Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema

ISSN: 1750-3132 (Print) 1750-3140 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrsc20

The tale of two turns: Khrustalev, My Car! and the

cinematic memory of the Soviet past

Alexander Etkind

To cite this article: Alexander Etkind (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, 45-63

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1386/srsc.4.1.45_1

Published online: 03 Jan 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 58

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrsc20
 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 KEYWORDS
The essay offers a reading of Aleksei Iu. German’s film Khrustalev, My Car! post-Soviet film
(1998) as a memory event. Khrustalev, My Car is discussed together with memory
two other films about the Soviet past, The Cold Summer of 1953 (Aleksandr mourning
Proshkin, 1987) and Island (Pavel Lungin, 2006). Showing deep but reversible Stalinism
transformations of the central characters, each of these films develops in two Aleksei Iu. German
turns: first from citizen into victim, then from victim into citizen. Crucial to this narratology
reading of Khrustalev, My Car! is a narratological analysis that distinguishes
between several levels of narrated reality: what the narrator claims 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’s wet dream,
culminating in 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.

45

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 45 5/13/10 12:01:31 PM

 Alexander Etkind

1. For cinematic memory In what is arguably the most important film of post-Soviet memory,
and mourning, see
Santner (1990),
Khrustalev, My Car!/Khrustalev, mashinu! (Aleksei Iur'ievich German, 1998),
Rosenstone (1995) the military surgeon Klenskii is arrested and then raped on his way to the
and Grainge (2003). Gulag. Suddenly, he is redressed, perfumed and taken to the ailing Stalin. As
For an excellent
discussion of poetic Klenskii regains his military posture and clinical focus, Stalin dies in his hands,
and cinematic allegories producing a final expulsion of flatulence. In one moment, Klenskii reverts
as the means of from the stinking, bare life of a prisoner to the sublime duty of a citizen. In
representing catastrophic
experiences, see the same moment, the dictator departs from his duty and, quickly passing the
Lowenstein (2005). stage of the stinking, bare life, is annihilated forever. The central scene of the
2. Joseph Brodsky altered film occurs when the sovereign and the abject meet and their positions swap.
Adorno’s statement into Thinking about this cinematically powerful but historically improbable scene,
‘How can one write
poetry after the Gulag?’ I began to notice similar constructions in other Russian films about the Soviet
and added, ‘and how past. Some of them, probably the most remarkable ones, also develop in two
one can eat lunch?’
(Brodsky 1995: 55).
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
3. For critical analyses of
Agamben’s thought, see philosophical concepts that were devised to understand the Holocaust.1
Edkins (2003: 211–15),
Ross (2008) and
Mazower (2008). For a
recent attempt to apply
… BUT NOT SACRIFICED
Agamben’s theorizing to The provocative statement by Theodor Adorno that writing poetry after Auschwitz
nineteenth-century Russia,
see Ruttenburg (2008). is barbaric, has led to a prohibitive dictum that representing the horror of the
For testing these ideas in Holocaust is impossible.2 Inspired by the literary representations of Auschwitz
the context of the Gulag, by its survivor Primo Levi and seeking a philosophical means of representing
see Etkind (2008).
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 moderns, 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
level of decay, a bare life can rebel.3

46

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 46 5/13/10 12:01:31 PM

 The tale of two turns

In Aleksandr Proshkin’s film The Cold Summer of 1953/Kholodnoe leto 53-ego 4. For an illuminating
account of the historical
(1987), the central character is an army captain who, after many battles with context, see Dobson
the enemy, finds himself in the Gulag. In 1953, after Stalin’s death, the former (2006).
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 piti-
ful 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 villag-
ers 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 sover-
eign, who both live in the state of exception from law. But he does not dis-
cuss the possible transformation of the former into the latter or an exchange
between their respective positions. In Proshkin’s film, 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,

47

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 47 5/13/10 12:01:31 PM

 Alexander Etkind
5. In an official praise
for the film, Aleksii II
said: ‘People are tired
of those films that spill
blood and produce
propaganda for hatred
[…] Films tell us too little
about positive things
in life. (‘Patriarkh …’
2009).
48
SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 48
it is Lusga who stops random violence and restores legal order. In the micro-
politics of this story, the homo sacer becomes the sovereign of the domain that
he pacifies by killing his enemies and sacrificing his friends.
It is not quite plausible that an exhausted, chronically underfed man could
defeat a gang of professional bandits with his bare hands. However, the
senseless suffering of Lusga, an officer of World War II who was rewarded
for his heroism on the battlefield with many years in the camp, also tran-
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 com-
pose 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 differ-
ent 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
II applauded the film.5 But critics also attacked Island for suppressing histori-
cal truth. Mark Lipovetsky (2007) noted that there were no monasteries in
northern Russia in the 1970s and that the characters and conflicts in this his-
torical film are conspicuously relevant to religious debates in contemporary
Russia. This is all true, but a deeper theme of the film has escaped the crit-
ics 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 dis-
gust. 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
5/13/10 12:01:31 PM
 The tale of two turns

emphasize this transfiguration. The script skips the formative years of Father 6. The classical
anagnorisis, the plot of
Anatolii and shows only the moment of his betrayal and then, 32 years later, recognition, reappears in
his triumph and death. The viewer recognizes the traitor in the monk only this post-Soviet tragedy;
because Anatolii talks and thinks recurrently about his great sin, the murder for this concept, see
Cave (1988).
of his captain.
7. The literature and cinema
The central scene of the film presents both of the characters that we met in of socialist realism
1942, encountering each other once again. The former captain, now an admiral, promoted the idea of
delivers his hysterical daughter to the famous elder for healing. After a success- heroism as the ability
to withstand torture and
ful exorcism, the two men, Anatolii and Tikhon, recognize one another, though die loyal to authority.
neither in the least resembles his former self.6 The actors who play these two Classical examples
old men are deliberately chosen to look the opposite to those who played the are the children’s tale
by Arkadii Gaidar
same men in their youth. As a young sailor, Anatolii was played by the boyish, ‘Skazka o o Mal'chishe-
practically unknown Timofei Tribuntsov; as the revered monk, he is played by Kibal'chishe …’ (1933)
and its screen version
the charismatic, ironical and, sometimes, very powerful Petr Mamonov (an (1964); and Aleksandr
actor who underwent an unusual transfiguration from a rock star to a religious Fadeev’s novel Molodaia
recluse). Tikhon, the captain, was played by the handsome, hyper-masculine gvardiia (1945) and its
screen version (1948).
Aleksei Zelenskii; the older admiral is played by Iurii Kuznetsov, an experi- For broader contexts,
enced actor who specializes in the hapless, heavy-drinking officials of post- see Lievers (2004) and
Soviet soap operas. Two life trajectories have crossed and all but swapped. A Kaganovsky (2008).

traitor turns into a saint; a hero who met his death with a cigarette in his lips 8. For an analysis of
Rasputin’s stories,
evolves into a suffering father and nervous bureaucrat. ‘Do not be afraid,’ says see Etkind (1998:
Anatolii to Tikhon. 585–630).
Thus Anatolii learns that he did not kill his captain. Having commit-
ted 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 mor-
tal 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, how-
ever, 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 pre-
revolutionary debauchery that were popular during the last years of the
Soviet empire and were depicted in Elem Klimov’s Rasputin/Agonia (1974,
released 1981), a story of war-time betrayal and life-long repentance prom-
ised sufficient empathy among the public.

49

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 49 5/13/10 12:01:31 PM

 Alexander Etkind

9. In this respect, Island The swift action of Island decelerates with the ethnographic depiction of
and the other films
analysed here converge
the life in the monastery and Father Anatolii’s relations with its administra-
with the category of tion. Though devout monks and holy fools are not supposed to be particularly
historical melodrama competitive, in the monastery we see a personal fight. Two powerful men, the
described by Larsen
(2000). abbot and his secondary, compete with Father Anatolii for leadership; eventu-
ally, 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
same time, the film skips over the entire world in between these two poles.9
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 citi-
zen 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 ‘disorient-
ing 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!

50

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 50 5/18/10 8:25:40 AM

 The tale of two turns

screen, we see Aleksei as a boy, never as an adult. Throughout the film, how- 10. Mikhail Iampolski
(1999) formulated it
ever, we hear his aged voice sporadically commenting on the film’s action. The well: ‘German’s films
gap between two stages of one person, which in Island is represented by two do not pretend to be
remarkably different actors, is suggested here via the unbridgeable difference a reconstruction of
history, they present a
between the face of a boy and the voice of the same man 45 years later. In this remembrance’ (emphasis
situation, there is no way to attribute the voice and the face to the same per- in the original); he
son, unless the voice tells you so. The viewer would not recognize the conti- compares My Friend
Ivan Lapshin and
nuity of the person if, behind the chaotic action on the screen, Aleksei’s aged, Khrustalev, My Car! to
bitter voice did not affirm his identity with Aleksei’s young, insecure face. Marcel Proust’s In Search
of Lost Time. In contrast,
The story as Aleksei tells it is a mixture of reminiscences, conjectures and Valerii Podoroga
fantasies.10 The film is grainy black-and-white with a barely comprehensi- (2000) emphasizes the
ble soundtrack, requiring interpretation, like a dream. The distance between dream-like quality of
narration, ignoring the
Aleksei Klenskii, the protagonist and narrator of the film, and Aleksei German, consistent, even stubborn
its creator, is intentionally short. Klenskii bears German’s first name and voice of the mourner
matches his age. He also shares German’s fascination with the father figure. behind the screen.
Addressing the same
The film is autobiographical and historical, but this is a history in the sub- disconcerting problem,
junctive mood. German said in an interview that this film is a fantasy about Larisa Berezovchuk
(2005) speculates about
what would have happened to his own father if his father had been arrested. divergences between
‘It all comes from my childhood – faces, senses, everything,’ said German.11 ‘historical memory’ and
His previous film, My Friend Ivan Lapshin/Moi drug Ivan Lapshin (1984), was ‘personal memory’ in
German’s films.
based on novels that were written by Aleksei German’s father, the writer Iurii
11. ‘Aleksei German’,
German (1910–67). Set at the time of the father’s youth and also narrated a documentary film
by the son, this film depicts the Soviet secret police of the 1930s. While this directed by Petr
earlier film presented a father who admires the Soviet regime and glorifies its Shepotinnik, Channel
Rossiia, (2005).
police, Khrustalev, my Car! presents a son who mourns his father as a victim of
12. On German’s
the same police.12 In both films, German realizes his intuition that ‘memories deconstructive technique
have no colour’ and that when people visualize their dead, they see them in of performing and
black-and-white (German 1999a: 127; see also Berezovchuk 2005).13 We see subverting his father’s
novel on the screen, see
Aleksei and his family in 1953; we also see large chunks of the action that Rifkin (1992).
Aleksei could not possibly have seen. He is the narrator of the story but not its 13. In My Friend Ivan
witness or camera-man. Like narrators of modern (say, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lapshin, black-and-
or Philip Roth’s) novels, Aleksei Klenskii realizes his power to combine what white scenes from the
past contrast with the
he saw and what he imagined in one complex narrative, which is now unfold- coloured scene that
ing before our eyes. This is the way of memory. From this distance in time, shows our contemporary,
memory is not precise but it is not arbitrary. It is not innocent either. the aged narrator. In
Khrustalev, My Car! we
The film begins with four rhymed lines that the narrator reads over the never see this narrator
scene of an empty Moscow street: and the whole film is in
black-and-white. Having
no narrator, Island
It is all, all as it used to be also exploits a contrast
And it will always be like that. between the black-and-
white distant past and
A little horse and a little boy the coloured, relatively
Neither finds the cold sweet.14 recent past.
14. Vse, vse po staromu,
The narrator says that he used to attribute this poem to his grandmother, byvalomu,/I budet kak
vsegda:/Loshadke i
though she did not write verses. Then he shifts to the theme of memory and mal'chike malomu/Ne
says that on ‘our street’, which we are watching, ‘a Persian lilac’ grew but sladki kholoda.
nobody remembers it anymore. In this film dedicated to memory, this remark is 15. Stating that the film
the only moment of nostalgia.15 This long, static scene ends with a dog strolling is a ‘necro-realist’
depiction of ‘the hell
along the street and an arrest of a certain Fedia, whose sad fate is entirely unre- which is Russia’,
lated to the story. Playing the role of an epigraph to the whole film, Aleksei’s Akosh Siladi (1999)
monologue focuses the viewer on his memory, which is bright and unreliable contrasted Khrustalev,
My Car! against Nikita
at once. To be sure, the stanza was not penned by the grandmother. Mikhalkov’s Burnt by

51

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 51 5/13/10 12:01:32 PM

 Alexander Etkind
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,
byvalomu,/Da tol'ko –
bez menia!
52
SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 52
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 experi-
ment 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 suc-
cess 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
Figure 2: Still from Khrustalev, My Car!
5/18/10 8:29:19 AM
 The tale of two turns

apparently had a wet dream; having soiled his underpants, he rinses them, 17. For a historical account
of ‘the inverted world’
looks in the mirror, and spits at his reflection. ‘This is me,’ comments his voice of 1953, see Brent and
45 years later. For the next couple of hours, we watch the father enjoying him- Naumov (2003).
self with power, cognac, women and physical exercise.
The film is the story of General Klenskii’s arrest. It is set in 1953, imme-
diately before and after Stalin’s death. Running his military hospital at the
time of the ‘Doctors’ plot’, General Klenskii foresees disaster.17 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 hor-
rifying; 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 physi-
cal, 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 some-
thing 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 Light/Liudi lunnogo tsveta (1911), Vladimir
Nabokov in Bend Sinister (1947) and Vladimir Sorokin in Day of the Oprichnik/
Den' oprichnika (2006) pursue this line, which merges, in a peculiar way, homo-
phobia 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

53

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 53 5/18/10 8:29:23 AM

 Alexander Etkind

Figure 3: Still from Khrustalev, My Car!

him and bring him to Stalin. The soon-to-be-dead dictator is dirty, uncon-
scious 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 […] 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

54

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 54 5/18/10 8:29:23 AM

 The tale of two turns

agree to accept as the narrator’s fantasy), and the zone of indistinction, in 18. These formulations are
mine. For classical
which reality claims are dubious or contested.18 These axes structure Aleksei’s accounts of narratology
life-long melancholia, an incomplete and never-to-be-completed mourning in literature and film, see
for his father that mixes love, guilt, self-hatred and obsessive fantasy. Booth (1961), Bordwell
(1985) and Shmitt
The son remembers his father as he knew him, and imagines his ordeal, (2003).
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 life 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 Iurii 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 struc-
ture. 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 pos-
sibly 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

55

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 55 5/13/10 12:01:35 PM

 Alexander Etkind

19. According to the original told as figments of imagination are not. In this film like in any human reality,
script (German and
Karmelita 2006: 579),
boundaries between memory and imagination are sometimes evident and
Aleksei also sees his sometimes vague. A task of the critic is to map these boundaries.
father’s double during
the search of their
apartment. He takes
him for his father, but … A TEAR AS HOT AS FIRE
soon realizes his error. At the centre of the story, when the shift from victimization to valorization
In the film, however,
events are shortened occurs, we observe the fateful meeting between the rehabilitated victim and the
and the appearance of soon-to-be-dead sovereign, in which they exchange their positions in respect
the double in Klenskii’s
apartment is omitted.
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 adora-
tion 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 sto-
ries of investigative torture or fights between ‘political’ and ‘criminal’ prison-
ers. 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 pro-
duction 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 incomprehensibil-
ity 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

56

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 56 5/13/10 12:01:35 PM

 The tale of two turns

survival that might come from the elusive world of the Gulag. It also under- 20. Slezoiu zharkoiu,
kak plamen',/
cuts any rational effort to understand what happened to Aleksei’s father. Nechelovechaskoi
Second, the father spends a night with a woman who wishes to have a child slezoi! (Lermontov,
with him, thus promising Aleksei a chance to have and find a brother. This and Demon, VII). In the
poem, these lines
other erotic scenes in the film belong to the sphere of imagination as opposed precede the scene
to memory. Throughout the film, the aged Aleksei juxtaposes his father’s in which Demon is
potency with his own sexually deprived youth. In this spirit, after the meeting visited by an angel,
a messenger of God,
with General Klenskii, the Scandinavian socialist recites Lermontov’s Demon, a who warns Demon
parable of fantastic, superhuman masculinity which is fatal to the female: about the imminent
danger and urges him
to flee. Demon rejects
By a tear as hot as fire, this call. Eventually, he
An inhuman tear!20 causes the death of
Tamara, not his own.
German’s intertextual/
In the crucial scene in which Klenskii departs, a Jewish boy sings the long folk intermedial work on this
song, ‘Tumbalalaika’: poem (and Rubinstein’s
opera) continues in a
crazy scene in Klenskii’s
One night a young lad could not sleep hospital: a nurse sings a
quatrain from ‘Charming
And he thought and thought Eyes’ (‘Ocharovatel'nye
How to marry and not be shamed glazki’), a romance
How to marry soon.21 by Ivan Kondratiev
(1849–1904), which
elaborates on a few
The father is lost not only after (and because of) the son’s political betrayal but lines from Demon: ‘I will
also in the process (and because of) the son’s sexual maturation. descend to the bottom of
the sea,/I will ascend to
Third, Aleksei’s memory breaks out of the cinematic duality of the visual the clouds,/I would give
and the acoustic and absorbs another sensory domain which is unusual for you everything on earth,
If you only love me.’
film: the olfactory. Beginning with Aleksei’s memory of his wet dream, the film (‘Ia opushchus' na dno
culminates in his intense fantasies of his father’s (and Stalin’s, the father of the morskoe,/Ia podnimus’
people) anal pains, sounds and smells. The anal processes in this film include a na oblaka,/Otdal tebe
by vse zemnoe,/Lish'
fascinating demonstration of the logistics of toilet usage in a communal apart- tol'ko poliubi menia.’)
ment; the sounds of farting that many characters produce in their permanent 21. Kak-to noch'iu parenek/
attempts to threaten and humiliate others; Stalin’s inflated stomach and termi- Razmyshlial i spat' ne
nal fart, which is shown in detail as Klenskii’s therapeutic success; the violation mog/Kak by zhenit'sia
chtoby ne stydit'sia/
of Klenskii’s anus and his subsequent bleeding, suffering and futile self-help; Kak by zhenit'sia mne
and the repetitive complaints of Stalin’s internal security at Klenskii’s offensive poskorei.
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 Il'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,

57

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 57 5/18/10 8:32:16 AM

 Alexander Etkind

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 ech-
oes 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 (‘O 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

58

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 58 5/18/10 1:44:49 PM

 The tale of two turns

him to come back. But actually, the viewers believe in something different: 23. Comparing German’s
and Mikhalkov’s work,
not that the image of the living and playful Klenskii is true, but that Aleksei, Dmitrii Bykov (2000)
now in his sixties, cherishes this image as the dearest part of his inner life. notes that both film-
In Aleksei’s melancholic fantasy, which contrasts with Hamlet’s, the father makers are sons of the
leading Soviet writers,
survives betrayal by the son to return with unusual powers. Emerging from men of talent and
his bare, dog-like life, he provides Stalin his final service and brings home the success.
prisoners of the Gulag.

… 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 Russia/
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 politi-
cal 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 hap-
less 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 ‘Iz 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 struc-
ture 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, anony-
mous 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, ‘sov-
ereignty’ 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 […]: 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 Möbius
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).

59

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 59 5/13/10 12:01:36 PM

 Alexander Etkind

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 impor-
tant 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’ (‘O fil'me …’).
Post-catastrophic cultural memory does construct the Möbius 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 mourn-
ing 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

60

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 60 5/18/10 8:36:42 AM

 The tale of two turns

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 unrepresent-
able. 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 symbol-
ized 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 power-
ful 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.

REFERENCES
Agamben, Giorgio (1995), Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
—— (1999), Remnants of Auschwitz, The Witness and the Archive, New York:
Zone Books.
Anon. (2008), ‘Prem'era “Utomlennykh solntsem-2” sostoitsia 9 maia 2010
goda’, news.ru, 6 February, http://www.newsru.com/cinema/06feb2008/
utomlennye.html. Accessed 24 March 2010.
Barskova, Polina (2005), ‘Filial Feelings and Paternal Patterns: Transformations
of Hamlet in The Gift’, Nabokov Studies, 9, pp. 191–208.
Benjamin, Walter (1998), The Origin of German Tragic Drama, London: Verso.
Berezovchuk, Larisa (2005), ‘Identifikatsiia vremeni. Ob ekrannom voploshche-
nii istorii, proshlogo i pamiati v fil'makh Alekseia Germana “Moi drug Ivan
Lapshin” i “Khrustalev, mashinu!”’, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 76, pp. 178–212.
Blok, Aleksandr (1960), Sobranie sochinenii, 8 vols., Moscow and Leningrad:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura.
Booth, Wayne C. (1961), The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Bordwell, David (1985), Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Brent, Jonathan and Naumov, Vladimir P. (2003), Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot
Against the Jewish Doctors, New York: HarperCollins.
Brodsky, Joseph (1995), ‘Uncommon Visage: The Noble Lecture’, in On Grief
and Reason, New York: Farrar.
Bykov, Dmitrii (2000), ‘German vs. Mikhalkov’, Iskusstvo kino, 6, http://old.
kinoart.ru/2000/6/11.html. Accessed 21 July 2009.
Cave, Terence (1988), Recognitions: A Study in Poetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Coates, Paul (1991), The Gorgon' s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the
Image of Horror, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Condee Nancy (2009), The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema, Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press.

61

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 61 5/18/10 8:36:45 AM

 Alexander Etkind

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 Cultural and 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, literatura i revoliutsiia, Moscow: Novoe
literaturnoe 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: Séance.
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
Cultural History, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lievers, Keith A. (2004), Constructing the Stalinist Body: Fictional Representations
of Corporeality in the Stalinist State, 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 Horror Film, 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.
‘O 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.

62

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 62 5/18/10 8:36:45 AM

 The tale of two turns

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), Revisioning History: Film and the Construction
of a New Past, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ross, Alison (ed.) (2008), ‘The Agamben Effect’, South Atlantic Quarterly, spe-
cial 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 cinema-
tic 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 Psychoanalysis in Russia (1993), Khlyst. Sekty,
literatura i revolitsiia (1998) and Non-fiction po-russki pravda (2007). He is a mem-
ber of the board of Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie and The Russian Review.
Contact: King’s College, Cambridge University, CB2 1ST, Cambridge UK.
E-mail: ae264@cam.ac.uk

63

SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 63 5/18/10 8:36:45 AM

 >ade
Klm\a]k
=\algjk
9f\]jkEYjcdmf\
Dmf\Mfan]jkalq
9f\]jk&EYjcdmf\8dall&dm&k]
;Ykh]jLqZb]j_
Mfan]jkalqg^;gh]f`Y_]f
[Ykh]j8`me&cm&\c
?mffYjAn]jk]f
FLFM$Ljgf\`]ae
_mffYj&an]jk]f8`^&flfm&fg
9f\j]oF]klaf_]f
Mfan]jkalqg^OYk`af_lgf
Ycf8m&oYk`af_lgf&]\m
HYlja[cNgf\]jYm
Klg[c`gdeMfan]jkalq
eYad8hngf\]jYm&\]
EYfY_af_=\algj
Jg[`]dd]Oja_`l
oja_`lj8addafgak&]\m
afl]dd][lbgmjfYdk
SRSC_ 4.1_Etkind_045-064.indd 64
BgmjfYdg^
K[Yf\afYnaYf;af]eY
AKKF*(,*%/01)tGfdaf]AKKF*(,*%/1(-
*akkm]kh]jngdme]tNgdme])$*())
9aekYf\K[gh]
BgmjfYdg^K[Yf\afYnaYf;af]eY BK;9!akYh]]j%j]na]o]\k[`gdYjdqbgmjfYd
\]ngl]\lgYddYkh][lkg^^ade[mdlmj]afK[Yf\afYnaY af[dm\af_>afdYf\Yf\
A[]dYf\!&L`]bgmjfYdYaeklgZ][ge]Yfaf\akh]fkYZd][gfljaZmlgjlgl`]_jgol`
g^cfgod]\_]YZgmlK[Yf\afYnaYf^ade%eYcaf_Yf\lghjgna\]YklaemdYlaf_
hdYl^gje^gj\ak[mkkagfkgfK[Yf\afYnaYf[af]eYYf\alk[mdlmjYdZY[c_jgmf\&
;Ydd^gjHYh]jk
L`]]\algjko]d[ge]^mdd%d]f_l`Yjla[d]k -$(((Ç0$(((ogj\k!$Yko]ddYkk`gjl]j
al]ekkm[`Ykafl]jna]ok$[gf^]j]f[]j]hgjlkYf\[gee]fl]\Yj[`anYd
\g[me]flk&K[`gdYjkaf^adeklm\a]k$K[Yf\afYnaYfklm\a]k$Yf\j]dYl]\Yj]YkYj]
afnal]\lg[gfljaZml]Yjla[d]kl`Ylj]^d][ll`]ajj]k]Yj[`Yf\l]Y[`af_afl]j]klk2
Yjla[d]ko`a[`oaddafkhaj]l`]]p[`Yf_]g^a\]YkYf\]ph]jlak]Y[jgkkfYlagfkYf\
\ak[ahdaf]k&
>gj^mjl`]jaf^gjeYlagfgjim]klagfkhd]Yk]]%eYadYfqgf]afl`]]\algjaYdl]Ye&
ooo&afl]dd][lZggck&[ge
5/13/10 12:01:38 PM