Alexey Alexandrovich Karenin

Screenwriter and director Avdotya Smirnova has said more than once that none of her friends go to the cinema, but watch films on DVD or on the Internet. People around me don’t go to the cinema either, but they do read the magazine “Seance”: apparently, enlightened fellow citizens have stopped connecting their viewing interest in cinema with the box office. As a result, it is the audience's successes that are so unexpected.

The other day I came across “Anna Karenina” by Sergei Solovyov (in theaters since 2009). I didn’t know about this film at all: Solovyov filmed it for almost twelve years, at first as a serial.

In an interview with Tatyana Drubich, who played Anna, we read: If I were a director, I would film two parts. The first part is the story told by Karenin, the second is the story told by Vronsky.

In the “rental” version of Solovyov’s film, I see the story itself as told by Karenin—at least not by Vronsky. So Alexey Alexandrovich - that is, Oleg Ivanovich Yankovsky in this role - should be considered the main character of the film narrative. For outside of Karenin-Yankovsky, the 2009 film is just a tragedy of a very nervous married woman who managed to fall madly in love with a young man with whom nothing but a “sunstroke” of passion connected her.

However, who would risk playing Anna after Vivien Leigh (and twenty other actresses)? And Dolly - after Iya Savvina? There is no doubt that Garmash is a wonderful actor, but what to do if the script did not give him any material for the role of Konstantin Levin?

In his 1928 work “Tasks of Poetics” V.M. Zhirmunsky wrote (at the height of discussions about formalism) that “any change in form is, thereby, already a revelation of new content, for empty form cannot exist where form is understood, by its very definition, as an expressive device in relation to some content."

In fact, it is from these positions that we understand Yankovsky-Karenin in a very special way. Oleg Ivanovich Yankovsky was an actor of unique talent, and the main thing he needed for his work was freedom from the form set by the director. Yankovsky himself “lived into” the role and no longer played either Alexei Aleksandrovich Karenin or lawyer Komarovsky in Doctor Zhivago, but became them, finding expressive techniques for the content he himself created.

It is thanks to Yankovsky that Tatyana Drubich is reliable in the scenes with Karenin, even in those shots that do not quite correspond to the stylistic instrumentation of the film.

Here Karenin is at home, not yet taking off his uniform with gold embroidery, tenderly hugging Anna, whom the viewer sees from the back naked to the waist (almost “Venus with a mirror”). Strictly speaking, this could not have happened - not only then, but never, if only because gold embroidery will inevitably scratch you into blood. But this comes to mind later, and here we see Karenin’s genuine feeling and Anna’s half-childish affection.

Karenin in this film is much more diverse and human than in the novel, where Tolstoy every time reminds us of his ears and his raspy voice. Karenin-Yankovsky is a lean man, approaching fifty years of age, habitually secular, habitually reserved, at first happy, then lost and suffering so much that he no longer has the strength to hide this torment.

And most importantly, Yankovsky’s Karenin is genuine in his feelings: he loves, he is deceived and thereby especially offended and, finally, crushed. And he's scared...

As is known, in the novel Tolstoy sought to contrast Anna as a symbol of a sparkling, living, albeit “wrong” life - with the lifeless, drying out, mechanical-protocol Alexei Alexandrovich with his service, unnecessary committees, empty rituals. In the film, Anna is almost immediately revealed to us as a woman with a breakdown; so then this tear simply unfolds “increasingly.”

At the very beginning of the film, Anna is trying to convince the exhausted and tear-stained Dolly to forgive her husband - but, it seems to me, Anna herself is already so excited that no reassurance can come from her. However, if you play Anna as constantly on the verge of tears and only trying to hide her doom, then it turns out to be more tiresome than dramatic.

I would give a lot to know how Yankovsky came to his interpretation of Karenin: after all, in essence, it abolishes the moralizing “MKhAT” construction, which has become classic in the Russian theater and film tradition. As a schoolgirl, I managed to see Nikolai Pavlovich Khmelev (1901-1945) in the role of Karenin at the Moscow Art Theater. Forty-year-old Khmelev played Karenin as an old courtier with an unpleasantly raspy voice, so the audience could only feel sorry for the man who had suffered undeserved humiliation during such years.

But could Yankovsky-Karenin be humiliated?

It would be a completely different story.

Rebekah Frumkina