Geoffrey Griffard and Dr. Raisa Solovyova, Germanic and Slavic Languages

First of all, I must say that it was a great honor and privilege to receive the ORCA award and the opportunity to set off on my own academic journey. I was able to work with two of my greatest loves—film and Russia. In the journey, however, I also had to deal with the darker sides of their characters—those of bureaucracy and escapist entertainment.

In the end, I decided to concentrate my efforts on one tale from the Belkin series: The Snowstorm. I spent a month in Moscow, Russia, looking for my little film, The Snowstorm, and the whole search could be described as an exercise in bureaucratic functions (I could write an entire encyclopedia on Russian bureaucracy after the experience!) I went first to the Central Archive of Literature and Art where, more than just information about the film, they were able to tell me where else to search. The State Library (formerly Library of Lenin—most people still call it this) yielded a wealth of information. I discovered the real goldmine, however, when I visited the State Institute of Filmmakers where Vladimir Basov, the screenwriter and director of The Snowstorm, studied back in the forties. They had a collection of the best film journals and newspapers and even had a personal file on Basov full of newspaper clippings and articles that he had written. It was also here, incidentally, where the school staff was the most helpful and the bureaucratic hoops were kept in the closet.

Rather than the film being an example of Soviet realism and state-sponsored censorship, it and its surrounding questions could just as easily have cropped up in Hollywood. The discrepancies between the film and Pushkin’s original short story can be attributed largely to personal choices by the screenwriter/director and the studio’s desire to appeal to the movie-going masses.

Vladimir Basov was a veteran of the second World War and as soon as it was over he began his studies at the State School of Filmmakers. Not only was he a screenwriter and director, but he was also an actor. A good number of his films are adaptations of literary works (like The Snowstorm). The ironic thing is that Basov is better known for his films depicting ordinary citizens in life-changing situations (your standard real-life dramas) and for his film series The Shield and the Sword—a wartime-based spy series that helped to inspire the present Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to join the KGB. Basov said that he wanted his films to be about the choices that faced people in life and the honor in making the correct choices. So when he made The Snowstorm this was the moral that he wanted at the heart of the story.

Critics, however, did not appreciate Basov’s retelling of Pushkin’s classic. They felt that all of the characters’ deep psychology had been removed and that the central theme of fate had been altogether overlooked. They were bound to be disappointed, however, because Basov was making a film about his interpretation of Pushkin’s tale and not merely placing Pushkin’s words into a visual format. This is the same dilemma that faces every film adaptation of literature regardless of time or country.

Audiences did not appreciate the film because, although the film had been made such that it was beautiful and should have been pleasing to the average movie-goer (this approach explains Basov’s attention to the architecture of the time, the religious ceremonies, and the costumes— they were making a period piece and wanted to show audiences what those times looked like), the romance in it was not compelling enough, there were no movie-stars attached to the project (all of the main actors were starring in their first movie—in fact, the main actress who plays Marya Gavrilovna, Valentina Titova, was in the film because Basov was in love with her and the two later married), and the actors did not generate enough heat to become stars. A film version of The Shot (also a Pushkin tale from the same series—the Tales of Belkin—that The Snowstorm hails from) filmed a few years later was, unlike The Snowstorm, a big hit despite being filmed in the same glossy appealing format for the masses merely because its two stars appealed to audiences. Despite Russians’ deep love for Pushkin, when it came to a movie version of his stories audiences still acted like your average movie-goers—going for gloss and appealing actors.

Unfortunately, there was no Soviet masterplan to demystify Pushkin stories. There was no secret religious agenda on Basov’s part to slip in as many shots of churches as possible. There was simply a young movie maker who wanted to make the movie his studio bosses wanted (something that would appeal to everyone), stay true to his movie motto of choices and honor, and cast the woman he was in love with in her first movie role. Well, I suppose that sort of passion is what I love about Russia anyway—and, of course, that sort of bureaucracy.