Performing Identities and Negotiating Memory in Contested Spaces: Ukrainian Folk Songs in Contemporary Russian War Films
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Performing Identities and Negotiating Memory in Contested Spaces: Ukrainian Folk Songs in Contemporary Russian War Films Adrienne m. Harris ABSTRACT Every year leading up to Victory Day on 9May, Russian screens, large and small, show feature films, documentaries, and miniseries about the Second World War. These films have helped unify Russian citizenry and develop patriotism. The year 2015 proved to be notable for war cinematography: three feature films and one twelve-part miniseries premiered in honour of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. While all of these cinematic releases retell or engage with wellknown narratives, these remakes reflect tensions surrounding the conflict that erupted in Ukraine following years of increasing strained relations with Russia. ‘Performing Identities and Negotiating Memory in Contested Spaces: Ukrainian Folk Songs in Contemporary Russian War Films’ analyses the incorporation aUkrainian folksongs into Sergei Mokritskii’s feature film Battle for Sevastopol and Leonid Pliaskin’s twelve-part miniseries, The Young Guard. In every cinematized version of The Young Guard, music has played asignificant role. The author asks how directors use these songs to respond to the annexation of Crimea and conflict that erupted in the Donbas in 2014 as the films take place in these two regions. Contextualizing her analysis in scholarship related to collective memory, nationality, nostalgia, and intertextuality, she argues that the directors use the films to take two different approaches: symbolically reuniting the Soviet Union in film one and appropriating aUkrainian song to underscore suffering caused by Ukrainian and German ‘fascists’ in the other. KEYWORDS: Ukrainian folk song, Russian war films, Russo-Ukrainian conflict (2014–), negotiating memory, popular culture The most sacred Russian holiday inherited from the Soviet period remains 9May, the day that commemorates victory over Nazi Germany in the war Russians call ‘The Great Patriotic War.’ Every spring, televisions broadcast patriotic programming— feature films, miniseries, documentary films, concerts of young people performing songs about the war while dressed in uniforms, and news footage of the Immortal Regiment marches in which Russians carry photographs of relatives who fought. This programming ritually commemorates the war and unifies Russian speakers by reminding viewers of this great victory, both its heroic deeds and its costs. 2015 proved to be aparticularly notable year for Russian war cinema: in honour of the 70th anniversary of Victory, six films or miniseries debuted, all remakes or revisions of wellknown narratives.1 1 By ‘narrative,’ Ifollow Prince, Dato, Greimas, and Todorov and mean the recounting of several events, fictional or historical, that form acontinuant subject and constitute awhole. OPEN ACCESS
ADRIENNE m. HARRIS 53 While some of these films had been in production for several years, most production took place in 2014 as anew war was raging. Years of rhetoric proclaiming Ukrainian nationalists as ‘fascists,’ the same word used for Nazis, escalated in the Russian media which paid great attention to the plight of mostly Russian speaking Ukrainian refugees from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. As Jade McGlynn has recently discussed, ‘remembering in Russia is increasingly performative and actualized,’ and ‘By presenting the Great Patriotic War as aframe through which to understand events in Ukraine, the media and government guided domestic political perceptions of the contemporary crisis and encouraged participative shared remembering as abulwark against threats to Russian national security and historical legacies.’ (McGlynn, 2018, p.1). Of the six World War II films or miniseries that debuted in 2015, two—Sergei Mokritsii’s Russian/Ukrainian feature film Battle for Sevastopol and Leonid Pliaskin’s twelve-part miniseries The Young Guard—take place in contested spaces: in Crimea and in Krasnodon, Ukraine—located in the Donbas, Lugansk oblast (region), one of the two Ukrainian regions embroiled in conflict since 2014. The chosen settings and the year in which the films debuted, prompted both directors to mark the Victory anniversary while ‘managing’ the Ukrainian crisis,2 albeit through drastically different approaches, yet from perspectives sufficiently Russian to secure support from the Russian Ministry of Culture. Both films set in Ukraine include Ukrainian folk songs in the soundtracks. Authors and filmmakers creating works set in Ukraine, yet aimed at Russian-language consumers, have been shaping and manipulating representations of Ukrainian identity markers—usually through performance of language, song, and costume, often reductionist—for roughly two centuries (Bojanowska, 2017, pp.227–48; Karpuk, 1997, 209–32), as folklorists gathering folksongs viewed Ukrainian culture as more pristine, less influenced by Russian control. Even the Ukrainian author Nikolai Gogol’ included untranslated verses of Ukrainian folksongs in the Russian-language stories in his collection Evenings on aFarm Near Dikanka, songs that captured the Ukrainian environment and contributed alayer of Ukrainian auditory images. Political objectives have often shaped these depictions, determining whether viewers and readers encountered idealized, romanticized, reductionist, or demonized constructions of Ukrainian identity, often determined by actions, or performance of ethnic identity. Both Battle for Sevastopol and The Young Guard include well-known Ukrainian folk songs imbedded into the soundtrack ‘The Blackthorn Blooms’ [Цвiте терен] and ‘In the Cherry Orchard’ [У вишневому саду] sung by Russian actresses playing historically Russian characters, both performing Ukrainian identities in the films. Russians and Ukrainians broadly refer to these songs as ‘folk [narodnye] songs.’ Natalie Kononenko defines ballads and lyrics in aSlavic folk context as, ‘ADictionary of Narratology— University of Nebraska Press’, Nebraska Press, p.58. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/9780803287761/a-dictionary-of-narratology [accessed 5March 2019]. 2 Iuse the term “crisis” because Iam also referring to the period of rising tension leading up to the Maidan protests, the annexation of Crimea, and the conflict in the Donbas as these films were already in process before the crisis turned violent. OPEN ACCESS
54 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 1/2023 Ballads are story songs, and ballads […] belong to everyone. Most people have sung ballads at some point in their lives. […] Lyric songs express loneliness [… and…] are productive. They deal with emotions that are an ever-present part of life. […] Because both lyric songs and ballads deal with the common problems of humanity, there is overlap between them. The difference between aballad and alyric song is that the ballad tells the story of acommon human problem, such as the conflict between parents and children, and alyric song expresses the emotions that the conflict generations. Lyric songs are typically descriptive rather than narrative. They capture the emotion that the singer wishes to convey by focusing on ascene, usually in nature, or on anatural object and describing it in detail (Kononenko, 2007, pp.43–46). With this definition in mind, Iidentify ‘The Blackthorn Blooms’ as alyric song for the poetic Ilaments her grief as her beloved has left her. Iwould argue that ‘In the Cherry Orchard’ exists at the intersection of lyric and ballad as amother and daughter discuss where the daughter spent the night, with whom, and the daughter’s feelings after parting with her loved one. Most Ukrainians and many Russians would know these songs, identify them simply as ‘folk’ and explain ‘we usually sing them around the table as we drink’ or ‘we all known them.’ These two songs are sufficiently wellknown and representative of Ukrainian folk songs, they are two of ten songs chosen for the 1978 Smithsonian Folkways Ukrainian collection, The Dove, and on lists of beloved songs such as the Speak Ukrainian Online Language School’s list of ‘Top 10 Beautiful Ukrainian Folk Songs.’3 As such, these songs have diachronic histories outside of these films into which directors placed them, however, they both occupy central spaces within key plots in Russian films that delineate and redefine Ukrainian identity. They both remind viewers of the Ukrainian setting, in spite of Russian-language soundtracks, while presenting two different visions of Ukrainian identity palatable to Russian viewers. Likewise, these narratives have long histories—layers of memory akin to palimpsests—as they are abiopic and aremake, both based on the lives of real people. They also belong to acohort of films that debuted at asymbolic time—the 70th anniversary of the conclusion of the Second World War and roughly ayear after the Ukrainian crisis became violent, which we now recognize as the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Thus, both films and both songs imbedded within them come with associations and histories from previous lives before they were united in 2015 as part of alarger cohort of Russian war films commemorating the Second World War. In this paper, Iask how and when the directors incorporate these well-known Ukrainian songs into their films and what function these folk songs play within the cinematic texts. As both Battle for Sevastopol and The Young Guard are both loosely based on the lives of 3 The Dove, Smithsonian Folkways Liner Notes, 1978. https://folkways-media.si.edu/docs/folkways/artwork/MON00797.pdf and https://www.speakua.com/10-ukrainian-folk-songs/ [both accessed 13February 2023]. The Speak Ukrainian list claims that “In the Cherry Orchard” was written in the 20th century, but other sources do not corroborate that information. OPEN ACCESS
ADRIENNE m. HARRIS 55 war heroes and serve as the latest reiterations of well-known narratives, Iconsider how the points of divergence from previous versions reveal the dynamic nature of nationality and memory and how the shapers of cultural memory appropriate these Ukrainian songs, as well as other markers of Ukrainian identity, to promote postSoviet Russian claims to Ukrainian territory. Iargue that the films present two different Russian options for Ukrainian identity: Ukrainian identity is fine when it is isolated and performed by Ukrainians who speak unaccented Russian, recognize no significant national differences, and defend Soviet—and by extension, Russian—imperial aims. In the other scenario, the director represents Ukrainian identity so that the viewer understands it to be dangerous and aligned with fascism. Ukrainians collaborate. To blend in as aUkrainian, aRussian performs aUkrainian folksong while wearing acheap reproduction of afolk song before Nazis. These films exemplify two ways that the Russian Ministry of Culture supported directors who appropriated Ukrainian folk culture to serve the same political goal: delineating acceptable from dangerous Ukrainians. This article will outline the methodology and national context, and for each film, introduce the films and their predecessors, and discuss the performance of the songs within the 2015 films. The conclusion addresses how these songs, along with the films into which they are imbedded, relate to Russian collective memory of the Soviet past. If numerous scholars have analysed how musicians perform nationality through songs, what are the consequences when anation appropriates another nation’s songs and performs them in amanner that undermines the original nation’s sovereignty? THE NATIONAL CONTEXT: WHO ARE WE? WHO IS ‘OURS’? WHO IS ‘OTHER’? Homi Bhabha defines anation as ‘asystem of cultural signification,’ in which national identity is located in anation’s cultural signs: its narratives, images, monuments, and heroes.4 Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russians began debating their identity as anation, as an ‘imagined community,’ to use Benedict Anderson’s term (2006, pp.6–7), re-evaluating, rejecting, and embracing cultural signs and revising the history and myths inherited from the Soviet past (Smith, 2002; Wertsch, 2002; Boym, 2001; Gessen, 2017). As relations among newly independent post-Soviet states 4 Bhabha (1990, p.2) in his preface, writes ‚Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully encounter their horizons in the mind’s eye‘. From this seemingly impossibly metaphorical beginning, this volume confronts the realities of the concept of nationhood as it is lived and the profound ambivalence of language as it is written. From Gillian Beer’s reading of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby’s cultural history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Francis Mulhern’s study of Leaviste’s ‚English ethics‘; to Doris Sommer’s study of the ‚magical realism‘ of Latin American fiction and Sneja Gunew’s analysis of Australian writing, Nation and Narration is acelebration of the fact that English is no longer an English national consciousness, which is not nationalist, but is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. OPEN ACCESS
56 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 1/2023 shifted, Russians asked if their former compatriots remained ‘ours’ or had become ‘other?’ In search of post-Soviet identity, some sought answers in Russian Orthodoxy and others in folk culture (Olson, 2004, p.4). As Gregory Carleton and Stephen Norris have shown, upon assuming the presidency in 2000, Vladimir Putin began drawing upon the memory of the Great Patriotic War as aunifying means of forging apostSoviet Russian identity (Norris, 2012; Carleton, 2017). He began investing in cultural products that would bolster patriotism, including high-quality, big-budget films and mini-series depicting key battles on Soviet land. After Putin reassumed the presidency in 2012, his regime became more authoritarian and room for ambiguity that deviated from political aims evaporated (Norris, 2021, p.299–300). While some of the storylines are entirely new, all films in the 2015 cohort are reworkings of myths and elaborations of narratives known to citizens raised in the Soviet Union (Norris, 2012, p.120). Particularly in the case of The Young Guard, Ifind it useful to approach these canons of films and literary works as ‘palimpsests,’(Genette, 1997) to use Gerard Genette’s term, because multiple versions of the same narrative exist and older versions affect the reception of new versions. The nature of the palimpsest both preserves the distinctness of the individual texts, yet exposes the contamination of each other, the layering of texts. By combining Genette’s approach with scholarship on national identity and collective memory, these new films, their cultural precedents, and the relationships among them reveal areas of evolution and points of tension. Furthermore, reviews and conversations in forums (on kinopoisk. ru and kino-teatr.ru) and on YouTube give evidence that many viewers approach post-Soviet remakes through their memories of Soviet versions of various genres.5 Published interviews show directors to be highly aware of previous versions of their remakes. In the case of The Young Guard, which includes folk performances in multiple versions, Iconsider how these performances differ from each other—both in terms of execution and of relation to the larger work. UNIFYING THE NATION: MOKRITSKII’S BATTLE FOR SEVASTOPOL The increasing tension between Russia’s imperial aims and Ukraine’s insistence on its independence and sovereignty since the dissolution of the USSR, which culminated in armed conflict in 2014, has both complicated the narratives of the heroes depicted in these two films and underscored their relevance. Both of these films take place in multi-ethnic borderlands, in places that Russians lay claim to in 2014. Sergei Mokritskii’s quasi-biographical film depicts the wartime experience of Hero of the Soviet Union Liudmila Pavlichenko, the Soviet sniper who killed 309Nazis. During the war, journalists, both Soviet and Western, published accounts of Pavlichenko’s battle successes and American folk singer Woody Guthrie composed asong about her 5 Soviet citizens would have encountered these war heroes in myriad genres, both narrative: feature films and miniseries, fiction, official histories and biographies, textbooks, newspaper articles, rumours and myths; and visual: monuments, paintings, postage stamps, and museum exhibits. OPEN ACCESS
ADRIENNE m. HARRIS 57 ‘Killed by her Gun.’ She, herself, published ashort autobiography in 1960, and the Brezhnev years saw numerous short biographies. Abook-length biography and novel appeared in 2014 (Begunova, 2014; Pavlichenko & Pegler, 2018; Vinogradova, 2017).2017 In addition to Pavlichenko’s biography, Mokritskii also engages with alarger ‘Defence of Sevastopol’ narrative that dates back to the Crimean War (1853–56). In Battle for Sevastopol, Ukrainian-born Russian director and screenwriter Mokritskii approaches national identity by implying and identifying ethnic identity then blurring and blending ethnic markers into an overarching Soviet identity, juxtaposing the Soviet Union with the United States, and tapping on nostalgia for the Soviet past. For example, Ukrainian-born Pavlichenko’s surname points to ethnic Ukrainian heritage, but she acquired her name from an ex-husband; her maiden name, Belova, betrays aRussian background. As Mokritskii eliminates the husband from his film and attributes the Pavlichenko surname to her father, viewers would assume Ukrainian heritage unless they know otherwise, making Pavlichenko aparticularly useful example of aseemingly Ukrainian Soviet hero who identifies as ‘Soviet’ and risks her life to save Sevastopol, synecdochally the Soviet nation, in Crimea6 and who eventually relocates to Moscow, the centre of Soviet power, after the war. While Mokritskii does not address the surname question in interviews, he explains other conscious decisions he made so that this feature film might be aunifying experience. These choices include working with Ukrainians in the film industry, shooting the film in Russian—almost entirely unaccented by Ukrainian—and dubbing the entire film into Ukrainian for Ukrainian audiences, releasing the film in both countries on the same day, April 2, 2015, and choosing aUkrainian title Indestructible or Unbreakable [Незламна], and as ‘Battle for Sevastopol’ would sound politically incorrect in light of Russia’s February 2014 annexation of Crimea.7 The Soviet film industry tended to prefer symphonic music in cinema (Rees, 2015, p.2) and the Ukrainian national symphonic orchestra provided the background music for the soundtrack. Nevertheless, the Mokritskii and the film’s composer Evgenii Galperin incorporated popular music at certain key points relevant to the film’s secondary romance plots, balancing asong written and performed by the popular Ukrainian rock band Okean elzi, ‘Embrace Me’ [Обійми] with Russian singer and 2015 Eurovision contestant Polina Gagarina’s new recording of Russian-Korean singer Viktor Tsoi’s classic ‘Cuckoo’ [Кукукша].8 Within this context, roughly 55 minutes 6 Areview on the Ukrainian database kino-poisk.ua, written by Vitalii Vashchuk on March 28, 2015, attests to the fact that viewers assumed Ukrainian heritage “One can say alot from many different points of view about the story of the notable Ukrainian girl-sniper Liudmila Pavlichenko, finally having erupted on the screen…it’s ours—Ukrainian” ‘Bitva za Pavlichenko— Retsenziia na fil’m Nezlamna ‘ Kino-Teatr.ua’ ‘ https://kino-teatr.ua/review/nezlamna-2921.phtml [accessed 29March 2019]. 7 Zakhar Vinogradov, ‘Sergei Mokritskii: Eto fil’m pro Sevastopol’, misticheskuiu territoriiu’,RIA Novosti, https://ria.ru/20150508/1063345608.html [accessed 1March 2019]. 8 ‘Okean El’zi— Obiimi (OST Bitva za Sevastopol’)— YouTube’ https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4WNKIg00VSQ [accessed 1March 2019]; ‘Polina Gagarina— Kukushka (OST OPEN ACCESS
58 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 1/2023 into the film, one encounters the lyric song ‘The Blackthorn Blooms,’ asad song about ayoung woman’s grief as her beloved has gone off to look for another. The camera captures amedical tent marked by ared cross illuminated against the night sky and as the viewer hears several women’s voices harmonizing as they sing the following lines of ‘The Blackthorn Blooms’: Хто в любові не знається, Той горя не знає. А я молода дівчина, Не буду я спати, Буду його виглядати, День і ніч чекати. Viewers approach the tent from the perspective of Captain Makarov, Pavlichenko’s love interest at that point in the film. When the cinematographer shoots the inside of the tent, the viewer sees specifically Pavlichenko singing the song. As the scene continues, the voices split according to gender: the men drink to Odessa while the women sing. Immediately after the song, an established couple Grisha and Masha rush off together, apilot forcefully attempts seducing Pavlichenko only to be interrupted by Makarov after Pavlichenko has fought off the would-be suiter, Pavlichenko runs after Makarov, finds him in the fog, and kisses him. Within the film, the song serves three purposes. On asimply artistic level, it foreshadows the unhappy trajectory of the developing romances, as both Makarov and Masha’s Grisha will soon perish. The Blackthorn symbolizes suffering and obstacles in Ukrainian folklore and literature.9 The song provides an additional layer of the gendering that occurs throughout the film: to make his film compatible with 2015 gender norms, Mokritskii takes liberties with Pavlichenko’s biography and frames military rituals and the performance of asoldierly femininity so that the film depicts women’s participation in combat as transgressive and out of character from their ‘true,’ traditionally-feminine nature. Namely, he ensures that viewers understand Pavlichenko to be attractive to heterosexual men, interested in men, longing for children, and friendly with other women. The performance of this lyric song from awoman’s perspective simply underscores the director’s careful shaping of her complicated gender identity as awoman who kills Nazis yet remains traditionally feminine. Most importantly, the scene captures aperformative Ukrainian identity and shows aUkrainian presence, even though all main characters speak unaccented Russian. It draws aconnection to Russia’s first feature film, Aleksandr Khanzhonkov’s and Vasily Goncharov’s 1911 Defence of Sevastopol about the siege of the city in the Crimean War. Although the film is silent, between scenes of carnage, men and women overBitva za Sevastopol’)— YouTube’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuPX8mjeb-E[accessed 1March 2019]. 9 Taisiia Povalii, ‘Tsvite teren,’ https://dovidka.biz.ua/tsvite-teren-tsvite-teren-analiz/ [8February 2023] Whoever is not familiar with love Does not know sorrow. But I am a young woman, I will not sleep I will look for him And wait, day and night. OPEN ACCESS
ADRIENNE m. HARRIS 59 come by anational sentiment spend aminute and ahalf performing aUkrainian kick dance; in spite of their dire situation, they cannot help but dance, simply because they are Ukrainian. The performance in Battle for Sevastopol seems equally spontaneous, an authentic performance, unpractised, acapella, unifying the young women in harmony—yet reminding viewers that these Russian-speaking nurses, the Russianspeaking officers drinking to Ukrainian cities, and Pavlichenko herself were part of amultinational Soviet people that defended Odessa, Crimea, and Ukraine. Though composer Russian Galperin Evgenii carefully balanced Ukrainian and Russian contemporary songs in the soundtrack, he did not include aRussian folk song as acounterpart for this song. Perhaps there was no need—though Russians acknowledge it as aUkrainian folk song, they love it and even perform it for Russian audiences as the Russian folk singer Pelageia performed it at aconcert in the Moscow Kremlin in 2018.10 An international community commented favourably, primarily in Russian. The film leaves viewers, most of them Russian, with anostalgic longing for aSoviet-past when all nationalities depicted—Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews in Battle for Sevastopol—fought as one nation against aformidable enemy, at time when the Ukrainian language was allocated secondary status to Russian. Mokritskii depicts idealized pre-war years in Kiev and Odessa, Khrushchev years in Moscow, and wartime years in Odessa and Sevastopol, symbolically reunifying the Soviet Union without reference to the Russian/Ukrainian border. THE YOUNG GUARD: MEMBERS AND LEGACY While ‘The Blackthorn Blooms’ plays arelatively minor role within the rest of the Battle for Sevastopol soundtrack, ‘In the Cherry Orchard’ functions as an instrumental leitmotif in several episodes of The Young Guard and occupies aprominent role as aperformance that distracts Nazis while allowing Young Guard members to engage clandestine activities. The film uses the song to accompany scenes that deliver an overtly anti-Ukrainian message. Over the past seventy-five years, few, if any, Soviet war heroes have inspired as many commemorative representations as resistance group known as ‘The Young Guard.’ Points of divergence among the narratives reveal the dynamic nature of nationality in the Young Guard narrative and how the performance of music functions as ameans to construct nationality and reshape memory through the Young Guard narrative. During January and February 1943, Nazis tortured and executed 80 young people, mostly teenagers, for engaging in underground activity in the occupied mining town of Krasnodon, Ukraine. After the liberation of the town, news of the Young Guard spread across the Soviet Union and five members were decorated posthumously with the highest Soviet honour, as Heroes of the Soviet Union. While historians and relatives and conspiracy theorists still debate exactly what the 10 Garekht, Syromlia, Golan and Pelageia, ‘Tsvite Teren— Final— Golos deti Sezon 5‘— YouTube’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fioTEUi7P7A [12February 2023] OPEN ACCESS
60 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 1/2023 group did and who served in which role, the group’s importance lay—and lies—in its cultural legacy, for this group of young people inspired numerous works of literature and film in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Because the Young Guard operated in Ukraine, rather than in Russia, the nationalities of members and enemies have always been relevant. Soviet authors and filmmakers used avariety of means to ensure that readers and viewers understood that these young Soviet citizens comprised an international group, as the group’s international nature contributed to their heroes’ propagandistic value. While references to Ukrainian identity and the Eastern Ukrainian setting in the Donbas have always shaped the story of the Young Guard, acomparison of versions reveals that the significance of nationality as seen through performance—singing songs, donning folk costumes, especially embroidered shirts, speaking in Ukrainian or with Ukrainian-accented Russian—evolves in this well-known narrative that happens to take place in adisputed borderland embroiled in violence since 2014. The novel and three films that comprise the core of the Young Guard canon were written by Russians for aRussian-speaking audience—especially the 2015 miniseries. In archival documents from July 1943, the Communist Youth League identified 35 of 70 participants as Russian, 26 as Ukrainian, two as Belorusian, an Armenian, aJew, and an Iranian. Of the five young people canonized ‘Heroes of the Soviet Union’ in 1943, three were Ukrainians and two were Russians. Viktor Tretiakevich, written out of previous narratives but positioned as the protagonist in the 2015 version, was Belarusian (Petrova, 2015, pp.359–68). As atestament to the perceived potential of the Young Guard story already in 1943, the Komsomol Central Committee commissioned anovel from Aleksandr Fadeev, the first secretary of the Soviet Writer’s Union; the first edition appeared in late December 1945.11 In spite of the fact that Fadeev’s novel was awork of fiction, most readers interpreted it as historical truth. The nation’s most elite director and composer Sergei Gerasimov and Dmitrii Shostakovich collaborated on the cinematized version of Fadeev’s novel, which premiered in 1948. Meanwhile in Krasnodon, relatives fought among themselves over the deceased’ legacies. Fadeev had eliminated Tretiakevich from his novel, but in 1959, Treatiakevich’s relatives succeeded in rehabilitating him. In 1965, alarge palatial museum opened in Krasnodon, reproducing Fadeev’s pantheon; Soviet children celebrated initiatory rituals in the museum, and eventually, many Soviet youth simply tired of the perfect young heroes as represented by Fadeev and Gerasimov (Furst, 2010, pp.137–56). When perestroika and glasnost presented the opportunity to update the curriculum, pedagogues abandoned the novel. After Putin began repositioning World War II as aunifying event, the novel saw reprints and pedagogues began trying to reincorporate it into the curriculum. Two unsuccessful attempts to update the story appeared in the mid-2000s: aminiseries drenched in Orthodox Christian themes and images and an adventure novel aimed at youth yet teeming with sexual content. 11 In 1951, he would be compelled release arewritten version of the novel which embellished the role of adult communist leaders. OPEN ACCESS
ADRIENNE m. HARRIS 67 WORKS CITED Aleksievich, Svetlana. 2016. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, First U.S. edition New York: Random House. Anderson, Benedict Richard O’Gorman. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism London; New York; Verso. Begunova, Alla. 2014. Angely Smerti: ZhenshchinySnaĭpery, 1941–1945, Voennye Taĭny XX Veka Moskva: Veche. Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. (ed.). Nation and Narration, 1 edition London; New York: Routledge. ‘Bitva za Pavlichenko— Retsenziia na fil’m Nezlamna— Kino-Teatr.Ua’, https://kinoteatr.ua/review/nezlamna-2921.phtml [accessed 29March 2019]. Bojanowska, Edyta, ATicket to Europe: Collections of Ukrainian Folk Songs and Their Russian Reviewers, 1820s-1830s,in Ukraine and Europe: Cultural Encounters and Negotiations, ed. by Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, Marko Pavlyshyn, and Serhii Plokhy University of Toronto Press, 2017, pp.227–48. Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia New York: Basic Books, 2001. Carleton, Gregory, Russia: The Story of War Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The BelknapPress of Harvard University Press, 2017. ADictionary of Narratology— University of Nebraska Press https://www.nebraskapress. unl.edu/9780803287761/a-dictionary-ofnarratology [accessed 5March 2019]. The Dove, Smithsonian Folkways Liner Notes, 1978. https://folkways-media.si.edu/docs/ folkways/artwork/MON00797.pdf [accessed 13February 2023]. Fadeev, Aleksandr, The Young Guard: ANovel, Progress Soviet Authors Library, 2 vols Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973. Furst, Juliane, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gagarina, PolinaKukushka Bitva Za Sevastopol’— YouTube https://www.YouTube. com/watch?v=fuPX8mjeb-E[accessed 1March 2019]. Garekht, Syromlia, Golan and Pelageia, Tsvite Teren— Final— Golos deti Sezon 5YouTubehttps://www.YouTube.com/ watch?v=lAPBpdKfCtA [accessed 29March 2019]. Genette, Gérard, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, Stages, v. 8 Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Gessen, Masha, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia New York: Riverhead Books, 2017. Gurt Ekspres.Oi, uVishnevomu Sadu.- YouTube https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=- MtwBRyDRr8 [accessed 25March 2019]. Karpuk, Paul A., Gogol’s Research on Ukrainian Customs for the Dikan’ka Tales’, The Russian Review, 56.2 1997, 209–32. Kononenko, Natalie O., Slavic Folklore: AHandbook, Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2007. McGlynn, Jade, Historical Framing of the Ukraine Crisis through the Great Patriotic War: Performativity, Cultural Consciousness and Shared Remembering’, Memory Studies, 13: 6 2018, 1058–1080. Molodaia gvardiia 2015— … https://www. kinopoisk.ru/film/880743/ [accessed 5March 2019]. Norris, Stephen M., Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, and Patriotism Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Norris, Stephen M., The war film and memory politics in Putin’s Russia’, The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, ed. David Hoffmann Routledge, 2021. Olson, Laura J., Performing Russia: Folk Revival and Russian Identity, BASEES/RoutledgeCurzon Series on Russian and East Europeanstudies, 7 London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004 Okean El’zi Obiimi OST Bitva za Sevastopol’- YouTubehttps://www.YouTube.com/ OPEN ACCESS
68 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 1/2023 watch?v=4WNKIg00VSQ [accessed 1March 2019]. Pavlichenko, Lyudmila & Martin Pegler. 2018. Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin’s Sniper Greenhill Books. Petrova, N.K. 2015. (ed.). Podlinnaia Istoriia Molodoĭ Gvardii’, Mify iPravda Istorii Moskva: Veche. Povalii, Taisiia,Tvite Teren.- YouTube https:// www.YouTube.com/watch?v=lUc_ojv6d_4 [accessed 29March 2019]. Rees, Lucy M. 2015. Mongolian Film Music: Tradition, Revolution and Propaganda Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Shlikhar, Tetyana. 2020. Between History and Memory: Cultural War in Contemporary Russian and Ukrainian. CinemaProQuest Dissertations Publishing, https://search.proquest.com/ docview/2467805172?pq-origsite=primo [accessed 2October 2022]. Smith, Kathleen E. 2002. Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory during the Yeltsin Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Speak Ukrainian. https://www.speakua.com/10ukrainian-folk-songs [accessed 13February 2023]. Vasina, Zinaida Oleksandrivna. 2006. Ukrainsskyj litopys vbrannja: [naukovo-chudozni rekonstrukcii] = Ukrainian chronicle of clothing = Ukrainskaja letopis odezdy Kyiv: Mystectvo. Vinogradov, Zakhar & Sergei Mokritskii: eto fil’m pro Sevastopolmisticheskuiu territoriiu’, RIA Novosti, 20150508T1346+0300Z https:// ria.ru/20150508/1063345608.html [accessed 1March 2019]. Vinogradova, Lyuba. 2017. Avenging Angels: Young Women of the Soviet Union’s WWII Sniper Corps New York: MacLehose Press. Vishnia. Pro Ukrainu. http://about-ukraine. com/vishnya/#more-417 [accessed 5March 2019]. Wertsch, James V. 2002. Voices of Collective Remembering Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press. Wickström, David-Emil. 2008. „Drive-EthnoDance“ and „Hutzul Punk“: UkrainianAssociated Popular Music and GeoPolitics in aPost-Soviet Context, Yearbook for Traditional Music; Canberra, 40, 60–88. Adrienne M.Harris is an associate professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Baylor University. She holds aPhD. from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. She has published articles on collective memory of the Second World War, heroism, women combatants’ memoirs, war poetry, and gender in Russia, and on masculinity in post-communist Czech film. She is currently drafting amonograph on twenty-first century Russian war films. She has served as vice president of the Slavic, East European and Eurasian Folklore Association. Contact: [email protected] OPEN ACCESS