Tales of Fear – Weekend – Kommersant

Nadezhda Kosheverova, an amazing director who created in Soviet cinema – contrary to time, but also in connection with it – her own special world of sadness, joy and light, turns 120 years old. Weekend recalls two of her main paintings.

Text: Polina Barskova

Post-siege Leningrad is a disastrous, disturbing place, there are more than a million ghosts of the dead siege survivors, no one wants to remember them, no one can forget them. What kind of art can be born in such a city? It is in this city that Nadezhda Kosheverova shoots Cinderella (1947) – perhaps the most not hopeless Soviet film.

Kosheverova, according to film historian Pyotr Bagrov, belonged to the aristocracy of Leningrad cinema: she started with FEKS back in the 20s, then worked with Kozintsev and Trauberg on the Maxim trilogy, but her own, independent cinematic fate was difficult, late. By the mid-40s, the most strangely nervous time of Soviet cinema, the time of humiliation and lack of pictures, she still had quite a bit of her own accomplished: her pictures did not live up to the rental, they lay on the shelf. And then, after the adaptation of “Cherevichki” based on Tchaikovsky’s opera, she decided – and she was allowed to decide – what she would do with “Cinderella” with Yevgeny Schwartz and Yanina Zheymo.

Schwartz’s affairs at that time were also unimportant: his main plays, The Dragon and The Naked King, never saw a big stage, fame was mainly based on the success of The Snow Queen, he was known as a good-natured inventor of children’s fairy tales, and non-disturbing, twinkling satires for children and adults.

The film was shot right before the onset of the Soviet political catastrophes of the second half of the 40s – before the “Leningrad case”, “the case of cosmopolitans” and “the case of doctors”. It was, in the words of Lidia Ginzburg, still respite, although its very ebb; under the decree of 1946, she did not fall.

“Cinderella” turned out to be a moment of good luck for all its creators, that very holiday ball, because this is an exhalation film, a film of survivors – it glows. The scenery and costumes glow, Cinderella’s magical, happiness-promising dress glows, her kind godmother and page boy glow, reminiscent of the retinue of Queen Titania from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Evil in this tale is not dangerous, not disgusting, not scary: anxiety only flares up in a distant glow. Its source is the envious and intriguing Cinderella’s Stepmother in an unforgettable performance by the legendary Ranevskaya. It is with her character that the only mention is connected of what was one of the main emotions, the main matters in the life of the authors of the film – fear.

King: listen, Forester, I have long wanted to ask you, why have you been shuddering and looking around lately? Is there a monster in the forest that threatens you with death?

Forester: No, Your Majesty, I would immediately stab the monster!

King: What brought you to this state?

Forester: My wife, your majesty! My wife is a special woman. Her own sister, exactly the same as her, was eaten by an ogre, poisoned himself and died.

If we restore the context of the script and compare it with Schwartz’s notebooks, it becomes clear that the Stepmother is not an innocent comic old woman, but, as usual in fairy tales, an allegorical creature. In Notebooks, Schwartz often studies her inherent vices: rhinoceros ambition, vanity, indifference, ingratitude, envy, and, not least, a thirst to be close to those in power.

However, the main person in power in Cinderella, that is, the King, does not take his power too seriously, he is even burdened by it, and strives to give someone his “Monomakh’s hat”, which interferes with him; besides, as the Gatekeeper notes in the original script, “His fabulous time has gone, but he still hopes.”

This role is played by the star of the Meyerhold Theater Erast Garin. Who is King Garin? Infinitely infantile, capricious and charming tyrant, his relationship with the Prince is arranged according to the classical model of “fathers and sons” – after all, he was not informed that “the boy has already grown up.” He needs power as a holiday, and he tries in every possible way to refuse everyday life and hardships, to run away, they are boring to him. The king wants a holiday, not power.

In general, escape, a magical place where time does not penetrate, is an important theme of this fairy tale: we remember that the guests at the ball go to a magical land where all wishes come true, where time stops, becomes different, before suddenly and abruptly leaving, running out. .

Far from young, Cinderella and the Prince behave like children, and this is not pathetic, but charming, touching; in this film, the genius of Yanina Zheimo, the Leningrad Juliet Mazina, was finally realized – the ability to shine, which is very rare among people. This “Cinderella” is about a postponed, belated, almost impossible happiness, when neither the beauty, nor the director, nor the playwright any longer hoped for magic, almost stopped hoping. This was the secret plan of “Cinderella” by Kosheverova and Schwartz: to create a film in which one could hide from history, from its anxieties and troubles.

Kosheverov and Schwartz start their next joint work 17 years later and again at the end respite, this time “thaw”. It can be assumed that “Cain XVIII” (1963) was conceived as a kind of sequel: Kosheverova was looking for similar material from the same playwright, and the inhabitants of the fairy-tale kingdom had a new meeting with the same King Garin, who, however, for long and difficult years, could not help but change. All the same questions interested Kosheverova – the nature of power, the nature of love, the nature of a miracle. However, things did not turn out dramatically as expected.

Schwartz, instead of the proposed Koshever alteration of “Shadow”, again began to glue, remake and finish a new version of “The Naked King”, but did not have time to finish, he died of another painful heart attack.

He was replaced by another fatal (first of all, alas, for himself) wit of the Soviet theater – Nikolai Erdman. The minion of Soviet fate, the author of the famous plays “Mandate” and “Suicide” (however, his troubles began with “Suicide”, co-author of “Merry Fellows”, in 1933 he was arrested and exiled and did not write plays after that ( At the same time, he remained a man of the theater, a writer of witty sketches, interludes and libretto), but after the war he became an extremely skillful, flexible and accurate screenwriter.

The fairy tale about all-conquering love and wit, conceived by Schwartz, was combined with Erdman’s fairy tale about the horror and vileness of unfreedom and the military. One of the central nodes of the film is the fate of science, which finds itself in the service of martinets; one of the main characters of the film is a mosquito modified by scientists, which, when slammed, creates an explosion of a huge affected area (according to Schwartz’s idea, it was supposed to be a ladybug).

The playwrights were interested in different issues, and they came up with different stories, bizarrely combined in the film. It is often written that Erdman completely supplanted Schwartz, eclipsed his intonation – I do not quite agree with this opinion: for example, in Jan’s conversations with the Princess, we can clearly hear Schwartz’s voice – here, verbatim, fragments from his letters to his beloved wife Ekaterina Schwartz, who committed suicide, are used shortly after her husband’s death. Also, the sinister court of King Cain cannot but remind of the characters of Shvartsev’s “Shadow”, where the minister turns out to be a cannibal, and the singer is a spy. Today, the forced joint work of Schwartz and Erdman is perceived as a palimpsest: the gentle, sad humor of the former shines through the poison and ice of the latter.

Like in Cinderella, in Cain an incredible set of actors was assembled: Yuri Lyubimov, Mikhail Zharov, Lidia Sukharevskaya. Kosheverova also led friends of her youth: the brilliant Boris Chirkov, Rina Zelenaya, the same Garin. It is impossible not to note the extremely convincing performance in the “drag” of Alexander Demyanenko (later the all-union beloved Shurik). The fantastic costumes of the young artist Marina Azizyan are striking: her new Princess appears as a Montparnasse fashionista, perhaps a “dude”, a fashionable and sharp little thing.

And yet, unlike the laughing, comforting Cinderella, Kosheverova’s other great fairy tale turned out to be much less bright, much more disturbing: King Cain is not only pathetic, he is also terrible, intoxicated with his power, I am sure that young princesses are due to him. – Here he is a bit and a Dragon. When he exclaims: “Where is my seal of Cain?” it turns out that we are talking about the press. His courtiers are terrible, among whom the Chief of the Secret Police is especially noticeable, languid, omniscient and omnipotent, in the elegant performance of Bruno Freindlich.

If we consider that “Cain” is a continuation, development of “Cinderella”, the scenes of gloomy balls deserve special attention here: composer Spadavecchia and choreographer Belsky create a spectacle as irresistible as it is heavy, seasoned with witticisms like “gentlemen, show courage and continue the fun so people don’t know about it!” The sensitive executioner Georgy Vitsin is amazing – on his cart is written “Discount for tyrants.” It’s hard not to fall into the temptation and not think that Erdman knew Nabokov’s “Invitation to the Execution”, so much touching intonations of horror and disgust coincide here.

But in “Cain” there are characters who are not related to the shadows. The princess and her friends are people of the new time, they refuse to take seriously the evil that considers itself eternal, they are not afraid of it. Their duel with Cain is a game duel, they laugh at the evil that is not terrible for them, swear and mock. The fear that crippled the lives of Schwartz and Erdman was replaced by a new dream of freedom, albeit short-lived and illusory, but flashing its smile on this film. The duel of aging and from this even more tenacious and disgusting evil and good laughing at him makes this film today an entertainment and consolation of a precious kind. At the end, the princess and her friends leave aimlessly from both kingdoms – something completely different, new awaits them, where neither kings nor cannibals can go.

There are films that are well suited to their time, but quickly fade away, such, in truth, are many of Kosheverova’s films; there are films that last and delight us for years without fail, such is Cinderella. But the most curious category of works are those that gain meaning over the years, as if manifesting themselves in the solution of time, and this, it seems to me, is precisely Cain VIII. Today, this film puzzles with its relevance. The power of evil is choked with evil.

What is not clear is this: how did this even appear on the Soviet screen, when, it would seem, much more innocent things were cut, washed off, scattered?

Literary historian Ilya Kukulin offers a version about a brief thaw of 1962-1963, Schwartz’s biographer Yevgeny Binevich – about the inability of critics of that time to assess the degree of danger, Alexei German says this: “The only reasonable explanation is that people were afraid to believe their eyes and ears, they were afraid even inside to suspect that a person could write a play ABOUT THIS.

Cain, a film about a rotting state, will remain relevant as long as states crumble and wars blaze, as long as we are captivated by the hope that the tyrant will die of fear in the outhouse, and the young wits and daredevils will outwit the executioners.

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