The Extraordinary Life and Art of Andrey Tarkovsky

What is it about Russia? What is it about her creative artists? To a man they love their country but to a man – with very few exceptions – particularly for the past century – they have been persecuted by their country’s rulers. Her great composers in the modern age, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, had to tread very carefully and tailor their work to please the political masters. Her great ballet artists had to flee Russia to express their genius freely. Above all, her great writers of the past hundred years suffered unspeakable indignities. Even today the number one persona non grata is Mikahil Bulgakov even though he died over seventy years ago. Why? Because ordinary Russians are flocking to cinemas to see a film version of his magnificent anti-Stalinist novel, The Master and Margarita. This has been made by an expat Russian and is now being interpreted as an anti-Putin satire.

Hannah Arendt, in her master work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, while recognising the post Stalinist communist system as one of dictatorship, did not see it in 1966 as totalitarianism. It lacked the quality of complete domination and while vicious, was but a crumbling edifice, a shadow of its former self.

Arendt wrote in 1966:

The clearest sign that the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term is, of course, the amazingly swift and rich recovery of the arts during the last decade. To be sure, efforts to rehabilitate Stalin and to curtail the increasingly vocal demands for freedom of speech and thought among students, writers, and artists recur again and again, but none of them has been very successful or is likely to be successful without a full-fledged re-establishment of terror and police rule.

No doubt, the people of the Soviet Union are denied all forms of political freedom, not only freedom of association but also freedom of thought, opinion and public expression. It looks as though nothing has changed, while in fact everything has changed. When Stalin died the drawers of writers and artists were empty; today there exists a whole literature that circulates in manuscript and all kinds of modern painting are tried out in the painters’ studios and become known even though they are not exhibited.

Bringing things right up to date, we have the story behind Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin’s  trilogy, now made famous by Netflix’s superb production of Part One, The Three-Body Problem. The Netflix production begins with the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. That’s where Liu originally placed the episode but censorship fears forced him to decide to bury it in the body of the work.

In the world of creative cinema, one of the saddest stories of all is that of Andrey Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky was born on 4 April 1932, probably the darkest decade in Soviet history. His mother, Maria Ivanovna, was a talented actress, and his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, a respected poet and translator. Both his parents have featured in his work. His mother had a central role in his masterpiece, Mirror. The haunting poems of his father were used in several of his films.

In addition to regular classes at school he began to study music and drawing. In 1954 he successfully applied for admission to the prestigious All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow.

Tarkovsky’s first major feature film, Ivan’s Childhood, was shown in Moscow in April 1962. This was a haunting and tragic story, beginning idyllically in pre-World War II Russia and then descending into horrors of that war. The story focuses on the evil of war and how it turns Ivan’s childhood into a monstrous nightmare. The film won the Venice Festival’s Golden Lion in that year and drew the attention of the world to the thirty-year-old director.

It also drew the attention of the Soviet authorities, creating an expectation that here was an artist who could serve their propaganda purposes. They were to be bitterly disappointed. The long and bitter harassment of Tarkovsky began at this point. His diaries, dating from 1970 up to just a couple of weeks before his early death in 1986, record the details of this struggle, as well as the creative instincts and the deep religious consciousness from which they sprang. That this consciousness could be nurtured by his mother in the terrifying environment of Stalinist Russia is one of the most extraordinary things about this man.

The trouble began around the end of 1966, with the begrudging release of his second film, the three-hour long Andrey Rublev. Initially his ideological masters did not seem to know what to make of it. But soon the penny dropped. It attracted international attention and with the critical interpretation of its themes, the apparatchiks realised they had a problem on their hands. They still wanted him to work for them, but on their terms. This effectively turned his working life into something like a living hell.

Of his battle to have the film released he wrote:

Late yesterday evening E. D. rang and said that Chernoutsan just telephoned him: Suslov signed the document for the release of Rublev immediately after the Congress. I must find out from K straightaway which cinemas and how many copies. Of course the Committee insists on cuts. I’ll tell them to go to hell. So I must contact A. N. Kosygin as soon as possible. He apparently wanted to meet and spoke highly of the film.

Kosygin was Russian Prime Minister from 1964 to 1980.

Andrey Rublev is structured in three parts and features the life and work of the great Russian icon painter of that name. One of his most famous icons is that of the Blessed Trinity. The central section depicts the struggles of the early evangelisers of Russia and their battles with the remnants of paganism. The last symbolic section shows the battle of a small Christian community to restore a bell to their church. This bell had to be built in a makeshift foundry and could only be done by a young boy who was the last person alive who knew the secret of how to do this. It is an utterly dramatic and moving sequence, clearly symbolic of the hopes of a Christian future for Russia.

The first article about the film in Russia appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda. “A nasty little piece,” Tarkovsky commented, “which will have the effect of bringing the public to see the film. There is no announcement in any paper about Rublev being on. Not a single poster in the city. Yet it’s impossible to get tickets”.

When Rublev was eventually shown in Sweden, Ingmar Bergman said it was the best film he had ever seen. He is reported to have watched it ten times. In an interview Bergman described Tarkovsky as the best contemporary director, superior even to Fellini.

Andrey Rublev, which was shown out of competition at the Cannes Festival in 1966, and won an award there, was only cleared for export by the Soviets in 1973. Similarly Mirror, completed in 1974 against strong bureaucratic resistance, reached west European cinemas only years later. Mirror is a deeply moving reflection of the life and travails of Tarkovsky’s own family.

With Solaris, made over 1971/1972, based on a science fiction novel by Polish writer, Stanislas Lem, Tarkovsky touched upon a subject that seemed relatively innocuous in the Soviet Union at the time – man forging ahead into space. But even here his approach generated a long list of criticisms and objections. This was because in his hands it was not just a science fiction work but a deep exploration of a man grappling with his conscience.

The Central Committee attempted to destroy Solaris.

Tarkovsky made a note of some thirty-three cuts they demanded but which he considered would destroy the whole basis of the film. “In other words, it’s even more absurd than it was with Rublev.” Among the alterations they demanded were the following:

There ought to be a clearer image of the earth of the future. (Presumably a communist future).

Cut out the concept of God.
Cut out the concept of Christianity.
The conference. Cut out the foreign executives.

He wrote in desperation:

Am I really going to be sitting around again for years on end, waiting for somebody graciously to let my film through? What an extraordinary country this is? Don’t they want an international artistic triumph, don’t they want us to have good new films and books? They are frightened by real art. Quite understandably. Art can only be bad for them because it is humane, whereas their purpose is to crush everything that is alive, every shoot of humanity, any aspiration to freedom, any manifestation of art on our dreary horizon. They won’t be content until they have eliminated every symptom of independence and reduced people to the level of cattle.

In the end he decided to make just those alterations that were consistent with his own plans and would not destroy the fabric of the film.

Then something like a miracle happened which he described as follows:

Romanov came to the studio on the 29th and Solaris was accepted without a single alteration. Nobody can believe it. They say that the agreement accepting the film is the only one to be signed personally by Romanov. Someone must have put the fear of God into him.

I heard that Sizov showed the film to three officials whose names we don’t know and who are in charge of the academic and technological side of things; and their authority is too great for their opinion to be ignored. It’s nothing short of miraculous, one can even begin to believe that all will be well.

In the next act in the drama Aleksey Romanov was removed and replaced by another equally opaque apparatchik. F. T. Yermash. He was to be Tarkovsky’s nemesis for the remainder of his career.

To be concluded in the October edition of Position Papers.