Original subtitles

PART FOUR

- To what extent

does the Biblical tradition

influence literature?

Is the Biblical tradition a kind of canon

that makes writing

easier and gives it

its principal direction?

- First of all, you should

distinguish between the Biblical and the Evangelical traditions.

Though they are connected, they are different.

Both of them have a great influence

upon culture in general, the whole culture of mankind,

but in a very...

...in such a way that cannot be traced directly.

One can't define the limits of such influence.

Except when writers take their characters from the Scriptures.

When they refer directly to its themes.

But when they don't, when they go through only its atmosphere...

Yes, it has a grandiose influence but is...

...sometimes difficult to trace.

Almost impossible. Even the author...

who experienced it, may not know it.

May be unconscious of it. - It is a beautiful influence.

- Beautiful. But don't mix the Bible and the Gospels.

They are different in tonality, and so on.

- It seems so simple.

So much has been said about man, his choice, his destiny.

And the very words of the Bible and the Gospels give us...

so many motifs... - Motifs, yes.

- While literature, you say, is undergoing its most severe crisis.

- All those centuries of biblical references are gone.

Only a general influence of the Bible's atmosphere is left.

But don't forget: Christianity, contrary to Judaism,

lays a straight path to life after death,

while Judaism doesn't accept life after death at all.

Not at all. That is their biggest difference.

And it finds...

the most distinctive resonance in their influence too.

That's why I speak of the Evangelical and the Biblical.

- Which of them most pertains to Russia?

- To Russia, the Evangelical.

But the Biblical is universal, it has graced...

all the world's literature.

Well, except that of Antiquity.

Antiquity gave its own...

It gave much.

Renaissance...

- Which colour did your mother like?

- Which colour?

Well...

Her piano...

...was dark red. Mahogany.

She used to play. Mahogany...

- What did she play?

- That, I can't say. I was...

When we lived with her, there was no piano any more

in our tiny room. Friends kept it, then she sold it.

- But what music did she like?

- You know, she tried to teach me music, but with no success.

It was my son Ignat who was to learn music.

Not me.

- Are you like your mother?

- Oh, I can't tell. Hard to tell.

Hard to tell how.

- She often smiled?

- Life didn't make us...

smile too often.

A Ionely widow,

from 'former owners', that is to say, persecuted.

They kept refusing her employment.

She had to bring up her son. Worked ceaselessly.

Was often ill. Got tuberculosis.

Of course, there were...

youthful companions, a good family of friends.

She asked me: "Will you sleep alone?" "Of course I will".

She locked me in at home

and ran to spend the evening with them.

I slept well. Was never afraid.

- Did she ever speak with you about life, about destiny?

- 'Destiny' is such a word...

Destiny as such... It's hard to imagine our life.

You know, for you it's hard to imagine.

What you are asking about, goes back to the 1920's.

- I was asking about the spiritual exchange between mother and son.

- Our spiritual exchange was through religion.

She believed in God. We had an icon, a lamp,

although it was already prohibited.

This was our spirituality.

Our family didn't know any spirituality outside religion.

We were of a simple origin,

and general things like spiritual philosophy

were unknown to us.

Everything was God: The Gospel,

the church, mass, the icons.

This is how we understood spirituality.

- Would she never sit next to you,

take your hand and say: "Sashenka,

"my soul is aching, I'm having...

"...a hard time.

- No, she asked my advice.

Even for important decisions in her life.

My usual resoluteness

made her ask me: "How should I behave, like this or like that?"

She often hesitated, and I was firm:

This - no, that.

She listened, or not.

- Did she love you? - You ask!

She devoted all her soul to me.

- Could a father do it?

- Mothers are more apt to it. There are different fathers, too.

Different...

- When did you read Andrei Platonov?

- Late.

When did I read him?

In the end of 1960ies.

I still want to write about him, but can't find the moment.

- How could it come into being? Can you help me to understand?

What's this language? Where from?

I have the impression his language

was formed under the influence of the provincial...

...Soviet press of the time. - Not the press. Not the Soviet.

- Of some people who... - No. ... who wrote much...

...as if his language was formed in a quite different way.

- No, he did not absorb an influence of a high culture.

Thanks to God. Were he not an assistant to a locomotive-driver,

were he to began from the Academy, we would have no Platonov.

He is...

such a...

- His language is a living one.

- He is just a living image...

of our simple people,

who are caught by the revolution

and try, by their own understanding,

to understand and to express it.

Hence, his expression...

...is like groping.

The world is so complex,

intersecting the traditional world, where he had grown,

his parents, his family and the rest,

and this incredibly new Soviet world he wants to believe in,

he wants to believe,

he's not a "malicious anti-Soviet critic" as they described him,

he wants to understand by himself.

This is why he gropes, almost like a blind man.

He is touching his words, looking for their combinations.

- Is it stylistics or philosophy? - Both. The process of cognition.

His style, his syntax is...

...an imprint of the cognition.

- Of the language, of life? - Of both.

Language is only an accessory tool. He is studying life.

But his expression is always from the inside.

And his amazing combinations of words

show what we were speaking about, only we were speaking of words,

that all of them already exist. But syntax too!

The syntax, the constructions,

and the government, the government of words, it's all there.

It's all there, but before him... And he only started it.

Still, he was not the first.

Some combinations can be found... - How do you imagine him?

What kind of man? How did he walk, speak?

What was he like? - Like a genial self-taught man.

A genial autodidact invents a steam engine.

Like Polzunov. Who else did we have?

- He's not a count-writer? - No, no. Not a who?

- A count-writer. - No, no, no, no.

An absolutely genial autodidact.

- Interesting.

- Yes.

I studied his syntax.

To write about him, and I want to write about him,

I have to work a lot. No time... Perhaps one day I'll have time.

- How terribly sad it is,

that his life was so hard, so unbearable.

All was so cruel. - That disaster with his son.

He was forced to write some pro-Soviet things.

I feel pity for those who wrote anything pro-Soviet.

He wrote just a bit of it.

- Yes, just a bit. - A bit.

- But still it is amazing, and resembles nothing. - No one.

- Suddenly a man appears, like a plant,

like a unique plant in a forest...

He could have not existed. - He could. A unique one.

- Now look: Such a writer appeared,

but what changed in the Russian literature?

Or such people doesn't matter so much?

They make a tremendous impression on us, the readers.

They are a part of our life, as literature in general.

Nothing is so important as literature for our life.

But among the fellow writers, among the literary workers,

what does mean the arrival to the world of such a...

- You mean, internationally? - Even if only...

for the Russian practice. - Remember that in Russia,

the Bolshevik censorship made many work underground.

Poems and novels were born without anyone knowing them.

They returned to the surface with such a delay,

unpardonable.

In their time, they could have tremendous social effect.

They were weakened by being released...

...only 50 years later. - For example, Astafiev, Belov,

...Rasputin? - They came in time...

- I know they did. - Yes, yes.

- Were they...

influenced by that extraordinary language... - Of Platonov?

- Does a writer feel such an influence?

- They all have succulent language. A fine vocabulary.

All have good, bright vocabulary.

By its origin,

a natural vocabulary.

But the syntax...

Platonov, on the contrary, doesn't have any special vocabulary.

He's all syntax. But in the syntax...

...of all the three, I can't see any Platonov's influence.

I don't know.

- I'm not even so interested in the influence of his literature,

as in the influence of his personality...

...upon the milieu of writers. - Platonov is too uncommon...

- No way to capture it? - No.

No, there were such cases before,

even there were such combinations,

one could start...

Not long ago I gave an example

of a pre-Platonov writing.

An early Platonov. There was a bit of it in the works of...

Apollon Grigoriev,

of Hetzen,

some few and scattered elements.

I mean only syntax. Expressions. Government of words.

I had one more example, I forgot it.

Before Platonov, but very alike.

But of course, Platonov is the king.

- Did you have many drafts for "Ivan Denisovich"?

- I wrote it in 40 days. Re-wrote it once, and that's all.

- But did you think it out before? - No, I didn't.

I didn't.

- You simply had to write it?

- My material was so abundant,

that my only task was telling them: Not you, not you, we have enough.

To choose only the most inevitable.

You only reject the superfluous.

The worst is to look for something to add.

That's the end.

If there's no density, the work has no value.

Only density.

- The density is an artistic criterion? - Yes!

For literature in any case, the density is,

not only for literature,

the main criterion.

The density. - Is literature emotional?

- Art in general? - Is literature an emotional or a rational art?

- Emotional.

- Emotional? - Yes.

There are rational elements in it.

There are even elements of scholarship, of analysis.

But emotions must be there, otherwise it's boring.

So, literature is a structural art, by its nature, isn't it?

Is it close to architecture, if one wants to understand?

- What is it closer to? - There's the strict science of culture.

The accuracy. - Closer to architecture

than to anything else. - Not to music?

Not to music? - It's poetry that is...

- Yes. ...closer to music.

The prose is closer to architecture, you're right.

To architecture. - With its space, its laws, its freedom?

Its history.

- And the cinema, to the theatre?

- Nowhere. It goes nowhere.

- No to the theatre? - It's not an art at all.

- Not an art? It's wrong.

It is an art.

Must I convince you?

This is an art. And in your works, it is an art.

- No, it just charms people. Charm is temptation.

Charm is not love. It is temptation.

Literature is an art.

- Do you know any talented Russian sociologists?

- Perhaps there are many. Can't recall at once.

Sociology is a bit vague... A vague...

...definition. A sociologist, a philosopher,

an economist, all of them are contiguous.

Now all the discoveries are made on the boundary of disciplines.

They are contiguous.

Sociologists... Sociologists... What to say...

Plekhanov was not a bad sociologist.

- Plekhanov? - Yes.

Plekhanov's fate...

...was remarkable.

- He's now quite in the shadow. - Quite. We have so much forgotten.

We had many sociologists. I can't even muster my brain to recall.

No time. For this, one must think in quite a new way.

To look up the names... or the decades.

- Which changes...

...in the moral geography of man...

...are irreversible?

- Interesting.

Which changes... - In the moral geography of man are irreversible?

- Biography? - Geography.

- Are irreversible.

- Why the geography of man? - There's such a space...

...with its physics, its motion and its stationary features,

some depth... Biography is a plane vision.

And geography...

Perhaps it is an amateurish idea. - I don't understand it.

I like the complexity of the question:

Which changes are irreversible. - Yes.

- But this geography disturbs me. - Good. Let's keep 'biography',

if it's clearer.

Because I understand 'geography' as a notion...

somewhat more specific to the human life.

Human life is not biographical, but geographical, because...

there are time and space, physical processes,

the man's immobility,

his physical nature and his artistic capacities.

- You see...

I will answer you simply from...

a Christian point of view.

The Christians believe

everything is reversible, any sin, even any crime.

While man is alive,

he can understand and repent.

In this respect, it is reversible. But you can't repair anything.

The result of your crime cannot be repaired. It's in the past.

Nothing to do.

Only to grieve and to change.

Still, Christianity appreciate it very much,

this renewal of the soul,

whenever it happens, even at the very end.

This is Christianity.

Otherwise...

In our days.

These turns of enlightenment become rare.

One follows assuredly one's wrong path.

The Age tells him: "Go on".

"Go on, everyone behaves so."

This "everyone does"

ossifies souls completely.

People condemn themselves

to complete perdition.

- Crime and punishment?

- Yes, it is...

The punishment is that man can't repent any more.

...lost in this stream

and in this stream, he's not even a person.

The reason is: "Everyone does so".

This is the most terrible idea.

Oh, Lord...

- Speaking of "Crime and Punishment",

what's most important to me, more important than the rest,

is that Raskolnikov finally goes to prison,

and the novel ends there,

but for me it only starts there.

How can one live with this memory, despite one's repentances

or with this deed,

this guilt, which will always haunt one,

for the murder one committed.

- Christians say: Pray,

pray, pray.

To ask for help your soul.

- And to not repeat those errors.

- Not only that.

He stays away from it, but his past is still there.

- What to do with one's past?

- What to do...

At Christian confession,

the priest, if you tell him

about a sin of the past,

will say:

"You did confess, it's pardoned".

Wrong.

It's never pardoned.

Until death,

it is not.

This is very important.

The higher power is always God.

The higher power is always God,

and those who cannot attain religious conscience,

must have at least...

some humility towards existence.

Remember the tree yesterday.

Each tree makes us stand in awe.

And is it only trees?

What about birds? Animals?

Rivers? Mountains?

Humility towards existence.

Understanding our limitedness, our wretchedness.

If not believing in God.

- We are looking at Russian history, trying to understand...

what point it has reached, we worry about today's events,

but I believe that the same questions,

acute pains and acute diseases

of Russian life,

were present at Catherine's time,

and in the 1900's.

I see it from your books.

- Of course, on one hand... - When you cite Derzhavin...

- The state is necessary to maintain the lives...

of masses of people.

Big masses can't live without the state.

On the other,

how can justice become

the foundation of state government?

It's difficult because the people in power are imperfect.

Not just imperfect,

but also wicked,

or full of inflated ambition - we know of...

many examples.

- Why in Russia are they so inadequate towards their mission?

- Not just in Russia...

- I mean in Russia.

- It's incorrect because this way...

we place all the guilt on Russia.

- We speak of Russia because...

...we live here. - We live on the Earth,

within humanity.

There are heavy crimes in Russian history,

but don't think the West has less.

England, France, Germany

will not be defeated by us in crime.

The United States, the torch of freedom,

exterminated Indians like cockroaches.

- Yes. - Yes! So don't say Russia is special.

- But the instability... - Instability...

We're unlucky, because...

we make...

Our government is making one error after another.

The Provisional Government was unable to think anything through.

Much alike today's reformists,

undertaking reforms without understanding them.

That Government ruined Russia.

Look, in the 1990's we could have...

chosen a more reasonable way

of leaving Communism.

- But for some reason... - Not 'for some reason',

but 'some people'. - Who?

- As if there was a vote. You know the names,

why repeat them?

All those flashing names are "who".

They chose this idiotic way

to worship the International Monetary Fund,

to try any recipe from abroad.

Never to live from one's own wit,

to put all the oil in private hands?

- No one can stop them?

- No one, they're in power.

They're at the very top.

How can you stop them? With an armed revolt?

They occupy the top positions and do what they want.

They're all criminals, all of them.

How can one abandon Russia's national wealth...

...to private hands for nothing?!

For 1% of the price?! They did well!

You think they did it for free?

Of course they took bribes.

To give away our national wealth!

Look at neighbouring China. Production is growing.

They quit Communism, too.

The East Europeans.

It wasn't the people who chose that.

We have yielded to the belief...

that our powers were democratic.

They aren't democratic at all.

I employed...

...when I first stepped back on Russian soil

I said: "We have not democracy, but oligarchy".

The word didn't take root then, and today everyone accepts it.

But in a distorted form.

'Oligarchs' is supposed to mean financial magnates.

Not only! Them too, but not only them.

The president's men, the government, top lawmakers

are oligarchs too.

Oligarchs are those 200-300 who are dawdling at the top

and who make all the decisions between themselves.

The people have no say.

What could the aim of human life be?

I formulate it so.

The aim could only be such:

To manage,

within one's lifetime,

to develop such qualities,

that would, if only a bit, surpass

our natural faculties.

The best.

That is to say, we have good and evil inclinations...

If we only spend our natural gifts,

this aim is not reached.

If we only preserve them without developing them,

our existence remains aimless.

But to finish life...

...at a level higher than you began,

could be the only aim of human life,

and nothing else.

- Does religion help? - It does very much.

It's there to help us.

But unreligious people can do it as well.

It's wrong to say not believing in God shuts off possibilities.

One can attain it through one's own interior work.

It's the only...

...aim and purpose of human existence on Earth.

- What place is there for art?

- Art has a big place, it helps to develop...

the tender features of the soul. - Softens it.

- Softens and refines it.

Plotin, he was a...

an Alexandrian philosopher, Plotin,

has said:

"Beauty's...

the light of truth seen through matter."

When truth reaches us through matter, this is beauty.

Beauty ennobles. Sorry, what did you say?

- What does it mean in our time of progress, this softening

art is trying to achieve, or is fighting for,

amidst the world's increasing harshness

due to "progress"?

- Progress does not facilitate this process.

It can hinder it, but can't facilitate it.

- Progress and art... - In art, there's no progress.

- They are incompatible, aren't they?

- In any case,

they are 'not coplanar', not on the same plane.

Different planes. - Art suffers pressure from progress.

So, not different planes. - They are in the same space.

Planes of the same space.

Yes, you see, unfortunately progress...

did not, as we see it...

The progress we know

made its biggest steps in the last 4-5, no, 4 centuries.

Before, it was very slow.

Millennia went on slowly, with very few changes.

But from the start today's progress

has overlooked the soul.

The emptiness of the soul. People began to lose their soul

to material growth, to civilisation.

We have spoken of this.

- This is true. Art prepares man for death, in one way or another.

- Softens him... - For death in particular, but not only.

It prepares him for life, too.

It opens to him the richness of life

that he himself might not have fully experienced.

We see one landscape after another, by great painters.

And, for example, I don't understand nature.

But after these paintings,

I see: "Oh, this is how I should look at it!"

It helps to get a sense of life.

To become aware of its charm, of its beauty,

of its fullness...

And among other things, of death. - Why do you think you haven't...

...this sense of nature? - Why, I do have it!

I was speaking of someone who'd come to such understanding.

On the contrary, I like nature. I grew up with it.

I love it.

I meant, if someone

doesn't perceive it, painting can help him.

- Art can. - Yes.

- But art comes to man very late,

when he is... - To an artist? - To anyone who perceives it.

- Wrong. - Some people never encounter it.

Now then, it comes to people already through child's toys!

Art enters life early.

One can remain unaware of its presence,

but it is there in one's toys, in melodies,

in any songs one hears...

- I was speaking of art as a drama, as a dramatic...

...or a tragic feeling.

- It is not necessarily dramatic or tragic. It depends.

By the way, I wanted to speak

about realism.

How to consider realism, or how do I see realism.

I'm not the one...

who looks for 'isms' to classify artistic trends.

Realism, romanticism, classicism, modernism and so on and so on.

To speak of the literature that is dear to me,

there are as many styles as there are talented authors.

You can tell each author from a few lines.

After a few lines at random you see who is it.

There aren't any trends that adhere strictly to canons.

Which is better. On the other hand,

the human mind needs classification.

Impossible to do without it.

So, they classify,

and give us some direction. Here is realism.

Realism supposes a high degree

of correlation with reality,

and only a much lesser degree

with the artist's arbitrary will.

A 19th century French artist, Courbet, called realism

a truly democratic art.

Right. But what's interesting: Our democrats,

who speak only of democracy, as soon as they come to art,

they start to...

they spit upon its reception by our contemporaries,

and keep making their kind of jumble.

They aren't democrats.

Since they aren't realists, they aren't democrats.

Realism means supposing that...

you intend

to be understood by your contemporaries.

I have an expression, a notion of...

'the back shore'.

When an artist...

is working, in every kind of art, including literature,

it is as if he were crossing an unknown river.

But all the people whom he came to know,

who are still there,

are left on the shore.

So, when you cross the river, mind that shore.

Never lose a sense of it,

never get entirely carried away to the new shore.

To my mind, this is realism. - Without a historical context?

You consider realism an extra-temporal category...

of literature? - Of art.

A category of art.

- So, there are works of realism in the 18th, 19th, 20th centuries?

Is this a principle? - But each author may vary...

For example, I'm writing a novel, with a great deal of realism,

but not only.

Some lines or pages are quite romantic,

some are fantastic,

some are utterly ironic,

the ways are different.

- If I understand well, the plot is the main feature

which proves the author's principles are realistic.

Is the plot required for this?

- No, not necessarily.

There are a lot of plots.

A lot, but...

...the entire texture of a work

is only then acceptable,

I accept it...

I regard it as something healthy,

as in my life,

in a delirium from a fever,

I can have a lot of visions,

but that's an illness.

I don't want a delirium,

I don't.

I want to be as close as possible

to reality.

To discover the depths of reality,

indeed.

And when needed, to digress from it,

to give a symbol.

Symbols are present in our life, only we can't see them.

- And Nabokov?

- He has a lot of plots.

- Entirely based on plots,

or not? - Well,

he gives himself great freedom.

He can't be called a realist. It is something else.

Nabokov

is not typical of the Russian literature that preceded him.

Now many are copying him,

yet unable to do as good.

A lot of imitators.

When I first read him, I couldn't imagine

he'd have so many imitators.

- Perhaps it's not too difficult.

- No, because it's irresponsible.

- Phantasmagoria is always like chaos.

- Irresponsible, yes...

- Chaos... - Irresponsible.

Yes.

- How...

important, for one's development,

for one's morality,

are the trials one is put through?

- Enormously.

Enormously.

Suffering forms the soul as nothing else can.

As nothing else.

- And if suffering is humiliating?

- What? - If suffering is humiliating?

If man goes through humiliation? - Humiliation?

It too may be for the good.

For the raising of the soul.

No,

the worst is total well-being.

The end of the soul.

Suffering... - Does the soul of man not have its own problems,

without any influence from the outer world?

- Only in deep personalities, who are concerned with their soul.

The majority,

if nothing happens outside, have no concerns.

No, you know,

well-being,

the absence of suffering,

leaves the soul underdeveloped.

Not that one should go after suffering.

It would be unnatural.

Accept it with courage.

- Is suffering beneficial for the soul?

- One must have courage to accept it

and to understand it is sent for a reason.

It has a very important aim.

To guess it,

to develop in the right way, is not easy.

They put you in prison.

First, you think it's unbearable, it's the end.

But time passes, month after month,

2 or 3 years,

40 months,

and you begin to understand that, oh,

this life is really very deep

and very enriching for the soul.

I must take my lessons from it.

I think that if I hadn't been put in prison,

my progress would have been much poorer.

Much poorer.

- I see, but it's hard to accept.

For my heart, it's hard to accept.

What then? What is happening with our logic?

To all of us, all the people who live in Russia,

destiny sends suffering...

Ought we to become better?

Instead, we are always speaking

about our great concern for morality

and for change.

Why? What to do?

- What's going on is decay, violent decay,

not trial by suffering.

Trial by suffering too, since half of the population is starving.

But much more of decay.

Through the TV, the newspapers,

the general atmosphere of greed.

Each one lives by pushing aside the others.

This is much more destructive, and this is not suffering at all.

This is what brings decay.

When one...

has been ill...

See how

those who've been bedridden a lot in their youth,

for a number of years,

with some trouble - an arm, a leg,

their bones or something other

acquire an astonishing depth of soul.

They develop during their youth

like others who play football,

never do.

I know a lot of them.

A wretched youth, later a talent.

- Strange. - It's like that.

- Talent, a punishment or a gift?

- A gift of God.

A punishment, if you can't handle it.

- And if it tortures its owner,

never lets him live in a normal way?

- One should manage it.

- But how? - How?

Of course, to revel in it, to keep saying: "I am talented",

to boast of it at every occasion,

will just turn your head.

No.

Talent is a heavy responsibility.

You need skill to bear it.

A film by Alexander Sokurov

Camera: Alexander Degtiarev

Sound: Sergei Mochkov, Vladimir Persov

Editors: Konstantin Stafeev, Vladimir Vasilyev

Camera assistant: Dmitri Sheveliov

Production managers: Mikhail Krsitch, Anton Ratnikov, Galina Kotchetkova

Production supervisor: Tatiana Antsiferova

Producer: Svetlana Voloshina

Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn

Subtitles: Alexei Jankowski, Susanna Scott

� "Nadezhda", 1998.