Russia (bbabo.net), - How to film "Eugene Onegin"? There were many versions - and not only Russian ones. Irina Evteeva also has the Venetian "Silver Lion", and her own "Nika", and the Moscow "Silver George" - but most importantly, she has her own unique look. One of the most unusual Russian directors, she creates her films at the intersection of cinema, animation and painting. She is currently working on the original version of "Eugene Onegin", based on the script by Irina Margolina.
According to Evteeva, her "Hotel Onegin" is a kind of commedia dell'arte on the theme of Pushkin's "novel in verse." We will see the film in three years. But on the eve of the 185th anniversary of the poet's death, we talked with Irina Evteeva about her Pushkin and about why it is increasingly difficult for us to understand what "Eugene Onegin" is all about.
Irina Vsevolodovna, at what stage is your "Onegin" now?
Irina Evteeva: So far, the shooting of the film blanks with actors in landscapes and interiors and against a green background has been completed. And now the most important part has begun - creating animation from the image. Someone calls it color painting on glass, someone calls it the interaction of animation and feature films. You know how I do it - several images are simultaneously projected onto a large glass, which are synthesized by light, color, texture. That is, I transform each frame on glass manually with the help of light and paint.
This is not your first appeal to Pushkin.
Irina Evteeva: Yes, but when I took on "Little Tragedies", I was interested in conveying the word of Pushkin through plastic, through painting. And here there is "Eugene Onegin" himself, and Tchaikovsky's opera of the same name. This script Irina Margolina hooked me, as they say. Because on the one hand, there is an opportunity for fantasies on the theme of a "novel in verse", and on the other, the divine music of Tchaikovsky, which you can not memorize, but when you accidentally hear it somewhere, you understand: "I know it!" It is in us literally at the genetic level.
The story that formed the basis of the film is that an animator comes from England with his cat, whose Russian grandmother instilled in him a love for Russian culture and, naturally, for Pushkin's poetry. And it just so happens that he settles in the Onegin Hotel, where Pushkin's heroes live, and where all sorts of metamorphoses take place with him. For example, in one of his dreams, the Queen of Spades appears to him. Our hero wakes up and points a gun at the Queen of Spades: "How can I start my picture," and she hands him three cards. There is such a character as the Wardrobe Man.
If we talk about the "wardrobe", then it refers more to Chekhov and his "Cherry Orchard" than to Pushkin.
Irina Evteeva: As a matter of fact, this is a strange person who walks along the corridors, in a fluttering very long lionfish, which at some point becomes a river, the Neva, and various images emerge from there. Then the ghost leaves and the cabinet remains, but the cabinet with "ears" is like a library file cabinet, from which drawers begin to slide out, where it says "Onegin", "Tatiana". There is an associative motif here that any penetration into the literary-temporal thickness is associated with the library.
On the one hand, we sought beauty, and on the other hand, a feeling of anxiety ... The owner of this hotel was played by the singer Lyubov Kazarnovskaya, the director-animator - Artur Vakha, and Kota - Sergey Byzgu, St. Petersburg theatergoers know them well. Putting on a turban knocked down from Chernomor, he becomes not just a Scientist Cat, but a literary critic who knows everything. At the same time, this is a comical image.
Do you need him like Mozart's Don Juan needs his quarrelsome servant Leporello?
Irina Evteeva: Yes. "Turn off the opera, I don't like it." - says the Cat one day. "But when this tenor sings, I cry." The hostess of the hotel asks him: "Do the poems also touch you?" Cat: "They touch, how. But I don't read poetry, I write about them."
Is your cat an allusion to Kota Bayun from Lukomorye?
Irina Evteeva: Ours is kinder. After all, in fact, according to legend, Kot-Bayun is not a positive character at all, he can lull a traveler to sleep, and then eat him. But at the same time, he brought salvation from all diseases and ailments to those who caught him, which is why he was kept on a chain.
And what is all this for - why didn't they want to film the novel itself?
Irina Evteeva: Today, it seems to me, it's not enough just to take on "Eugene Onegin". It doesn't matter anymore whom, who married whom. More important is the environment in which Pushkin's characters live, and you immerse yourself in this through the same comments. Then, as Yuri Lotman said, we read any classical work from our time and this is a completely different work than what Pushkin's contemporaries read, for example. We perceive his poetry and prose already in the context of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and this gives additional associations.Therefore, for me, this work is a very interesting immersion into the world of Pushkin, through Eugene Onegin himself, through Tynyanov's unfinished novel Pushkin, through Lotman's comments.
You mentioned Lotman, but there were also Nabokov's comments - a thick volume with a detailed analysis of almost every word of the "novel in verse".
Irina Evteeva: Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman's comments are more specific for me, they give an opportunity to feel the life of a noble estate and its inhabitants. And Nabokov wrote foreign reader who would never understand the beauty of Pushkin's verse, so it was more important for Vladimir Vladimirovich to find analogues, associations that are closer to an English-speaking person.
Lotman and Nabokov are fascinating to read, but somewhere annoying: you feel that we don’t know Pushkin either, and in Onegin we read only the plot.
Irina Evteeva: We really don't know Pushkin. We are accustomed to the cliches "Pushkin and the nanny", "Pushkin and power", "Pushkin and the tsar", "Pushkin and the Decembrists", "Pushkin and Natalya Goncharova" ... And who thinks, for example, what an 11-year-old boy experienced when he was torn off from the family and sent to the Lyceum?..
I'm afraid that most of us leave school with clichéd ideas about Russian classics.
Irina Evteeva: Yes, Pushkin is a womanizer, Yesenin is a hooligan and singer of Russian birch trees, Mayakovsky is the mouthpiece of the revolution. And it is worth reading prose, for example, Yesenin, and you will be surprised - it is very similar to Strugatsky's "Snail on the Slope". Yes, what prose, Yesenin's voice surprises.
What about him?
Irina Evteeva: In the 80s, the disc "Poets read their poems" was released, and when Yesenin's voice rang out, I was amazed - he spoke in such a bass! We are used to thinking, looking at his portraits: "Ah, golden-haired, sweet-voiced Lel."
Well, yes, a sort of Lensky performed by Ivan Kozlovsky.
Irina Evteeva: So, not Kozlovsky at all, but louder and lower than Chaliapin. Mayakovsky, it turns out, was much more tenor-like than Yesenin.
It's a pity that the phonograph was not invented in the era of Pushkin - we will never hear his voice. And yet, let us return to the comments on "Eugene Onegin". Why do we need them today?
Irina Evteeva: They are needed to imagine the socio-cultural context of the time when Lord Byron sparkled in the minds of young people, all sorts of fashions, and at the same time the brilliant Bonaparte, who had already set off on a campaign, swallow Russia. To understand why Onegin does not work, does not serve in the army? How to unravel Tatyana's terrible and prophetic dream, with a bear, three sticks under the pillow, which turn out to be a bridge to the future groom, and the groom is the same bear.
Nabokov was an ardent opponent of the opera "Eugene Onegin", called Tchaikovsky's music mediocre, called the authors of the opera almost "criminals" who should be dealt with "according to the law" ...
Irina Evteeva: Every great person has his own great delusions, I guess. And Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy said that Chekhov's plays are terrible, and ballet dancers jump instead of following the plow. The only thing we can agree with Nabokov is that the opera libretto has little to do with Pushkin's "novel in verse" itself. But, on the contrary, Tchaikovsky's great music provides a deep context for understanding Pushkin's novel!
About the context and environment. You watch costume films, and yourself thinking: it is enough to grow thicker sideburns - and please, a person of the beginning of the 21st century will pass for Pushkin's contemporary. The classic was right, only the buttons change?
Irina Evteeva: Appearance is easy to bring closer to that time, but habits, gait - no. By the way, that's why I have a lot of ballet dancers in the film - it's easier for them to control their body.
What happened to walking in Pushkin's times?
Irina Evteeva: Well, just imagine - cobblestone pavements, you can twist your leg all the time. The rotten wooden pavements squelched in the Petersburg dampness, and the feet sank into the slush. Now, on the set of historical films, the pavement is covered with hay so that asphalt or tiles cannot be seen. Cities come out completely covered with hay, even at the Hermitage ... And the cane? We came up with the idea that a cane is an attribute of a dandy, for beauty, or to poke a cab driver in the back with a knob. But the cane also had another purpose, a prosaic one: to remove "traces" left by horses from its path.
Svetlana Karmalita, wife and colleague of Alexei German, said that Alexei Yuryevich wanted to film The Three Musketeers, but she was against it, realizing how naturalistic Paris of the D'Artagnan era would have appeared on the screen.
Irina Evteeva: And it would be interesting to see it! Yes, when you talk about the material environment of the past, you have to immerse yourself in it, like Herman, or seek some convention to a greater or lesser extent. In my case, this is still a fantasy space.
You created your short film in the almanac "Siege Fates" on glass covered with frost. What solution did you come up with for "Eugene Onegin"?Irina Evteeva: It is still too early to talk about it, although the visual solution, in fact, builds the film. I can only say that it will be a combination of blue, pastel colors flowing one into another, my favorite purple, different collisions of yellow, ocher. I want to achieve a fabulous color. In the case of the world of Pushkin's "novel in verse" itself, it is muffled, while the Onegin Hotel should be rich, iridescent, on the one hand, and on the other, fading into other matters.
Such a dream reality that does not exist, but in which it is interesting to travel and consider the heroes who find themselves there. This is the opposite of modern computer technology, where the authors seek to impress the viewer with the plausibility of a fictional world. But in our tradition of animated films, poetry and conventionality have been and are consciously allowed. Remember Norshtein with his "Hedgehog in the Fog", Andrei Khrzhanovsky with his "Glass Harmonica", Alexander Petrov with Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea", which received an Oscar.
Have you ever fantasized: what would happen to Pushkin if he lived to an advanced age?
Irina Evteeva: As Dostoevsky noted: then Tolstoy and I would have nothing to do. And in a sense, he is right. At the end of his life, Pushkin began very good prose. "Little Tragedies" opened up the poet's inner depth in a new way... But, you know, no matter how much you think about a possible alternative ending, for some reason I can't imagine his other fate. Sadly, there is a deep meaning in the fact that it could not have ended otherwise. Like Lermontov.
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