Balabanov and Empire

Three years ago, shortly before the Federation Council allowed the president to enter troops into the territory of Ukraine, they called me from an unfamiliar number to +38. The calling person introduced himself to Alexander from Simferopol and asked to send a book about Balabanov on his birthday to his teenage son, which was just released by the magazine "Session". Alexander was persistent and simple to abolition, in addition to my phone, he also got the number of the widow of Balabanov Nadezhda Vasilyeva; Then, with the whole editorial office, we tried to send him a copy, but then it just began - the courier services refused to accept the parcel, and the Russian Post did not give any guarantees. Crimean, it seemed, did not give a damn about the historical events that were happening around - he really wanted to turn the matter before his birthday, but nothing came of it. Then, it seems, the book was still sent, but Alexander, whose number now began at +7, continued to call, congratulate the holidays on the rights of a good acquaintance and was very offended when I asked him to stop the persecution. A sudden breakthrough of the broadcast in the days of the Crimean spring made a strong impression on me - no less strong than a 30%discount, which in the summer of 2015 I was provided in one of the Kyiv restaurants, learning the author of the book about Balabanov in me.

As the author, they are sometimes written by fans of his work from different cities of Russia. Recently, one person sent his own short film: the veteran of the war and the young guy on Victory Day is simultaneously beaten by hooligans, both lose consciousness and meet somewhere in the superman space, roam the battles together, moving from winter to summer (as in “I also want”), and then come to their senses in the hospital ward. “To make sure that everything was in order with him,” the mother of his mother throws, getting out of bed. "Where are you?" - "To the military enlistment office." I never found out where he plans to fight.

In a conversation about Balabanov, representatives of a conditionally liberal camp always experience certain difficulties: on the one hand, the power of its influence is obvious and continues to increase (and for Russian cinema he finally became a father’s figure, pushing Tarkovsky), on the other - he has to not notice or seek excuses for his own statements by the director (“the Jews arranged for the revolution,“ Khrushchev, ” He gave the Crimea ”), and for the presence of a significant number of adherents of the“ Russian world ”in its fan base. They appealed to Balabanov, but could not assign him all the warring parties. It turned out to be difficult to do: even the famous words "answer for Sevastopol!" They go into business only after a small semantic substitution-after all, they are said by not the universal favorite of Danila, but the comic-appropriate character of Viktor Sukhorukov, with whom few people want to identify.

Balabanov (like Boris Red) arose in the Urals as a result of a constant transfer of the flows of Soviet people, among his ancestors were not only Russians, but also Poles, and Moldovans, and Ukrainians; He spent the summer vacation at his uncle-yielding carrier near Izmail, he received higher education far from home-in Gorky in the city. The geography of Balabanov and his family is the entire Soviet Union. We will never know how this Soviet man Per SE would have responded to the events of the last three years, but, frankly, I have no doubt that his death a few months before the start of the Maidan and what followed later, is not just like that.

In the year of the release of the book, there were many events related to Balabanov - one of them was the show of “brother” in the St. Petersburg cinema “Aurora”, where, clinging to the plywood chips of chairs, for the first time looked in the summer of 1997. Although some argue that such an interpretation was always obvious to them, it was during this year before last session that I was surprised to find that I was watching a movie, the main character of which is not Danila Bagrov, but German. Yes, of course, the theme of a small person and a specific piercing humanism is one of the obvious signs of cinema Alexei Balabanov, but they love him, as they say, not for that. Danila is our brother, Putin - our president, resentification is our resentment.

However, after twenty years, it suddenly became clear that in this popular film a uninhabited carrier of a slender moral system is a cemetery frear - Danila next to him looks like a confused boy. The whole country is mistaken for Superman yesterday’s teenager, tragically doomed on an erroneous path, - this is aberration so aberration. In the context of the ended filmography of Balabanov, an incomprehensible, forever persecuted German stands in a series of directorial alter the ego (like Sunka or stoker). The author, like his hero, knows that he will not be heard, at least now; What is he calling for? To the abandonment of the temptation of power and the discourse of power in general - including the biological power of the killer over the victim. To the abandonment of a grabbing reflex, equally inherent in the thief, the rapist and the Imperial, who wants to capture and hold at all costs. He calls not to look for what power is - this is a call for saving weakness. It is not very similar to the “heroization of the killer”, in which Balabanov was often accused of and in which he (in the final “I also want”) accused himself.

Further-more: it was recently discovered that the famous poem from Brother-2 (“This is all my native”) is a somewhat modified work of the Yukagir poet Nikolai Kurilov living in Yakutia, transmitted to the translator Mikhail Yasnov. Balabanov could not know about this: the lines published and read by him in the journal Kolobok are signed as “Translation from Yukagirsky” - we did not know the researchers. Balabanov’s interest in Yakutia and other northern nation was born during his work at the Sverdlovsk studio of documentaries, to which the entire territory was “attributed” to the Urals - the Yakut theme sounds in several of its paintings. It is not surprising that the news from Yakutia came to us only now: this amazing civilization (whose relics knew Balabanov well) before our eyes begins his breakthrough to the world-including because only a couple of years ago they finally spent high-speed Internet (so there will be even more news from Yakutia).

But there is already a reason to laugh Sataninsky, because the Yakutsk-Yukagir Provenans (Kurilov together with his brother is the creator of the Yukagir alphabet) turns the imperial speech into something completely opposite-into the apology of the small homeland, sitting on the grass and complete satisfaction with what you have, without the slightest attempts of expansion. It is also worth noting that both the unfinished “river” and the “Kochegar” that became it were based on the works of the exiled Polish officer Vaclav Seroshevsky - that is, a representative of that rebellious environment, which for many decades, despite the defeat, conducted a consistent struggle with the empire.

It is obvious that Balabanov saw more than his contemporaries, and he also saw because he did not want to turn away from what others preferred to turn away from, it would be fair if they continued to look at him, gradually being released from the stereotypes of perception, conveniently varied over many years.