Not about Stalin

I practically do not remember films or performances where Comrade Stalin would appear. I vaguely remember only some kind of film. It seems to be called the "defense of Tsaritsyn." That is, it does not seem, but that was what it was called. And in this film, I did not remember anything and slowly pacing around the table with a pipe in the hand of a mustachioed person. We can assume that I have not seen anything.

The mobile image of Stalin, I repeat, practically did not come across. But his statue image, his busts and monuments, abundant and diverse iconography served as a constant, unquenchable background of my early childhood. Even the word "portrait" in my view meant "Stalin". I don’t remember this myself, but my mother said that, considering and leafing through the school textbooks of my older brother with different portraits, I sentenced: "And this Stalin is Pushkin. And this Stalin is Lomonosov. And this Stalin is Michurin."

Portraits of Stalin, especially colored, especially those in the "Ogok", I really liked it. The semantic center of any composition has always seen a mustache. It is they. Not beating with wisdom and kindness, slightly narrowed eyes, not gilded shoulder straps with gigantic stars on them, not noble - hair to a hair - grayish hair. No, it is a mustache.

Once my mother discovered that on all pages of a recently donated album for drawing, there was the same repeating plot. Mustache. Only a mustache, painted with different colors - red, yellow, blue, purple, green, again red. I endlessly repeated these mustache in a vain attempt to achieve an ideal, but mockingly elusive symmetry. I still did not understand then that the ideal symmetry is miraculous and that the meaning of all living art is also contained in its constructive violation.

Many years later, seeing the Hokusai album "thirty -six species of Fuji", of course, I remembered these Stalin mustache.

But this is much later. And then, when my mother discovered my “thirty -six species”, she was terribly scared, took this album from me and, under a powerful accompaniment of my desperate Reeva, burned it in the stove.

Nowadays, of course, a legal question cannot arise, of course: why did this, in fact, were clear whose mustache I portrayed?

But then the question of the owner of the mustache, about the same as the individual smile of the Cheshire cat, did not stand. Whose whose ... is understandable whose! No need to ask stupid questions!

Around the “mustache” torn from the iconographic context, their image was recreated by itself, perhaps not the only, but of course the main owner. And this image, equipped with green or purple mustache, was, to put it mildly, not too canonical, and therefore, fraught with its creator, easily predictable consequences.

Films, where Stalin appeared, I, as already mentioned, practically did not see in childhood. Yes, they were not until the seventies - time timid, cowardly, and therefore especially nasty restoration. In the then infinite and little movie epics, Stalin began to arise on a military theme - not that positive and not that negative, but, so to speak, "ambiguous." But then I was already an adult and did not really watch these films.

But Stalin’s Stalin's time was nowhere to go anywhere. Neither in the cinema, nor on TV. And I knew about these epochpers mainly from the memoirs of older friends. Apparently, apparently, an outstanding in its mythological power, a masterpiece, which was called the "Fall of Berlin", was performed.

I knew something about him. He knew, for example, that the film was shot in 1949 by the director of Chiaureli according to the scenario of the Stalin Laureate Pavlenko, known not only with the Laureate novel with the simple name "Happiness", but also by the organs that are not heated for both sides.

I knew something, but I have not seen the film for the time being.

And yet I saw him. Although not entirely. This happened in the winter of the 94th year. I turned on the TV at the moment when the epic was leaving for a magnificent sunset, to the apotheosis, to the final scene, where the plane and the leader fly to the defeated Berlin and sits on the square in front of the Reichstag - and where would you still like the plane.

In this scene, the great leader leaves the plane in a white Marshal tunic and calmly, leisurely and thoughtfully goes along the ranks of former prisoners of war in striped clothes. He is enthusiastically welcomed by people of different nationalities - representatives of the liberated peoples of Europe. The liberated peoples, symmetrically - like those very ill -fated mustache - located on both sides of the majestic figure of their liberator, harmoniously, like an opera choir, not hiding tears and disciplinedly observing a live queue, shout out words of gratitude. These words sound in different languages, but the word "Stalin" is clear to everyone.

The comic effect, which was clearly not provided for by the creators of this vapuko, was many times aggravated by a completely unthinkable spatio-temporal context in which these frames overtook me.

Firstly, I saw him not somewhere, but, imagine, literally in the city of Berlin, about which the outstanding film was told about the fall, and not far from the place where Comrade Stalin once came down from heaven. The fact is that these days there was a retrospective of old Soviet cinema on one of the German television channels. I rarely looked there - it was not too interesting, and many films were familiar to me. And then he suddenly turned on and immediately realized what he came across.

Secondly, the film was duplicated, so all his heroes spoke German. Literally everything: Hitler, Stalin, Zhukov, Red Army soldiers, partisans, SS, Ukrainian girls stolen in Germany - everything.

I can’t convey to what it was funny.

When the marvelous sight ended, I switched to the channel where the news was. Including from Moscow. They showed a communist demonstration, and the first thing I saw was a large, as if a portrait pulled out of a movie that was pulled out of a movie, which was pulled out of a gloomy crowd, pulled out of a movie. The commentator, as just Stalin in the Berlin TV, also said something in German. And it was not funny at all.

I do not know at all what to answer if someone for some reason asks what this text is about. He certainly is not about Stalin, although it may seem that he is the main one. And not about his images, from early childhood woven into the dense fabric of my visual experience. And not at all about the features of totalitarian cinema. And not about the fact that approximately the same in various historical or spatio-temporal contexts can be homominically funny and dreary-vigilant. Who does not know this!

Or maybe we are talking about the fatal unattainability of the ideal symmetry accepted sometimes for signs of harmony of the world, the mutual consent of all its disparate elements? Or that this very unattainability is a sign of life and is.

Or is it about rhythm, not always perceptible and conscious, but always forcing us at one time or another and, it would seem, it is not clear to pull out of the memory that the related fragments and episodes, words and words, half -forgotten fading pictures, melodies, smells?

Maybe so. Because the rhythm - in music, in poetry, in history, in biography - like symmetry, is also not perfect. Elements and episodes never repeat each other literally. They only rhyme and echo. But so far we are not losing the ability to hear in a rash noise and gncing these roll calls and aukani, we are not left confident or at least the hope that we are not alone here.