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The Devil in the Details

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Photo: Russian literature in Western cinema, Source: Collage The Gaze by Leonid Lukashenko
Photo: Russian literature in Western cinema, Source: Collage The Gaze by Leonid Lukashenko

Highly attentive viewers who have already managed to watch Tim Burton’s new film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness in cinemas might have noticed seemingly insignificant details in the frame: in the first film, one of the characters is reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and in the second – Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. You might think, so what?

Indeed, for those viewers who prefer to follow the plot, the action, and the actors' performances, minor details in the frame, such as which book is lying on the main character’s coffee table, which posters or paintings are hanging in the living room or nursery, what’s written on the heroine's t-shirt, or even what colour the walls are painted in the house where the action takes place, may seem unimportant.

However, true auteur cinema (and even commercial cinema, for that matter) is a highly complex production cycle, the result of the efforts of a large team, where there are no ‘accidental’ frames, phrases, or scenes. If a director decides to spend several precious seconds of the film’s runtime drawing the viewer’s attention to a book in the character’s hands, then these seconds bear necessary semantic weight – they help to better reveal the character’s personality, set the tone for their future actions, and serve as the same ‘easter eggs’, hints about how the story might end.

That said, Russian classics, which appear in an enormous number of films and series, either as book covers or more veiled references to the famous works of Russian writers and poets, are not always a metaphor for the plot. For more than a hundred years, the ‘Russian literary triad’ – Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky (sometimes also Chekhov or, say, Joseph Brodsky) – has become a cliché used by directors and screenwriters to convey an extremely simple idea: ‘our hero/heroine is a modern, thinking, and educated person.’ Indeed, it is much easier to show the character's intellect this way than to invent some clever and profound monologue for them (since, for this, the author must possess the necessary intellect themselves). Thus, a novel like The Brothers Karamazov in the hands of an intellectual film character is roughly the equivalent of a t-shirt with Che Guevara's iconic portrait or a Guy Fawkes mask on a rebel hero – a genre cliché, nothing more.

Why an English nobleman-conspirator like Guy Fawkes or a Latin American guerrilla like Che symbolise rebellion against the system (as well as a clear inclination towards leftist views) needs no explanation – the biographies of these historical figures speak for themselves. But why Western directors consider it almost a mark of good taste to shove the musty, outdated, and sometimes overtly xenophobic and chauvinistic Russian classics into their films – that question deserves a more detailed answer.

For at least the last 100 years, Europe and America have been ‘bombarded’ with Russian classics by all sorts – from university professors of Russian studies (whose work was generously funded by Russia) to regime exiles and dissident escapees like Solzhenitsyn or Brodsky (who, however, remained deeply imperialist in their convictions) and employees of ‘Russian cultural centres’. The narrative imposed by the Russians about the mysterious and enigmatic ‘greatness of Russian culture’ has taken such a firm hold in the minds of the Western establishment that it is now considered an axiom. 

‘Yes, they are wild, cruel, cynical, and vile people, but just look at how beautifully they repent and suffer for it’ – this is roughly how one might describe the cognitive dissonance in how the civilised world perceives Russians and their culture.

The illusion of the necessity of the ‘great Russian writers’ and the adjective ‘great’ that always accompanies the term ‘Russian culture’ is firmly cemented in Western society. However, the persistent Russian trend in European culture, paradoxically, has led to a situation where the tomes of Russian classics do indeed grace the bookshelves of all respectable Western libraries, bookstores, and the personal libraries of intellectuals, but… practically no one reads them. The lengthy existential struggles of Dostoevsky’s wicked and hungry characters or the lost and infantile heroes of Tolstoy are clearly not what can captivate a resident of a modern Western metropolis.

Nevertheless, the mere recognition effect created by the constant, intrusive presence of Russian literature in Western films compels Europeans to seek justification and reasons not to allow the disintegration and disappearance of Putin’s empire of evil – who else would create new ‘great’ literary masterpieces to justify the new war crimes of the imperialist and chauvinistic Russians?

Hence the endless volumes of War and Peace in the Fallout bunker or the aquarium fish named Pushkin in The Three-Body Problem. The work of Russian influence agents continues successfully even now, after the genocidal war unleashed by the Russians in Ukraine.

Thus, through repetition, one minor detail in a frame can shape a trend, which is why the leaders of the anti-Putin coalition still cannot decide how to deal with Russia – to finally end the war and yet prevent the devaluation and disappearance of Russian classics from the global cultural landscape.

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