Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film

5 War as the Family Value: Failing Fathers and Monstrous Sons in My Stepbrother Frankenstein

114 The Symbiosis of Myths The connection between the motif of war and the representation of fatherhood in Soviet and post-Soviet cultures is persistent yet not logically obvious. Since such films of the 1960s as Sud’ba chelovka [Fate of a Man, Sergei Bondarchuk 1959], Kogda derev’ia byli bol’shimi [When the Trees Were Tall, Lev Kulidzhanov 1961], Mir vkhodiahshchemu [Peace to Him Who Enters, Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov 1961], Otets soldata [Father of a Soldier, Rezo Chkheidze 1965], the understanding of the Great Patriotic War (the official Soviet term for World War II) as a means to sanctify the father figure is solidified in Soviet culture. All these and many other similar films and books appeared in the 1960s during the Thaw, which on the one hand, had removed the supreme patriarchal authority of Stalin and yet, on the other, had secured the victory in the war as the most important if not the sole legitimization of the Soviet regime. Invoking the war as the cornerstone of the father’s authority, directors of the sixties strove to replace the collapsed and debunked father figure of Stalin with a less god-like image of the father, and thus simultaneously transformed the totalitarian mythology of war into a more democratic and humane mythology of the nation’s collective suffering that was instigated by the war. Although the war significantly depleted the male population and inevitably made women largely responsible for the well-being of families, war films of the sixties overwhelmingly failed to undermine, or at least five War as the Family Value: Failing Fathers and Monstrous Sons in My Stepbrother Frankenstein Mark Lipovetsky war as the family value · 115 to question, patriarchal authority and, moreover, rarely attempted to examine the connection between the war and women’s changing social roles.1 It is well known that the core of totalitarian culture was shaped by the affirmation of society’s interests over the interests of the nuclear family, as well as by the mandatory defeat of individual values for the sake of collectivist ideologies. In contrast, the change of focus in the sixties from the social “fathers” to the private father-child relationships reflected the dramatic problematization of the entire system of Soviet values, a problematization that was generally indicative of Thaw culture. However, despite the anti-Stalinist ideology of the aforementioned films, the connection between the war and its culture of violence and suffering, with the symbolic capital of the father(ing), was a way of rewriting the totalitarian mythologies. As Alexander Prokhorov demonstrates, “Thaw culture has inherited from Stalinism the family trope—as a symbolic image of the Soviet society, and war—as the symbolic image of this society’s main form of existence” (Prokhorov 152). In Thaw films the structure of the totalitarian Great Family was preserved in the realm of the nuclear family—it was domesticated and deprived of imperial grandeur, and yet it at least maintained and arguably increased its sacredness. Thus the war theme shaped a unique discursive field in the culture of the 1960s to the 1980s, a field in which the official and liberal discourses frequently merged, or at least tolerated each other. The mythos of the war, invariably understood as the patriotic war in which the interests of the state were no different from the interests of an individual or a family, allowed the perpetuation of a balance, however fragile, between society and the individual of post-Stalinist Soviet culture. Moreover, the connection of the war themes with the father figure or, more precisely, with the idealization of patriarchal values and corresponding models of social order, constituted the very foundation of this balance. The myth of the Great Patriotic War not only retained its symbolic value during the post-Soviet period but also has been significantly reinforced during the years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The cultural historian and sociologist Lev Gudkov, while analyzing numerous polls of VTsIOM (All-Russia Center for the Studies of Public Opinion), argues that, since 1995 and up to the present, “an extremely structured social attitude towards the war is incarnated and consolidated in the main symbol that integrates the nation: victory in the war, victory in the 116 · war in the post-soviet dialogue with paternity Great Patriotic War. In the opinion of Russia’s inhabitants, this is the most important event in their history; it is the basic image of...