"The Fate of a Man" by Sergei Bondarchuk and the Soviet Cinema of Trauma

Abstract

Representations of the Second World War The Soviet canon of representing the Second World War as a heroic exploit of a people that had liberated Europe from fascism and defended the ideals of humanism began to crumble during the glasnost period. In post-Soviet Rus sia, the memory of the war has become inseparable from the memory of the crimes of Stalinism. A number of films that came out in 2004-2005 as part of the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, showed the war as a tragedy for those who had fought in penal battalions, had been taken away by the NKVD, or had been prisoners of war and were then convicted as traitors and sent to Soviet labor camps.1 These in terpretations of the war in terms of psychic trauma are forcing a rethinking of the ways in which the human psyche has been depicted in Soviet narratives about the war. Indeed, as Dominick LaCapra reminds us, critique of a repre sentation canon includes the noncanonical reading of canonized texts, on the one hand, and new interpretations of texts that have been marginalized or al together excluded (21). It is a startling fact that, despite the horrendous losses of the Soviet Union in the war, suffering as such was not the focus in Soviet depictions of the war, unlike, for instance, in literature and films about the Holocaust produced in the West. Indeed, the image of the people as a victim of Nazism never became canonical in Russia.