Les Dostoïevskis

On November 25, in St. Petersburg, on the new stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater, a retrospective of films by Pierre Leon, a French director of Russian origin, film critic, actor, and teacher (in LE Femis and MSKU), student and like-minded Jean-Claude Bestta. Inna Kushnareva talks about the strange transmutations of Russian culture in French cinema Leon.

Cinema Pierre Leon is a strange cultural artifact. Born in Moscow and spent in it young years, Leon took out to France late -Soviet attachments and topics: Russian classical literature - Chekhov and Dostoevsky, Blok and Tsvetaeva, Russian romances, romantic music of the 19th century, Tchaikovsky in the interpretation of the Bolshoi Theater of the 1937 model, Aria of the Lensky performed by Sobinov ... This set of cultural milestones may seem outdated: between today's scandalous scandalous scandalous scandalous scandals The production of Dostoevsky or “Evgeny Onegin” in the current large and Soviet tradition formed a huge gap. But Pierre Leon projected the Russian and Soviet cultural inheritance to a completely different problem: the death of cinema, proclaimed by criticism in the 1980s, the crisis of narrative, which French cinema tried to overcome through the cultivation of chamber autobiographical genres, a game in real and fictitious documentary and intimacy. At the exit, the Russian classic appears in Leon, it seems to be such a familiar, “close to the text”-and at the same time in a bibli-beed.