On the Genre of Balabanov’s “Brother”: An Epic Hero of Our

Time.

Danila Bagrov, the hero of Balabanov’s 1997 film

“Brother” gets involved in the Petersburg crime world, makes

that petty universe pay him good money, but is not himself a

gangster for the simple reason that, alone of all the

characters in the film, Danila does not have a gang. No one

can claim him for his own without Danila’s own consent,

although many try.

In this the young ex-soldier back from the Chechen

mountains and the Chechen war differs indeed from

Lermontov’s Pechorin, whose unlaughing black eyes, black

whiskers and blond hair are as noticeable in a crowd as

Danila’s pale green eyes and soft face no different from

anybody else’s face are not: no one can claim Pechorin for

his own, not even with Pechorin’s own consent. My reader,

mystified as to Pechorin’s sudden appearance in this paper,

will, I trust, not protest against an explanation.

Danila stands at the beginning of history as Pechorin

stands at history’s end, but both are heroes of the epic

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world surrounded by lesser beings. Danila comes to

Petersburg bringing his own Hephaestus with him: his hands.

Danila’s hands are those masterful hands which, in Pilnyak’s

phrase, do everything; those hands which, should we be so

sober, precede all stories of the gods, for they are the

origins of everything we have. Unlike the other armed thugs

in the movie, Danila does not need a supplier of Colt

Magnums with and without silencers, as he is able to get

what he needs and to make what he requires on his own; two

of the film’s most powerful sequences are a look into the

skilled weaponmaker’s table-top forge, where all of the

materials are common household items put to a different use

than what we are accustomed to do with them. Unlike Achilles

himself, Danila needs no Hephaestus to provide him with his

arms. And, needing no Hephaestus, Danila naturally precedes

Achilles in the order of civilized development, for even

Achilles would not be the same without his famous shield and

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armor.1 We sometimes speak of self-made men, but rarely thus

literally.

The made men in this film are, to the contrary, people

who do not feel comfortable with weapons in their hands, not

understanding the physical nature of their work, and

therefore surround themselves with various bits of

metaphysical tinfoil: huge Colt Magnums, vodka on the job

and off the job, tough voices and hard words. Danila’s

brother has a bodybuilder’s muscles and shaven head, but

these intimidating features of his physique conceal only the

heart of a man who does work which frightens him and

therefore finds it necessary to display a warlike

appearance. To a trained eye, in other words, the muscles

and the shaven skull, together with all the drama of putting

on his knees at gunpoint whoever rings at his doorbell, give

away a coward. And this is what Danila has: not a history

but a background, not a psychology but the right training 1 Pechorin, on this note, has hands which are the opposite of Danila’s, foregrounded in the weapons-

making scenes: not thick and workmanlike with tough nails, but remarkably thin and aristocratic.

Pechorin has all his weapons and all his situations ready-made. Even the Art of Love, with Pushkin’s

commentary on that immortal work of literature, is already written for him. If Danila has no idea what

to talk about with a woman and does not much bother talking, then Pechorin knows all that both he and

they could say and loves to play a game of silence.

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for the job. But to have this training in the modern world

where people are terrified of the very sight of a weapon,

and, with this training, to be attached to no group or

grouping, government or otherwise, is to be a man above the

daily crowd, for one who is not afraid to die is,

accordingly not afraid to live.

On this note we come to Pechorin, whose job it will be

to try and prove me wrong: everyone knows that Lermontov’s

Hero of Our Time is not afraid of dying, even if he would

prefer to live a little while longer, but can we say about a

man who will not marry because he fears to find his death by

a wicked wife, who grows bored even of the Chechen bullets

flying past his head at the frontier, and who does not

remember his old friendships, that this man is not afraid to

live? When Pechorin sets out to obtain Bela’s heart, even

her wild pride is not long for resistance. But not long

after she does give up the grim resistance of her savage

pride, Pechorin starts to yawn in her presence. Princess

Mary, if he loves her, is still so predictable in her

attachment as to return Grigory Alexandrovich to his old

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fear of death by a wicked wife. Can we imagine princess Mary

as a wicked wife? But in all and everything, Pechorin’s

answer is: No thank you, I have had enough.

Because Pechorin himself is not a remnant of Bela’s

world before civilization, but rather the most civilized of

all civilized men alive: the one who has returned to the

native state, retaining nothing of the native silence in his

thoughts. Pechorin knows that everything must end, and so

grows bored in the most interesting situations; his mind

exhausts the appeal of everything he finds, finding out

every man and woman in his path, to see it from one,

brilliant and one-sided point of view. Pechorin’s

objectivity about the feelings of others is an illusion.

Feeling his infinite superiority above them all, the

disgraced officer gives everyone his benefit of a doubt,

never once doubting that perhaps what he sees seeing through

them is not there at all in their hearts. To give just two

examples, nothing in Pechorin’s journal can tell us what it

is that Princess Mary thinks of as she sits in front of a

book with empty eyes when Grigory Alexandrovich looks into

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her window after spending half the night just upstairs with

Vera: maybe about him, or maybe about her childhood, who

knows? Certainly not Pechorin, whose power over women lies

in that he neither knows nor cares to know what they feel if

it does not concern him. And, again, nothing in Pechorin’s

journal explains why Grushnitsky begins shouting at the site

of the duel, swearing to kill Pechorin with a knife from

behind the corner if he lives.2 Grushnitsky’s laughable and

trite desire for the beautiful princess Mary comes out on a

sudden as something completely different than what Pechorin

makes of it in his acrid notes. And then, perhaps what

Grigory Aleksandrovich writes down are not exactly

2 But to this example can we not also add a third? What is it exactly about Grushnitsky’s words which

made Pechorin pull the trigger? Did Grigory Aleksandrovich get frightened in full earnest, or was there

maybe some trace of feeling in his own heart which, had he let it speak, would have made him apologize

to Grushnitsky for the whole terrible situation, ignoring Grushnitsky’s seconds, whose opinion he

despises at any rate? Or is it simply because Grushnitsky tells Pechorin that “there is no room for the

two of them on the earth”, and, for this one instant, Pechorin sees something in it; that he is not

unique, because some Grushnitsky also resembles him? To me it seems that Pechorin, for all his talents

and for all his pride, is doomed to be a slave to convention because he cannot forgive others for

having the spark of poetry in their souls which he does know how to put to a good use in his own. I

must admit that my own answer does not satisfy me, for even if Pechorin is surrounded by lesser souls,

then they are lesser only when seen through his eyes; and thus we must say about him that he makes

others smaller than they might be in the chronicles of time, undoing the poetry which might have

followed. But in short, Pechorin is not objective even as regards himself; he only has the invincible

assurance that he is. Which assurance, I will add, has conquered many an admirer over the years: it is

tempting to know that you do not know, then especially when you do not know it yet.

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Grushnitsky’s words to the princess, but rather the words

which a trite fool would say to her? Pechorin can tell us

nothing about the poetry in the other young man’s soul,

about the feelings which went into all those trite

expressions, and so, in proper telling, tells us nothing

whatever of the man because he tells us nothing of what the

man was to himself. But there we have him, Pechorin is that

man who simply does not care what others are to themselves;

is this such a rare affliction on the planet Earth?

Pechorin‘s is a world in which all the combinations have

been tried, all the answers found and there is nothing more

for a man to do but die with dignity; those still having

feelings which differ from the proud boredom of Grigory

Aleksandrovich merely confused fools. But all this is to say

that Pechorin is the one who brings all combinations to

their ends in other people’s lives, the one who exhausts all

possibilities and shows them that they have nothing more to

live for; not by any malicious intent to harm, so much as by

his unbreakable spirit of opposition. Show him one way, he

will find another; despair, he will take hope.

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Whereas Pechorin is what Gogol would call a hero of the

secondary epic, whose main virtue is in that he could be

worse, were he to dispense with his weary knowledge of the

world at its ending, marry high and start something new,

such as another Waterloo for example, Danila Bagrov is a

hero of the primary epic, the epic which Gogol believed

could not be written after Homer for the reason that its

heroes must come at the beginning of time, preceding history

and therefore also moral judgment. In short, primary epic is

only possible before anything has been written. 3 For us to

know between good and bad something must have happened in

the world before us. And if Pechorin is burdened with the

world’s weight of knowledge about good end evil so far as

that he feels even himself to have no choice in anything he

does, for all the enviable freedom which he takes in dealing

with women and in getting involved in other people’s lives, 3 For more about this distinction in Gogol’s thought, see the subchapter on the genre of Dead Souls in

Yury Mann’s Poetika Gogolia (Moscow:1978). I take Gogol’s opposition, but the ideas are all mine.

Still, I feel that Nikolai Vasilievich would not object against the idea of opposing a hero who

believes himself to end all stories with a hero who believes himself to begin them. As, after all,

taken from a different view, Pechorin starts the first act of people’s comedies and ends up in the last

act of their tragedies, simply by the combination of his attractive and his dangerous qualities. As

Danila, he is one who cannot help but get involved no matter where he goes. But then so is Chichikov,

whom both these men at times resemble.

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then Danila starts the world anew, standing at the very

beginning of time in his own way: before anything has been

written about him and, I submit, about us his viewers.

Our friend Danila is back from the army and, evidently,

from the Chechen War. In 1997 it was hardly a year and some

months after the Russian army spent its New Year’s night at

the city of Grozny in Chechnya, where the armor plates of

the tanks literally melted in the streets, so thick was the

machinegun fire descending from the city’s rooftops, and a

whole division disappeared without a trace. What Danila has

seen, what he has done, and what he might have been, had all

of this not happened, is not given us to know. But neither

are we given to know (not in the Illiad) what swift-footed

Achilles might have been, had the history of the divine

realm turned out different and did not require for there to

be a Trojan War. Nor does the Odyssey tell us how Odysseus

learned how to lie. We get stories of genealogies, it is

true; and the first song on Danila’s soundtrack, to which

the awkward fellow in his big army jacket climbs unto the

scene, is „Wings“, a song about lost dreams. Who will doubt

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that there was something beautiful about Danila which his

experience in the army cut off for good? Perhaps he might

have been a poet, like Lermontov, had he lived in

Lermontov’s age before the horrors of modern warfare.

Perhaps simply a decent man, living within the bounds of

good and evil. Be it as it may, he would not have been our

hero, capable of seeing the world completely anew, cleansed

of all previous moral categories.4 As a proper hero of the

primary epic, Danila’s preparation for being what he is when

he comes into the story, is behind him and comes up only to

function. There is no discussing the quality of good and bad

horses in the epic genre; those are the prerogatives of the

later forms of the tradition. Pechorin can speak about his

past,5 but Danila Bagrov has no past to speak of. Where 4 I will only remind my understanding reader that the Iliad begins with the story of a nasty quarrel,

and, as it happens over a beautiful young woman. Achilles does not get beat up as Danila does, but does

go to the shore and play music to soothe his injured pride. To the director of the clip, it has

nothing to do with a beautiful young woman and everything to do with wasted camera time; but all such

complications mean nothing to young Danila, who only wants to know the music which he heard them play.

Is there not something primal about his love for this new music, as if an animal coming to an

attractive scent? 5 Although again only functionally: Pechorin’s reflections on himself are weapons in his psychological

war, since they help him keep his calm and not think about the feelings of others. Pechorin’s self-

consciousness would vanish into thin air when nothing depends upon it, and with no game to play he

would lose sight immediately of this man he is who plays so inadvertently with others. Hence his

boredom, for the man needs human matter to change into the stuff of his dramatic life. Pechorin

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Achilles learned to play music and to kill men is not much

spoken of; where Danila Bagrov learned to be his own

Hephaestus and to kill without a second thought, is

unspeakable.

If Danila has a psychology, we are not let into it. It

seems to me that whether or not Danila has shellshock is not

the center issue: this film is in a different genre. I will

even grant it to my reader, if he please, that there is no

question about it, of course Danila returns a changed man

from the war and you can call it shellshock if you please,

but what this film is after is not the consequences of what

came before, but the sudden possibility to make a new

beginning. If being shellshocked puts you in a good position

to survive in the civilian world and make your money on the

terms to which this world has descended while you were in

the army, then so be it, let us have a shellshocked hero.

Only this is at most a circumstance of Danila’s character,

as also his miraculous hands, his taste in clothes and his

resembles a meat grinder which is turned by the energy of the live meat that enters it and whose

processed matter is the past which Grigory Alexandrovich is firmly over: no energetic meat to grind, no

energy in the meat grinder.

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desire for something new after the monotony of army service;

the message of the film we must seek elsewhere.

Other films have been made about the psychological and

the social consequences of the wars in Chechnya; among the

best, the 2004 „My Stepbrother Frankenstein“ (Мой сводный

брат – Франкенштейн). There, a young man returns from

Chechnya with one of his eyes gone from out of his head

after a bullet wound and the mind inside that head fractured

irremediably: the emptysocket retains its sight, but not of

living people. Rather, of enemies, which in colloquial

Russian are called „spirits“.6 The boy continues to search

his father’s apartment for these spirits, and finally shuts

himself up in it together with the whole family, promising

with the fearful calm in his voice of one who knows exactly

what he is doing, to protect them againstt he ever-present

„ghosts“. A SWAT team comes and, to the tears of the family,

who had become attached to the madman, sweet of heart as he

is mad of his wits, kills the young man right in their home.

6 Дýхи, with the accent on the first syllable, as opposed to souls, which only „our own“ have; and

also because in a place such as Afganistan or Chechnya, the mountaineer enemies appear out of nowhere,

like ghosts.

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Danila, even if he is as calm as anyone can be in going

about his complicated business of eliminating his brother’s

business partners, has at any rate this advantage over that

unfortunate young man, that his enemies are real. That he

has no scruples over killing them is a question of morality,

not of psychology; and in Danila’s case, not of morality

either, but of practical expediency. They would not have

hesitated to kill him, either. Is such a man insane?

But returning to the realm of art before we steep

ourselves in moral judgment, the selfsame Nautiluses have,

in a 1988 album, recorded a song about a blind brother

returning from a war and seeing everywhere „spirits“, this

still the Afghan War which saw the rise of the American-

backed Taliban, not yet the Chechen. Butusov describes the

effects of shellshock in terms which, as I think, the makers

of the film about the one-eyed boy returning from Chechnya,

well remembered. The song is called „My Brother Cain“, and

these are some of the symptoms: he has come back from

defending the women and the children in the lands of the

Prophet in order to save Russia from Freemasonry and hard

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rock; when he laughs the man is not all there; when he goes

to sleep, he does not sleep on a bed because he is afraid of

falling down. And the refrain assures us that „he is no

longer a human being“.7 Whatever one may think of Danila’s

choice of employment, this is just not him.

How different a picture would we have, were Danila

indeed no longer a human being! But of all the people that

Danila meets from first camera shot to the last, there is no

one more alive than he is, no one who has less succumbed to 7 Here is the text for this song: Мой брат Каин

мой брат Каин был в далекой стране /защищал там детей и пророков /мой брат Каин вернулся спасать / Россию от масонов и рока /мой брат Каин за военный порядок /и за железную власть /Каин тяжко контужен

и не спит на кровати / потому что боится упасть /и когда он выходит в двенадцать часов /пьяный из

безалкогольного бара /лунный свет станет красным на десантном ноже /занесенном для слепого удара//когда

он ревет кровь течет из-под век /когда он смеется у него не все на месте /он уже не человек /он уже не

человек //мой брат Каин он все же мне брат /каким бы он не был - брат мой Каин /он вернулся домой - я

открыл ему дверь /потому что он болен и неприкаян /он ловит в воздухе духов рукой /но натыкается

только на нас /мой брат Каин все равно нас погубит /потому что у Каина больше нет глаз/ когда он ревет

кровь течет из-под век /когда он смеется у него не все на месте /он уже не человек он уже не человек

Мой брат Каин, track 9 on the Отбой album; cited from the official website of the band, stable URL:

<< http://www.nautilus.ru/SONGS/S560.shtml>>

To the counterargument, that Danila would not listen to this song because it comes too close to the

heart, I say only: does a psychological study show us only what its subject likes to do? If the purpose

were indeed to show us a young man ruined beyond repair, to look into his mind and to consider the

implications, then it would have been a different film altogether. And if I am to believe that I am

presented with a psychological study which subtly avoids the psychology for the very reason that so

would its subject, a story of a shellshocked youth with no history of shellshock in it, then I request

only that we then admit that this will be an argument from perversity: taking the more difficult

explanation in preference to the more simple one. My inclination is towards the simple, but customs

vary.

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the daily grind and more retained his humanity than has this

young man. Neither the German nor Svetlana are more

reasonable, more reliable and calm than he is, but at most

are on a level with him; and not even the two of them see

the world with his fresh eyes. Is it not human to want to

punish injustice? Or to want personal vengeance for wrong

done upon one’s own?

Observing only the obvious, then, if Balabanov’s

purpose were to speak to us about the psychological

destruction wrought in a young mind by going to war, then

this song, “My Brother Cain” were the one to put into the

movie track before any other. Instead, we have the “Wings”,

which is about losing your dreams, but not because you have

been forced to lose them. Danila makes a choice. The German

tells him at the end that the city is a force of evil, which

takes the strength out of a man, and makes that man weak.

And then Danila hears words which are difficult at the first

consideration to reconcile with his situation, having helped

all his friends (so far as they accepted his help: the

15

German and Svetlana did not), and hurt all his enemies. But

the German says: Вот и ты пропал. You, too, are a goner.

Is this not so? Why could Balabanov not have made a

second film about Danila which would be on a level as an

independent work of art with this first? When Danila gets

into the truck in the last sequence, having paid all his

debts and said all his goodbyes to Petersburg, he tells the

trucker the exact same words which he spoke to the police

chief who wanted to recruit him at his story’s end: Дембель

я, отгулялся. And then, wanting to turn on the music, the

young enthusiast lunges forward and lets fall from inside

his coat the sawed-off shotgun which helped him put an end

to the round-faced crime boss and his gang. Danila has

forgotten all about the weapon in his desire to listen to

the music, but the weapon is a tangible reminder of the

past: he cannot get rid of it now that he has used it, since

who knows what waits in Moscow. The driver notices the

weapon, a grim silence ensues, and then somehow the two

Russian men find a common language again and laugh over a

simple and inconsequential phrase about the road. And this

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is all that Danila has left to himself: his weapons, his

music and his nationalism.

Balabanov is a worthy artist, and he could not have

made his second film go against the principle of his art:

all that there is left to unveil about Danila’s character is

his nationalism, more music and more guns. The moral

principle with which Danila begins he voluntarily gives up

in the course of the movie; but then too, this is his

tragedy. As “the German” is brought to admit finally that

what is good for the Russian is death for a German when he

refuses Danila’s blood money, and as Svetlana cannot go away

with him despite that she loves him because she cannot bring

herself to take his bloodstained hands now that she knows

all there is to know about his work, so too Danila settles

into the business. To Petersburg he comes starting the world

anew, but to Moscow he goes in order to try and make a new

beginning. And so, the words which come out naturally spoken

to the police chief at the story’s beginning, are a trite

lie at the story’s end, spoken by Danila in the very tone of

voice in which his gangster brother used to speak, even

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though, speaking literally, it is perfectly true that Danila

has just gotten out of the army and wants to try something

else. What is two or three weeks extra? But who lives by the

sword must go on living with it. In the army Danila followed

orders, but released into the world he made a choice. The

choice brought him to the tragedy of his lost innocence;

since to have learned how to kill men and make weapons is

not what we mean when we speak of losing innocence, and

certainly not in Russian. This is how the truck driver takes

it: who knows what a man has behind him in his life, he has

a weapon, let him have a weapon if he wants to, does not

mean that he will actually use it.

And here I return to my beginning theme: Danila has no

history behind him. The here of the primary epic acquires a

history as he goes along, tying himself up in the world by

his own decisions until the outcome is inevitable long

before the end. We know that Achilles will not get out alive

at the end of the Trojan War, as we are given to know that

Danila cannot just leave the crime world behind simply by

going to Moscow. How can a man keep from doing that which he

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knows how to do best, which he does calmly and with

understanding?

As Pechorin is defined by all of what has come before,

and feels himself as much an instrument in the hands of his

goddess Fate as all the lives he brings to ruin, so Danila

is defined by everything which he himself does in the course

of the film. What do we know about him from before the

minute when in his army jacket he climbs up onto the

production site, attracted by the interesting music more

even than by the snow-white back of the naked woman? That he

has had a brother and a father, and served somewhere in the

army, evidently not as a clerk in headquarters. Put

differently, Pechorin is a problem, whereas Danila is a

solution. Pechorin on the night before his duel with

Grushnitsky writes about himself that he has been the

indispensible figure for the fifth act in people’s lives

without which no one could die or lose hope forever. What

does Danila keep doing for his brother? We cannot begin our

business because of this man, we cannot start our commerce

up because of that one: this is the song “the Tatar” sings

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throughout the movie. And again, returning for Sveta at her

apartment at the end of things, Danila offers her a new

beginning. There is something about this young man exactly

the opposite of Pechorin, but which no one is able to derive

any good from except us the viewers, who can see in him an

image of restored youth for a world weary of its complicated

half-truths and half-way moral choices. Danila makes the

wrong choice in entering the crime world, but at least he

makes a choice, and he keeps with it. We can therefore call

Danila the necessary character for the first act in our own

lives, bringing us the news that nothing has happened yet in

the world to keep us from living in it to the fullest of our

native strength. He is the Pechorin of the Rising Sun, as

Pechorin, who assures us that we are not going to be any

better than we are no matter how we try, is the Danila of

the Sunset.

If the psychology of the stepbrother Frankenstein and

the brother Cain are the results of warfare come to haunt

the people who have forgotten that their peaceful lives

stand firm upon the bones of others, the consequences of

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prior developments, then with Danila we have the very

beginning of things. He has just come into being; just been

invented and brings to Petersburg not blindness, but a pair

of fresh eyes. Does the army haunt him? Maybe yes and maybe

no, it is not for us to find out about this. Do memories of

Chiron haunt Achilles? When Achilles was newly invented, a

character who did not exist before, surely they did not.

Literary heroes must first have a history in people’s minds

before they start to have their prehistory in flashbacks.

It can hardly be said about Danila that he has come

back “in order to save Russia from Masons and hard rock”.

First of all, hard rock is the only thing Danila really

loves. Second of all, the Nautiluses themselves are the most

Masonic of the Russian rock groups, with their love of

theology and mythology, and, more to the point, with their

steady theme of opening your eyes to that which is around

us, of self-wrought revelation. If Danila has lost something

of himself in the army, then it is not his sanity but his

rest. The young man wants to see the world of people. In

this he is also the opposite of Pechorin, who again and

21

again returns to his old theme: I have lost my youthful

aspirations, I have lost my love of humanity! Because what

is also to be noted about Pechorin as a hero of the

secondary epic is that he does not meet any individuals who

are actually evil, only those who are not as good as they

might be; compared to them he does turn out a villain.

But if we take a film such as Victor Tsoi’s “Игла”,

also made in 1988, where a man strikingly like Pechorin in

both his appearance and his total disregard for other

people’s feelings comes up against individuals who are

actually bad, we have a story which resembled Danila’s, but

with this difference only that Tsoi’s Moro dies with his

hands clean, not having helped anything at all, but only

lost his life in trying. Moro, as Pechorin, is a hero of the

secondary epic; confronted with evil he must die as a point

of genre, for in order to survive he would have to do

greater evil himself. In other words, even though Pechorin

feels himself to be beyond good and evil, he is not so in our

eyes; he is in fact very good because he alone would stand

up to fight those who are very evil, had such people come

22

his way. Pechorin’s misfortune is that he keeps up coming up

against decent individuals. Moro, who does stand up against

evil in his world, comes out with his hands clean for the

reason that, like Pechorin, he cannot stand to belong to any

group. The way to fight his enemies in order to defeat them

would have been to make a crime group of his own, to put up

battle on their own terms, to kill and to sell drugs; in

short to have stopped to listen to the surgeon’s speech at

the bathhouse, when that deeply unpleasant individual offers

the young man in the black gloves to join hands with him.

Because he refuses to grow into the world, having outgrown

its daily meanness, Moro can only die.

But Danila’s enemies, as his friends, come as ready-

made into being as he himself: do we have the slightest

notion how long “the Tatar” has been “the Tatar”, or the

crime boss a crime boss? How long has Kat been doing acid,

or Svetlana cheating on her husband? And so in dealing with

all these individuals, Danila can invent his moral code as

he goes along, since the moral code of the gangsters is just

as new as is his own. In Tsoi’s film, the moral code of Moro

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is: Not as they do. Danila’s, on the other hand: I do as I

do. And so, the choice of murder is as open to him as it is

not to Tsoi’s hero, who would then have become no better

than anybody else.

Speaking of the Masonic Eye of the Sun, I must again

return to the wondrous pairing of the soundtrack to the

situations in this film. On his second day in Petersburg,

after spending the night in an abandoned apartment and

before presenting himself to his brother, Danila sits at the

marketplace which will see him do his first hit job later.

Sitting at the market place and smoking his cigarette in the

army and the prison style8, when he sees a Russian thug

demanding undue protection money from Danila’s soon-to-be-

friend “the German”. Danila puts away his cigarette, knocks

out the thug with a single strike of the elbow from the back

to the liver and takes away his gun.9 Thus starts his 8 Butt outwards, flame into the hand: both less noticeable in the dark and also more warm in the cold.

9 Is it not obvious about Danila that the moral code does not exist for him as yet? Not a single man

in the movie, not after the first sequence at the production site and one of the two thugs chasing him

after the hit job from the marketplace, does he hit or shoot, or threaten to do so, otherwise than

unarmed or below the belt or both: this first thug in the back, Svetlana’s husband in the groin with

his fist and then again in the leg from his shotgun; both the thugs in his brother’s apartment lying

face-down on the ground. The Georgian in the trolley Danila threatens by pointing his gun between his

legs; the two men in the downstairs apartment he shoots without warning, granted that they would have

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acquaintance with the German. During this whole sequence the

soundtrack remains silent to let Danila and his new friend

talk; but when the younger Bagrov returns to the marketplace

preparing for his hit against “the Chechen”, the soundtrack

runs a song called “Mother of the Gods”, with these lyrics:

Этот город убийц, город шлюх и воров, существует покуда мы верим в него;но открой глаза, и его уже нет,и мы снова стоим у начала веков10

Balabanov has set up things so that Butusov sings these

lines exactly in the moment when Danila observes, calmly and

soberly as ever a Pechorin would, the situation at the

marketplace. The key to his morality is that Danila has

discovered himself not at the end of time, but at time’s

beginning. Pechorin, coming after all the moral codes are shot him the back themselves on their way back from the job. Would Pechorin have ever gotten away with

such low-down ways of fighting? But here is the paradox which, I hope, this paper sheds its light upon

with the idea that they belong to opposite stages of the epic world, Danila at its beginning and

Pechorin at its end: Pechorin, who does everything as nobly as he can under the circumstances, invites

judgment, whereas Danila, who fails to see even that Svetlana is a better woman than Kat to spend his

time with, invites applause. (But we must not suppose that it is only Danila’s naive understanding

which is so attractive, for naivete it is not: he comes back for Svetlana, but comes only to say

goodbye to Kat).

10 This city of murders, this city of whores and of thieves

Exists only so long as we believe in its existence;

But open your eyes and it is already not there

And we stand once again at the beginning of times.

(Taken from the film, translation and transcription mine).

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written, is, as Nietzsche would later put, beyond good and

evil; Danila, coming out of the war in Chechnya with all the

previous moralities swept away, comes before all the moral

codes are written, before good and evil. But the message of

this movie is, I believe, that Danila Bagrov is also a

savior, for he has come to tell us that nothing has started

yet, so we need not fear to look at this world with eyes

that see. All we need is to acquire the practical skills of

doing whatever it is that we choose to do. But the moral

code we carry in us, and all that is needed to return to the

absolute simplicity of the world of epic is not a war, but a

moment of plain seeing: do our cities of postmodern death

really exist, or is it all just words which we have scared

ourselves with, as children scare themselves with the sounds

they make in the dark? Be all this as it may, there is no

more Masonic symbol in this world than that the world shows

itself in its first image to those who simply open their

eyes. As Herman Melville puts it: look again.

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