The Sacrifice

Apart from being the beloved country of this recently deceased director whose heyday coincided with Europe’s postwar rebirth, Sweden is undoubtedly one of the least plausible locations you might imagine involved in a cataclysm of the type only possible the last sixty-odd years.  Bergman’s untouchability has been questioned the last two decades or so, but such impertinence is common to every wave of clammy-handed critics who seek to deify their contemporaries and cast out the old masters.  When you consider that the ghosts of Milton, Bach, and Melville all labored at one point or another in obscurity in favor of talentless hacks whose names are long forgotten, Bergman’s waning authority is not surprising.  Soon enough, however, he will be restored to power because he is a genius of this newest art of ours, the moving picture.  And this film, shot with some of Bergman’s habitual actors and crew and on the Swedish island he so adored, is a monumental tribute to Bergman by the greatest cinematic artist the world has ever seen.

We begin the film in Gotland, land of God or good, an island away from the Swedish mainland, a small sanctuary amidst the torrents of chaos, war, and materialism.  There Alexander (Erland Josephson), a family patriarch and man of no faith, lives with his family, including his English wife Adelaide and their mute six-year-old son.  Alexander’s days are quiet ones, very distant from the storm of his younger years in which he was an actor, psychologist, and something of a philosopher.  The postman comes with a telegram that allows Alexander to digress into the usual existential poppycock about the fate of man (no one is supposed to be impressed with the casual mention of profound topics except perhaps Alexander himself).  Civilization, he muses, has no real meaning, and it is fruitless even to discuss that some higher power has given us the privilege of life.  It is in this context, at a family dinner to which the postman is invited, that the unthinkable occurs: a short, earthquake-like scene is followed by an emergency announcement from the television. This is the worst kind of announcement; the announcement no one ever, ever hopes to hear or consider; the announcement that for a while during the height of the Cold War seemed less of a fantasy than at any other time; the announcement that makes Alexander do something he has never done or wanted to do.  And at the end of this strange session which he seals with a promise, Alexander wakes up, cold and wretched.  But the world he sees does not reflect his misery in the way he thought it might.

There are myriad interpretations as to why Alexander makes such a choice, why his house erupts in flames (in one of the greatest scenes in all of cinema), and why his son, in the end, finally speaks.  Perhaps the most satisfying approach would be to ask oneself what Bergman and Tarkovsky have in common.  Both are Northern Europeans, aesthetes of the finest caliber, untraditional if devout in their spirituality, and committed to demolishing the falsehoods of trend, movement, and theory that throughout the course of human history have tried and failed to reduce us to amœbæ.  Man is first and foremost a spiritual being, a soul caged in a brittle box.  What else he makes of himself is often dictated by vanity, hedonism, or cruel circumstance.  The aging Alexander, who has always been vain and hedonistic, cannot fathom for the longest time why anyone should care about what we can’t see, or those billions of people we cannot meet, or the ecumenical and moral responsibility we have to preserve ourselves in the face of extinction and lesser plagues.  Hopeless man does not even deserve my pity, he assures himself.  Then he grasps at a thread – a large, branched thread that he plants on his birthday – tries to follow its path against the almighty sun, and comes across something else.  His beginning is his end, so to speak.  Or something greater than both.

Bely, "Ночь"

A poem ("Night") from one of Russia's greatest prose writers, most famous for this unparalleled novel. You can read the original here.

As spring’s warmth passed, so too the wicked heat;
In vain I sought plain peace, elusive still.
And in a roaring wave the house went shrill
To Hayden’s heights flew forth one elite.

And arrogant he went, in hidden shame.
Contemned by fate, he blew above the dim
And wilted grass, his sighs now long and grim,
And wind beat pale the shacks through darkened panes.

What silence! What simplicity reigns whole!
What miserly and fireless sunrises bend!
So too will you pass on, o friend, poor friend,
Why then should seas of storms still flog our soul?

Pour down, o rain, in mutiny severe!
So sweet cascade the sighs of sumptuous trees.
And night’s effacing look talks in the breeze,
With suffering unheard and wind unnear.

Blok, "Разгадал я, какие цветы"

A work ("I have guessed which flowers you keep") by this Russian poet. You can read the original here.

Up above on that window most white
I have guessed which flowers you keep.
You’re afraid, I suppose, that you might
Catch me wandering through sweetest sleep.

Now I walk amidst flowers most white
And behold the bright flashes of day,
May it be one of joy or of plight,
All the same will your kisses come play.

No sun’s love will you gain from afar,
For you fear to approach it and cheat.
That all-burning, all-wandering star
Cannot love you like my passion’s heat.

And this morn I came forth and I sang,
Pretend not you were deaf to your knight.
A voice lonely, replying, then rang,
And, aquiver, your flowers turned white.

Despair

There are some literary themes that will always seem well–worn, perhaps because they are so essential.  Love in its myriad forms; betrayal, the greatest of all sins; nostalgia for a lost opportunity, a lost childhood, or a lost homeland.  In fact, love, betrayal, and nostalgia could very well form the essential triptych of human journeys.  When we love unrequitedly, we are betrayed.  And when our love is returned, rare is it that such a sensation lasts more than a few weeks or months of actual time.  Love is unique in that it cannot be fully realized until  much later in the future.  The perspective that love brings in relation to all the other petty details of life is one of richness, unending richness, and is the feeling that comes closest to giving us a sense of what consciousness beyond all these buildings and clocks might be.  Not everyone gets the chance to be truly, madly, and deeply in love; some wallow in the grim, sadistic dungeon of quelled lusts and voyeuristic itches.  No surprise then that some of our society's most resentful souls (let us leave aside for the moment the pathologically and maniacally ill) are those who believe they should be loved, believe also they have much to offer prospective partners, and then shun the world because all the world's lovers have shunned them.  This vicious cycle may, in some circumstances, lead to crime.  But more often than not it leads to misanthropy, bitterness, and a need to channel this frustration into something productive like work or art.  And this last observation should inform our reading of this brilliant novel.
 
Our narrator, Hermann Karlovich (his Russian patronymic; no surname is ever provided) sells chocolates in Berlin.  He is, much like the protagonist of this classic Russian tale, a bilingual Russo–German equally at home in both cultures.  And like the German of Pushkin's story, Hermann is Russian in his social circles but German in his thoughts.  This means, in general terms, the company and culture he keeps are Russian and russophone, but his philosophizing and emotional limitations suggest a more austere upbringing full of rules, regulations, and harmony.  Before I am castigated for espousing such multicultural rot, you should consider the author of Despair and his view on the matter (better yet, read Nabokov's scathing reflections on German culture in this book reviewed earlier on these pages).  The whole point is that Despair is about cultural clichés, romantic clichés, even the much–belabored thematic cliché of the double, resulting in a monstrous parody of all these approaches.  Not that all critics of the novel agree with this assessment.  Their summary (and the one furnished by Hermann himself) would read as follows: a man, frustrated by a boring job, an unfaithful wife and, perhaps, unrealized literary aspirations, finds his Doppelgänger in a Prague park, and plots his own murder so as to abscond with the insurance money, thereby altering his tedious lifestyle.  Now if you know anything about Nabokov you know he is a master stylist and a master plotter – a rare combination in the annals of literature.  While Despair injects some of the "rhetorical venom" (Nabokov’s own comment in his introduction) that would be found in two later works, if this were indeed the plot and sequence it would be as worthless as the pulp novels that so fascinate Hermann’s airhead wife Lydia.  Critics retort that Hermann, a "failed artist," is raving mad and unable to conjure up anything more than the most recycled of plots, see the whole endeavor as Nabokov’s critique of bad writers with evil intentions, and gladly write off the work as one of the grandmaster’s least successful gambits.        

Yet they are, I say in all modesty, completely wrong.  The description that Hermann provides – indeed, the ostensible events of the novel itself – are mired in a deception so fantastic and ingenious that every cell of my being wants to reveal at least one card of Nabokov’s hand.  But I cannot.  I cannot say what numerous readings of this novel indicate might be the true storyline, the true motivations of Hermann, of his double Felix, and of his wife and her perfidious cousin, Ardalion.  If I were to hint at the trick that Nabokov plays on his unsuspecting readers, I would direct your attention to Hermann's treatment of one subject in particular: that of art.  Art for Nabokov is the pinnacle of human achievement, God's work refashioned and regurgitated in the finest form our earthen clay can muster.  If someone in Nabokov's world is a friend and champion of art, true art, it is likely that his negative character traits will be offset by a bit of favoritism from his creator (as in this novel, Nabokov's best).  Keep this in mind when judging Hermann's and Felix's discourse in the country inn, or Ardalion's letter, or Hermann's bizarre machinations in a Berlin post office that so reminded me, for some reason, of the Berlin post office which I would frequent.  There are so many layers of suggestion in Despair that, if you are in the mood for a murderous allegory of revenge, you cannot put it ... And there, I fear, I have said too much already.

Tarkovsky, "Вот и лето прошло"

This poet will forever be known, first and foremost, as the father of perhaps the greatest director of modern cinema.  This poem ("And so summer has passed") is recited by the title character in one of his son's films, a masterpiece with few peers.  You can find the original here.

And so summer has passed,
Fictive bittersweet squall,
The sun’s shadow is warm,
But this cannot be all.

All that could came at last,
A soft five-fingered fall
Of a leaf in my hands,
But this cannot be all.

No heaven or morass 
Failed to pain or enthrall,
Warm light shined without end,
But this cannot be all.

By life’s wing I trespassed,
Safe and strong was my wall,
Fortune beamed on my days,
But this cannot be all.

No leaves fumed by hot gas,
No twigs broken and small,
Clean clear sky was like glass,
But this cannot be all.