The Russian Memoir: History and Literature

Accommodating Consumers’ Desires: El’dar Riazanov’s Memoirs in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

Alexander Prokhorov Accommodating Consumers’ Desires: El’dar Riazanov’s Memoirs in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia ENTERTAINING MEMORIES In post-Soviet Russia, memoirs have become best-selling entertainment. Geia Publishers issues a series of spy memoirs, Declassified Lives, among whose best-known authors is the sinister spy master Pavel Sudoplatov.1 In 1998 AST Feniks publisher launched a series of male celebrity biographies titled Man-Myth, featuring such diverse male icons as Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin (Luk’ianov) and Elvis Presley (Whitmer), Russian actor and bard Vladimir Vysotskii (Zubrilina), and Casanova (Flem). On its web page, the Russian publishing house Vagrius presents memoirs as its top-selling genre. Vagrius now issues the memoirs series Literary Memoirs and My Twentieth Century; the latter includes the reminiscences of famous actors, musicians, writers, diplomats, and politicians. The memoirs of the famous Russian film director El’dar Riazanov (born 1927) have been published four times in this series. For many readers, the memoirs of popular cultural and political figures evoke pleasant reminiscences of their youth. Older readers often perceive memoirs as recollections of a more secure and stable life. Many recently published memoirs of Russian celebrities—hockey player Viacheslav Fetisov , film director El’dar Riazanov, actress Lidiia Smirnova, actor Innokentii Smoktunovskii—sell readers their star status. Such stars are typically first consumed visually, on TV and movie screens, and then verbally through their memoirs. As objects of consumption, these celebrities combine the extraordinary with the ordinary. On the one hand, Fetisov, a star of the NHL and the Russian hockey league, is the unattainable object of desire and an all-Russian champion. On the other hand, Fetisov is a Russian everyman , “just like us,” with whom the viewer and reader can identify.2 70 Christine Gledhill notes that stars have emblematic as well as cultural value, “as condensers of moral, social, and ideological values” (215). A star—through her or his celebrity status—transcends the social contradictions that the consumers of culture experience in their own lives. The celebrity status of El’dar Riazanov inspires the former Soviet intelligentsia, in particular, because in his persona and memoirs he attempts to reconcile important cultural tensions: first, between popular culture (as a filmmaker) and high art (as a poet) and second, between the myth of the artist (independent , creative, and nonconformist) and the mass-produced, industrial nature of modern culture (the artist’s labor subordinated to the entrepreneurial talent of the producer). El’dar Riazanov has made more than twenty feature films, most of them comedies or melodramas, and until recently he enjoyed the status of one of the most popular film directors in the former Soviet Union. Until the 1990s most of his films were blockbusters, and several have been recognized as symbols of entire historical periods in Russian culture—Carnival Night (1956) of Khrushchev’s Thaw,3 and Irony of Fate (1975) of Brezhnev’s Stagnation.4 Riazanov is also a popular talk show personality; he hosted Kinopanorama from 1979 till the late 1980s5 and produced numerous popular TV programs.6 After Yeltsin ordered troops to shoot at the Russian parliament building (White House) in October 1993 and public opinion turned against him, the president’s press service asked Riazanov to conduct an interview with Yeltsin in order to raise the latter’s popularity. Riazanov complied , and also interviewed Yeltsin before the national referendum. By including this episode in his book Riazanov emphasizes that his popularity goes beyond the world of the arts and can even influence an entire nation’s opinion of its leader and his policies. Since 1977 Riazanov has published eight editions of his memoirs, four of them after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since the mid-1980s Riazanov has produced such “television memoirs” as Four Evenings with Vladimir Vysotskii,7 Six Evenings with Iurii Nikulin,8 and Russian Muses.9 In his writing and television memoirs Riazanov bridges various cultural divides in an unsuccessful attempt to construct a unified, harmonious self and to vouchsafe the vicarious pleasures of his narrative persona to his postSoviet readers, and, above all, to the intelligentsia. As this volume’s introduction details, the recent Russian fashion for memoirs has its origins in a well-established tradition of memoir writing that goes back to the preromantic age. One of the important factors that recently expanded the market for memoir literature is “the tidal wave of nostalgia sweeping through postsoviet society” (Goscilo, 9). Helena Goscilo notes that Russia’s honeymoon with the West ended around 1995...