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Mikhail Tarkovsky: What does it mean to be a Russian?

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Mikhail Tarkovsky: What does it mean to be a Russian?

11.02.2018

Svetlana Smetanina

That's what Mikhail Tarkovsky says about himself, “My way of life is hunting, and writing is a reflex." When he says 'hunting' he means it quite literary for he's been hunting since 1986 in Bakhta village, Turukhasnk district. Though, today Mikhail Tarkovsky is, first of all, a writer. In the end of 2017 he published his new book The Flight of an Owl, which “can be prescribed” to those who worries too much about Russia. Once you’ve read it, you are guaranteed to feel better, really.


Gates to Russia

Who knows what would have happened to Mikhail if he hadn’t left Moscow 30 years ago for the banks of the Yenisei River. He wouldn’t be a hunter, that’s for sure. Would he be a writer? It’s also hard to say. Quoting the main character of his latest book, “any spunker can write a “novel” nowadays and claim that it is “successful” because it “sells well”. So, the fight is not just between the book and all kinds of… seducers, but rather between, let’s put it that way, the paper and electricity, between…. the word and the digit, the fight is between the book and a huge load of scribble, which has nothing to do with literature.”

[Picture: youtube.com]

One thing is certain, in Moscow he would have hardly been able to get rid of the burden of his family name and step out of the shadow of his famous relatives, the grandfather - poet and the uncle - film director. Mikhail admits that he has always been annoyed with people asking him about his relatives. He believes that a person should be interesting because of who he is, not because he is somebody’s grandson or nephew. This would have been impossible in Moscow. In Siberia it happened without effort.

Anyway, the most important milestone in his spiritual development and upbringing even before the Siberian taiga is, no doubt, his grandmother, Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova. It was she who gave Andrey Tarkovsky the inspiration for the main character in the film Mirror. In his autobiographic documentary Frozen Time Mikhail says, “I found myself on the Yenisei thanks to my grandmother Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, who I spent the most of my childhood with. My grandmother “opened three gates for me, the gate to Russian literature, to Russian nature and to Orthodox Church.” Before that she made me so accustomed to literature that “writers to me became as close as family”. They travelled all over the central Russia together. After Mikhail finished the 3rd grade his grandmother brought the boy to Optina hermitage. “We came to live at the very edge and took a forest path to go to the monastery, where Zosima the monk had lived. Grandmother told me a lot both about the monk and Alyosha Karamazov. She had always read out adult books for me, but there she decided that I was big enough to read them myself and gave me my first book. That was the Brothers Karamazov.”

Encouraged by his grandmother Mikhail read a lot about Siberia and the Far East. “I was just a young boy when she told me that when I grew up I would live in the taiga.” The grandmother bought him tarpaulin boots and a sleeping bag. Consequently Mikhail had wanted to become a field zoologist ever since he was a school boy. By the time he finished school he had decided to go to Siberia. And so it happened. After graduating from the pedagogical university with the degree in geography and biology, he went to work on the Yenisei River.

The Siberian taiga once saved Maria’s son Andrey Tarkovsky. The film director wrote in his memoirs that being young he had joined the wrong crowd, dropped out of the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies. Then his mother got him a job in a geologic survey crew in the Siberian taiga. “This has remained the best memory of my life,” admits Andrey Tarkovsky.

The grandmother should know better what she was saving her grandson from. Mikhail explains in his film how true her foresight was: “As soon as I got exposed to the life on the Yenisei, it totally absorbed me. I saw such a long perspective – Russian and historic. It was an honour for me to be a part of it gave a certain sense to my life.”

All the questions from city dwellers like “how could you leave Moscow?” and “how did you bring yourself to such a sacrifice?” - do nothing but puzzle Mikhail. “It’s like all the young people with no exception were supposed to dream about some comfortable life of cakes and ale. Even though it was the time when thousands of young people rumbled across Siberia with student construction brigades and expeditions. At the same time young guys just like us came under fire in Afghanistan.

In the Siberian taiga the young man discovered an ancient Russian practice of hunting and became a hunter himself. “I discovered totally different shades of a hunter’s life in winter, its constituents - the solitude, crafting, carpentry. In general, being a man, a master. There is a feeling piercing time, when you can sense the man, who lived here 300 years ago and waded in the waist-deep snow in search for dry wood for his fire. And there were no motor saws, no snowmobiles, but the snow crunched under the feet and the face burnt just like it feels today. And it seemed to me that the most important thing in life is to be able to do everything yourself, to be frugal, enduring, quick-witted. And most importantly, independent of the circumstances.”

At the same time there was a different life inside of him as he discovered that writing a poem or a story is “like building a wooden house, with all the logs necessarily having roots, roots from life. And it’s up to you what to make of them, a useless pile or a temple.”

And so it happened that he was looking for a beauty of taiga but found much more than that, he found home, as well as, perhaps, his own self too. “Then I became a Siberian, I located my soul on the map and felt its bonds with the whole Russia.”

Picture: vk.com

[Picture: vk.com]

The Flight of an Own

The main character of his new and quite autobiographical book titled the Flight of an Owl does exactly the same thing. A young literature teacher Sergey Ivanovich Skurikhin leaves a big city for a Siberian village at the bank of the Yenisei. He leaves the city of a good reason: “What interests me the most in this endeavour is to find out what being Russian means. Being Russian, not just according to the passport, but deep inside, spiritually and see how this deep understanding manifests itself in everyday life and work.”

Being a city dweller Sergei had an idealistic image of the province. He even formed a «map of the Russian spirit». “Peasantry and the Old Belief in such remote areas as Angara and Yenisei have preserved untouched local customs, language and crafts, all the dear things that comprise our national heritage. Meanwhile in cities like Moscow these things are uncommon and even those who cherish the Russian spirit have no importance whatsoever. That’s why the map of the Russian spirit today looks like a reverse portrait of the population map: the less dense the population is the more intense is the spirit”.

My decision to work in a place like this was caused by my desire not only to find strength and calmness in the vastitude, but also to quench my thirst with that potion of inviolability that has eternally nourished our literature.”

However, his hopes for “inviolability” fail. In the remote village the young teacher finds himself literary in the midst of an ideological battle. His remark during the literature class that we should study a foreign language not to leave the country or to work in foreign companies but to understand and love the mother tongue better causes a heated discussion in the teachers’ room. His opponent is the school principal and the English teacher who sincerely believes that the abundance of foreign words in colloquial speech is justified by necessity and she herself overuses words like trainings and innovations, asking her young and over enthusiastic colleague to be “bit more tolerant.”

The worst of all is not even this stupid situation but the position of the young IT teacher who claims literary the following: “I don’t agree with you, Sergey Ivanovich. What is that goodness you are talking about? Now people need completely different traits of character.” Then she continued raising her voice so that it sounds like a warning “These days if you are motivated by goodness, you’ll achieve nothing”.

That was a punch in the guts. “Where has this artless girl picked up so much of this nonsense just in a few years? What kind of tricks had been used on her, what kind of injections or botox, damn it, had been injected into the skin of her soul to make it completely numb? And how many more Lidias like this one are there at schools, education and culture departments in villages, towns and cities with Russian names? Having lost touch with their own land, deprived of its guiding protection, half of the country turned into hostile disruptors in no time at all without even realizing their treason!”

However, Sergey Ivanovich has trusty allies - the Russian writers. The children are persuaded that they’ll need education not to make our country better, but to become “successful”? Fair enough. Let’s discuss success at a literature class and take Gogol’s Portrait as an example, the book about a tragic fate of an artist who traded his talent for temporary and meaningless “success” with the high society. “How can one help loving Russian literature? It’s our shelter, which our enemies can’t fully comprehend, though they are encroaching upon it. Our classic authors seem to have built fortified facilities in all directions, whose power of light destroys any enemy’s attack. You are talking about “success” – here comes the Portrait, atheism – the Brothers Karamazov and the God’s Summer, tolerance – Bunin, you are being pushy in general – here comes Taras Bulba!”

Naturally, the young teacher’s life is not just about high speeches. The book is full of other bright episodes, some funny, some almost tragic. The character, who just like the author, tries to write something as a hobby is surprised that he can hardly find a spare moment to do that. The character is reading the Freaks by Shukshin, while the real freaks, not the ones from the book, won’t leave him alone. “I’ve finished the Freaks and decided that reading about them is much more interesting than living with them.”

It seems impossible to be by yourself in the village. It’s nothing like the city where nobody cares for you as soon as you finish work. In the village somebody needs you all the time. So the teacher finds himself driving a ferryboat with pigs and food across Yenisei for the first time in his life, or saving the drowning neighbour, or nearly drowning himself while hunting and being saved by his own student.

Picture: sinergia-lib.ru

[Picture: sinergia-lib.ru]

Perhaps these episodes about saving are the most important ones, they are the key events in the book. No wonder that the book ends with another symbolic episode of salvation, this time of a polar owl that got entangled in the grass near the teacher’s house. “Sergey took the owl carefully with both hands, straightened its wings and making sure it lies properly thrust it with all his might into the beautiful bluish-grey sky. He failed to notice how it took off, with its wings folded or spread, but he froze in his tracks abashed: the owl literary inserted itself into the sky, it matched perfectly. It fit instantly, without a hitch and disappeared in a few strokes, rising itself slightly above the wings and pulling them together over the back as it flapped.”

There was no hitch and yet there was a strike, a shudder; the world shook and paused for a second though not in the sky, but inside of him. Sergey had expected that everything inside of him would be smooth and straight, but the bird would stumble, slip, scoop the air with its wings, it would drop even if by the width of a hair. He was expecting this drop, this shiver so much that when the bird fit in so easily something slipped in his soul. This blow literary shook him and he stood there stricken, enchanted and then went to a high cliff and for a few minutes he stared in the distance, where the breeze came from and where to the South a white blanket of snow hung above the water as straight as a line and the water looked especially leaden”.

And everything was all about this match…

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