"lost in space": the nostalgic anti-heroes of two russian-italian co-productions:...

Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Lost in Space": The Nostalgic Anti-Heroes of Two Russian-Italian Co-Productions: Tarkovskii's"Nostalghia" (1983) and Mikhalkov's "Occhi Neri" (1987)Author(s): Peter ChristensenSource: Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 42, No. 1/2 (MARCH-JUNE 2000), pp. 149-169Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40870140 .

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Peter Christensen

"Lost in Space": The Nostalgic Anti-Heroes of Two Russian- Italian Co-Productions: Tarkovskii's Nostalghia (1983) and Mikhalkov's Occhi Neri (1987)

Because of the undeniable stature of Andrei Tarkovskii as one of the greatest and most original filmmakers of our time, there has been relatively little scholarship comparing his work to that of other contemporary directors. Maia Turovskaia, however, does compare his work in passing to Ingmar Bergman's.1 Tarkovskii's sudden exile and early death in 1986 claimed him before the post- 1989 world came into being. A comparison between Tarkovskii's Nostalghia and Mikhalkov's Occhi Neri, or Dark Eyes {Ochi chernye), made four years later, provides a new way of seeing Tarkovskii's penultimate film. His anti-hero's nostalgia is based on a hope that he can return to a place and a way of life in which he once existed without experiencing the ravages of time. In contrast, Mikhalkov's anti-hero's nostalgia is rooted in his knowledge that time is ever passing.

These films lead to an interesting comparison because in each case an Italian screenwriter associated with the prestigious days of post-war Italian cinema was part of the project. In the case of Nostalghia, Tonino Guerra, famous for his screenplays for Antonioni, was the writer. In the case of Dark Eyes, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, long associated with Luchino Visconti, was a participant in the collaboration. Nostalghia and Dark Eyes represent one attempt to get back to intimate dramas in Italian cinema. Fellini's turn in direction with Satyricon, Visconti's with La Caduta degli dei, and Pasolini's with Oedipo Re and Medea in the late 1960s, all highly symbolic works played out on a vast campus, moved Italian cinema farther and farther away from neo-realism. Nostalghia and Dark Eyes, without subscribing to neo-realism, return to the smaller scale drama, based on character development.

Juxtaposing Tarkovskii and Mikhalkov is instructive for several reasons. In terms of Western distribution of films, Tarkovskii has been received as an auteur of the highest standards. Because of his small but brilliant body of work and problems distributing his films in the Soviet Union, he has tended to find

1 Maia Turovskaia, Sem' s polovninoi, ili fil'my Andreia Tarkovskogo (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1991) 130, 137.

Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. XLII, Nos. 1-2, March -June 2000



1 50 Peter Christensen

himself classified with Sergei Paradzhanov, a director even more persecuted and more obscure.

What can we learn from from discussing Nostalghia and Dark Eyes together? First, we find temporary extensions of the theme of the superfluous man in Russian culture in the protagonist of each film. Second, we explore a bit another

episode of Russian-Italian cultural exchange, remembering, for example, that

important figures such as Nikolai Gogol and Maxim Gorky chose to live in

Italy. Third, we see that Tarkovskii's concern with "sculpting in time" to create a sense of duration can be compared to Mikhalkov's sense of the passage of time

through his Chekhovian concerns with the potential monotony of existence. Both Nostalghia and Dark Eyes are Italian-Russian co-productions which

explore the cultural distance between the two countries while stressing Italy in

terms of the location of the diegesis. Each film uses actors from both Russia and

Italy. In Nostalghia Russia haunts the Russian protagonist who has left it, whereas in Dark Eyes, it haunts the protagonist who has visited it and returned to Italy.

Nostalghia tells the story of Andrei Gorchakov, a contemporary poet, who is doing research in Tuscany. The Italian interpreter, Evgenia, takes what appears to be a romantic interest in him, but he keeps her at a distance, choosing instead to spend time with a mad recluse named Domenico. Separately, Evgenia and

Domenico go to Rome, where to her horror she sees him burn himself to death

in the Campodoglio, as a protest against contemporary life. Meanwhile,

Gorchakov, who knows nothing of this event, collapses and apparently dies as

he does a symbolic deed for Domenico of walking across a slimy pool of water

with a lighted candle. Dark Eyes, in contrast, is a story from the pre-World War One period.

Romano, the lazy husband of Eliza, a cultured but pretentious Roman socialite, becomes so irritated and bored with his life of casual affairs that he temporarily

separates from his wife. Arriving at a spa, he is suddenly struck with love for a

Russian woman, Anna, who has a little dog. He declares his love to her, but the

day after they sleep together, she flees back to Russia and the husband whom she

does not love. He follows her some weeks later and against all odds finds her.

After they again declare their love, he goes back to Italy to prepare to be with

Anna for ever, but he falls under the spell of his wife and lacks the courage to

seek emotional fulfillment. On the one hand, we have Nostalghia in which Gorchakov, the nostalghia-

ridden anti-hero, is a Russian poet of the 1980s sympathetic to a madman in the

form of an Italian apocalyptic visionary and hostile to an attractive translator

with some feminist independence. On the other hand, we have Dark Eyes, where

the ennui-drenched Italian anti-hero, Romano Patroni, is a turn-of-the-century



"Lost nv Space": Nostalgic Anti-Heroes 1 5 1

wastrel, unhappily married to a rich woman, indifferent to promoting his inventions and incapable of seeking happiness with the confused but vibrant Russian woman he has loved. Ironically, she turns out to have just married the sympathetic Russian listener to whom the anti-hero tells the story of his loss of love, a tale which constitutes almost the entire duration of the film. Tarkovskii's Gorchakov can never get back to the Russia that he misses, whereas Mikhalkov's Romano chooses to give up love abroad and stay in his homeland in a pathetically unsatisfying marriage to a woman born into a higher class than himself. For Mikhalkov both Russia and Italy are class-structured societies, and one is not all that much different from the other.

Russia's attempt to Westernize is so successful that it represents the tamed exotic or the reconcilable other. The threat of Westernization through manufacturing is presented to Romano through the figure of the ecologically conscious veterinarian. When Mikhalkov's hero returns to Italy, it is not because he suffers from nostalgia but because he cannot break out of the life of the superfluous man that he has always led. In short, the major problem of the anti- heroes is within themselves not their environments. One feels that wherever they go, they will not be able to live up to their potential.

Whereas Gorchakov is totally oblivious that one cannot step into the same river of life twice, Romano is so aware of the river of time that carries him on that he cannot exert himself to resist its flow and end his passivity. Gorchakov ends up bitter, reduced to symbolic gestures of solidarity, and then most likely dead; Romano, reduced to being a waiter on a luxury boat, at least retains the ability to communicate his experiences and accept the happiness of others. Romano is an Italian "nephew" of Oblomov, with some of the likeable audacity of his "uncle." But Gorchakov is a Dostoevskian ideologue divorced from the big picture of life. Although Tarkovskii is unequalled in sculpting individual scenes in time, it is ironically Mikhalkov who gives us the larger Chekhovian sense of the ravages of time itself.

Tarkovskii in Sculpting in Time points out that Pavel Sosnovskii in his

penultimate film is loosely based on Maksimilian Berezovskii (1745-1777), composer of the opera Demofont (1773). Quoting from Tarkovskii's Sculpting in Time, Mark Le Fanu summarizes: Berezovskii "showed such musical ability that he was sent by his landowner to study in Italy, where he stayed many years, gave concerts, and was much acclaimed. But, in the end, driven no doubt by. . . inescapable Russian nostalgia, he eventually decided to return to serf-owning




Russia, where, shortly afterwards, he hanged himself.' In brief, Sosnovskii was a serf who preferred slavery at home to freedom abroad and then killed himself.

For Guy Gauthier, Sosnovskii, the composer, is also a figure based on the well known composer, Dmitrii Bortnianskii, the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a serving woman, who went to Italy where he wrote very original Italian

operas.3 Geoffrey Norris writes in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians4 that Dmitrii Stepanovich Bortnianskii (1751-1825), from Ukraine, was thought to have studied with Galuppi in the imperial chapel choir. In 1769 he went to Italy on scholarship, returning to Russia in 1779. He wrote three

operas in Italy and four on his return. He was a student of Martini, who in turn had studied with Mozart.5 Tchaikovsky edited his complete sacred works in

1881, and today many of these pieces of church music are available on

recordings. However, no music by Bortnianskii is used in Nostalghia. Instead, a

warped recording of Beethoven's Hymn to Joy from the Ninth Symphony accompanies Domenico's suicide.

There are several problems that make interpreting Nostalghia difficult, and

consequently directly opposite views of its ending have been proposed. The

spectacular last shot may represent the overcoming of nostalgia through the union of past and present, Russia and Italy. On the other hand, it may show the encasement of the motionless hero in front of his dacha within the ruins of an Italian church, indicating the failure of his attempt to overcome nostalghia and to make the nostos, or homecoming. There are two sets of reasons for the

interpretive problem. Firstly, Tarkovskii has fostered it himself in several ways. Secondly, the film is ambiguous.

Let us look first at Tarkovskii himself. One, Tarkovskii has read both

endings onto the film in his comments in Sculpting in Time.6 He calls the

ending "A model of the hero's state, of the division within him which prevents him from living as he has up till now"; yet he adds ingenuously, "Or perhaps on the contrary, it is his new wholeness in which the Tuscan hills and the Russian

2 Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (London: Faber and Faber, 1989) 203, quoted in Mark Le Fanu, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (London: BFI, 1987) 108. 3 Guy Gauthier, Andrei Tarkovski (Paris: Edelig, 1988) 122. 4 Geoffrey Norris, "Bortnyansky, Dmitry Stepanovich," The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Stanley Sadie, ed. 20 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1988) 3: 70-71. 5 Turovskaia 153-154. 6 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 213.



"Lost in Space": Nostalgic Anti-Heroes 1 53

countryside come together indissolubly; he is conscious of them as inherently his own, merged into his being and his blood."

Two, in the same book, his three definitions of nostalghia leave us with too much latitude for the film's title. Tarkovskii at one point presented nostalghia as a specifically Russian state of attachment to national roots ; at another time, a

"global yearning for the wholeness of existence"9; and on a third occasion, Hamlet's sense that "the time is out of joint."10 He had directed Hamlet at the Komsomol Theatre in Leningrad in 1977, where he took the view that Hamlet does not come to a religious awareness in the last act but rather allows himself to die because he has degenerated into a murderer.

On the question of nostalgia, Giovanni Buttafava writes that Marina Tsvetaeva fits the description of a Russian with so much nostalgia that she goes home and kills herself, almost like Sosnovskii did. He adds: "The eighteenth century really does not provide, even with all the writers who spend a great part of their lives in the West, an authentic sense of toskapo rodine, or 'nostalgia for the homeland.' Nostalghia is a literary and educated term that few Russians

currently use. The nineteenth century would offer closer ideological references to the Soviet situation."1 x

Three, Tarkovskii in an interview before the film's shooting offered bitter words later given to a specific character in the film, Gorchakov. When Gorchakov tells Evgenia after she comes out of the church that translation is a useless profession, he once again takes a timeless view of life. Gorchakov's condemnation of Evgenia' s belief that Dante, Petrarch, and Machiavelli can reveal something about Italy suggests at the very least the chance to know

something of the Italian past through translation of literary works. Yet Tarkovskii apparently agreed with Gorchakov in his narrow-mindedness, for,

according to Tony Mitchell, Tarkovskii said at a RAI press conference in Rome before production:

We Russians can claim to know Dante and Petrarch, just as you Italians can claim to know Pushkin, but this is really impossible - you have to be of the same nationality. The reproduction and distribution of culture is harmful to its essence and spreads only a superficial impression. It is not possible to teach one person the culture of another.12

7 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 213. 8 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 202. 9 Tarknvckv Sruintino in Timp 704 1° Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 205. 11 Giovanni Buttafava, "Nostalghia, nostalghia ...," Bianco e Nero 44 (Oct.-Dec. 1983): 95. 12 Tony Mitchell, "Tarkovsky in Italy," Sight & Sound 52.1 (1982/83): 54.




If this inflexible view is really Tarkovskii's, he seems to be suggesting that one can more easily communicate with a madman than with a foreigner. In an interview with Irene Brezna, Tarkovskii echoes Gorchakov in his lament that the world is divided up by political barriers that must be broken down. The Cold War and its barbed wire has only promoted nostalgia - according to Tarkovskii13 - which, I dare say, may be so, but his statement once again shows that his use of the term "nostalgia" is very loose.

Four, on a biographical level, I find it hard to believe that Tarkovskii, who settled for a time in Italy, found the country to be only a land of ruins. After all, as Mikhail Romadin points out in "Film and Painting" in Solaris, Tarkovskii felt that the he wanted to recreate the style of the early Italian Renaissance

painter Vittore Carpaccio, especially his picture of an embarkment for Venice.14 One also remembers the sense of wonder with which Ignat looks at the

reproductions of the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci in The Mirror: The Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, The Last Supper, La Gioconda, and The Virgin of the Rocks.15 In fact, according to Guy Gauthier, Tarkovskii loved Italy. Yet Tullio Masoni and Paolo Vecchi quote Krzysztof Zanussi as recording that Tarkovskii said that the decline of the West began with the Italian Renaissance. When the two directors went to the Uffizi together, Tarkovskii wanted to see

only the first three rooms and avoid the later paintings.17 Furthermore, Maia Turovskaia finds that Nostalghia and the conditions under which it was produced, commercial Western cinema, resulted in an "acrid confrontation between

Tarkovsky and Western civilization" in which Tarkovskii resisted Guerra's idea to use lovely Italian landscapes.18 Instead, he showed the countryside shrouded in

mist not sunlight. Thus the church at the beginning of the film apppears as a

potential haven from the outdoors. When we move to the film itself, we have three other problems. First, as

Johnson and Pétrie have pointed out, the characters bear too much weight of

possible interpretation given their limited dialogue.19 Second, interpretations of

13 Irena Brezna, "Entretien avec Andrei Tarkovski sur Nostalgia," Positif 284 (Oct. 1984): 19. 14 Mikhail Romadin, "Film and Painting," About Andrei Tarkovsky. Comp. by Marina Turovskaia (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1990) 145. 15 Achille Frezzato, Tarkovski) (Firenze: 11 Castoro Cinema, 1978) 79. 16 Gauthier 120. 17 Tullio Masoni and Paolo Vecchi, Andrej Tarkovski} (Milan: 11 Castoro Cinema,

1997) 96. 18 Maya Turovskaya, Tarkovsky: Cinema As Poetry, Trans. Natasha Ward. Rev ed.

Ed. and Introduction by Ian Christie (London: Faber and Faber, 1989) 117, 121. I9 VidaT. Johnson and Graham Pétrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual

Fugue (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994) 163.




the reality status of the events may lead viewers to opposite conclusions about the film. Johnson and Pétrie note that the film is a step toward the questioning of reality through film technique which is even more apparent in The

Sacrifice?0 In earlier films such as The Mirror and Stalker, Viada Petric had

pointed out Tarkovskii's search for an "oneiric air - a dreamlike impact - which resists the audience's need to verify the logic, as well as the credibility, of the events presented on screen."2 ! Third, the film seems by its very nature to prefer the irrational to the rational by labeling hope as "faith" or "fede' without a

clearly articulated attack on the weakness of this thinking. There is no

presentation of secular community life in the film. The fact that Italy is a

democracy is made irrelevant to the film, which stresses the individual in

relationship to God and himself or herself. The only person concerned about

community, Domenico, is a madman who has caused much suffering to his

family. Fourth, we really do not know enough about Gorchakov and Evgenia to see

how their actions fit into their entire lives. I, personally, find that the film more

likely leads to a pessimistic conclusion. Gorchakov no longer has a voice. He is reduced to silence and or death in the final shot. Evgenia' s vitality can no longer revitalize him.

As Mark Le Fami indicates, Nostalghia shared a joint Special Jury Award at Cannes in 1983 with Bresson's L'Argent?2 In his book on Tarkovskii he wishes to defend Nostalghia from the nihilism he finds in Bresson's film.

However, Le Fanu fails to recognize the nihilist element in Tarkovskii's film which comes from the director's either/or mentality of national cultures and

gender differences. However, to reclaim the film for a doubtful humanism, Le

Fanu does not think of Nostalghia as primarily about nostalgia at all but about the importance of recognizing the spiritual qualities that make Domenico a Holy Fool figure worthy of respect rather than a madman.23 Massimo Garritano goes even further in reading the film optimistically. He finds24 that Gorchakov learns to jettison his self-centeredness and identify with the noble-minded Domenico in

carrying the candle for him before his own untimely death. Thus the famous last shot shows more of the unification of the Russian and Italian spirit through the

20 Johnson and Pétrie 171. 21 Viada Petric, "Tarkovsky's Dream Imagery," Film Quarterly 43.2 (1989-1990): 29. 22 Le Fanu 108. 23 Le Fanu 113-123. 24 Massimo Garritano, "II cinema corno specchio della poesia," Andrej Tarkovskij: Le Ragioni della poesia Vincenzo Camerino, ed. (Cavallino di Lecce: Capone, 1990). 75-77.




deep feeling of the men than the sense of permanent exile and cultural clash, which I feel is represented by the end of the film.

In contrast to the humanist/optimist readings of Le Fami and Garritano, we have the more appropriate pessimistic ones of Kreimeier, Schmid, and Makolkina. Klaus Kreimeier finds the ending of Nostalghia quite unsettling. The

Italy of the film is a land of ruins and paralysis, and in the end there is no

possibility of a reconciliation of Italy and Russia. 5 Working from an earlier assessment by Eva M.J. Schmid in Jahrbuch Film 83/84, Kreimeier notes that the music of Mussorgsky's lullaby, as contrasted with Verdi's Requiem, symbolizes the unreconcilable cultural dissonance here. Anna Makolkina goes so far as to call the film the emblem of a death anxiety on Tarkovskii's part even

though Gorchakov does not have what Harvey Kaplan calls pathological as

compared to normal nostalgia.27 The very idea of a Russian-Italian co-production seems at odds with

Gorchkov/Tarkovskii's idea that cultures are not capable of relating to each other. As an Italian-Russian co-production Nostalghia was begun in March 198 128 funded by Sovin Film and RAI. Le Fanu claims that this was the first time a Russian artist who was neither a dissident nor emigré had gone to Western Europe to do an art project apparently without strings attached. It was the first film by a Russian director to be made for European television. Some

filming had been scheduled for Moscow, but eventually it was all shot in

Italy.30 Le Fanu points out that Tarkovskii (b. 1932) had first gone to Italy in 1962

when Ivan 's Childhood was a success at the Venice Film Festival, where he met

Tonino Guerra, the great poet, novelist, and screenwriter, who, at that time

associated primarily with the films that made the reputation of Michelangelo Antonioni. In 1980, Tarkovskii and Guerra traveled through Italy to make the

short documentary Tempo di viaggio, a seldom seen work, which, Le Fanu

25 Klaus Kreimeier, "Kommentierte Filmografie," Andrej Tarkowskij Comp. Wolfgang Jacobsen et al. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1987) 154-167. 26 Kreimeier 166. See also Eva M.J. Schmid, "Nostalghia/Melancholia: Ein

interpretatori scher Versuch zum Verständnis von Andrej Tarkowskijs sechstem Film," Jahrbuch Film 83/84, Hans Günther Pflaum, ed. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1983). 27 Anna Makolkina, "A Nostalgie Vision of Tarkovsky's Nostalgia" in Before the Wall Came Down: Soviet and Eastern European Filmmakers in the West, Graham Pétrie and Ruth Dwyer, eds. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990) 220, 217. See Harvey Kaplan, "The Psychopathology of Nostalgia," Psychoanalytic Review 14 A (Winter 1987). 28 Le Fanu 112. 29 Le Fanu 112. 30 Mitchell 54-55.




claims, serves as the prompt for Nostalghia. According to Wolfgang Jacobsen, this short film was initially released in the Soviet Union in a censored form and was not shown in its complete version until the Tarkovskii retrospective at the 15th Moscow Film Festival in July 1987.31

Furthermore, Tarkovskii had placed himself squarely in the world of

European art cinema since the 1960s and had a particular interest in Antonioni. In the session on "Cinema Thieves - International Intrigue" held at the Centro Palatino in Rome on 9 September 1982, Tarkovskii presented clips from

Mouchette, Nazarin, and La Notte, particularly praising Antonioni for L'Avventura in general and for La Notte' s final sequence as "perhaps the only episode in the whole history of cinema in which a love scene became a necessity and took on the semblance of a spiritual act."32 As far back as an interview from

1966, Tarkovskii had showed his interest in Antonioni - in this case, his first use of color in Red Desert?1' From the diaries, we can tell that Tonino Guerra introduced him to Antonioni and got him invited to Antonioni's expensive villa. Tarkovskii can be seen in 1982 photos with Antonioni and Fellini in Gleb Panfilov's 1995 article on Tarkovskii.34 Alexandra Heidi Karriker also feels the influence of Fellini and Antonioni on Nostalghia.

5

Tarkovskii 's film should logically have been interpreted as pro-Russian rather than pro-Italian. However, after Sergei Bondarchuk, a member of the 1983 Cannes Jury, tried to keep Nostalghia from winning the Palme d'or, Tarkovskii found himself in trouble with Soviet authorities, despite his claim that his film was a patriotic one that showed the impossibility of Russians ever living happily in Western Europe.36 The governments of Andropov and Chernenko indicated that he would not be able to work in Russia again, and Tarkovskii chose to stay in the West, even though the authorities had not given leave to his

thirteen-year old son Andrei to join him.37 In July 1984 Tarkovskii's defection was announced - about the time he and his second wife Larissa bought a home in

Italy at Grosetto. In January 1986 Tarkovskii's son and mother-in-law were

31 Wolfgang Jacobsen, "Daten," in Jackobsen Andrej Tarkowskij 206. 32 Mitchell 56. 33 Andrei Tarkovskii, "la stremlius' k maksimmal'noi pravdivosti...," Andrei Tarkovskii: Nachalo... i putì, Comp. by Rostotskaia (Moscow: VGIK, 1994) 37. 34 Gleb Panfilov, "Andrei Tarkovskii: Ital'ianskii Dialog," Iskusstvo Kino 1 1 (1995): 202, 194. 35 Alexandra Heidi Karriker, "Patterns of Spirituality in Tarkovsky's Later Films," in Before the Wall Came Down: Soviet and Eastern European Filmmakers in the West. Graham Pétrie and Ruth Dwyer, eds. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990) 186. 36 LeFanull2. 37 LeFanull3.



158 Peter Christensen

allowed to join him, but after finishing work on The Sacrifice, he died of cancer in Paris on 29 December 1986.38 Thus ironically Tarkovskii had to deal with enforced exile as compared to the presumably voluntary one of Gorchakov in

Nostalghia, even choosing exile over homelife with his child. Since Tarkovskii claims in Sculpting in Time39 that Gorchakov does actually die, and since his heart problem is only mentioned in the film once, we sense that he dies in part from loss of family as much as from physical causes.

When I divide Nostalghia into sequences, I see no indication of progress for Gorchakov. The opening credits offer a black-and-white Russian landscape with four human figures. Then we suddenly leave these characters to join a car with two passengers outside a Tuscan church. Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Iankovskii), a

poet, has gone to Italy for research on the eighteenth-century composer Sosnovskii, a figure created by Tarkovskii. Although the film does not enlighten us as to how well the research has gone, it may be near the end of fairly successful completion of the project, as Gorchakov thinks a great deal about

going home to his wife and children. However, he has met in Tuscany an official Italian interpreter named Evgenia (Dominizaia Giordano) and goes to the Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena with her. There he irritably refuses to enter, while

she sees a painting by Piero della Francesca called the Madonna del parto and witnesses a religious ritual. The scene is an homage to Piero della Francesca, since we are at the Cappella del Cimittero at Monterchi (Arrezzo) near the Borgo San Sepolcro where Piero della Francesca was born.

Back at their hotel, it is obvious that Evgenia is more interested in

Gorchakov than he in her. He also falls in with Domenico (Erfand Josephson), a

mad recluse, who had locked up his family for seven years because of his

apocalyptic fear of the world's end, at the Bagno Vignoni nearby. Gorchakov

visits Domenico at his waterlogged home, alienates Evgenia to the point of her

storming off, and then agrees to carry a candle for him across the baths while Domenico takes care of important business away from town. Again at the hotel, after Evgenia has come into Gorchakov' s room to use the electric socket for her

hair dryer, they have a big fight and she accuses him of indifference to her and to

life. At the baths, Gorchakov, drunk, tells to a little girl named Agatha the story of a man who was "rescued" from the puddle in which he lived by a well-

intentioned jerk. He dreams of a visit to a roofless cathedral and burns a book of

poetry.

38 LeFanull3. 39 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 205. 40 Gauthier 120.




After Domenico goes to Rome, Evgenia courteously telephones him from the Eternal City, where she is staying with her rich and vulgar boyfriend, to remind him to complete Domenico's request with the candle. In parallel scenes Domenico (while Evgenia rushes up in horror) burns himself up in the Campidoglio, falling from the horse of the Marcus Aurelius statue. Meanwhile, without knowledge of this suicide, Gorchakov offers a type of memorial to Domenico by walking the thirty metres of the now slimy bath with a lighted candle. When he finally succeeds on the third try, he collapses, probably dying. In the famous last shot the camera pulls out to show Gorchakov with family, dog and dacha in a Russian landscape where the snow is falling, gradually revealed to be lodged within the walls of the cathedral of San Galgano.

It is significant that Tarkovskii does not give a temporal dimension to the idea of nostalgia. The final image is one of timelessness. Gorchakov wants to be back where he always has been, as if he can somehow erase from his memory this trip to Italy, which turns out only to be a detour from what he thinks of as his real life. However, Tarkovskii's nostalgia is always a return to a place. His anti-hero filled with longing, never realizes that he can never step into the same Heraclitean stream twice, for time has marched on and made such a return a desire for a state maiked by the clause '"as if things could be the same again." Vladimir Jankélévitch shows that this time dimension of nostalgia is important. In his 1974 book, L 'Irréversible et la Nostalgie, he writes:

Mais la liberté d'aller de Paris à Lille et vice versa s'applique à l'espace seulement : le trajet du retour se replie sur l'aller et se superpose à lui coextensivement pour l'annuler, en sorte que le voyageur revenu à son point de départ se trouve rétabli dans le statu quo ante : tout comme s'il n'était jamais parti! Mais attention... Seulement comme s il Car au point de vue temporel le retour s'inscrit à la suite de l'aller dans la biographie d'un voyageur que son voyage a peu ou prou transformé.41

But the freedom to go from Paris to Lille and back is applicable only to space. The trajectory of return bends back on the trip away and superimposes itself on it coextensively so as to annul it, so that the traveler, returned to his point of departure, finds himself back in the situation beforehand - all as if he had never departed. But, pay attention, it is only an "as if! From the temporal point of view the return is inscribed after the departure in the biography of the traveler, who has been more or less transformed by the journey. (My translation - PC.)

The failure to account for time in thinking of nostalgia, the factor about which Jankélévitch warns us, is indicated by the use of flashbacks, visions, and the opening and closing sequences of Tarkovskii's film.

41 Vladimir Jankélévitch, L'Irréversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1974) 26.




It is impossible to locate the first sequence in time. Is it a memory of Gorchakov? Is it the standard against which the whole film is set, but supplied by the film maker? Is it the frame for the film continued by the last shot, which also allows the camera to move back and take in more and more of the

landscape? In any case, we know nothing about Gorchakov's family or what has

happened amongst them before he set off on his trip. According to Maya Turovskaya, Gorchakov's stay at Bagno Vignoni could have lasted two weeks or two days: it does not correspond to everyday time, as is the scene for departure for Russia via Rome.42 In Either/Or, in the essay "The Unhappiest Man," Kierkegaard describes as the unhappiest man one who is cut off from the present by his longing for the past and his anxiety over the future. The obfiiscation of Gorchakov's present moments occurs through the black-and-white sequences, which could at times be either pleasing memories or projected hopes for the

future, for their temporal location is unclear.

Secondly, when Gorchakov reveals Pavel Sosnovskii's letter from Bologna, he does not recognize its atemporal longing. The composer who was to commit suicide believed that he could go back to his childhood. It is thus no surprise that his dream is a nightmare about immobility - an expression of his repressed knowledge that such failure to accept the passing of time is dangerous. Sosnovskii writes to the hypothetical Petr Nikolaevich about his stay in Italy for two years - a period significant for him as a composer and as an individual. The letter is translated into English in full in Sculpting in Time:

Last night I had a strange nightmare. I was producing an important opera, to be

performed in the theatre of my master, the Count. The first act took place in a great park filled with statues, and these were played by nude men made up with white paint, who were obliged to stand for a long time without moving. I too was acting the part of one of these statues, and I knew that were I to move a fearful punishment awaited

me, for my lord and master was there in person, watching us. I could feel the cold

rising through my feet, and yet I did not move. At last, just as I felt that I had no

strength left, I woke up. I was filled with fear, for I knew that this was no dream, but

reality itself. 1 could try to ensure that I never return to Russia, but the very thought is like death. It surely cannot be that as long as I live I shall never again see the land where I was born: the birches and sky of my childhood.44

42 Turovskaya, Cinema as Poetry 131. 43 See also Tataro for the same idea that "shifts between realms of reality make it

difficult to be certain of the ontological nature of certain events." Donato Totaro, "Time and the Film Aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky," Canadian Journal of Film

Studies 2.1 (1992): 27. 44 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 211.



"Lost in Space": Nostalgic Anti-Heroes 161

It is paradoxical that the director who championed the idea of "sculpting in time" used his film technique to give a sense of minute-by-minute duration only to block off another sense of Bergsonian duration. It is on Bergson' s thought that

Jankélévitch, who wrote a book on this philosopher, builds. Despite Tarkovskii's extreme annoyance at Eisenstein's failure to adequately account for

temporality, the famous long takes of the film, such as Gorchakov's eight- minute walk with three successive candles, are lost to the larger temporality of his life. In Sosnovsky's dream, time appears in its fearful aspect as the return of the repressed. Were he to move from his statuelike state he would be punished, and once he does move back to Russia, he is punished by his failure to account for the changes that have just taken place in him (and which he has mentioned) over the past two years. So he drinks too much and then kills himself.

Every time we see the wife of Gorchakov appear in what seems most

obviously to be a black-and-white memory flashback rather than a vision, there is no way that a temporally based story can be developed. It is just the opposite of Jacques Rivette's approach in Céline and Julie Go Boating (1973), where

ultimately the flashbacks/visions are combined into a moving and amusing story by both the women and the audience. In the boating scene at the end of the film, they finally save the little girl and escape. Without being so "scuptural" with his

camera, Rivette has indicated time in its passing mode in a way that Tarkovskii misses.

Although the character of Domenico was inspired by a newspaper story that Guerra found by chance after he began the screenplay,45 he is a generic religious madman. The speech about peace that he gives from the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius is a hopeless harangue to return to the past time before

everything went wrong - the usual appeal to the Golden Age that existed in neither time nor space. So I can not agree with Gideon Bachmann that Domenico in the Roman scene is not presented as being a fanatic.46 Although Domenico fears the apocalypse, that is, the end of time as disaster, he also really dreads the

simple passing of time, and he tries to stop it by locking up his family for seven years. The police finally have to let them out, and they are very grateful. In the fantasy in the sequence with Agatha at the baths, Gorchakov looks into a wardrobe mirror and sees the reflection of Domenico. It is not a surprising doubling, since they are both so adverse to the passing of natural time.

In the fantasy sequence in the hotel room we see Maria the wife and Evgenia join each other in the same frame, although Evgenia ultimately leaves, and we

45 Mitchell 55. 46 Gideon Bachmann, "Att resa i sitt inre: Samtal med Tarkovskij," Chaplin 26 A (1984): 160.




have only the pregnant Maria an the bed before the film's lighting techniques make her disappear. Again, we have no idea of the temporal state of the

pregnancy. Is it a reminiscence of the birth of his daughter or a desire/

premonition of a future birth? We are not allowed to know. The blending of the

past and present is made even more concrete by the fact that Domenico's German

shepherd seems to be a double for Gorchakov's family dog, which appears for the first time in the first sequence. The viewer feels that Evgenia's antagonism toward Gorchakov is more deserved than his toward her. He reveals nothing and is afraid of moving on, just as she claims. His visions serve as an objective correlative to her condemnation of his mind-set.

In the film Arseni Tarkovskii's poetry, optimistic in its way, turns out to be ironically bleak by counterpoint. Kitty Hunter-Blair's translation of the second stanza of the poem, "A Sight Grows Dim," reads:

I'm a candle burnt out at a feast. Gather my wax up at dawn, And this page will tell you the secret Of how to weep and where to be proud, How to distribute the final third Of delight, and make an easy death. Then, sheltered by some chance roof, To blaze, word-like, with posthumous light.47

It does not seem that the eight-minute one-shot sequence of Gorchakov's

pilgrimage with the candle indicates dying easily ("legko"). Nor is the cathedral of the last frame of the film a chance roof. Nor does the snow in the air indicate a posthumous light ("zagopefsia posmertno").48 At this point, Gorchakov is

beyond language and he has burned the book of poetry. The bleakness of the film triumphs over all of Tarkovskii's attempts to

endow the film with faith. First, if we accept Domenico's appraisal of Catherine of Siena, we are stuck with both the self-torturing as well as the spiritual side of this mystic. Guy Gauthier writes that the Libro della divina dottrina of St. Catherine (1347-1380) is the mystical text on which the film rests. God said to

her, "You are the one who is not, and I am the one who is." St. Catherine

preached the double knowledge of God and the self.49 Yet is not entirely clear where Domenico got his quotation from Saint Catherine. It may be a paraphrase of the opening line of Chapter 18 of the Dialogue, which Suzanne Noffke

47 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 123, quoted in Le Fanu 1 19. 48 Arseni Tarkovskii quoted in Y. Bogotolov, "la svecha, ia sgorel na pyru," Mir i

filmy Andreia Tarkovskogo, compiled by N.M. Zorkaia et al. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1991) 162. 49 Gauthier 123.




translates as follows: "Know that no one can escape my hands, for I am who I

am, whereas you have no being at all of yourselves."50 With this allusion to Exodus 3: 14, Catherine's second petition to God is partially answered.

Catherine may be associated with Domenico, a husband now acting like a

religious widower, because, although not a widow, she joined the Martellate, or widows' branch of the Dominicans at the age of eighteen, receiving her habit in that year, 1365. At this time she began to live in silence and solitude in her room. She took part in Italian events somewhat naively in her political exhortations, as does Domenico, and she looked for martyrdom. Her death at age thirty-three was hastened by long abstinence from food and sleep.5

1

Secondly, at the end of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovskii compares Western and Eastern thought and art to the detriment of the West in spiritual matters. He declares that there are moments when one wants to give up or else give oneself over to some "total worldview - like the Veda."52 The West devoured the East, however, with its material civilization. He continues:

Compare Eastern and Western music. The West is forever shouting, "This is me! Look at me! Listen to my suffering, loving! How unhappy I am! How happy! I! Mine! ME!" In the Eastern tradition they never utter a word about themselves. The person is totally absorbed into God, Nature, Time, finding himself in everything, discovering everything in himself. Think of Taoist music... China six hundred years before Christ.... But in that case, why did such a superb idea not triumph, why did it collapse? Why did the civilization that grew up on such a foundation not come down to us in the form of a historic process brought its consummation!53

Some Chinese Taoist music is made by a resident of the hotel in Nostalghia. It is so peripheral that it is like the one last call of real Eastern faith to bad Westerners. One senses here that Russia does not represent the East but rather a

part of the negatively pictured West. For Tarkovskii, "civilized society, the great mass of which has no faith, is entirely positivist in outlook." In the diary entry for 10 July 1981 we see why the film was dedicated to Tarkovskii's mother: it was a question of faith. On that day he went to her grave site and

prayed for her to intercede in his life, and suddenly "there was a phone-call from

Rome,"55 the beginning of the contract negotiations with the Italians.

50 Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue. Trans, and Preface by Suzanne Nottke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980) 56. 51 Suzanne Nofifke, "Introduction," The Dialogue 3-9. 52 Tarkovskv. Scutotinz in Time 240. 53 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 240. 54 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 228. 55 Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time 284.




Third, the legacy of Dostoevsky's ideological thought informs the film without really clarifying questions of faith. Giovanni Buttafava finds that the

dialogue between Domenico and Gorchakov that contains the saying of Catherine reminds him of the talk between Shatov and Stavrogin in The Demons of

Dostoevsky. Buttafava writes: "To Stavrogin's question, 'Do you believe in God?' Shatov, who takes on himself the role of sacrificial lamb more by voluntarism than by vocation, answers, 'I will believe.' Tarkovskii, to a

hypothetical query about his faith in the non-existence of God, perhaps would

respond in the same manner."57 For Buttafava, Tarkovskii seems to be desiring to find God even when part of him resists it.

In total contrast to Nostalghia, God is never an issue in Dark Eyes (Occhi Neri). His existence or non- existence is of no concern to anyone in the film. This fact reflects the Chekhovian origins of the film and Chekhov's basically secular view of life. About his ninth feature film, Dark Eyes (1987), Mikhalkov said to Stella Milior of Première in June 1987, that the film is inspired by Chekhov, but that when a literary property is carried to the screen, it is not a

particular work that is important but the attempt to find the spirit and general atmosphere of the author. In the case of Chekhov it is not for one to follow word for word what he wrote but to discover between the words the half-tines, the non-said.

Dark Eyes takes place in 1911, as an Italian waiter, Romano Patroni

(Marcello Mastroianni) aboard a luxury boat recounts his life's story to a

recently married middle-aged Russian man, Pavel, who comes into the ship's dining room before lunch time. Rather than preparing for the meal, Romano

regales him with the story of his life, concentrating on the crucial events of 1903. The film interrupts its long flashback at various points to show us again Paulo talking on the ship to Pavel. Romano's narration of events leads into

scenes in which we see and hear the characters. Telling of his past, Romano indicates that he was a promising young poor architectural student in Rome who married a beautiful woman, Eliza, who became an heiress. Feeling the

disapproval of his mother-in-law and incapable of enjoying luxury without

succumbing to ennui, Romano eventually lost all of his plans for the future and filled his time with casual affairs, while never stopping to feel a vague fondness

for his wife and their one child, a daughter. After twenty-five years of marriage, however, in the first flashback scene,

we see that economic disaster has hit the Patronis through Eliza's poor choice of

56 Briefly mentioned in Gauthier, "Andrei Tarkovsky et la tentation de l'Occident," CinémAction 56 (July 1990): 104. 57 Buttafava 99-100.




a lawyer in early 1905 and that the family risks losing everything. After a fight with his wife, Romano goes off in a huff to a spa (filmed at Montecatini Terme). Four scenes at the spa then follow, forming a sequence in which Romano falls in love passionately for the first time since he met Eliza in the 1880s. In the first of them, Romano's friend Tina arrives with her husband at the spa and points out to him a Russian woman who is sitting with her back to him. Tina tells him that this time he may really have pushed Eliza to the point of non-reconciliation. In the next scene, Romano, pretending to have an ailment that keeps him from walking, introduces himself to the Russian woman, Anna, as he hobbles around the spa. The first word of Russian that he learns is the word for "little dog," as the dog is her companion and her husband is in Russia. The following scene shows Romano entering a mud bath to retrieve Anna's hat, blown off by the wind, and as he brings a flower out of the pool of mud, we realize how deeply he has fallen for her. In the fourth spa scene, Romano finally one night declares to Anna his love for her. The subsequent (fifth) scene presents them the morning after they have slept together and he is eating a watermelon. It is deliberately reminiscent of Heifitz's 1960 film of the "morning after" scene in Chekhov's "A Lady with a Dog." However, later in the day, when Romano comes back to see her, he finds from the spa's maid that Anna has left the spa suddenly. He has only a letter in Russian from her, one that he can't read, as the only Russian word he knows is "sobachka." Each of the scenes is interrupted by brief shots of Romano talking to Pavel.

After the ending of the spa sequence, the next scene shows Romano having a Russian woman at the university in Rome translating the letter for him. He finds out that Anna loves him very much, but, full of fear of the unknown, she has fled back from the love for which she longed to her husband whom she dislikes. Romano resolves to go to Russia ostensibly to get a contract to set up a Russian manufacturing plant for Manlio's unbreakable glass. We see him in Russia first in St. Petersburg, then in Sistoev, where he encounters Anna. They meet in her husband's house by chance, for her husband turns out to be the official with whom Romano discusses the glass-making plant. They declare their love again in a barn surrounded by chickens. Romano swears that he will come back. However, in the last scene, after the last intercutting of shots of Romano with Pavel, we see Romano back in Rome. Eliza is selling the house and is very upset. She has found Anna's letter and asks him to tell her the truth about it, but he is too cowardly and says tht he had no love affair. So Eliza takes him back.

Finally, as the frame story close, Romano tells Pavel that she got an inheritance and that they did not have to sell the house or lose their elegant life after all. At this point we discover that Pavel has married Anna, who fled her husband. He persisted and after half a dozen times, she agreed to marry him even




though she was only fond of him. He is very happy. We see Anna on deck as Pavel comes to her to tell her to get ready for lunch, and we do not know if Romano stays to meet her again.

The story actually has a double frame. Surrounding the encounter of Romano and Pavel are the beautiful credit sequences. In the first, we see a ship in a series of woodcuts tinted in red. The ship metamorphoses itself into Romano's workplace. At the film's close, we are left with the red sun going down over the fields of Russia. It was through these fields that Romano had passed with the veterinarian and his daughter on their way back to St. Petersburg as he planned to go to Rome to pack up and leave it for good.

One of the great successes of the film is its evocation of the passage of time. In the scene in which Romano is still in Rome with his wife Elize, there are several remarkable moments. The gathering of the family on the villa's lawn for a photograph reminds us that the moment caught in the photograph can never be recaptured at a later date. After Romano goes inside the villa, Mikhalkov

gives us several beautiful tracking shots of him, pursued by Eliza, Tina, and Manlio. These actions transpire during the time that a concert is going on in the other room.

The time for the performance of a musical piece also reminds us of the duration of natural time when Romano at the baths sees Eliza for the first time. We can determine how long this initial experience of her beauty lasts for him because it is counterpointed to a woman singing an aria from The Barber of Seville. Later at the baths we notice the passage of time with the days getting cooler outside, as indicated by the gusts of wind on curtains.

In Russia the tone of the film changes when Romano tries to interest various officials in the glass making factory. We get the sense that Romano is

simply "marking time" until he finds Eliza, The background music turns into a Nino Rota pastiche score, which drowns out the words of the officials while Romano is hurried from one appointment to another. However, once he actually finds Eliza again, the music changes, and we are back to the meaningful psychological time of personal encounters, culminating in the scene in the barn.

The final indicator of the inevitable passage of human time is the use of the

lullaby remembered by Romano from is childhood days. He thinks of it when he

passes through the Russian steppes, and the last shot of the film closes with the sound of a woman singing it faintly, as we see the landscape to which Romano will never return. The mother's lullaby reminds us that Romano has never found the total love that he shared with his mother as a child, and much of it has been his fault, as he has not known how to look for happiness.

According to Sauro Borelli, the relative fortune of Nikita Mikhalkov (b. 1945) in Italy began with the success oí Slave of Love at the Week of Soviet




Cinema in Verona in June 1977 and of the Incomplete Piece for Player Piano in Rome in December 1977, based loosely on Chekhov's longest play, Platonov. These triumphs were followed by a Mikhalkov retrospective in Firenze in 1978. He appeared in 1980 at the Pesaro Festival with his film of Oblomov.59 Perhaps Mikhalkov was able to feel the pulse of Italian cinema of the time. In Dark Eyes the use of the music to Johann Strauss 's Fledermaus is an obvious counterpoint to Felllini's use of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" for the scene at the baths in 8 7/2, which, of course, also starred Marcello Mastroianni. This Fellini film is also cited as an influence on Nostalghia by François Ramasse.

Mira Liehm in 1984 wrote that one of the "symptoms of the 1970s crisis in the Italian cinema was a lack of original scripts, resulting from the producers' fear of backing unproven subjects."61 She adds, "In the seventies, as in the early forties, the use of literary adaptations tended to encourage a calligraphic approach to filmmaking."62 She characterizes Valerio Zurlini's "re-creation of a symbolic atmosphere woven from obsessions and dreams" in her praise for his 1976 adaptation of Dino Buzzati's 1940 novel // deserto dei Tartari?* Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes can be said to be a continuation of this evocative style of adaptation at its best.

On the Russian side of literary cinema, we should remember that in 1970 Mikhalkov's half-brother Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovskii had made a film of Uncle Vanya. In Russia, "The Lady with the Dog" had been splendidly filmed in a loose adaptation by Heifitz in the mid-1950s, Romm had made Late Blooming Flowers from an early Chekhov story in the 1960s, and an interesting Sea Gull (Chaika) was released in 1971.

Romano is a character who fits into both the Russian and Italian traditions. He is the superfluous man on the Russian side and the man suffering from ennui on the Italian side. Ellen Chances wrote in 1978 that although the term "superfluous man" is generally used to refer to the characters from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin chronologically up to Goncharov's Oblomov and Turgenev's Bazarov, we should consider the "superfluous man" figure as extending through

58 Sauro Borelli. Nikita Mikhalkov ( Firenze: II Castoro Cinema. 1982) 62-63. 59 Nikita Mikhalkov, "'Les Yeux noirs': Découpage intégral après montage, dialogues in extenso, bilingues (italien/français)," Avant-Scène du Cinéma 365 (1987): 8. 60 François Ramasse, "Nostalghia: Souviens-toi de Sisyphe," Etudes Cinématographiques 135-38 (1986): 121. 61 Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 273. 62 Liehm 273. 63 Liehm 273.




to Dr. Zhivago and probably beyond.64 She finds, "there are enough examples of Chekhov and the Symbolists to suggest that hints of the theme [of the

superfluous man] are hidden within the verbal acrobatics of these pre- revolutionary literary figures."65

Dark Eyes is a type of fantasy of Chekhov's story as if things did not turn out well for the people who met at the resort. In each case the little dog, "who does not bite" provides an opening for conversation between Anna and Gurov. At the end of Chekhov's story "A Lady with a Dog" there is still hope for Gurov, the unhappy married man who has had many affairs, and Anna Von Dideritz, who is also unhappily married. In the last paragraph of the story from Ronald

Hingley's translation in volume 9 of The Oxford Chekhov, we read:

Soon, it seemed the solution would be found and a wonderful new life would begin. But both could see that they still had a long, long way to travel - and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.66

Unfortunately, Romano does not have the courage to travel the long road, in this

case, back to Russsia, to his Anna. In Dark Eyes, Romano has no goals for he has no real imagination; he lacks the ability to imagine real happiness. He loafs for years, seducing women at spas to pass the time, and then when he finally has a chance to claim the woman he loves, he throws it all away to return to the

ennui of his wife's villa in Italy. In Italian poetry we get a sense of the "superfluous man" in one of the great

poems of Leopardi, "To Count Carlo Pepoli." According to Reinhard Kuhn, in

this poem, "Leopardi transforms a traditional treatment of boredom inherent in

satiety into a form of enduring and immutable ennui that nothing under the

heavens can cure."67 Only the imagination can save a man, but it begins to

wane in childhood, and "the poet, like the count, will spend his last days in the

contemplation of the bitter truth of human wretchedness."

Leopardi writes of this spiritual waste land:

Nell'imo petto, grave, salda, immota Come colonna adamantina, siede Noia immortale, incontro a cui non puote Vigor di giovanezza, e non la crolla

64 Ellen Chances, Conformity's Children: An Approach to the Superfluous Man in Russian Literature (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1978) iii. 65 Chances 142. 66 Anton Chekhov, "A Lady with a Dog," The Oxford Chekhov; Vol. 9: otoñes, 1898-1904. Trans. Ronald Hingley (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) 141. 67 Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon ors in the West, Graham Petne and Ruth Dwyer, eds.

(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990) 281. 6« Kuhn 281.



"Lost in Space": Nostalgic Anti-Heroes 169

Dolce parola di rosato labbro, E non lo sguardo, tenero, tremante, Di due nere pupille... (70-76)69

In the depths of his heart, heavy, massive, immutable, Like an adamantine column, there thrones Immortal ennui impervious to Youthful vigor, unshaken by Sweet words from lips of rose Or by the tender, trembling glance Of two black eyes." (70-76)70

These two black pupils, or "dark eyes," belong to Anna of the trembling glance in Mikhalkov's film. Romano loses her when he fails to have the imagination to either go through with his project for the glass making factory or to tell his wife that his existence with her should not be resumed after so many years apart.

We know that it is about eight years before telling his story that Romano left Anna in Russia, and that he had been married about thirty years up to that

point. He does seem to be about sixty in the frame narrative of the film.. Pavel has not been to Italy before. Yet he is able to communicate quite well with Romano. No Tarkovskian Angst here. The last shot is of a beautiful reddish sunset, and metaphorically it reminds us of the sunset of life, Romano's life, and of the life of the belle époque. The ability of the rich to move from country to

country will come to an end with World War One and set up the barriers of Eastern and Western Europe that Tarkovskii will present as so unbridgeable in

Nostalghia.

69 Giacomo Leopardi, "Al Conte Carlo Pepoli," The Poems, Geoffrey L. Bickersteth, ed. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1973) 240. 70 Kuhn 281.



"lost in space": the nostalgic anti-heroes of two russian-italian co-productions:...

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