseless than myriad Soviet stories of investigative torture or fights between 'political' and 'criminal' prisoners. But the nightmarish scene of the gang rape in the paddy wagon destroys the father's dignity precisely in the area in which the son admired and envied him most of all, the area of masculinity. Four uncoordinated phantasms accompany the father's disappearance. First, the father is doubled, producing a man who looks, smokes and performs tricks like the father, but is not the father. One could speculate that the production of doubles and clones is the imminent result of the process of levelling differences. We see Klenskii's double at the crucial moments of the film: first in Klenskii's hospital, where he is kept as a privileged patient; and then after the rape, when this double, with other uniformed officials, escorts Klenskii to Stalin. In the critical interpretations of this double, he is understood as either a part of Klenskii's plan of escape or as an agent who chases Klenskii, or even as an actor who is prepared to be Klenskii in the show trial if the general refuses to collaborate (Bykov 2000).19 Since we do not see Aleksei in either of the scenes with the double, we should treat this double as Aleksei's fantasy rather than his testimony. Doubles are a traditional element of horror movies (Coates 1991). One of many reasons for the horror that doubles evoke stems from the fact that they obstruct the processes of recognition. If Aleksei should see Klenskii again, how could he be sure it was his father? Multiplying Aleksei's uncertainty, his father's double works as a powerful trope that suggests the incomprehensibility of terror. Alluding to the uncanny doubles of Gogol's and Dostoevsky's stories, who subverted the sacred order of the bureaucratic world, Klenskii's double plays an entirely different role in the midst of the Soviet terror. The existence of the double casts into doubt any possible evidence of Klenskii's

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survival that might come from the elusive world of the Gulag. It also undercuts any rational effort to understand what happened to Aleksei's father. Second, the father spends a night with a woman who wishes to have a child with him, thus promising Aleksei a chance to have and find a brother. This and other erotic scenes in the film belong to the sphere of imagination as opposed to memory. Throughout the film, the aged Aleksei juxtaposes his father's potency with his own sexually deprived youth. In this spirit, after the meeting with General Klenskii, the Scandinavian socialist recites Lermontov's Demon, a parable of fantastic, superhuman masculinity which is fatal to the female: By a tear as hot as fire, 2 An inhuman tear!" In the crucial scene in which Klenskii departs, a Jewish boy sings the long folk song, 'Tumbalalaika': One night a young lad could not sleep And he thought and thought How to marry and not be shamed
2 How to marry soon. 1

20. Slezoiu zharkoiu, kak plamen',/ Nechelovechaskoi slezoil (Lermontov, Demon, VII). the In poem, these lines
precede the scene

The father is lost not only after (and because of) the son's political betrayal but also in the process (and because of) the son's sexual maturation. Third, Aleksei's memory breaks out of the cinematic duality of the visual and the acoustic and absorbs another sensory domain which is unusual for film: the olfactory. Beginning with Aleksei's memory of his wet dream, the film culminates in his intense fantasies of his father's (and Stalin's, the father of the people) anal pains, sounds and smells. The anal processes in this film include a fascinating demonstration of the logistics of toilet usage in a communal apartment; the sounds of farting that many characters produce in their permanent attempts to threaten and humiliate others; Stalin's inflated stomach and terminal fart, which is shown in detail as Klenskii's therapeutic success; the violation of Klenskii's anus and his subsequent bleeding, suffering and futile self-help; and the repetitive complaints of Stalin's internal security at Klenskii's offensive smell. The sensory intimacy of Aleksei's fantasy brings him into closer contact with the memory of his father than any other detail could. Exploring sensory domains that are new to Russian cinema, German forcefully provokes in his viewers responses of unusual intensity, from fear to revulsion to the unusual feeling of the dense reality of the represented life-world. Precisely because a large part of this film is introduced as the self-conscious fantasy of the narrator, it is elaborated with naturalist detail and sensory power. Fourth, the arrest and rape turn the father into a semi-human, half-animal monster. Though the rapists call him 'a cockerel' he behaves like a dog. He drinks from a puddle and paws a pile of snow to cool his bleeding mouth and anus. Like a dog, he sniffs the dying Stalin. The 'lupization of man and humanization of wolf', formulated Agamben (1995: 106) in his own fantasy of the bare life in the camp. As in some other post-Soviet film tragedies such as 4 (script by Vladimir Sorokin, directed by fl'ia Khrzhanovskii, 2005), dogs accompany human characters throughout German's film. Here we see or hear four animals, peculiar beasts of the Soviet apocalypse: cockerels, dogs, parrots and men. Responding to the image of the dog at the very start of the film, the final hint at this transformation of the father into a beaten-up dog,

in which Demon is visited by an angel, a messenger of God, who warns Demon about the imminent danger and urges him to flee. Demon rejects this call. Eventually, he causes the death of Tamara, not his own. German's intortextual/ intermedial work on this poem (and Rubinstein's opera) continues in a crazy scene in Klenskii's hospital: a nurse sings a quatrain from 'Charming Eyes' ('Ocharovatel'nye glazki'), a romance by Ivan Kondratiev (1849-1904), which elaborates on a few lines from Demon: 'Iwill descend to the bottom of the sea,/I will ascend to the clouds,/I would give you everything on earth, Ifyou only love me.' ('Ia opushchus' na dno morskoe, /la podnimus' no obloka,/Otdal tebe by vse zemnoe,/Lish' tol'ko poliubi menia') 21. Kak-to noch'iu parenek/ Razmyshlial i spot' ne mog/Kak by zhenit'sia chtoby ne stydit'sia/ Kok by zhenit'sia rune poskorei.

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22. On the son and the father in The Gift, see Paperno (1992), Greenleaf (1994) and Barskova (2005).

Figure 4: Still from Khrustalev, My Car! a parody of the werewolf, is bizarre and bitter; but it also bears hope for the father's viability and return. This monstrous image of the raped father echoes the figure of the double. For a long time, cultural critics have speculated on monsters and doubles as two major types of the uncanny. 'There is no monster who does not tend to duplicate himself [...] no double who does not yield a monstrous aspect on closer scrutiny', said Rene Girard (1984: 160). The reduction of a human person to the bare life inevitably leaves an uncanny trace, an irreducible leftover of the dear and familiar that has become foreign and then horrifying. The son feels his grief, guilt and admiration many decades after his father's disappearance and probable death. He imagines the continuing life of the lost object and desperately hopes that it will return. Using another artistic language and relying on a different historical experience, German's Aleksei reproduces the ordeal of Fedor from Nabokov's The Gift (Dar, 1938) which documents the sensory processes of re-presenting the father to the son with an equal power.22 Adoring their lost fathers, both sons desperately believe in their survival. Construing their fathers' fate as uncertain, the sons engage in unbridled fantasies about their fathers' heroic adventures that would bring about their salvation and return. Starting the narrative with the pedantic reconstruction of his youth in the shadow of his father, Aleksei shifts into a sheer fantasy. But the task of a film-maker, as German understands it, is to depict his dreams as if they are real. 'The boy fantasized or dreamed about the general. But we had to show it in such a way that the viewer would believe us', said German ('0 fil'me ... '). The film ends with a cheerful picture of Klenskii balancing a glass of wine on the top of his head while standing on a shaky railway carriage. If, after all, Klenskii is still eager to perform his tricks, Aleksei can keep waiting for

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him to come back. But actually, the viewers believe in something different: not that the image of the living and playful Klenskii is true, but that Aleksei, now in his sixties, cherishes this image as the dearest part of his inner life. In Aleksei's melancholic fantasy, which contrasts with Hamlet's, the father survives betrayal by the son to return with unusual powers. Emerging from his bare, dog-like life, he provides Stalin his final service and brings home the prisoners of the Gulag.

23. Comparing German's and Mikhalkov's work, Dmitrii Bykov (2000) notes that both filmmakers are sons of the leading Soviet writers, men of talent and success.

... TWO SYMMETRICAL FIGURES

First, a citizen turns into a victim. Second, a victim turns into a hero. As we have seen, this improbable sequence of events occurs in a number of Russian films about Stalinism. When Mikhalkov's sequel to Burnt by the Sun (1994) is completed, we will see the same chain of events there. In the first part, the charismatic officer Kotov is arrested and beaten by the secret police. In the second and third parts, he miraculously survives, forges a new military career, and meets Stalin to devise an offensive operation in World War II. Though the premiere of the film is scheduled for 2010, Mikhalkov screened its central scene, the meeting of Stalin and Kotov, on the television show Name Russial Imia Rossiia in 2008. In this fragment, Stalin espouses his cruel, indiscriminate military philosophy while Kotov trembles with adoration and fear. According to press reports, another and more symmetrical meeting between Stalin and Kotov takes part in a dream Kotov had in the Gulag: Kotov receives Stalin as his guest, serves him a cake which is shaped like Stalin's face, and drowns Stalin in the cream (Anon. 2008). Despite the immense difference in political and aesthetic views between Mikhalkov and German, they hold the two turns of the plotline in common. 23 The powerful citizen is turned into a hapless victim who is then turned into a noble hero. 'Kniazem budesh' ('You will be a prince'), said Beria to Klenskii when they parted from Stalin's dacha. He probably referred to the Russian saying 'Jz griazi v kniazi' ('From dirt into a prince'), which precisely describes the second, ascending turn. Agamben (1995: 170) construes the political universe as a tripartite structure with a massive body, which is the state of law, and two parts that are exempted from law: the superior part, which is the sovereign or (easier to say) the tyrant; and the inferior part, which consists of the pathetic, anonymous victims of the tyranny, those who can be killed but not sacrificed. For Agamben, these latter parts are unequal but symmetrical. In terms of the political theory that he borrowed from the Nazi theorist Karl Schmitt, 'sovereignty' is defined as the ability to create exceptions from the law, such as a state of emergency or a concentration camp. 'The camp is thus a structure in which the state of exception [...] is realized normally'. Since the tyrant and the camp are both states of exception, they are intrinsically connected. In this structure, Agamben perceives a kind of symmetry. 'As the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures [...1: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one in respect to whom all men act as sovereigns'. Both of them, the tyrant and the victim, live in the Hobbesian state of nature. 'The state of exception and the state of nature are nothing but two sides of a single topological process [...] as in a Mbbius strip'. In other words, the tyrant and the victim both represent 'a limit-figure of life, a threshold in which life is both inside and outside the juridical order' (Agamben 1995: 84, 37, 27; emphasis in the original).

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Figure 5: Still from Khrustalev, My Car!

Thinking about the Holocaust and the Gulag, is there any way in which it makes sense to talk about a symmetry between the victim and the tyrant? I had found the question either profane or anti-historical until I confronted the uncanny symmetry that these figures shape in the post-Soviet imagination. In the films under consideration, a central character first is lowered into the hell of political victimization and, second, reshapes himself into the position of a sovereign of their life-worlds. In some of these films, the victim actually meets the tyrant and exchanges with him the most significant regalia of power, such as life and the ability to take life. Like a werewolf, which is still another important concept of Agamben's philosophy, this accursed character transgresses those very borders that define him, demolishing the hierarchy of power along with his acquired stigmata. A similar process sometimes happens to sovereigns who have cherished fantasies of descending into the bare life. As German said in an interview, summarizing ages of Russian political myth-making, 'The Russian mentality is such that everyone is longing to be someone else. One tsar became a wanderer, another one became a monk [...] To go and hide is an important component of the Russian mentality' ('0 fil'me ... '). Post- catastrophic cultural memory does construct the M6bius strip that Agamben attributes to the very functioning of totalitarian regimes. But in opposition to Agamben's vision, historically this strip did not mysteriously spread from the tyrant to the victim and back to the tyrant, equalizing them in a manner that was entirely foreign to these regimes. It is, rather, the mourning memory that, in a belated attempt at justice, constructs this symmetry. This posthumous mechanism elevates the sick, weak, soon-to-be-dead victim to the level of the sovereign. In a reciprocal move, it brings down the tyrant to the level of a victim. This symmetry and this mobility are fantasies, but not

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random ones. On the contrary, in the works of post-Soviet film-makers they appear recurrently, maybe even obsessively. They form a systemic allegory that does not belong to a particular film but rather shapes cultural memory in its desperate search to represent events and feelings that are unrepresentable. While the historical processes of victimization were senseless to victims and unproductive for a nation or even an ideology, cultural memory tends to redeem these processes in hindsight by turning victims into sacrifices and even more, into self-sacrificial heroes who earn sovereignty in exchange for their losses. Arguably, ascribing meaning to senseless loss and the consequent distortion of reality is an operating mechanism of melancholy. In post-catastrophic memory, real but unimaginable suffering is symbolized with fantastic but understandable metaphors. By its very nature, this work of mourning employs allegories, which are, as Walter Benjamin (1998: 185) put it, 'the only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and a powerful one'. The severe truth of the pathetic, stinking soon-to-be-dead who do not know why they suffer because no such reason exists, is redeemed by a gigantic transformation of historical reality. At each end of this eerie equation between the superior perpetrator and the lowest of his victims, the work of memory transgresses the frame of history.

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Dobson, Miriam (2006), 'Show the Bandit-Enemies no Mercy: Amnesty, Criminality, and Public Response in 1953', in Polly Jones (ed.), The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization:Negotiating Culturaland Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, London: Routledge, pp. 19-40. Edkins, Jenny (2003), Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Etkind, Alexander (1998), Khlyst. Sekty, literaturai revoliutsiia,Moscow: Novoe literatumoe obozrenie. (2008), 'Bare Monuments to Bare Life: The Soon-to-Be-Dead in Arts and Memory', Gulag Studies, 1, pp. 27-33. German, Aleksei (1999a), 'Izgoniaiushchii diavola', Iskusstvo kino, 6. -- (1999b), 'Trudno byt' Germanom', Interview with Natalia Kilesso, Moskovskii komsomolets, 19 October. German, Aleksei and Karmelita, Svetlana (2006), Chto skazal tabachnik s Tabachnoi ulitsy i drugie kinostsenarii,St Petersburg: S6ance. Girard, Rene (1984), Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Grainge, Paul (2003), 'Introduction', in Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film, New York: Manchester University Press. Greenleaf, Monika (1994), 'Fathers, Sons, and Imposters: Pushkin's Trace in The Gift', Slavic Review, 53: 1, pp. 140-58. Iampolskii, Mikhail (1999), 'Ischeznovenie kak forma sushchestvovaniia', Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 44, http://www.kinozapiski.ru/article/656/. Accessed 4 September 2009. Kaganovsky, Lilya (2008), How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. Larsen, Susan (2000), 'Melodramatic Masculinity, National Identity, and the Stalinist Past in Postsoviet Cinema', Studies in 20th Century Literature: Russian Culture of the 1990s, 24: 1, pp. 85-120. Lawton, Anna (2001), 'Russian cinema in troubled times', New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Films, 1: 2, pp. 98-112. Levine, Lawrence W. (1993), The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American CulturalHistory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lievers, Keith A. (2004), Constructingthe Stalinist Body: FictionalRepresentations of Corporeality in the StalinistState, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Lipovetsky, Mark (2007), 'The importance of being pious: Pavel Lungin's Island', KinoKultura, 15, http://www.kinokultura.com/2007/15r-island. shtml. Accessed 4 September 2009. Lowenstein, Adam (2005), Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern HorrorFilm, New York: Columbia University Press. Mandelshtam, Nadezhda (1970), Vospominaniia, New York: Izdatel'stvo im. Chekhova. Mazower, Mark (2008), 'Foucault, Agamben: Theory and the Nazis', Boundary 2, 35: 1, pp. 23-34. '0 fil'me Alekseia Germana "Khrustalev, Mashinu!"', Russian State University of Humanities: 'Kinocenter', http://kinocenter.rsuh.ru/lib/films/hrustalev. htm. Accessed 24 March 2010. Paperno, Irina (1992), 'How Nabokov's Gift is Made', Stanford Slavic Studies, 4: 2, pp. 295-324. 'Patriarkh Aleksii II poblagodaril sozdatelei fil'ma "Ostrov"' (2009), Blagovest-Info, 29 November, http://www.blagovest-info.ru/index. php?ss=2&s=3&id=10361. Accessed 24 March 2010.

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Podoroga, Valerii (2000), 'Molokh i Khrustalev', Iskusstvo kino, 6, http://old. kinoart.ru/2000/6/12.html. Accessed 4 September 2009. Rifkin, Benjamin (1992), 'The Reinterpretation of History in German's Film My Friend Ivan Lapshin: Shifts in Center and Periphery', Slavic Review, 51: 3, pp. 431-47. Rosenstone, Robert A. (ed.) (1995), RevisioningHistory: Film and the Construction of a New Past, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ross, Alison (ed.) (2008), 'The Agamben Effect', South Atlantic Quarterly,special issue, 107: 1. Rothberg, Michael (2000), Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ruttenburg, Nancy (2008), Dostoevsky's Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Santner, Eric (1990), Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Scott, James C. (1985), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shmitt, Wolf (2003), Narratologia,Moskva: Iazyki slavianskoi kul'tury. Siladi, Akosh (1999), 'Sto let smerti', Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 44, http://www. kinozapiski.ru/article/657/. Accessed 4 September 2009. Timenchik, Roman (2009), 'Trilistnik iubileinyi s subbotnim prilozheniem', in Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii. Sbornik v chest' 60-letiia A. V. Lavrova, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, pp. 710-28. Vasil'eva, Svetlana (1999), 'A. German. Khrustalev, mashinu!', Znamia, 12, http:// magazines.russ.ru/znamia/1999/12/vasil.html. Accessed 24 March 2010. Wood, Tony (2001), 'Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German', New Left Review, 7, pp. 99-107.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Etkind, A. (2010), 'The tale of two turns: Khrustalev, My Car! and the cinematic memory of the Soviet past, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 4: 1, pp. 45-63, doi: 10.1386/srsc.4.1.45_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Alexander Etkind is Reader in Russian Literature and Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is also the head of a large European project, Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, which is financed by the HERA Foundation (2010-13). Before coming to Cambridge, he taught at the European University at St Petersburg and was a visiting scholar or professor at Helsinki, Harvard, Georgetown and New York Universities, as well as at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. His books include Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysisin Russia (1993), Khlyst. Sekty, literaturai revolitsiia (1998) and Non-fiction po-russkipravda (2007). He is a member of the board of Novoe literaturnoeobozrenie and The Russian Review. Contact: King's College, Cambridge University, CB2 1ST, Cambridge UK. E-mail: ae264@cam.ac.uk

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Title: The tale of two turns: Khrustalev, My Car! and the cinematic memory of the Soviet past Source: Stud Russ Sov Cinema 4 no1 2010 p. 45-63 ISSN: 1750-3132 Publisher: Intellect Ltd. The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol BS16 3JG, United Kingdom

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