Russian granny

October sixteenth. The princess flutters through the halls of the Catherine Palace like a Nabokov butterfly. Gogol is twirled by Nicholas II the Bloody. Waltzers everywhere are intoxicatingly beautiful. But choo! what's happened? Hello! I am Rasputin. It's nice to live in Transylvania. Snowy fields, evil trains. At every junction there are invisible Bolshevik ghouls: they are never seen, but they will conquer all the valleys and hills; and only occasionally a bat flashes against the faded background.

Made in the aesthetics of Russian icons and illustrations for “Old Man Hottabych,” this character organizes the time and space of the cartoon. Who can resist him? Every year, the October Revolution is perceived as perhaps the strangest event in world history: the Bolsheviks - all these Zherbunovs and Barbolins, Kopenkins and Zheleznyaks - turn into servants of some mystical evil, which bears responsibility for the revolution. And every morning the Eisenstein grille groans in front of the Palace Square under the weight of invisible bodies - like the walls of the Vievsky

temple. Lenin is a mushroom, Chapaev is Buddha, Rasputin is Dracula. It is from this point of view that it is interesting to watch “Anastasia”: the Americans made an extremely timely cartoon on a very fashionable revolutionary theme. Bolshevik Russia as a space of total evil - not in the Christian, but in the fairy-tale-mystical understanding - is depicted in the cartoon. Everything fits in well here: golems, bats, talking dogs, lustful squirrels - who knows what. The only Romanova who is not affected by Rasputin’s spell is her grandmother. The good fairy, she gives Anastasia the treasured talisman •

medallion. She is waiting for a Hollywood couple - her semi-sane granddaughter Nastya, who is unable to remember how she lived for the first eight years, and the former gigolo stove maker Dmitry (the fact that the prince is an impostor can already be heard in his name). But they don’t care at all - there is no one to shout “Grishka Otrepiev is anathema.” The maximum that the beauty and her admirer are capable of is to leave Rasputin barely alive. They themselves do not want to bear any responsibility: they do not care about poor Russia. Everything remains the same: a ghoulish howl can still be heard over the country for a long time, and an orphaned Russian grandmother remains living in Paris.

Lev Danilkin

strangely, they somewhat resemble the appearance of the actors who voice Anya and Dmitry - Meg Ryan and John Cusack. Partly because all the characters, dialogues and even the costumes in this film are also quite in the style of Hollywood movie musicals. It’s interesting, by the way, that in 1956, Fox had already made a film about Anastasia with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Breiner.

Of course, several hits were composed for such a large-scale project. Plus - a noisy advertising campaign. The result was not long in coming.

An interesting parallel is the appearance of two multimillion-dollar projects from 20th Century Fox in one season. "Titanic" and "Anastasia". Both films are based on real historical events that millions of people know something about, in general terms.

Fiction built on the basis of non-fiction. The Russian viewer, however, seems hardly able to perceive “Anastasia” as pure fiction, a funny fairy tale. They will probably note that the ball for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty was supposed to take place not in 1916, but in 1913. And the revolution, by the way, did not occur in 1916 either. And Anastasia Nikolaevna at that moment was not eight years old, but sixteen. And, therefore, if the heroine is the real Anastasia, then she should remember everything quite clearly. (Although, in principle, even an eight-year-old girl already knows her own name). People more familiar with Russian history will note that the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, mother of Nicholas II and grandmother of Anastasia, lived after the revolution not in Paris, but in her native Copenhagen. Maria Fedorovna really, until the end of her days, could not believe that her son and grandchildren were killed. But, of course, she did not recognize any of the impostors. And finally, the last “linden”. The name of the movie heroine - Anya - evokes in the memory of viewers who are more or less familiar with the history of the issue, associations with Anna Tchaikovskaya. This person has been fooling many people for many years. Despite active opposition from Maria Feodorovna and the German relatives of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (who cited as an important argument the dissimilarity in the shape of the ears of Anna Tchaikovskaya and Anastasia Nikolaevna: the latter, according to them, had ears that were very characteristic of the Hessian dynasty). Despite everything, Anna Tchaikovskaya did not give up and stubbornly called herself a princess.

> A ghoulish howl can still be heard over the country for a long time, and an orphaned Russian grandmother remains to live in Paris

Her supporters were misled by Anna’s rather strong external resemblance to the Grand Duchess and her imaginary “memories of childhood,” compiled not without the active creative help of former courtiers, who then, in

The twenties, in the hope of the fall of the Bolshevik regime, created the legend of Anastasia’s miraculous salvation. All these errors, by the way, are not so harmless - considering that 20th Century Fox widely recommends the film to children, schoolchildren and “for family viewing.” And the current “Anastasia” is a masterly animated version of Hollywood pseudo-historical productions. Everything about it, from the plot and characters to the scenery and costumes, is emphatically “cinematic.” In this sense, the film rightly deserved its nominations and rightly did not receive a prize. Those viewers who, due to their knowledge of the history of the issue, cannot take the action taking place on the screen seriously, can be advised: accept this picture as a brilliant parody - and get great pleasure!■