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The Reinterpretation of History in German's Film My Friend Ivan Lapshin: Shifts in Center and Periphery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Benjamin Rifkin
Benjamin Rifkin*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Extract

Aleksei Iu. German's film My Friend Ivan Lapshin, based on prose works written by his late father lurii P. German (1910-1967), was completed in 1983 and released two years later to some scandal. The prose works themselves had quite a different fate. The elder German published prolifically during some of the most repressive periods of Russian literary history, from the 1930s through the 1960s, although most of his works were published in the earlier two decades. His first works appeared in print in 1931 in Molodaia gvardiia and he continued to publish in this journal throughout the decade; his published works of the 1930s and 1940s include Our Acquaintances (1934), Our Friend the Militiaman (1940) and Stories about Feliks Dzerzhinsky (1947). Aleksei German states that his father held steadfast to his faith in communism, despite the occasional political difficulties he encountered during the course of his career. The son insists that the ideas which pervade so many of his father's published works were not a product of careerism, but rather of his world view: he truly believed in socialist realism.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , Fall 1992 , pp. 431 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1992

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References

1. One critic and theorist, describing lurii German's creative biography, notes that the elder German was listed together with Akhmatova and Zoshchenko in the first draft of Zhadanov's famous attack of 1946, but was ultimately spared the persecution. Karakhan, L, “Proiskhozhdenie,” Iskusstvo kino 1 (1987a): 96 Google Scholar.

2. German, A., “Kino prozrastaet iz poezii: beseda s T. Iensen,” Voprosy literatury, no. 12 (1986): 143 Google Scholar.

3. Aleksei German notes with some irony: “He [lurii German] accomplished less than he was allowed to.” Ibid., 142.

4. A. German, Unpublished personal interview, 1989.

5. In fact there is a slight difference in the details of the setting: The events depicted in the novella take place from December 1936 through some months of the following year in Leningrad; the events in the film are shifted one year earlier, beginning with December 1935 through some time in 1936, and take place in the mythical provincial city of Unchansk. I will show, below, that this difference, however slight, is of great significance for the meaning of the film.

6. The characters Ashkenazi (in the novella) and Zanadvorov (in the film) are linked by more than their common profession; they utter similar lines of dialogue in many instances.

7. German, Iu., “Lapshin.” Dve povesti (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1938a), 59 Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this work will be noted simply with a reference to a page number in the text. I have translated this and all other citations unless otherwise noted.

8. German, Iu., “Aleksei Zhmakin.” Dve povesti (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1938b), 258.Google Scholar

9. A. German, Mot drug Ivan Lapshin (My Friend Ivan Lapshin), 1985. Subsequent citations from the text of the film will be noted simply with the date of the film's release, “1985. “

10. One of the images in the prologue might be considered emblematic of the construction of the film as a whole: the painting in the glass frame. The camera focuses on this painting for a bit longer than on any of the other things in the grandfather's apartment, yet it is impossible to “read” the painting due to the reflection in the glass frame. The glass reflects part of the interior of the apartment and the window with its view of the outside world. The filmic text, like the painting, is an artistic text which may be difficult for the addressee to receive due to interference arising from expectations both intrinsic (the reflection of the apartment's interior) and extrinsic (the reflection of the window and the world exterior to the apartment, the filmic space) to the text.

11. Iampol'skii, Mikhail, “Diskurs i povestvovanie,” Kinostsenarii, no. 6 (1989): 178 Google Scholar.

12. This term is used for lack of a better alternative. In order to make the usage clear, I ask the reader to recognize that the word “shower” means “s/he who shows” and should rhyme with “lower. “

13. Iampol'skii, 178.

14. A. German, Unpublished personal interview.

15. Eagle, Herbert, “Soviet Cinema Today: On the Semantic Potential of a Dis credited Canon,” Michigan Quarterly Review XXVIII, no. 4 (1989): 746 Google Scholar.

16. Karakhan, L, “Proiskhozhdenie,” Iskusstvo kino, no. 2 (1987b): 84 Google Scholar.

17. Ibid.

18. A. German, “Kino prozrastaet iz poezii,” 152.

19. There are many fabula components in the novella typical of socialist-realist literature, which the director chose to omit from his film. The ideological conflict between the father, Iurii German, who contributed to the establishment of socialist realism, and his son, Aleksei German, who has contributed to its destruction, is modeled in the film. At one point Zanadvorov tells his son, Aleksandr (the boy who presumably grows up to be the narrator-teller), to shut off the radio, explaining that he doesn't respect Aleksandr anymore since he doesn't listen to him. Aleksandr replies simply: “Well, don't respect me then!” (1985). Just as Aleksandr does not seem to respect his father's rules, so too Aleksei German fails to respect some elements of his father's literary tradition.

20. Her screams are not subtitled in the IFKX version of the film. Readers who do not speak Russian should note that background dialogue is rarely, if ever, subtitled in the film version released in the United States by IFEX.

21. This is the only use of the verb “to torture “in the htm, despite the suggestion of its use in the investigation of the butcher implicated in the Solov'ev affair and in other investigations.

22. For more about the depiction of “byt” in this film, see: Benjamin Rifkin, Semiotics of Narration in Film and Prose Fiction: Case Studies of Scarecrow and Lapshin, Russian East European Studies in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Peter Lang, forthcoming).

23. Karakhan, 1987b: 85-86.

24. A. German, Unpublished personal interview.

25. Ibid.

26. The camps themselves are depicted, although in an idealized form, in the excerpt of the play within the film, Pogodin's The Aristocrats.

27. Aleksei German's Lapshin is ultimately destined to meet an unhappy end— the filmmaker himself explains: “It is impossible for me [to imagine] a Lapshin who survived 1937.” (A. German, “Kino prozrastaet iz poezii,” 153.)

28. In two scenes in the film, pioneers are shown to be conducting an experiment on the peaceful co-habitation of a rooster and a fox. When the pioneers forget to feed the fox, its predatory instinct “flares up” and it eats the rooster, but the pioneers hope to resume the experiment.

29. A. German explains that as a child he had a dog with this name. (A. German, “Kino prozrastael iz poe/.ii,” 149.)

30. Ibid., 150.

31. Karakhan, “Proiskhozhdenie,” (1987a): 85.

32. See Benjamin Rifkin, op. cit.

33. Andrew, Dudley, “The Primacy of Figures in Cinematic Signification” in Heath, Stephen and Mellencamp, Patricia, eds., Cinema and Language (Frederick, MD: University Publications, 1984), 140.Google Scholar

34. Eagle, 745.