Chapaev does not sink – Weekend – Kommersant
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Released on screens in the mid-1930s, “Chapaev” became not just a folk cinema, one of the first blockbusters of sound Soviet cinema. There are many popular films in the treasury of our cinema, but none of them, before or since, has produced a hero at the same time so real and so fictional – barely resembling his historical prototype and yet reliable in every trait. “Chapaev” by the Vasilyev brothers remains one of the most influential creations of Russian cinematography today, with the mythogenic power of which neither Sergei Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky” nor the films about Lenin that polished the image of the leader of the world proletariat can argue.
“Chapaev is you, Chapaev is me,” proclaimed the titles of an avant-garde short film released in 1988 by film critic Sergei Dobrotvorsky entitled “Members of the Che-paev Society Speak.” The annotation to the film stated that “the task of the film group was theoretical research in the field of modern film mythology, as well as practical propaganda of the total Chapaev idea. The main activities of the film group are reflected in its name, which combines the names of two of the greatest figures of the heroic pantheon – Ernesto Che Guevara and V.I. Chapaev. Fragments of animated collages jumped across the screen: first, the legendary commander with a false mustache, like Max Linder (note, no less legendary), swam under machine-gun fire Ural, and then suddenly found himself in a filled bathtub, where the enemy, decorated with a villainous swastika, stretched towards him a hand that decided to finish off the hero, obviously resting after military labors. But it was not there. “Chapaev does not sink,” one of the final inscriptions stated.
If Dobrotvorsky the director frolicked, trying his hand at “parallel cinema”, then Dobrotvorsky the scientist was interested in the problem of the unsinkability of the hero as quite a serious academic phenomenon. It is Dobrotvorsky who owns one of the fundamental studies that analyze the nature of the existence of the Chapaev myth on the movie screen and outside – “The film “Chapaev”: the experience of structuring total realism.” In this work, he not only explains in detail the components that made up the image of a combat commander familiar to every Soviet person, but also proposes a new term that can replace the word “myth-making” – in his opinion, not quite correct and accurate in the context of Soviet art of the 1930s . In the end, Chapaev’s on-screen plausibility is so total that it surpasses experience and logic, so it’s much more appropriate to use the phrase “universal realism.”
The credibility of “Chapaev” is difficult to question, not because there are no reasons for this. On the contrary, there are plenty of them. The film, practically in no way consistent with reality and historical truth, was not exposed from these positions only by the lazy. But the truth of the cinematic image in this case is so much more voluminous and convincing than the truth of life that it forms life itself, becoming a source of reality. The real Chapaev was an average infantry commander, did not wear a cloak and certainly did not wave his saber due to the consequences of a wound in his hand, but does it really matter when you see a hero rushing at full speed on a dashing horse towards the camera and the viewer? Chapaev is a unique, radical example of how reality can not only be corrected under the influence of the myth created around it, but directly shaped by this myth. This strange ability of the film to import its own authenticity into life was later noted by the authors themselves, who decided to explain themselves to the audience in their memoirs as follows: “Not wanting to copy Chapaev, not wanting to give him photographically, we recreated him, <...> the image combined all the typical features that should have been inherent in Chapaev. We have come to know the real, real truth of this man.” It looks like the work of a neural network that collects a thread from the world and weaves patches into a non-existent carpet at the behest of the algorithm. Or on a postmodern collage, like the same Dobrotvorsky. Or to the poems of Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, for whom Chapaev became one of the important heroes – “Chapaev in a fiery hat / Was in the Urals like a thunderstorm, / And the whites lay in fear, / Closing their frozen eyes.” Of course it did. He is the hero of jokes. But to get into the joke, it had to be created by the authors of the film, the brothers in the cinema Vasilyevs.
It is often believed that it was not the Vasilyevs who started the work on mythologizing Chapaev, but Dmitry Furmanov, whose novel of the mid-1920s was the basis of the film. However, Furmanov, although he came up with the death of the hero in the Ural River, which was later refuted many times, was guided in his fantasies by his own memories, private observations of a real person. The Vasilievs went further. Their image is correlated with reality only by the formality of the surname in the title – but after all, it was invented, and after the release of the picture, the family of the division commander Chepaev was rewritten in the Chapaevs. The ideal hero was composed of ideas about him, allusions and expectations, the characteristic attributes of the hero. The legend has become more important than the man.
In the film, by and large, there is nothing that would somehow correlate with the historical Chapaev (or is it Chepaev?), But there is a cloak, a checker, a dashing horse listed above, there are military leadership talents and ambitions (the commander himself, as you know, escaped from the academy to the front), important as a projection of Suvorov, whose image of the defender of the fatherland (along with Minin, Pozharsky, Kutuzov, Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy) was so dear to Soviet propaganda from the mid-1930s. The on-screen Chapaev was assembled by the Vasilyevs on the basis of artistic intuition, as a work of conceptual art. And it is unlikely that this character, assembled as if from nothing, could come to life at another time, somewhere in isolation from the radical ideology that gave birth to him (in this sense, the disputes between the relatives of the division chief and the directors due to the appointment of Boris Babochkin for his role are indicative). Only the mid-1930s could make it a reality that gave rise to all layers of life, manifesting itself everywhere – from the “Chapaev” cycle of Osip Mandelstam to numerous plays, fairy tales, songs. Years will pass, and Chapaev will become the hero of jokes. And this is not at all because the cinema does not age, but because of the amazing authenticity of the presented image. Something similar will happen with Stirlitz from Seventeen Moments of Spring. But Stirlitz is not real, everyone knows that. And Chapaev lived and fought in reality (which, however, lost to fiction in all respects).
It is amazing, but even years later, despite the long-term exposure of Chapaev to the toxic postmodern environment, even after numerous television and magazine exposures of the Vasilyevs’ work from the point of view of historical truth, the image woven by their film and established in reality retains its enviable solidity. Chapaev rises like an Egyptian monument in a rapidly changing cultural landscape – not just a film, but a historical fact, authenticity invented to the smallest sensations, authenticity as such, without discounting the truth. And I would like to wish this hero, who testifies with his myth about the extraordinary possibilities of art and human credulity, to maintain this mood for eternal life. “Get up, unfortunate one, and jump! / And sing! and continue what you started! / There is no other way for either you or us,” writes Prigov. After all, Chapaev does not drown.
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