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The Tramp in a Skirt: Laboring the Radiant Path

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Anna Wexler Katsnelson
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Abstract

In this article, Anna Wexler Katsnelson focuses on Grigorii Aleksandrov's musical comedy, 'Svetlyi put' (The Radiant Path, 1940) as a way of investigating the modes of screening laughter in the USSR in the 1930s and exploring the reasons for the film's gradual disavowal of laughter. The key questions posed by the article are why does laughter disappear from the nominally comedic, purposefully merry Svetlyi put'? Where is its affective energy redirected? And, finally, is laughter on film at all possible under the conditions of high Stalinism?

Type
Soviet Jocularity
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , Summer 2011 , pp. 256 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2011

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References

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18. Kaminsky, American Film Genres, 148.

19. While already present in the original play, the shifting of emphasis from mere comedy to heightened social content is made evident in the changes in the script. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 2450, op. 2, d. 1295.

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28. While in Svetlyiput´ the shuttle acquires a sexual connotation, in traditional fairy tales it was the spindle that signified penetration (for example, Charles Perrault's “Sleeping Beauty“). For a classical exploration of the weaving/sexuality axis in fairy tales, see Fromm, Erich, The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales,and Myths (New York, 1957)Google Scholar.

29. This again is a wordplay (albeit not at all intriguing), since the Russian for “beating“ and “achieving” are cognates. Anne Eakin Moss offers a fascinating account of the peculiar erotic gaze of Stalinist cinema, diverted as it was to Stalin himself and the partystate, basing her analysis on Svetlyi put´ as well as other films of the era. Moss, Anne Eakin, “Stalin's Harem: The Spectator's Dilemma in Late 1930s Soviet Film,” Studies in Russian andSoviet Cinema 3, no. 2 (August 2009): 157–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. This scene draws on some well-known and ideologically driven predecessors: the factory/castle echoes a similar image in Dziga Vertov's paean to socialist labor, Enltiziazm (Enthusiasm, 1931); while the dramatic wrought-iron gate references an analogous opening in Sergei Eisenstein's Oktiabr’ (October, 1928—on which Aleksandrov worked as an assistant).

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33. Richard Dyer's seminal analysis of musicals as embodiments of a Utopian sensibility is operative here as well, as are the categories he oudines. Dyer, Richard, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Altman, Rick, ed., Genre: The Musical (London, 1981), 175–89Google Scholar.

34. On socialist realism and Utopia, see, for example, Giinter, Hans, “Sotsrealizm i utopicheskoe myshlenie,” in Gunther, Hans and Dobrenko, Evgenii, eds., Sotsrealisticheskiikanon (St. Petersburg, 2000), 41–49.Google Scholar

35. From a review of Svetlyi put´ in A. Iakovlev, Komsomol´skaia pravda, 11 October 1940.

36. I. Bachelis, Izvestiia, 5 October 1940.

37. Ardov's play was criticized for being bourgeois in its all-too-naked transformation, its lack of emplotments, and its general mediocrity. Quoted in Igor, Frolov, GrigoriiAleksandrov (Moscow, 1976), 112 Google Scholar.

38. There are visual parallels that connect this shot of Aleksandrov's film to Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) produced a decade earlier.

39. Projection work—and in the 1930s only rear projection was in use—entails placing actors against a screen onto which a setting would be projected, then refilming the whole ensemble from the front.

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41. The sequence that has Tania flying over Moscow in her shiny black automobile might remind a contemporary viewer of a similarly fantastic flight in Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (1966-67).There is a possibility that this connection is not an entirely accidental one. Around 1936 Aleksandrov and particularly Orlova, became friendly with the writer and his wife, visiting their home (Elena Bulgakova notes their presence a couple of times in her diary, although it is unclear from its text whether they were present during Bulgakov's reading of drafts of his novel).

42. Immediately following the revolution, fairy tales and their narrative devices were “condemned as ‘idealism'” by newly minted experts in child development, chief among diem Vladimir Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaia. Balina, Marina, Goscilo, Helena, and Lipovetsky, Mark, eds., Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales (Evanston, 2005), 105–7.Google Scholar On the resurgence of the fairy-tale genre under Stalin, Katerina Clark conwrites: “In order to describe homo extraordinarious one needed more fabulous forms, such as fairy tales.” Clark, Soviet Novel, 147.

43. The fairy tale of Cinderella, one of the oldest and most globally common motifs in folkloric literature, was first written down by Charles Perrault in Contes de ma MereL'Oye in 1697. His collection was translated into Russian in 1768 as Skazki o volshebnitsakhs nravoucheniiami.

44. The theme of a domestic servant who aspires to a better life was already featured in Aleksandrov's first film VeselyerebiataasweHas, for example, Boris Barnet's 1928 film Domna Trubnoi (A House on Trubnaia Street). The fairy tale of Cinderellawzs finally made into a film in 1947, but even then it was not based on the rather innocuous Perrault original, but on a Soviet adaptation by the playwright and children's book author Evgenii Shvarts.

45. Elena Stishova writes in an essayistic piece that “the archetype of Zolushka, as a sign for an oppressed woman liberated by the Soviet regime for a new, happy life,” originated in Lenin's famous quote that had a common cook governing a state. Stishova, Elena, “Prikliucheniia Zolushki v strane bol´shevikov,” in Engel, Christine and Reck, Renate, eds., Frauen in der Kultur: Tendenzen in Mittel- und Osteuropa nach der Wende (Innsbruck, 2000), 233.Google Scholar In the 1930s Zolushka was also treated by writers such as Shvarts and the once-futurist poet Semen Kirsanov.

46. Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino, 255. The song in question is the popular “March of the Aviators.“

47. Z. Grigor'ev, Vecherniaia Moskva, 7 October 1940.

48. Bergson, Laughter. Bergson's theories had a wide circulation in Russia at the time.

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51. Locally and historically, medieval Russia had developed two interconnected traditions of laughter: holy fools (iurodivye), inherited from Eastern Orthodoxy, whose performance of folly was seen as prophetic and wise, and the satirical folly of kromeshnye prazdnestva (dark celebrations), a type of ritualistically staged courdy laughter that was popular with Ivan the Terrible. For the Russian tradition of laughter and its political aspects, see Lotman, Iu M. and Uspenskii, B. A., “Novye aspekty izucheniia kul´tury Drevnei Rusi,” Voprosyliteratury, no. 3 (1977): 148–67Google Scholar; Likhachev, D. S., Panchenko, A. M., and Ponyrko, N. V. , Smekh v Drevnei Rusi (Leningrad, 1984)Google Scholar.

52. Aleksandrov, Epohha i kino, 189.

53. Two points need to be made here. The first is that changes in the script of Svetlyiput´ seem to bear out this supposition—evidendy the subject matter demanded a more socially aware treatment. RGALI, f. 2450, op. 2, d. 1295. Second, Stalin, who adored Volga,Volgaund its bureaucratic fall guy (even making jokes about their resemblance), allegedly found Svetlyi put´ to be lacking in bite, commenting to its director that “we value your courage, but in this picture you aimed to please us. You wanted to please die boss.” Mark Kushnirov, Sveltyiput´ Hi Charli i Spenser (Moscow, 1998), 195.

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62. The choice of Tania's profession, no matter how much motivated by Soviet reality (her character was based on Dusia Vinogradova, a real-life prizewinning Stakhanovite master weaver) contained a suggestive set of built-in fairy-tale connotations, connecting it not only to the idea of sexual initiation mentioned earlier but also, self-reflexively, to the act of telling a story (made explicit, for example, in the English expression “spinning a tale“)—and, in this case, the making of a film. This metaphor is actualized by the many visual homologies that couple cinematographic procedure with the process of weaving

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66. Peter Kenez makes the parody assessment: see Kenez, Peter, Cinema and SovietSociety: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (New York, 2001)Google Scholar. Maria Enzensberger, ‘“We Were Born to Turn a Fairy Tale into Reality': Grigori Alexandrov's The Radiant Path,” in Taylor, Richard and Spring, Derek, eds., Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London, 1993), 106.Google Scholar Enzensberger's analysis builds on Maiia Turovskaia's groundbreaking study of fairy-tale conventions in Ivan Pyr'ev's films: Maiia Turovskaia, “I. A. Pyr'ev i ego muzykal´nye komedii: K probleme zhanra,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 1 (1988): 111-46.

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68. Propp, Vladimir, Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki (Moscow, 2000), 61.Google Scholar

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