Page 106 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

religious one, proclaiming 'devotion to a common good rooted in Christianity'.8 Therefore he sees
the only salvation from the perils of the phenomenal world in creativity: following God, one should
'create oneself and one's noumenal world 'from nothingness .''
Berdyaev's Russian Idea, Freud's death drive and cinema all curiously meet in the myth of the
fantastic (or phantasmic) city of Kitezh (Kitezh-grad). The legend of Kitezh is amongst the few ancient
Slavic myths that has survived to this day. It dates back to the times of the Tartar-Mongolian invasions
of the thirteenth/fourteenth centuries and corresponds to other world myths about the Great Time
(Mud tempus) of 'the beginnings'; as such it thus relates to the Judeo-Christian eschatological belief
in the Golden Age that awaits the righteous at the 'end of times'. The myth tells the story of how
beautiful Kitezh-grad, pillaged and destroyed, went under the waters of lake Svetloyar and became
invisible for non-believers until the 'second coming of Christ'. And only the muffled ringing of its
church bells, coming from the depths of the lake, reminded pilgrims of its mystical existence. There
is a less popular, demonic side to the myth of this Russian Atlantis: long before the Tartar-Mongol
invasion the lake Svetloyar was sacralised as one of the 'entrances' to Kupala, the nether kingdom of
the dead. 10 From the nineteenth century on, Kitezh-grad crossed over into the secular domain and
became a favourite mystical symbol of modernity, a national myth of sorts, popularised by the Silver
Age poetry and symbolist paintings.
Berdyaev emphasises the role of Kitezh-grad as the grand national myth of escapism: 'Russian
thinkers, artists and politicians kept ignoring the agonies of their bleak historical present' and turned
instead to the Mo tempore - the mythical past or future - where the glories of 'the true kingdom of
the Lord, Kitezh-grad' lay hidden under the lake." In other words, the national myth 'provided
a representation of, and a solution to major enigmas'.12 From a psychoanalytical point of view,
the Kitezh myth is a frankly pessimistic eschaton (a myth about the end of the world), being an
invitation to collective suicide. The numerous devastating attempts, known from Russian history, at
annihilating the historical reality in the name of a mirage, buried under its horrors can be interpreted
as compulsion to repeat' a collective death wish. Following Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis, then, the films under discussion in this essay can therefore be viewed as ' mise-en-scenes
of the [impossible collective] desire', where the 'unconscious implications' of the Russian Idea 'are
organised' into the 'fantasies or imaginary scenarios' of the national myth 'to which the [collective]
instinct becomes fixated'.13

IDEOLOGICAL BOUNDARIES OF THE SUPERNATURAL: SOCIALIST REALIST ESCAPISM
AND DISSIDENT MYSTICISM

Kovalov points out that 'while unequivocally detrimental for state, individual and the world at large',
the extremes of the Russian Idea proved 'beneficial for the nineteenth and early twentieth-century
art'. In its painstaking mediation, along with its pursuit of the evasive spiritual salvation, it provided
the much needed cathartic effect of enlightenment and salvation on the individual and social level.
Russian Imperial cinema, on the other hand, 'remained foreign to the role of spiritual mediator
because its ... poetics ... was stuck in the concreteness of matter'. Most notable films from that
period - the school of Yevgeni Bauer - had 'more in common with the cosmopolitan tradition of art

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