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

7 Resurrected Fathers and Resuscitated Sons: Homosocial Fantasies in The Return and Koktebel

169 Masculinities: There Are Fathers and Then There Are Fathers At the turn of the millennium, gender studies exhibited an increased interest in and concern about contemporary masculinity, an anxiety that mainly stems from the perception of “manhood in an awkward predicament .” Recurrent fears of “man in crisis” produced a body of scholarship shifting the focus from singular masculinity to masculinities and from viewing woman as a social construct to a persistent belief that man is the socially constructed gender. Social scientists and psychiatrists alike dwell on the difficulties men experience in negotiating their roles as fathers, husbands, lovers, and workers (Coward 95, Clare 1). Rather brazenly Guy Corneau proclaims: “Woman is, Man is made,” basing his pronouncement on the biological realities of sexual difference that mark woman with menstruation and leave man vulnerable and in need of acquiring his identity (14). Much in the same fashion, Francis Fuku­ yama claims that masculinity and fatherhood are the socially constructed identities, in effect reversing Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal feminist truism . Stella Bruzzi’s monograph (2005) on fatherhood and masculinity as represented in Hollywood cinema of the 1990s argues that these “crisis” books within gender studies promoted the sensitive and caring father as a male archetype, which “in turn cemented the importance of the need for male role models, a move that reflects a fundamental ambivalence within the men’s movement: men were radicalized to the extent that they seven Resurrected Fathers and Resuscitated Sons: Homosocial Fantasies in The Return and Koktebel Yana Hashamova 170 · reconceiving filial bonds were more in touch with their feelings, but they were also regressing into essentialism” (157–58). Masculinity was understood as a role model to be passed from father to son. On the other side of the Berlin Wall and after the disintegration of the Soviet system and its social organization, both men and women experienced difficulties identifying their places and roles in the new society . Men found themselves threatened by the instability of the new Symbolic order, which, unlike the Soviet system, required that they locate their niche within society instead of vouchsafing them a secure place within a stable hierarchy. Consequently men felt that they had to find new ways of empowering their positions and restoring their machismo, which some, paradoxically, perceived as having been damaged during the Soviet period by women’s emancipation. Viktor Erofeev, a contemporary Russian writer, claims that the Soviet system ruined Russian men because it liberated women socially and sexually, and women’s demands threatened and weakened Russian men (51–56; 112–17). Feminist scholars of Soviet society, such as Lynne Attwood, also elaborate on this paradox , observing that men seemingly became weaker and less resourceful because they perceived that women no longer needed their “protection” (1990; 1993, 65–88). These brief observations of men’s identification anxieties in Russia today resemble Western scholars’ discussion registered in the body of “man in crisis” books. Of particular importance to Russian culture, however, and to this discussion is the function of the father in individual, family, and social identifications. Russia’s centuries-long history of tsarism reveals a particular conversion of the tsar’s figure into the “father of the nation.” The Russian collective imagination knows the mythic preeminence of the “batiushka tsar” and his much-revered authoritarian status. In the history of twentieth-century Russian totalitarianism, the father symbol positioned the leader (Lenin and Stalin) as a paternal god who reigned above all (Schoeberlein). Later in the twentieth century, however, this paternal function of the leader weakened and the first secretaries of the Communist Party morphed from ideal fathers into government functionaries . Thus one can argue that the nostalgia for the return of the paternal figure in Russian culture, evident in most recent films, although similar to Western gender anxieties, also results from the long and successful political tradition of upholding the figure of the leader as the resurrected fathers and resuscitated sons · 171 father of the nation, a tradition that faded away in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It is no surprise that Vladimir Putin’s image has slowly but firmly undergone reverse alteration, from a party functionary to authoritative leader (and perhaps father) of the nation.1 Such concerns (more social than political) about the destabilized father function, however , are not uniquely Russian and are also registered in America: David Blankenhorn’s influential Fatherless America contends that the absence of fathers has...