Page 118 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 99
8
CREATING THE NEW MAN
Where might the ideological strategy for revising Tolstoi into a more topical tract
for the times have originated? One possible answer is to be found in the career of
the co-scenarist Alexei Faiko, a newcomer to cinema paired with the young though
already experienced Fyodor Otsep. If Otsep brought his pre-Revolutionary
experience of ‘psychological’ scripting to the project–including the notable Queen of
Spades he had written for Protazanov in 1916 –we may suppose that Faiko
contributed a sharper sense of contemporary ideology. Essentially a playwright, he
had already scored a precocious success in 1923 with Lake Lyul, a detective story
set in an imagined capitalist country, directed at Meyerhold’s Theatre of the
Revolution by the future film director Abram Room. Faiko’s later successes of the
1920s would all satirise the careerism that flourished openly under NEP; and his
most famous play, The Man With the Briefcase, dealt directly with the issue of the
pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia’s adjustment–or lack of it–to Soviet demands.
Recasting Tolstoi’s somewhat cardboard hero as a dreamer obsessed with an erotic
Martian fantasy situates him in the Symbolist tradition, and perhaps links him with
Wells’s apocalyptic fantasy ‘A Dream of Armageddon’ (also a ‘dream counterpoint’
narrative); above all it makes him a more complex and, as suggested earlier,
recognisable character in the Russian vein.
He has indeed a precursor in Dostoyevsky’s late story ‘The Dream of a
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Ridiculous Man’. In this the narrator is overcome by a feeling of uselessness and
contingency in relation to the contemporary world and decides upon suicide, only
to fall asleep and dream of his resurrection before being transported to a planet
similar to Earth where the whole cycle of the Golden Age myth is in progress. The
‘ridiculous man’ believes he has corrupted this paradise and caused its Fall: he
begs the now warring inhabitants to kill him, by crucifixion, but they refuse. He
then wakes, convinced of the need to preach the ‘old truth’–‘love your neighbour
as yourself’. Here, before the vogue for Wellsian ‘scientific romance’ which would
prove so influential upon later Russian utopian materialists, we find a curious
fusion of Dostoyevsky’s radical evangelism and his anticipation of the dystopic vein
that would dominate Russian Symbolism. It has been suggested that the story
marks a further refutation of What Is To Be Done? and in particular its vision of a
future Crystal Palace, expounded in the ‘fourth dream’ of one of the characters,
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Vera Pavlovna. Dostoyevsky had already attacked Chernyshevsky’s novel in his
Notes from the Underground; now he adopted its dream form to imagine a ‘moral
utopia’ which could result from an apocalyptic conversion experience due to what
Bakhtin identifies as a ‘crisis dream’ . 72
The thrust of Otsep’s and Faiko’s scenario for Protazanov is towards a Soviet
model of this conversion allegory. Although Los is shown first as a conscientious
Soviet citizen married to an equally conscientious wife, both of them willing to put
duty before domesticity, the arrival of Erlich triggers their latent dissatisfaction.
Hitherto Los has been able to keep his rocket researches with Spiridonov and his