ABSTRACT
Literature stays with us beyond the four walls of school. It will always
be with us, opening more and more unique aspects of our nation’s life.
Literature introduces us to more and more creative aspects of the Soviet
(From a Russian schoolbook of 1972)
At the very start of the twenty-first century, within months of President
Putin coming to power in Russia, a new television drama was broadcast,
entitled Rostov-Papa. Far from the only fresh dramatic series on national television, it nonetheless epitomized a massively popular art form that had
exploded over the last few years. Rostov-Papa embodied a type of social
dreaming in ten short tales which interwove their isolated characters’ lives
across the embankments, streets, stairwells, offices, buses, and bedrooms of
a southern port. This drama frames our initial discussion of action heroes,
how much they cost to film and what (if anything) they should (or can) say.
Language and lucre are very closely tied to nostalgic Russian TV’s stories of
taciturn gallantry. The eighth story in Rostov-Papa was entitled The New Don Quixote
(Novyi Don-Khitot), based upon a screenplay by Elena Gremina and direc-
tor Kirill Serebrennikov. A retired high-school teacher of literature, Ktorov,
spends his entire pension on paperback adventure stories, on pulp fiction
that combines broad-shouldered Soviet machismo and modern, well-armed
panache. Inspired by the need to undertake a similar task of honor and
romantic excess, he adopts the name of the ‘‘Faithful One’’ (Vernyi) and goes
in search of a long-lost student, Mariia, whom he once loved. Finding her proves to be difficult but he keeps looking, sometimes obsessively. Moving
further and further from rational behavior, Ktorov grows nonetheless closer
to a realization of his ideal, in that he is changing, improving, and under-
mining objective actuality by infusing it with passion. His reality is nothing
without the unmanageably romantic. Accompanied by the young and initially cynical drunkard Panas, Ktorov
wanders through Rostov, bumping on occasion into other female students
of the past, none of whom have become happy women in their adult lives.
The one Mariia, meanwhile, eludes them. Ktorov and Panas scream at a
Coca-Cola stand, blaming the ‘‘Americans’’ for stealing her, perhaps as the
heroine of West Side Story. The two men even grab the microphone at a
rally of lady communist pensioners, in the hope of finding social sympathy
and more candidates of the right age amid a sea of home-sewn red banners. They are once again unlucky, however, especially when Ktorov’s fervent,
rambling speech about boundless love and charity is dismissed angrily by
the ladies as the diversionary rhetoric of somebody ‘‘who’s been bribed by
the city administration.’’ Passion, policy and avarice are all muddled up;
they can all be equally pushy and sometimes occupy the same space.
