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
2
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.
6
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
9
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
10
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.
12
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
13
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
17
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
18
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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