Between utopia and dystopia – Weekend – Kommersant

The best films about the fact that nothing can be done, but still – something needs to be done, are based on the novels of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The Strugatskys are the most non-Soviet Soviets, Progressors who have become disillusioned with the idea of ​​Progressorism, science fiction writers who have told more about the Soviet and post-Soviet world than this world was able to perceive. Their stories and novels are whirlpools of ideas, hopes and disappointments of the mid-twentieth century. To the 90th anniversary of Boris Strugatsky Xenia Rozhdestvenskaya talks about how it happened that the best film adaptations of the Strugatskys tell about those who think, hope and are disappointed today.

“Stalker” by Tarkovsky, “It’s hard to be a god” by Herman, “I also want” by Balabanov – if you need to know something about a man of the turn of the century, then here he is, this man. He goes to the Zone, afraid of his own desires. He looks at the Middle Ages around him, afraid of his own desires. It turns out to be a member of the European Film Academy, afraid of his own desires.

Why was Strugatsky so lucky with film adaptations? What did they say about the man and his desires? Simple “Sorcerers” (1982) by Konstantin Bromberg (“not a bad musical”, according to Boris Strugatsky, to which he eventually “got used”) – what is called a “good audience movie”: excellent actors, New Year’s fuss, three white horses , oh, three white horses – this is a fairy tale about desires and how insulting and sickening it is to work on them. Or Grigory Kromanov’s “Hotel at the Dead Climber” (1979) – a sci-fi horror about how difficult it is to distinguish homo sapiens from an alien, a living being from a robot, an intelligent person from an idiot, a good, necessary thing from betrayal – and what can we say about the hulks of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) or German’s It’s Hard to Be a God (2013), films that explore the mechanisms of human desires, depriving the viewer of even a hint of hope.

Yuri Arabov, scriptwriter of Sokurov’s “Days of the Eclipse” (based on the novel “A Billion Years Before the End of the World”), considered the Strugatskys to be the best plot writers in Russian literature of the 20th century, the main teachers of the plot – “if by the plot we understand not only the composition of events, but also the meaning their”.

The point is not only that the ABS were ready to rewrite the scripts as many times as they wanted and re-invent their own characters, if the director demanded it. And not only in the fact that they treated the result with surprising complacency (Boris Strugatsky, after watching Bondarchuk’s “Inhabited Island”, said that the film was shot close to the text, and the shots of fights and battles are very impressive). They understood how society works: they anticipated the composition of the future, understanding its meaning. They consciously mixed genres: Arkady Strugatsky believed that one should “not be afraid of light sentimentality in one place, coarse adventurism in another, a little philosophizing in a third, amorous shamelessness in a fourth, etc. Such a mixture of genres should give things an even greater flavor of the extraordinary. Isn’t the extraordinary our main theme? They knew that “real science fiction is MIRACLES—SECRET—RELIABILITY” (hereinafter quoted from Boris Strugatsky’s book “Comments on the past”).

Real cinema is also a miracle, mystery and authenticity. In the best books of the Strugatskys there is a reason for miracle and mystery: silence, gaps, gigantic blurred spaces where any reader – and any director – can write what he wants, choose his own version of authenticity. You can turn an action movie into an existential drama, a satirical fairy tale into a musical, leave horror as horror.

Their books were all the more powerful the less explanation they had. Films based on their novels are arranged in exactly the same way. No wonder the BNS wrote that Tarkovsky liked their general idea: nothing really fantastic in the frame. “There should be as little “fantasy” as possible in the Zone – continuous expectation of something supernatural, the maximum tension caused by this expectation, and nothing. Greenery, wind, water … “

This expectation of the supernatural, the constant readiness for it, is the leitmotif of Soviet existence, balancing between utopia and dystopia. The idea of ​​a bright future justifies the nausea that comes at the sight of the present. Although, perhaps, this is the leitmotif of human existence in general.

For Tarkovsky, by his own definition, working on Stalker (as well as on Lem’s Solaris) was an opportunity to “legally touch the transcendent.” His Stalker is a holy fool, not a petty black marketeer. A guide, not a hero. It seems absolutely logical that before starting to shoot Stalker, the director was thinking about filming Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. If the first versions of the film adaptation of Roadside Picnic were an action movie, then the further, the less entertaining remained in this plot. Even the “time loop”, which Tarkovsky really liked – the military expedition moved endlessly along it – turned out to be superfluous. “The film was made in such a way that the viewer had the feeling that everything is happening today, that the Zone is next to us,” recalled Boris Strugatsky.

Tarkovsky used the world of Roadside Picnic, its wonder and mystery, completely changing its authenticity. Sokurov did the same with the story “A billion years before the end of the world.”

In this story, the heroes enter into a struggle (or quickly abandon it) with the Homeostatic Universe: the task of reality is to keep the world in balance, to prevent scientists from making certain discoveries that can shake this balance.

When the Strugatskys wrote “A Billion Years Before the End of the World”, by Homeostatic Universe they meant “competent organs” – “a stupid, blind, assertive force that knows neither honor, nor nobility, nor mercy, that knows only one thing – to achieve its goals,— by any means, but always and without any misfires. Some of the readers believed that the story was about the invention of nuclear weapons and the Homeostatic Universe simply strives to prevent the end of the world, and therefore fights scientists with the most absurd means. Someone perceived “A Billion Years Before the End of the World” as the story of any genius who can be distracted from his work by anything: salmon in its own juice, a boy, a bra. What is this force that cannot be defeated – entropy, inertia, “stagnation”?

Sokurov and his screenwriter Yuri Arabov show not the force itself, but its cosmic scale. The world that opposes their hero began to disintegrate a long time ago and is striving not for balance, but for complete chaos. Sokurov in “Days of the Eclipse” partly photographs the world of his own adolescence, which took place in Turkmenistan, in Krasnovodsk. A world in which it is hot, a world in which the city is just a toy, the Soviet colossi are the ruins of an ancient civilization, and a person is just an unconvincing model of something more.

The brothers worked on the “fun, purely adventurous, musketeer” novel “It’s Hard to Be a God”, according to Boris Strugatsky’s definition, at the very moment when the thaw ended and it became clear: “There is no need for hopes for a brighter future. <...> And if for us communism is a world of freedom and creativity, then for them communism is a society where the population immediately and with pleasure fulfills all the instructions of the party and government.

Many historical epochs have passed since the writing of the first script “It’s Hard to Be a God” in 1968 (it did not go into production due to the introduction of troops into Czechoslovakia – the parallels were too obvious) until the release of the epic by Alexei German. Herman, in the words of Peter Weil, freed this book “from the sixties” – that is, again, he worked with certainty, clearing it of unnecessary hopes. He drowned Arkanar in shit and blood, deprived it of subtext, pulled death to the surface.

Balabanov’s snow-covered fairy tale “I also want” (2012), a kind of paraphrase of “Roadside Picnic”, showed the Zone as the last refuge of all who are still able to desire. “Happiness for everyone, for free, and let no one leave offended”; simpler: let no one leave.

To understand means to simplify, the Strugatskys argued. They didn’t explain much, but it was still clear (simplified): a miracle is a confrontation with chaos, a mystery is how all civilizations again and again turn into chaos, devour themselves, an even greater miracle is why all this continues and new people again come to grips with entropy.

How, how to deal with it, what to do? Infiltrate? Progress? Trust in the gods? Everything collapses, technology fails, censorship, on the contrary, turns out to be on top, actors grow old, and some even die, the film turns out to be defective, scripts are worse than one another, dullness triumphs, evil is indestructible, some are cut right on the street, others sit at home and dutifully waiting for their turn, I would directly ask: literate? Fuck you! Do you write poetry? On stake! “Destroying is easy for you … But still, the only way out is to do your job, firmly understanding that “neither you, nor I, none of us will see really tangible fruits of our work.”

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