Uncensored?: Reinventing Humor and Satire in Post-Soviet Russia

Debunking Myths Old and New: Yury Mamin's Satires in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema

Debunking Myths Old and New: Yury Mamin's Satires in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema Alexander Prokhorov, College of William and Mary I didn't choose the path of comedy and satire. There are simply those who see things differently than the majority. That's the way I am: material that might give some people heart attacks might be very funny to me. - Yury Mamin in an interview with Andrew Horton Yury Mamin's satires have captured the Soviet empire's collapse and exposed the rise of the new imperial mythology on the ruins of the Soviet utopia. His films owe their success to his rare ability to convey the grotesque atmosphere of Russia's everyday life. Mamin recalls that as a young theater director he was drafted into the army, where he was assigned to the brass orchestra at a missile base.1 The filmmaker notes: "The army, being a microcosm of Our country, helped me to understand that we live beyond the looking glass, and that the main genre that God chose me to pursue is the social satire.,,2 The society that finds its essence in military barracks and concentration camps, and the lack of an alternative to this oppressive model in Russian life, became the central themes of Mamin's pictures. A student of Eldar Riazanov, Mamin started his career at a time when the three major living comedy filmmakers, Riazanov, Georgy Daneliya, and Leonid Gaidai had stopped making films that made people laugh. Daneliya's late Soviet films turned to bitter sarcasm and were not very successful with viewers . Similarly, Gaidai failed to revive the slapstick genre that helped establish his fame in the 1960s. Finally, Riazanov's films started gravitating towards nostalgic melodrama out of tune with the new values and audiences. Mamin filled this vacuum with his biting exposes of the crumbling imperial mythology. 1 Before Mamin became a filmmaker, he established himself as a talented theater director with a Meyerhold-inspired production of Denis Fonvizin's Millor (Nedorosl') at the Velikie Luki Drama Theater. 2 Larisa Volodimerova, "Iurii Mamin: Chast' Vtoraia," http://lit.lib.ru/w/ wolodimerowaJ~ w/yuriymamin2.shtml (accessed 8 March 2006). Uncensored? Reinventing Humor and Satire in Post-Soviet Russia. Olga Mesropova and Seth Graham, eds. Bloomington, IN : Slavica Publishers, 2008,101- 15 . 102 A LEXANDER PROKHOROV This article traces the evolution of Mamin's satirical style from the late Soviet Neptune's Feast (1986) to the post-Soviet Kiss the Bride (1998), examining his use of carnivalistic and dystopian discourses and his dialogue with the Petersburg myth of Russian culture. I argue that despite the popular success of Mamin's films in the late 1980s, they continue the tradition of high-brow art cinema. As David Bordwell has demonstrated, "the art cinema motivates its narratives by two principles: realism and authorial expressivity. On the one hand, the art cinema defines itself as a realistic cinema.... Yet at the same time, the art cinema foregrounds the author as a structure in the film's system .,,3 The art cinema resolves the tension between realism and authorial expressivity "by the device of ambiguity.,,4 Mamin's satires take late-Soviet and post-Soviet reality (topical political issues, current forms of popular culture, the cityscape of Leningrad-Petersburg) and carnivalize it through a distinct set of authorial devices: the anarchic street crowd as the main hero; a loose narrative structure guided by eruptions of the crowd's clowning; and mockery of official iconography by linking it visually with the lower body stratum. Mamin's satires possess a distinct authorial style and can be viewed as chapters of an oeuvre unified by a subversive tone and irreverent attitude towards Russian imperial culture. His films engage with and subvert that culture 's foundational identity narratives, with the Petersburg myth at their center . The Petersburg myth occupies a special place in Mamin's films because it both asserts and challenges the legitimacy of modern Russia as a partially Westernized empire. The treatment of the Petersburg myth distinguishes Mamin 's Soviet satires from his post-Soviet ones. If in Neptune's Feast and Fountain (1988), Mamin mocks the absurd Soviet universe but stops short of challenging its legitimacy, then in Sideburns (1990) and Window to Paris (1993), Mamin questions the very possibility of such a community. In the latter two films, the director depicts Petersburg as the setting of two failed utopias: imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. He also embraces in his two later...