Shaping the genealogy of the Soviet intelligentsia in two film adaptations of the 1960s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article traces the role of the intelligentsia as represented in the cinema of the Thaw through two Soviet films from 1960: The Blind Musician by Tat’iana Lukashevich and The Northern Story by Evgenii Andrikanis. Both films were adaptations of literary texts: a short novel by Vladimir Korolenko originally published in 1898, and a novella by Konstantin Paustovskii published in 1938 respectively. The protagonists of both films belong to diverse generations of the Russian intelligentsia. Based on an analysis of the films and archival research of the scripts, this article demonstrates that these two films covertly revisit the historical role of Russia’s intelligentsia, which they present as an independent force of historical progress, albeit inspired by the ‘common people’. This new image of the intelligentsia was created by film-makers who had worked in cinema since the 1920s and early 30s, and who remembered Stalin’s humiliation of intellectuals. They opposed to the experience of the late 1940s and its anti-cosmopolitan campaigns the heroic myth of the revolutionary intelligentsia. This myth represented the intelligentsia as Russia’s liberators and was traced back to the pre-Revolutionary period. Both films combine the aesthetics of Stalinist cinema and local experiments that tended to destabilise it.