Film Music and the Construction of Post-Soviet
Collective Identity: Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the
Sun
Peter Kupfer
I. Collective Identity and Film in Post-Soviet Russia
The struggle to (re)establish a sense of Russian identity in the wake of
Communism came to a climax in 1996, when former Russian president Boris Yeltsin
announced a public contest to find a “new Russian idea.”1 Kathleen Smith describes
the contest and its implications as follows:
The notion that Russia was suffering from an identity crisis came as no surprise to the
politically aware in 1996. The simultaneous collapse of Communist rule and the Soviet
empire in late 1991 had given new life to centuries-old intellectual debates on the nature of
Russia’s national interest and the proper definition of the nation. ... The “idea for Russia”
contest served as a stimulus for democratic opinion makers to debate the appropriate
1 This and the following paragraph are based on Kathleen Smith’s, Mythmaking in the New Russia:
Politics and Memory during the Yeltsin Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), ch. 1, “Memory and
Postcommunist Politics,” 1-10 and ch. 8, “Searching for a New Russian Idea,” 158-172.
12
content and form of Russian patriotism. It also spurred Yeltsin’s advisers to take stock of
the state of the nation’s collective memories.2
The contest was open to the general public, in hopes of reestablishing an identity
based on collective input. But the contest failed miserably: over a year later, Yeltsin
and his advisers still had not agreed upon a “new Russian idea” and the editors of the
newspaper that had been printing suggestions suddenly and without explanation
stopped doing so. That the contest failed points directly to the lack of a unified
sense of Russian self, embodied most poignantly in the nation’s tumultuous political
history. The shared history viewed as so crucial to the establishment of a national or
political sense of identity was simply lacking. Politicians could neither patently praise
nor denounce any single period in Russian history, nor could they conflate ancient
and modern Russia, for any hint of partisanship immediately offended large sections
of the population.
Thus, Russia of the 1990s faced an identity crisis. It lacked a “usable past,” which
James Wertsch defines generally as
an account of events and actors that can be harnessed for some purpose in the present. The
most common reasons for developing a usable past have to do with individual or collective
identity claims. These claims appear in debates that can become quite heated and sometimes
escalate into ‘history wars.’ Identity claims take many forms and are tied, among other
things, to the need to mourn, the desire to foster patriotism, and the need to erase the sting
of defeat and redeem a lost cause.3
At the heart of the identity crisis Russia faced in this period was the question of how
to deal with a problematic past, particularly with the darker episodes of the Soviet
era. The task was complicated by the fact that the Soviet regime had actively
attempted to suppress the memory of much of its wrongdoing creating, in effect,
“blank spots” in the collective memory.4 Smith writes that a
significant portion of the totalitarian state’s antipathy to diversity is its deliberate destruction
of historical memory. ... [T]he party-state uses its control over the flow of information to
promote its own ideologized version of the past, to erase all conflicting conceptions. ...
Smith, 158.
James V. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
31. For more theoretical discussions of collective memory see Wertsch, 30-116 and Jay Winter and
Emmanuel Sivan, “Setting the Framework,” in Winter and Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6-39.
4 On the issue of collective memory of the Soviet era, particularly as it relates to death, see:
Catherine Merridale, “War, death and remembrance in Soviet Russia,” in War and Remembrance, 61-83
and Kathleen Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1996), ch. 1, “Liberalization and Settling of Accounts,” 1-19 and ch. 9, “The
End of Soviet Rule and the Prospect for Settling Accounts,” 194-209.
2
3
13
[C]oming to terms with the Soviet past is complicated by an accumulation of unaddressed
violations of basic rights.5
This issue of identity is embodied, quite literally, in debates about whether or not to
bury Lenin’s body, still on display in his mausoleum in Red Square. Hard line
Communists want the body preserved, claiming it represents an important era in
Russian history, while progressive thinkers feel that it is time to bury Lenin, and with
him the glorification of the Soviet era.6
Because of its potential for mass appeal film is a particularly powerful tool for
constructing a “usable past.”7 This was not lost on the early Bolsheviks: according
to the legendary Leninism, cinema represented “the most important of all arts.”8
From the 1920s onward the State controlled what would become a long tradition of
“pedagogical” cinema, in which education and propaganda were central to all films,
even in the works of avant-garde artists.9 Recognizing the mass appeal of cinema
and the communicative power therein, the Soviet state completely appropriated
filmmaking, turning it into one, if not the, central form of mass entertainment. When
Stalin came to power he took what he deemed “the greatest means of mass
agitation” to an even higher level.10 He was so concerned about the content of
Soviet films that he edited many film scripts himself and watched each film before
allowing it to be shown publicly. According to Peter Kenez, “Stalin, and he alone,
decided the fate of every film to be distributed in the Soviet Union.”11 As Anna
Lawton writes, “the cinematic image became subservient to a political purpose.”12
Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims, 10-11.
For only a small selection of views on the issue see “Communists: Don’t Bury Lenin,” The Moscow
Times, 14 November 2005; “Let the Dead Lenin Lie, Gorbachev Says,” The New York Times, 12
October 2005, Section A, p. 5; C.J. Chivers, “With Lenin's Ideas Dead, What to Do With His Body?”
The New York Times, 5 October 2005, Section A, p. 3; Sergey Stefanov, “Issue to Bury Vladimir
Lenin’s Body Still Actual,” Pravda Online, 21 February 2003,
http://english.pravda.ru/society/2003/02/21/43587.html; Patrick Tyler, “Moscow Journal; With
Putin in Power, Lenin Should Rest in Peace,” The New York Times, 15 January 2001, Section A, p. 4.
7 For discussions of the intersection of film, memory and the writing of history see: Marc Ferro,
“Does a Film Writing of History Exist? The Case of the Soviet Union,” in Anna Lawton, ed., The Red
Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1992), 315-321 and Pierre Sorlin,
“Children as war victims in postwar European cinema,” in War and Remembrance, 104-124, esp. 104109.
8 Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London: I.B. Tauris,
2001), 27.
9 For a brief historical survey of cinema in Soviet Russia see: Lawton, “Introduction: An
Intepretive Survey,” in The Red Screen, 1-15. See also Kenez and Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet
Russia and Nazi Germany (New York: I.B. Tauris, rev. ed. 1998).
10 Tayor, 15.
11 Kenez, 190.
12 Lawton, “Introduction,” 6.
5
6
14
In the years after the fall of Communism, the state of Russian cinema deteriorated
drastically.13 The previously state-run cinemas suddenly found themselves without
funding and badly in need of upgrades. The film industry became a center for
money laundering and, with the rise of television and piracy, attendance fell severely.
New government agencies and subsidies, as well as private investors, improved the
situation somewhat, but the “successful” era of Soviet cinema had ended.14 Most
Russian filmmakers (as well as writers and other artists) of the 1990s could find no
hope in the past, nor, given the grim outlook for contemporary society, could they
find any in the future. Instead, these artists turned to the dark present, and were
given the name chernukha -- literally, that which is made black. Birgit Beumers writes:
“The mainstream of Russian cinema indulge[d] in this blackness, or bleakness, and
offer[ed] neither alternative nor perspective. Filmmakers have rejected their
‘mission’ to act as prophets ... or to guide morally and aesthetically.”15
This trend seems to have changed little since the turn of the century. Film and its
history are still troubled issues in Russia today. Symptomatic of this is the recent
(November 2005) closure of Moscow’s Cinema Museum, or Muzei Kino.16
Established in 1989 with the precise purpose of preserving the rich history of film in
Russia, the museum was eventually, for mysterious property and financial reasons,
pushed out of the building which had been designed specifically for it and which was
jointly funded by the official Filmmakers’ Unions of all fifteen Soviet republics.
Repeated pleas for help sent to officials from President Vladimir Putin on down
went unheeded. Even Mikhalkov, who gave the first press screening of his Burnt by
the Sun at the museum in 1994, and who has served as president of the Russian
Filmmakers’ Union since 1997, has been of no help. In spite of his bureaucratic heft,
Mikhalkov then and since has made no effort to save the museum (or, by extension,
the public face of Russian film history). In fact, he heads the board of directors of
the company to which the Muzei Kino was forced to sell its share of the building (a
building, remember, which was built especially for the museum). The importance of
Russian film history has clearly been sidelined in favor of enigmatic financial and
political interests. So for now the museum, and along with it the status of Russian
film history, and the issue of Russia’s “usable past”, remain packed in boxes waiting
for a new home.
13 This, as well as the rest of the paragraph, is based on Birgit Beumers’s, “Introduction,” in
Beumers, ed., Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers,
1999), 1-11 and Beumers, Burnt by the Sun: KINOFile Film Companion 3 (New York: I.B. Tauris
Publishers, 2000), 4-6.
14 Mikhalkov even stated as much in his speech to the IV Congress of the Russian Filmmakers’
Union in May 1998, just a few months after having been elected its president. The speech, in its
entirety, is reprinted in Russia on Reels, 50-3.
15 Beumers, Burnt by the Sun, 5.
16 Tom Birchenough, “End of the Show,” The Moscow Times, 2-8 December 2005, Context Section,
1&3.
15
II. Music and Identity in Burnt by the Sun
Mikhalkov has not always been so reluctant to engage with history. On the
contrary, Burnt by the Sun, made in 1994, addresses a particularly dark and contested
period of Russian history – the Stalinist purges of the 1930s – as a means, so I will
argue, to promote the need for confronting Russian history as part of the process of
constructing a new Russian collective memory. Burnt by the Sun is one of very few
Russian films, and the first one widely-known from the post-Soviet era, to address
the age of Soviet history that had for decades been deemed a “blank spot.”17 As
Susan Larsen notes, the film offers an explanation of “what it means to be Russian”
by “engag[ing] with the relationship between contemporary Russian life and the
cultural traditions of the Soviet and prerevolutionary past.”18 The collective memory
that Mikhalkov hopes to generate stems from the “lessons”, in the spirit of Russian
pedagogical cinema discussed earlier, that the audience is to take away from the
central conflict between the three main characters: Kotov, Marusia and Mitia. This
conflict is created when the past, in the form of Mitia’s character, literally returns to
haunt the other two. As I hope to show in the following discussions of two central
scenes, music, by reflecting and amplifying the inherent and irreconcilable conflict
between Kotov, Marusia and Mitia’s individual memories and identities, plays an
integral role in Mikhalkov’s overall conception and construction of collective
memory.
Burnt by the Sun is the tragic story of the fall of Colonel Sergei Kotov (played by
Mikhalkov himself), a great hero of the Revolution, at the hands of his wife
Marusia’s ex-lover Mitia. (Though we know that Mitia and Marusia were lovers
thirteen years earlier, we do not learn precisely how or why they separated. The
sexual tension between them is quite high and it is clear that neither Marusia nor
Mitia in particular has fully come to terms with what happened.) Kotov is spending
the summer at his dacha with his wife, her eccentric family and their young daughter,
Nadia (played by Mikhalkov’s real-life daughter), when Mitia, who, having fought on
the side of the Whites following the Revolution, is now an NKVD (Stalin’s secret
police) operative, and arrives suddenly to take Kotov away.19 Kotov is the only one
17 Indeed, Burnt by the Sun won the 1994 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film,
launching Mikhalkov to international fame. For a survey of earlier and less well-known films that deal
with the purges, see: Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet cinema in our time (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), ch. 6, “Exorcizing the past,” 138-166 and Birgit Beumers, Burnt by the Sun ,
104-111.
18 Susan Larsen, “National Identity, Cultural Authority, and the Post-Soviet Blockbuster: Nikita
Mikhalkov and Aleksei Balabanov,” Slavic Review 62/3 (Autumn 2003): 491-511, at 492.
19 In the civil war that followed the Revolution, the “Whites” were a loose coalition of
monarchists, conservatives, liberals, and moderate socialists that made up the “counter-revolutionary”
forces that fought against the “Red” Bolsheviks in the name of law and order, restoration of a true,
parliamentary democracy and the values of Orthodox Christianity. See Steve A. Smith, The Russian
Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 46-55.
16
who understands the implications of Mitia’s seemingly innocent visit, but wistfully
indulges Mitia as the latter recounts tales from the old days (thinly disguising them
for Nadia’s sake by reversing characters’ names) and generally charms Marusia’s
family as well as young Nadia with his singing and guitar and piano playing.
Throughout, Kotov relies on his reputation, heroism and masculinity to maintain his
composure in front of the family, and to avoid giving the impression he is afraid that
Marusia still has feelings for Mitia, but it is these traits that eventually lead to his
undoing. Until the very end he foolishly believes that one phone call can save his
life. Little does he know that it is the same high-ranking officials he thinks can save
him that have ordered his execution.20
The first scene I would like to look at is Mitia’s arrival at the dacha. He does not
simply knock at the door; instead he barges in, disguised as an old, blind man, having
convinced Nadia that he is the wizard from Maghreb, the summer Santa and a
doctor (all at once)! The multiple personalities and costume reveal immediately that
Mitia is a performer, someone with (literally) many different faces. As Beumers
writes: “Mitia’s ‘performance’ underlines that he is playing a role, executing
somebody else’s plan. Just for one day he is the charming boy Mitia again, who once
took the hearts of Marusia’s family by storm, the talented musician and entertainer.
It is the only way he can get back into the past: masked as a clown.”21
It is no coincidence that as he walks through the house and sits at the piano, Mitia
sings (and eventually plays) the aria “Recitar! Vesti la giubba” from Leoncavallo’s
Pagliacci. In the opera, an actor, Canio, believes that his love, Nedda, is unfaithful.
He attempts to surprise her while she is with her lover Silvio, who escapes just in
time. Later, Canio must act in a play which recreates his real-life situation: Nedda is
making love to her on-stage lover when Canio returns unexpectedly. Overwhelmed,
he stabs her as well as Silvio when Silvio runs to her aid. Canio sings “Recitar! Vesti
la giubba” as he prepares for the play, knowing that he must act joyful when in reality
he is in extreme pain.
Example 1: Pagliaccio’s Act I, sc. iv aria
Recitar! Mentre presso dal delirio
non so più quel che dico
e quel che faccio!
Eppur è d’uopo... sforzati!
Bah! sei tu forse un uom?
Tu se’ Pagliaccio!
To recite! While taken with delirium,
I no longer know what it is that I say,
or what it is that I am doing!
And yet it is necessary, force yourself!
Bah! Can’t you be a man?
You are Pagliaccio
20 Kotov’s character is based loosely on Sergei Kirov, a Stalin loyalist and first secretary of the
Leningrad soviet. Though it is unproven, it is likely that Stalin, feeling threatened by his popularity and
power, ordered Kirov’s assassination in December 1934. See Peter Kenez, The History of the Soviet
Union from the Beginning to the End (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 105-6.
21 Beumers, Burnt by the Sun, 78.
17
Vesti la giubba e la faccia infarina.
La gente paga e rider vuole qua.
E se Arlecchin t’invola Colombina,
ridi, Pagliaccio... e ognun applaudirà!
Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il pianto;
in una smorfia il singhiozzo e’l dolor...
Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore in franto!
Ridi del duol t’avvelena il cor!
Put on the costume, and the face in white powder.
The people pay, and laugh when they please.
and if Harlequin invites away Colombina
laugh, Pagliaccio, and everyone will applaud!
Change into laughs the spasms of pain;
into a grimace the tears of pain, Ah!
Laugh, Pagliaccio, for your love is broken!
Laugh of the pain, that poisons your heart!
Underlined portions are those Mitia sings as he stumbles through the house insulting and joking with
everybody; italicized text is the portion Mitia sings and plays at the piano.
The parallels to Mitia’s situation are painfully real. Like Pagliaccio, Mitia is forced
to witness his lover with somebody else. Furthermore, Mitia is forced to reexperience the pains of his past (both emotionally and politically) while in costume -while being somebody he is not. His humor is playacting; like Pagliccio’s it is a
means to an end, a way of covering up the agonizing pain.
Video Example 1: Mitia arrives at the dac ha
Mitia plays distinctly different roles when interacting with Kotov, Marusia, Nadia,
and every other member of the family. That Mitia is a performer is crucial to his
relationship with all the others as well at the dacha: embodying fictitious personas
belies any real identity he might otherwise exhibit. Moreover, his function as a
performer embodies his own fate -- as a mere executor of Stalin’s will he performs
on behalf of someone else. Forced into his current position, Mitia has no choice, no
control over his fate: he is Stalin’s puppet.
Kotov’s view of agency is quite the opposite, and at one point, he accusingly
berates Mitia, claiming that one always has a choice. Kotov embodies honor and
dignity at the highest level; it would be unimaginable for him to relinquish his control
over fate. In an early scene in the film, Kotov’s reputation allows him to personally
call off a military maneuver that would have destroyed a nearby villagers’ field.
Though a great hero of the Revolution and a soldier through and through, Kotov’s
“primary loyalty [is] to the Russian land, rather than to the Soviet chain-ofcommand.”22 He does not subordinate his decision-making power to anyone. The
incompatibility of Kotov’s and Mitia’s belief systems is established as soon as Mitia
arrives, aided strongly by and reflected symbolically in the music. How these
worldviews can or cannot be resolved becomes the main theme of the film and
hence the motivating force behind Mikhalkov’s didacticism.
In the second important scene, Mitia and Marusia play the piano together after the
family has returned from an afternoon at the beach. Forced to leave the beach
because of a gas attack drill, the two still wear their gas masks as they perform the
22
Larsen, 497.
18
third nocturne from Liszt’s Liebesträume. As they play, Marusia removes her mask
and eventually transforms the melody of the nocturne into that of Offenbach’s cancan from Orpheus in the Underworld. Suddenly everyone in the room is dancing, except
for Kotov, who arrives late and cannot “understand” this music and dancing. He
leaves the room to begin lunch on his own. (The offensive and peculiar nature of
this gesture becomes clear when the cook, Mokhova, chides him for eating before
the others.)
Kotov cannot understand this kind of music (played by Mitia, and representative
of his worldview) because it represents a social class and political period antithetical
to his own. He is a hero of the Russian Revolution, a colonel in the Red Army and a
champion of Soviet Communism.23 The French can-can, a bawdy, sexual dance,
symbolizes for Kotov not only the decadent pleasures of the bourgeoisie, but also
the French influence prevalent among the 19th century (pre-communist) Russian
intelligentsia. In other words, it represents everything Kotov is not. It is also clear
that he perceives it as a threat. Mokhova wonders why he isn’t dancing with the rest,
and he tells her that he does not yet speak French.
Mitia, the performer (i.e. – the source) of the can-can, and Kotov’s nemesis, also
embodies, or at least did at a time in the past, an ideology opposed to Kotov’s. We
later find out that he was a so-called White Russian during the Revolution, but, as we
also learn from the metaphorical fairy tale he invents, Kotov was the official who
originally forced Mitia to abandon his middle-class allegiances and then, ultimately,
to become a spy for the Soviets in order to redeem himself.24 This is, of course, one
of the main sources of the acute identity crisis which defines Mitia’s character.
A “hired”, “performing” Soviet, Mitia continues to wear the gas mask as he plays
in order to “protect” himself from this bourgeois music which he should find
offensive (similarly, his earlier summer Santa costuming served to protect, or at least
distance, him from reality). Marusia and the others eventually file into the dining
room, but Mitia stays behind and continues playing. He begins to play faster and
faster, such that the can-can spirals out of control and he is only banging on the
keyboard rather than playing coherent notes and chords. The grotesquerie suddenly
overflows and Mitia frees himself both physically (by taking off the bathrobe and the
gas mask so that he is completely naked) and metaphorically, by bursting with
newfound energy back into the Liszt, the “high art” music associated with the
intelligentsia and his true, albeit former, self. The grotesquerie inverts into pure
irony – it is as if the craziness of being forced to play the can-can behind a
prophylactic mask, symbolic of his plight as a Soviet puppet, has pushed him to the
limit and he is able, at least momentarily, to rediscover himself. But the violence
with which he plays foreshadows the volatility of his schizophrenic state and its
23 In a particularly poignant scene representative of this view, Kotov picks up Nadia’s tiny, soft
feet, promising her that the Soviet regime will provide the infrastructure to keep her feet soft forever.
24 For more on the veracity of Mitia’s character and the historical context of the Russian
Revolution see: Beumers, Burnt by the Sun, 59-65, 77-80 and Smith, The Russian Revolution.
19
eventual eruption at the end of the film. When Marusia returns with Mitia’s clothes
to find him naked she is briefly paralyzed by what must be, for both of them, a
moment in which their memories seize them.
Video Example 2: Mitia and Marusia play piano together
This scene again highlights the conflict between Kotov and Mitia’s personalities,
as well as Mitia’s own internal crisis. The musical selections, particularly Offenbach’s
can-can, function to emphasize the incompatibility of the two characters’
worldviews, which are based on their antithetical political pasts and current beliefs.
Exactly mirroring the debate about the possibility of a usable past in post-Soviet
Russia, Mikhalkov’s characters are stuck in a similar predicament: neither of the two
past or present belief systems we see is privileged (particularly since both Kotov and
Mitia will die at the end of the film – Kotov by execution, Mitia by suicide).
Furthermore, the cyclical nature of Mitia’s rendition of the can-can – he cannot
“break out” of it in a traditional musical fashion, rather he must almost physically
“destroy” it – reflects the instability of his own trapped identity. Also cyclical is the
fact that the entire event is a repetition of something that happened in the past. The
camera ensures that we recognize this: the can-can scene begins with a close up of
old pictures on the wall, then pans across several more before showing Mitia and
Marusia at the piano. Continued cyclicity is guaranteed when we later see Mitia
teaching Nadia Strauss’s Beautiful Blue Danube waltz (another emblematic bourgeois
dance).
III. Choosing a “Usable Past”
How does this all end, then? How does Mikhalkov resolve the conflict? Which
history does he choose as the basis for his view of a usable past? Throughout the
film it seems as if the spectator is being invited to sympathize with Kotov, for he
ultimately loses his idyllic family and his life against his own will. But if Mitia does
not act according to his own beliefs, living a life without choices because of his Statedetermined existence, Kotov is to blame. According to Beumers,
what remains ambiguous through the film is the film-maker’s view of the issue of
responsibility for history: for Mikhalkov, neither Kotov (who believes he has a choice), nor
Mitia (who believes he has no choice) are in control of their destiny. Ultimately, then, Burnt
by the Sun is an apologia for action and inaction in a period of terror and tyranny. Mitia’s
resistance to the cult of Stalin and Kotov’s support for the Leader bear the same result:
death.25
25
Beumers, Burnt by the Sun, 131-32.
20
Though I agree with Beumers’ first point, that Mikhalkov does not ultimately choose
who is responsible for history, I find her second conclusion lacking. I do not believe
that Mikhalkov’s ultimate aim in this film is to completely defer guilt. Rather, given
the post-Soviet context in which the film was made, I maintain that it is his goal
ultimately to draw attention away from the film’s plot, and toward the reflexive
nature of his own project. On the one hand, he addresses a period of Russian
history that had been suppressed for so long, while on the other, he highlights the
problematic nature of writing Russian history in the post-Soviet era. In short,
Mikhalkov is interested that a collective memory be forged, but also understands the
possibility that that collectivity may have to include multivalent pasts. In the spirit of
Maurice Halbwachs, Mikhalkov does not focus on the event itself, which would lead
to its reification, but rather is concerned with the process of remembering.26 He does,
however, offer a glimmer of hope in Nadia, the sole survivor in this story (her name
is, after all, the diminutive of the Russian word and name for hope: nadezhda). As a
hybrid of the intelligentsia (from her mother’s side) and the Soviet regime (from her
father’s), she represents a future that balances these two extremes. Like a “balanced”
writing of history, both sides are remembered and neither is privileged. Yet, the
specific nature of this future is left unexplained; we only learn that Nadia’s character
survives as a music teacher in Kazakhstan. In the end, it is Mikhalkov’s unique call
to engage with Russian history, even with its darkest chapters, that is at the core of
the film. Though his own reading may amount to no more than highlighting the
ambiguous readability of history – the fact that it can be interpreted in so many
different ways from so many different viewpoints – Mikhalkov at least offers a reading
at a time when others had turned away from the issue altogether. But there is more
to it than that – the film also points out the dangers of not engaging with the past.
Music, once again, drives this point home. The single most important and
prevalent piece of music in Burnt by the Sun, and also the source of its title, is the
tango “The Weary Sun.” It appears incessantly in the film, in both diegetic and nondiegetic versions. We hear it when Marusia and Kotov dance together at the
beginning of the film, we hear it when Nadia sings and dances by herself, we hear it
after Mitia has recited his autobiographical fairytale, we hear it when Kotov is driven
off to his death, we hear it when Nadia innocently skips back home and we hear it
when Mitia lies dying in his bathtub, to name but a few of its diverse uses.
Video Example 3: “The Weary Sun”
26 See Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). For a
discussion of Halbwachs’s theories in the Soviet context, see Frederick C. Corney, “Rethinking a
Great Event: The October Revolution as Memory Project,” in States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts,
and Transformations, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 17-42 and Corney,
Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
For a discussion of memory issues in post-Soviet Russia see Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia.
21
Beumers offers the following description:
The tango ‘The Weary Sun’, along with the jazz compositions of the 1930s that are played
on the radio for the football match, represents a compromise: such music was entertaining
and popular, whilst it was also decadent in origin. Like the foxtrot in the 1920s, the tango
would become unpopular with the authorities in the late thirties, while jazz music would be
banned outright in part for its improvisational character. The tango is the song that is
associated with Marusia and Kotov, with their love that bridges the two worlds of the
military and the artistic intelligentsia, forming a link between the new and the old order. The
tango is also a personal tune for Mitia, in that the text sums up his dilemma: it reflects the
theme of lost love, and it is hummed by the substitute for his ‘beloved’, Nadia. ... The song
concludes on the note that both parties are to blame: Kotov and Mitia for the failure in their
political lives, Marusia and Mitia for the failure of their love.27
“The Weary Sun” symbolizes all that Beumers claims it does, but what is more
important than the many individual meanings it engenders is its ubiquitous and
universal applicability.
Example 2a: “The Weary Sun” (Utomlennoe solnste), as sung during opening credits
28
The weary sun,
gently bade farewell to the sea,
and at that hour you confessed,
that love had gone.
I was a little sad,
no melancholy or sadness,
at that hour resounded,
in your words.
Let us part, I shall not be angry. You and I are both to blame.
Example 2b: “The Weary Sun”, translation from subtitles when Mitia and Nadia sing it
after he tells his fairy tale
…
As the crimson sea did run,
I heard you say, my dove,
That there would be no love.
Let’s leave one another now,
I won’t hold it against you …
…
27
28
Beumers, Burnt by the Sun, 99-100.
Translation from Beumers, Burnt by the Sun, 99, slightly modified.
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As Beumers intimates, it is the only piece in the entire film that is not divisive. That
is, it does not “belong” to any single character, but rather represents everybody
because of its vast metaphorical purview. The tango bridges the old-new gap (as
Beumers points out) and also functions to set Russia against the West. The text
embodies the themes of love, death, loss and hope, to name a few, all of which play
prominent roles in the film. Like Yeltsin’s hope for his “Russian Idea” – something
that could represent and bind a diverse population with diverse histories – so too is
“The Weary Sun” the only element in the film that binds all of these diverse
characters and their diverse histories. In this way, it is clear that Mikhalkov does
believe in the possibility of a “Russian Idea,” but, as argued above, he does not
explicitly outline the form it will need to take. Yet, significantly, the one character
that is most closely associated with “The Weary Sun” is also the one that symbolizes
hope for the future: Nadia.
In this way, “The Weary Sun” is emblematic of the film’s greater purpose: just as
the identities and actions of the characters, Mitia and Kotov, cannot be explained in
simple black-and-white terms, so too must Russians understand that the search for a
usable past is a complex process that will involve the (re)negotiation and
(re)interpretation of many histories. The one-minded search for a single, ill-defined
goal will result in failure. The danger of such an approach is symbolized throughout
the film by an itinerant truck driver who is lost in the countryside around Kotov’s
dacha. The directions he has received are vague (he can’t even pronounce the name)
and so he drives around aimlessly asking anyone he sees if they can tell him where he
is trying to go. Unfortunately his destination is written incorrectly, dooming him to
meander endlessly. His wandering is ultimately fatal, as he ends up in the wrong
place at the wrong time – as a witness to Kotov’s beating and death – and thus
ensures his own demise; his survival would only have been ensured by clearer
directions.
Video Example 4: The Lost Truck Driver
Mikhalkov’s film thus represents a warning of what can happen when one’s path is
ill-defined. At the same time, it functions as a map to aid post-Soviet Russians in
finding their way.
Kathleen Smith writes that “Russian political actors [have] had particular
cause to delve into the past.”29 Her formulation is particularly apt, for Mikhalkov is
truly a Russian political actor: in addition to several influential cultural political
appointments between 1990 and 1993, in 1997 he was elected chairman of the
Russian Filmmakers’ Union. He won a seat in the parliament (which he later
declined) and it has been suggested that he run for president.30
Given the
atmosphere in which this film was made and given Mikhalkov’s own personal
29
30
Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia, 4.
Beumers, Burnt by the Sun, 2-4.
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politics, it is clear that this is a film that comments on the present as much as the
past. At a time when the search for a new “Russian Idea” and the reconsideration
and creation of collective memory were of tremendous political concern, and when
other filmmakers were actively shunning any attempts at dealing with the past,
Mikhalkov took the opportunity in this film to offer an alternative. At the center of
his conception is the notion that as difficult and tragic as it might be, the past,
including the bleakest periods of the Soviet regime, must be addressed in order to
foster a new and appropriate collective memory. And his message is indeed
transmitted effectively, enforced by a strategic and symbolic use of music.
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