An NEP Moscow Address: Abram Room's Third Meshchanskaia (Bed and Sofa) in Historical Context

AN NEP MOSCOW ADDRESS: ABRAM ROOM'S THIRD MESHCHANSKAIA (BED AND SOFA) IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT By Paul E. Burns In the years of NEP we were staggered, and at times driven to despair, by the tenacity of petty bourgeois mentality, for we were naive in those days and did not know that it is far more difficult to change man than to change the system of a country's government. — Ilya Ehrenburg The home life of the woman is a daily sacrifice to a thousand unimportant trivialities. The old master-right of the man still lives in secret. His slave takes her revenge, also secretly. -- V. I. Lenin Bed and Sofa (1927) seems an appropriate title for a film whose major dramatic action features its male heroes maneuvering back and forth between a bed and a sofa in a one-room apartment in housing-short Moscow. The film's other distribution titles reveal further aspects of Soviet director Abram Room's most notable feature. Second Love (Liubov vtoroem) refers to the heroine's exchange of one husband for another. Love in a Basement, Moscow Basement (Podvaly Moskvy), Three in a Basement (Trois dans' un soul-sol), Love Triangle—variously suggest the film's primary locale and its menage a trois. Most of these titles were applied by foreign distributors and were meant to enhance successful export. Still, none of the above, including the most familiar Bed and Sofa (Bett und Sofa), reflects the film's multiple levels or the complex social and political fabric from which this remarkable work emerqed. Tret'ia Meshchanskaia (Third Meshchanskaia [Street]), the film's original Russian title, while probably enigmatic to Western viewers, provides the key to Paul E. BuxnA ìa AòAociate PfLo{¡eA¿on. o{ HiAtony at the, üniveXAity o I Mcvada, LaA VegaA. 73 deciphering its contemporary social message. That message has been lost on Western writers who usually either did not know Russian or may not have seen the film, relying instead on the Englishwoman Bryher's account.3 Nearly all Western analyses of Room's work laud his deft handling of psychological relations between main characters , but are critical of what they deem his bowing to authority in his "compromised" treatment of abortion. Molly Haskell, who characterized Bed and Sofa as "one of the most extraordinary feminist films of that or any other time," proves the exception, seeing the treatment of abortion as "remarkably unhysterical" and accepting the heroine's decision not to have an abortion "as an understandable change of heart." But nowhere, except in Russian sources, does one find an awareness of the protracted Soviet debate over proposed legislation on marriage, family, and relations between the sexes which preceded the film's release. Western writers have also failed to appreciate such issues as widespread female unemployment which the NEP (New Economic Policy of 1921-28, a partial and temporary restoration of capitalism) fomented and the proposals of visionary architects and planners for rebuilding Moscow and creating housing which would abjure traditional housewife servitude in favor of communal kitchens. Thus, many of Room's contemporaries and Western writers alike, missed his gently ironic critique of petty bourgeois (the meaning of the Russian word meshchanstvo) remnants in Russian daily life and his "symphony of Moscow. "b Room's place in the theoretical debates and experiments occurring in Soviet film circles during the 1920s has also been obscured by the preeminence of the revolutionary theories of such "expressionists" as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, and by Room's failure to leave a significant written legacy. His films and his infrequent theoretical remarks stand in direct contrast to those of Eisenstein, who, along with the documentari st Dziga Vertov, was the most radical of the avant-garde filmmakers. Despite this, at least one Soviet film historian has spoken of a Roomian "camp" in Soviet film thought of the twenties.' Indeed, Room's more traditional narrative style, his "naturalism" or "de-aestheticism " as it has been called,8 has much in common with and qualifies him as a precursor of Andre Bazin' s realist aesthetic. Thus, in addition to clarifying the socio-legal setting of Third Meshchanskaia, this essay will briefly examine Room's...