Homeland magnet
Menashe, Louis
Repatriation HOMELAND MAGNET MOSCOW WELCOMES ITS PRODIGALS IT USED TO BE that if you were Russian and you had abandoned the homeland you could forget about ever returning. Aprimitive, clannish...
...Explaining that she sought private peace, not political freedom, she says that in the West she "was not free...
...A sleigh glides along the snow past the pastel-colored facades of old St...
...It can be fatal if one is not able to overcome it, but it can be Commonweal: 134 contracted only in a foreign country...
...It is based on the great nineteenth-century novel by Ivan Gon-charov about a title character who suffers from anhedonia and neurasthenia, a sort of Slavonic-aristocratic Woody Allen...
...So, a melancholic Russian director films abroad the story of a melancholic Russian scholar abroad researching the life of a melancholic Russian composer living abroad...
...I was in the hands of businessmen, lawyers, political figures and publishers" interested in her as a commodity...
...In the USSR, World War II is known by the emotive-patriotic term, "The Great Fatherland War of the Soviet Union...
...Now it appears the Soviet government is displaying an unaccustomed warmth toward some of its prodigals, repatriation with a human face...
...The celebrated opening scene takes pages and pages to get Oblomov out of bed...
...If previously," he said, "our heads were burning with narcotics [in Afghanistan] , now [in London] it was with thoughts of home...
...On the soundtrack are Rachmaninoff s Vespers...
...You can go home again...
...I came to understand clearly that I could live only in the land of my birth...
...for one single day...
...Yet the film amounts to a reverie for traditional Russia...
...This nostalghia, according to Tarkovsky, "mixed the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away...
...never mind Western losses or the vast Western contribution to the Soviet war effort in the form of lend lease: that the USSR suffered some 20 million dead in battling and defeating the Germans is a stark, awesome fact that no Russian, defector or loyalist, will allow anyone in the West to forget...
...What we do know is that for many Russians, the fatherland exerts a powerful, mystical magnetism, like no other in the West...
...One was what she saw as the absence of feeling, during D-Day commemorations in the West, for the Soviet dead in World War II...
...They went straight from German concentration camps to Soviet ones according to the logic that capture proved disloyalty...
...The boy had been adopted by Oblomov's friends...
...We don't know if these examples represent the start of a major campaign on the part of the Soviet government to woo back the hundreds of cultural and political dissidents who have defected in recent years or who were handed one-way tickets to the West and stripped of their Soviet citizenship...
...and of course, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter, who defected — no ambiguity about it — to the United States in 1967, her way of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution...
...Will Holy Soviet Russia claim his remains, too...
...The other trigger for Alliluyeva was seeing the Soviet film Oblomov...
...We don't know if an even larger target is intended: the tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, Armenians, and Germans whose emigration was a palpable by-product of detente and whose return, even in small numbers, would be a Soviet triumph in these days of renewed Cold War...
...With suitable public repentance on their part, certain defectors and deserters have been allowed to rejoin the fatherland after abandoning it...
...The reinterring of Boris Chaliapin's remains in Moscow recently even suggests that return is not limited to the living...
...Back in Moscow, Sergeant Ryzhkov described his homesickness and despair while in England...
...If you want to understand Russia and the Russians, learn why they defect...
...At least you could if you were the journalist Oleg Bitov, who claimed to have been kidnapped by British agents...
...The film director Andrei Tarkovsky, the most recent Soviet defector-luminary, called his last film Nos-talghia, and reminded Westerners that the word is pronounced in Russian with a hard "g...
...Well, speak to any emigre, even the most anti-Soviet, and you will notice the eyes clouding over with tenderness for the homeland when the subject comes up...
...A true son of the fatherland would have courted death rather than risk capture...
...Who couldn't help wanting to go to Russia, eyen for just a visit, after seeing Nikita Mikhalkov' s beautiful film...
...Rachmaninoff: another emigre who died in the West...
...Alliluyeva would sympathize...
...One extreme manifestation of this ferocious demand for loyalty was Stalin's practice of punishing Soviet soldiers who fell into German hands during World War II...
...LOUIS MENASHE (Louis Menashe teaches Russian history at the Polytechnic Institute of New York and lives not far from Little Odessa by the Sea...
...You can un-defect...
...Lenin condemned "Oblomovism...
...Igor Rykov, Oleg Khlan, and Nikolai Ryzhkov, who all deserted in Afghanistan...
...Petersburg...
...His own condition as an expatriate was reflected in the film, Tarkovsky explained...
...It is an illness, a moral suffering which tortures the soul...
...he was on his way to meet his real mother who visited him occasionally...
...Part of the old overheated nonsense about a purported Russian soul...
...Never mind her father's pact with Hitler or his peculiar reluctance to take Hitler's invasion seriously when it came...
...If you left, you were a traitor, period...
...She didn't say so at her press conference, but I'll bet Svetlana Alliluyeva, who longed to see her children and grandchildren, wept during this cinematic epiphany exalting reunion in Mother Russia...
...A cliche...
...Given this diagnosis and the self-evident cure, it should come as no surprise if Tarkovsky were to un-defect as well...
...At her press conference in Moscow, Svetlana Alliluyeva reported that two triggers helped push her homewards...
...And there is the broad, Russian douceur of Oblomov himself, who, after all, seeks only pokoi, an untranslatable word connoting unruffled serenity...
...Aprimitive, clannish vindictiveness guided the Soviet government in matters of repatriation...
...We don't know what negotiations, deals, plea-bargainings, and promises were concluded between these five individuals and Soviet authorities...
...Better, learn why some go back...
...To us," Tarkovsky said, "the word signifies a painful and destructive mood or feeling.'' The film is a bleak portrait of a brooding Soviet scholar in Italy researching the life of an eighteenth-century Russian emigre composer who eventually committed suicide...
...The film's last scene has a child, the son of the dead Oblomov, running across endless fields beneath a wide-open sky crying "Mama, mama, mama...
...He doesn't want any hassles, we would say...
...For his torpor and indiscipline Russians have taken Oblomov to be a national type...
...Some describe this Russian suffering as toska, a longing for the lost homeland...
Vol. 112 • March 1986 • No. 5
