Oleg Kashin: underground Parfenova

“M endeons” and “two hundred years together” first met last spring, when Leonid Parfyonov showed the first of his three films “Russian Jews”. It is worthwhile to carefully say that the scandal did not cause, most likely, thanks to the non -cardal (and certainly not anti -Semitic) reputation of Parfenov, because in the performance of any other author this concept would have sounded too radically - Partenov created the hymn of Jewish integration into the Russian imperial culture, in which only children of watchmakers, saapons and saapons and saaponers and saaponers and saapers and saapers and saapons and saapons and saapons and saapons and saapons and saapons and saapons and saapons and saapons and saapons and saapons. The merchants were able to become and became great Russian musicians, writers and artists. The first film ended in 1917, and this could be called him the main intrigue: if Partenov with pre -revolutionary Jewry has so treated, then what can we expect from a clash with the revolutionary?

The second (from the revolution to the war) the film about the Jews really turned out, probably, the most tough Parfenic film in general - even formally, in terms of the number of blood shed in the course of blood. It turns out that Parfenov also has a taste for the demonstration of murders: the royal family is detailed and convincingly shot several times by the number of survivors of the executioners, each of which wanted to attribute to the decisive role in the murder of the king; Trotsky is also killed in detail, and although the viewer at the same time sees only the silhouettes of the killer and victim, it does not become less terribly; The murder of Uritsky was decided in the classic spirit to the creator of the “M endo”-Leonid Kannegiser led from the place of murder on a bicycle, and his namesake of the Parthenov also sits on a bicycle and, repeating the route of the Roma-Seser, shows us how everything happened. The same, but already without a bicycle, is happening in Paris - the abduction of General Kutepov as the most loud success of Soviet intelligence, the story of which, of course, is also inseparable from the history of revolutionary Jewry.

The Parthenov actor in the second “Russian Jews” significantly more than in his previous films-perhaps the brightest scene depicts Trotsky’s performance before the Red Army soldiers to the front, and the Parthenovs in the image of Trotsky are so convincing that he does not need a pence, a beard, or an emphasis. They are not, there are only Parthenov himself, standing in a recognizable position on the tender of armored train and raising his hands to the sky, and it turns out an excellent Trotsky.

Animated roosters, goats and violins of Shagal fly over modern Vitebsk, and the Parfyenov himself, like Shagal in the eighteenth year, is pushing the modern Vitebsk tram with visual agitation in honor of the first anniversary of October. Sverdlov’s leather wardrobe is demonstrated and described as the phenomenon of history not so much politics as fashion, and huge portraits of leaders over the gloomy Russian landscapes finally turn the revolutionary epic into bewitching noir. The children of shoemakers and watchmakers turned out to be not only that Partenov offered them in the first film, they came and killed everyone, destroyed the empire, and in return they built their own.

His own, but not Jewish. Surprisingly, this simple formula turns out to be enough to cross out the entire almost centuries-old bloody hibl, equally important for the White Guard rhetoric of the Civil War, and for the Memory of Perestroika times, and further until the recent performance of the State Duma of Peter Tolstoy about the "Pale of Settlement". You can arrange the real Jewish surnames of the Bolshevik leaders and executioners as much as you like in brackets, but if these people themselves deliberately abandoned their Jewry in favor of proletarian internationalism, does anyone have the right to record them in Jews posthumously, retroactively and contrary to their will? Parfenov insists that there is no, and this idea, which is the basis of that part of the "Russian Jews", which talks about the revolution and the years that have followed, actually repeats the key motive for the first film. Well, yes, the escape from the town can also be the same as that of Isaac Levitan, but it can be the same as that of Leo Trotsky - different destinations, and the direction is one.

When the blood finishes pouring, and the Parthenov shows Blanter and Dunaevsky, who composed the football and circus marches of the Soviet empire, respectively, there is no doubt. Yes, and after the revolution for a Jew, who wants to achieve something, there can be only one way in Russia-into a large imperial culture, discarding the national one. The film begins and ends with poems, first Smelakov, “Lyubka Feigelman” (try to find something specifically Jewish in the Komsomol goddess, except for some reason emphasized surname), and at the end of Gudzenko, “we don’t need to regret,” classic Russian verses read by the very Russian vote of Vladimir Vysotsky, and does it matter who the Jew is here?

How to relate to such a cinema - this could depend on the context, but the main, already ordered feature of the Parfenov film is that there is actually no context, and this seems an important circumstance. Partenov-documentary began on the old NTV, there were "the other day. Our era", there were films about Pushkin, Nabokov and a lot more about whom. It was the flagship product of the famous television channel, the highest form of what the whole (then it could not sound ironically) a unique journalistic team, from the girls in the morning news to Parfenov, the main star of the canal. They all spoke the same language and worked for understanding which part of society - liberal, progressive, call it what you want.

This is a vacuum, and in a vacuum of Parthenov lonely

The series "Russian Empire" was already on another NTV, but also did not fall out of the common space of the canal, which in the first Putin years was, perhaps, the most difficult media experiment, a game with the illusion that if now there is no Gusinsky and Kiselev, then this may be an advantage for the remaining television - we no longer participate in oligarchic wars and do not fight with power, but this It does not prevent us from continuing to make perfect television for Russia and specifically for the same people who watched NTV in the nineties and entered the zero with the feeling that nothing bad is happening and that the new time, in general, is even better than the old one.

This illusion lived for several more years, then this, the new NTV, and Parfenov’s films moved to Ernst to the first channel, on which, as they said, a sovereign democracy, but which still retained an unsuccessful idea of the beautiful, and propaganda in the news was compensated by highly artistic and highly professional non -faceted television, whose pendant became then It is Parthenov. His films about Gogol, about Zvorykin, about the Urals, of course, make up the gold fund of the first channel of the zero years.

But such a compromise state of things was, of course, temporary. Partenov on Channel One appeared less and less and all later. The last film dedicated to Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, having long been on the first-hander shelf, was released four years ago late at night, simultaneously with some important football match, walking along another channel. And somehow it was immediately clear that there would be no more Parfenov here, that from the decoration of the canal he turned into a foreign essence, which only by some chance wedged into the net of the main state channel and the disappearance of which was simply a matter of time. And so it happened, “Russian Jews” go only in cinemas, which traditionally relate to documentary cinema not so as to show it for a long time and everywhere. This is a vacuum, and in a vacuum of Parthenov lonely.

I would like to call it a tragic figure of domestic television, but the understandable alternative to this tragedy stops. Imagine Parfenov, who remained the main leading NTV and now occupying the place where Irada Zeynalov sits. There would have been nothing good, and it is obvious that Parfyonov was the best fate of those who Putin's reality offer a television person. The best fate for a television person is to stop being a television person, and Partenov really stopped being in those years when his films were shown on the first channel.

Now it is most correct to call him a historian, but, of course, not what they live in academic science, but such as Karamzin, that is, a person who writes the history of the country, its culture and the key people for it; A person who actually creates a country formulating it. This is not an exaggeration at all. Perhaps, in the television language, Parfenov said more about the Russian past than Karamzin wrote, but Karamzin had one important advantage: he had a country, that empire that Parfyonov described in his old series already from an archaeological point of view. There is no empire for a long time, instead of it, the Putin state, to which for his own identity is enough the person of the leader and several popular stories from Prince Vladimir to the Great Patriotic War, is nothing more. Parfenov in such a state is not a place, and he turns out to be a chronicler without a country (in this sense, constantly circulating rumors about his emigration are indicative; of course, now it would be the most natural). Parfenov today is an underground with all the properties of the underground, for nothing that it is sometimes displayed by the noisy premieres, which the oligarch Friedman comes to. This underground creates an ideological, ethical, aesthetic alternative to Putin's Russia. By the way, it is possible that this is not only a description of the current Parfenov, but also a guide to action. Maybe the rest should move to this underground from the world of Vladimir Putin.

And in vain it was all or not, it will become clear in some future Russia, which, if we are lucky, will be needed by Parthenov Jews, and Prokudin-Gorsky with Zvrykin, and Pushkin and Gogol. And if you are not lucky, then they will not be. So far there is no clarity in this regard.

Oleg Kashin - journalist

Opinions expressed under the heading "Law" may not reflect the point of view of the Radio Liberty editorial