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Chapter Seven Return of the Prodigal Son Very few events have taken place in recent times in our art that have so shaken the social and aesthetic self-consciousness of the viewer. —B. Runin on Kalina krasnaia SHUKSHIN’S KALINA KRASNAIA ranks among the most sensational Soviet movies of the 1970s. Not only did the tragic and controversial story of recidivist-thief Egor Prokudin’s attempt to “go straight” and return to the rural home of his childhood draw over sixty million people to movie theaters across the country—and many of these viewers saw the movie more than once—but it generated public debate over the film’s themes on a scale virtually unprecedented in Soviet film history. Thousands of letters poured into the editorial offices of newspapers and magazines with viewers’ reactions and questions.1 The journals Sovetskii ekran and Voprosy literatury organized roundtables to discuss the film and the cine-novella on which it was based.2 The magazine Iskusstvo kino published a lengthy article on the making of the movie in direct response to public demand.3 Readers of Sovetskii ekran voted the movie the best Soviet film of 1974 and Shukshin the best actor in the magazine’s annual contest.4 In April 1974, shortly after its premiere, the film won best picture at the Seventh Annual All-Union Film Festival in Baku.5 Shukshin was even posthumously awarded a Lenin Prize for the film in 1976. The controversial content of the film no doubt accounted for much of its popularity. As Hedrick Smith states, “[T]he film’s whole thrust—crime growing in the supposedly pure soil of Communist society, the hero’s tragic ending, doubts about the perfectibility of man, and the clear implication that it was the depravity of modern city life which had made a good country boy go bad, all ran counter to the canons of Soviet Socialist Realism.”6 Kalina krasnaia was forbidden fruit, and viewers flocked to the theaters for a taste. Indeed, the release of Kalina krasnaia marks the second time in post-Stalinist Soviet society that political intervention at the highest level— by the general secretary of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet 136 Union)—produced a cultural act.7 Just as Nikita Khrushchev intervened to obtain the publication in 1962 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, so did Leonid Brezhnev reportedly rescue Kalina krasnaia from the censors in 1974, approving the movie for wide distribution after a private screening at which he was “moved to tears.”8 Though the first intervention was for a work of “high” culture, a book, and the second was for a work of “low” culture, a popular film, in both cases camp-life ethos, convict culture, and a peasant hero are central. To date, most commentators, East and West, have focused on the social dimensions of the film: Egor’s tragic end was predetermined by his “childhood of deprivation and early exposure to the underworld,” both traceable to sociohistorical conditions in the village after World War II.9 A different view was offered by Donald Fiene, who rejected the argument that Egor Prokudin is the “victim of Soviet social forces,” asserting instead that his story “makes sense psychologically and literarily only if we see it as a modern hagiography modeled on the ancient Russian saints’ lives.”10 Taking his cue from Fiene, Robert Mann identified St. George as Egor Prokudin’s “clearest prototype” and saw in the story many allusions to folk tales and Christian lore about the saint.11 These are all valid and productive ways in which to understand Kalina krasnaia, yet the movie as a filmic and verbal text has largely been ignored. For the first time in his film career, Shukshin had found the magic cinematic formula for telling his story of marginalization and transition. His embrace of the conventions and traditions of popular cinema in Kalina krasnaia greatly heightened the accessibility and emotional impact of the movie and merits special attention. After all, Soviet moviegoers responded not only to the story unfolding on the screen, but also to the way Shukshin the writer, director, and actor told Egor Prokudin’s tale, that is, to the acting , editing, use of symbols, foreshadowing, music, lighting, and other cinematic effects employed in the making of the movie. Shukshin’s popular aesthetic—his great investment in most effectively reaching cinema’s “audience of millions” (mnogomillionaia auditoriia)12 —had more to...

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