Singing on the steppes for Stalin: Ivan Pyr'ev and the Kolkhoz musical in Soviet cinema

Slavic Review

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 143-159

  Taylor, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248094559     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2672993     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. Cf. N. S. Khrushchev, The "Secret" Speech: Delivered to the Closed Session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party (Nottingham, 1976), 70-72;
2. Khrushchev, Doklad na zakrytom zasedanii XX s''ezda KPSS (London, 1986), 94-96.
3. The film was released in the United States by Amkino under the title The Cossacks of the Kuban.
4. My translation; cf. Khrushchev, "Secret" Speech, 71;
5. Khrushchev, Doklad, 94.
6. Cf. Khrushchev, "Secret" Speech, 72;
7. Khrushchev, Doklad, 95.
8. The various stages in Pyr'ev's career are most reliably covered in G. B. Mar'iamov, ed., Ivan Pyr'ev v zhizni i na ekrane: Stranitsy vospominanii (Moscow, 1994).
9. Denise J. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935 (Ann Arbor, 1985);
10. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, Eng., 1992);
11. Youngblood, "Entertainment or Enlightenment? Popular Cinema in Soviet Society, 1921-1931," in Stephen White, ed., New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 41-61.
12. Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992);
13. Richard Taylor, "Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s," in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London, 1991), 193-216.
14. I. A. Pyr'ev, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1978), 1:64.
15. B. S. Ol'khovyi, ed., Puti kino: Vsesoiuznoe partiinoe soveshchanie po kinematografii (Moscow, 1929), 429-44;
16. translated in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (London, 1988), 208-15; this phrase is on 212.
17. B. Z. Shumiatskii, Kinematografiia millionov (Moscow, 1935).
18. B. Z. Shumiatskii, Kinematografiia millionov Ibid., 247, 249.
19. The slogan is derived from Stalin's speech to the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites on 17 November 1935. See Konstantin V. Dushenko, ed., Slovar' sovremennykh tsitat (Moscow, 1997), 341.
20. The archival details of Shumiatskii's own unhappy and joyless end have recently been published in V. F. Koliazin, ed., "Vernite mne svobodu!" (Moscow, 1997), 161-68. Reading them is a chilling experience and makes the notion of "varnishing reality" all the more poignant.
21. James von Geldern, "The Centre and the Periphery: Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s," in White, ed., New Directions in Soviet History, 62-80.
22. Document dated 10 February 1933; Anatolii V. Lunacharskii, Sobranie sochinenii: Literaturovedenie, kritika, estetika, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1967), 8:615-16;
23. translated in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 327. The imagery of flight, representing among other things man's conquest of nature and the heavens, was a common theme of Soviet propaganda in the 1930s.
24. Cited in Dmitrii Volkogonov, "Stalin," Oktiabr', 1988, no. 11:87.
25. From Andrei Zhdanov's keynote speech to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934: Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s''ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934), 4.
26. These are the opening words of the song "Vse vyshe (Aviamarsh)" written by Pavel German and Iulii Khait in 1920 and popularized in the 1930s. The Russian text with English translation is reproduced in James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917-1953 (Bloomington, 1995), 257-58.
27. Using the term as defined by Rick Altman in Altman, ed., Genre: The Musical. A Reader (London, 1981);
28. Altman, The American Film Musical (London, 1989);
29. and most recently in Altman, "The Musical," in G. Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford, 1996), 294-303.
30. Mezhrabpomfil'm was a joint-stock company originally established in the early 1920s with investment from the German branch of Workers' International Relief, headed by Willi Münzenberg. It was therefore more oriented toward the international market than other Soviet film studios and more susceptible to foreign influences, and this undoubtedly played a part in its closure in the mid-1930s, when its premises were turned into the children's film studio.
31. The happy ending was quite alien to the Russian melodramatic and pre-Soviet cinematic traditions. The idea was imported from American cinema, hence the use in Russian of the Anglicized term kheppi-end. Under socialist realism the kheppi-end of course became a necessity because life could hardly be either happier or more joyous if it did not have a happy ending.
32. Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 90-92;
33. Grigorii V. Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino (Moscow. 1976), 196;
34. G. Zel'dovich, Liubov' Orlova (Moscow, 1939), 17.
35. See T. Anderson, "Why Stalinist Musicals?" Discourse 17, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 38-48.
36. This film is analyzed in both Moira Ratchford, "Circus of 1936: Ideology and Entertainment under the Big Top," in Andrew Horton ed., Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter with a Lash (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 83-93,
37. and Richard Taylor, "The Illusion of Happiness and the Happiness of Illusion: Grigorii Aleksandrov's The Circus," Slavonic and East European Review 74, no. 4 (October 1996): 601-20.
38. See M. Turovskaia, "Volga-Volga i ego vremia," Iskusstvo kino, 1998, no. 3 (March): 59-64.
39. See M. Enzensberger, "'We Were Born to Turn a Fairy Tale into Reality': Grigori Alexandrov's The Radiant Path," in Richard Taylor and Derek Spring, eds., Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London, 1993), 97-108.
40. The spatial geography of these films is discussed in a two-part article by Dobrenko: "'Iazyk prostranstva, szhatogo do tochki,' ili estetika totalitarnoi klaustrofobii," Iskusstvo kino, 1996. Aleksandrov is covered in no. 11 (November):120-29; and Pyr'ev in no. 9 (September):108-17.
41. There is also a curious parallel here with the two leading exponents of the "musical" in Nazi Germany: Veit Harlan married his Swedish leading lady, Kristina Söderbaum, while Georg Jacoby married his, the Hungarian-born Marika Rökk, who, thanks to the "trophy" films removed by the Red Army from Germany in 1945, became a box-office draw in the USSR. See M. Turovskaia et al., eds., Kino totalitarnoi epokhi (1933-1945)/Filme der totalitären Epoche (1933-1945) (Moscow, 1989).
42. The first major study of Pyr'ev in English appeared in N. M. Lary, Dostoyevsky and Soviet Film: Visions of Demonic Realism (Ithaca, 1986), 111-54. As the title suggests, however, this study is almost entirely confined to Pyr'ev's later adaptations of Dostoevskii's works.
43. See Richard Taylor and Ken R. M. Short, "Soviet Cinema and the International Menace, 1928-1939," Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 6, no. 2 (October 1986): 131-59.
44. B. Balash, "Varvarskii talant," Kino, 22 June 1933,
45. cited in M. Turovskaia, "I. A. Pyr'ev i ego muzykal'nye kornedii: K probleme zhanra," Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 1988, no. 1: 111-46; this citation is on 119-20.
46. Turovskaia, "I. A. Pyr'ev," 118.
47. Turovskaia, "I. A. Pyr'ev," Ibid., 136 (my emphasis).
48. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford, 1994), 262.
49. Dobrenko, "'Iazyk prostranstva,'" no. 9:109.
50. Pyr'ev, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 1:74-75.
51. Lary, Dostoyevsky and Soviet Film, 122-23, suggests that Pyr'ev had been agitating against Eizenshtein, whom he deeply resented and who was at that time in the midst of his ultimately abortive Bezhin Meadow project for the same studio.
52. See also Iurenev's introduction to Mar'iamov, Ivan Pyr'ev, 23.
53. This supposition is not, however, confirmed by the most recent research; see L. V. Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki: Stalinskaia kul'turnaia revoliutsiia 1936-1938 (Moscow, 1997), 241-53.
54. Pyr'ev, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 1:5.
55. Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s''ezd, 4.
56. Iurenev's introduction to Mar'iamov, Ivan Pyr'ev, 32. Dukel'skii's unfamiliarity was probably attributable to his having come to cinema straight from a career in the NKVD.
57. S. Nikolaevich, "Poslednii scans, ili Sud'ba beloi zhenshchiny v SSSR," Ogonek, 1992, no. 4:23. Nikolaevich is discussing the appeal of the Aleksandrov/Orlova musicals.
58. His surname is derived from the adjective iarkii meaning "bright, brilliant, lively." Klim is all three.
59. Translated in von Geldern and Stites, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia, 319.
60. Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 83-84.
61. Novikova derives from novyi, meaning "new."
62. This characterization contrasts with that of Strelka (little arrow), the heroine of Aleksandrov's Volga-Volga, who demonstrates initiative by delivering delayed telegrams by word of mouth, and of Kharitosha, the "conscientious postman" (akkuratnyi pochtal'on), in Pyr'ev's The Tractor Drivers, whose role is to bring the far-flung parts of the Soviet Union closer together.
63. Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, 262.
64. Paralleled of course by Aleksandrov the same year in The Radiant Path. See Enzensberger, "'We Were Born.'"
65. Iurenev's introduction to Mar'iamov, Ivan Pyr'ev, 38.
66. Dobrenko, "'Iazyk prostranstva,'" no. 9:112.
67. O. L. Bulgakova, "Prostranstvennye figury sovetskogo kino 30-kh godov," Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 1996, no. 29:49-62.
68. have dealt with the significance of both the Exhibition and Moscow as capital city in greater detail in a forthcoming article, "But Eastward, Look, the Land Is Brighter: Towards a Topography of Utopia in the Stalinist Musical," in D. Holmes and A. Holt, eds., Entertaining Ideologies: Reflections on 100 Years of European Cinema (Manchester, 1999).
69. Hans Günther, "Wise Father Stalin and His Family in Soviet Cinema," in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism without Shores (Durham, 1997), 178-90.
70. Cf. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1985), 114-35
71. . 52. Boris Z. Shumiatskii, "Zadachi templana 1934 goda," Sovetskoe kino, 1933, no. 11 (November): 1.
72. Iu. Saakov, "Kompromat na Kneishitsa," Iskusstvo kino, 1998, no. 3:73-77.
73. Lary, Dostoyevsky and Soviet Film.
74. Sergei M. Eizenshtein, "Ob Ivane Pyr'eve," written in 1946 and first published in Eizenshtein, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1968), 5:454-56;
75. translated as "About Ivan Pyr'ev" in S. M. Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 3, Writings, 1934-47, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London, 1996), 292-94.
76. Iurenev's introduction to Mar'iamov, Ivan Pyr'ev, 52-53.
77. Mar'iamov, Ivan Pyr'ev, Ibid., 48.