Screening Nabokov is an ungrateful occupation initially. And not because no one is allowed to imbue with the spirit of genius and give something proportional to the source on the mountain - directors of sufficient culture have always been (and always, I hope, will be) in abundance. The problem is that Nabokov is a writer too deliberately artificial, too whimsically useless, too flamboyantly satisfying his work not the reader, but his own “internal monster” to be at all utilitarianly fascinating. His prose, like nothing else, convincingly illustrates the antithesis of Gumilev “and like bees in a hive empty, dead words smell bad” – Nabokov’s words are lovingly and sterilely dissected, carefully strung on pins, like dead but better alive butterflies that preserved the beauty of their wings. They involve a long, close, selfless look at the reader, guessing the shades of meaning, admiring the redundancy of form. Therefore, in the true sense of “Nabokovsky” prepared film product risks being accused of boring and absurdity by most of the film audience and, accordingly, with almost one hundred percent probability of failure at the box office – which can not but discourage potential interpreters. Nabokov can be screened, in a good way, only in the form of a free exercise for the soul muscles trained by more routine gymnastics. That is how Ashpai approached his task. And the result of his graceful exercises was – nothing less than – the discovery of Nabokov the playwright.
For the sake of fairness, it is worth remembering that attempts to grab the Sirin bird by the tail by the means of cinema were made in our country before: in the early nineties, one after another, the film adaptations of Mashenka and Tales came out (not brilliant, but very, very good, not approved wholeheartedly because their all-round screening was prevented by the post-perestroika collapse of the domestic film rental). But in them on the canvas transferred precious Nabokov prose. Ashpai - in itself an exquisite screenwriter - made to play with all colors it is the author's dramaturgy - completely, as it turned out, unique. Pretending to be a puppet, deliberately flaunting the clutches, seams and staples of his character brethren, sewn on a live thread of flaps borrowed from famous fiction writers, Nabokov like no other knew how to quietly animate his dolls along the way - only to, as if mocking, turn them again into cardboard and glue closer to the end, carefully sprinkle naphthalene into a box until the next time. “Love only that which is rare and imaginary, which is stolen by the outskirts of sleep, which angers fools, that stinks are executable as a homeland, be true to fiction” – this is Nabokov’s appeal to his muse, for which, we note especially, the ball rolled under the nanny of the dresser, is livelier, and more important, and brighter than the nanny herself.
Ashpay starts with the balls. We comprehend them in glimpses and echoes of conversations, but in a strange way these most notorious balls turn out to be more material than a real boy, whose portrait is painted by the artist Troshchekin, their presence dominates more the ghost of a departed baby, Troshchekin’s son. Eshpai props are generally disobedient, capricious, scattered throughout the stage space, requiring disproportionate attention in the yawning theatrical vacuum of scenery. Canvases, cameras with tripods and without, a hooked shawl on a reticulated hammock, a Japanese kimono embroidered with dragons, mouthpieces, studs, canes, beards with espanyoloks, pompadour-style hairstyle - all this is piled up and crowded, ousting and overshadowing the heroes, reluctantly, with the pale shadows of previous artistic incarnations acting out for a long time, it seems familiar (or very similar to the familiar) action. Disfocused, slightly distorted, meta-drama spoiled mixture of Gorky and Chekhov (degenerate homunculi of which in the form of a third-rate aesthetic artist Alexei Maksimovich and a staff emigre novelist Antonina Pavlovna in it are present and participate) flabby rolls along the rails of her own established logic of the gun mentioned in the first act, and deliberately did not shoot in the fourth. The declared event never happens, the characters, animated by his expectation, again lose the third dimension, collapse, deflate, flatten, turn into a deck of cards. So why does it hurt your heart? Is it not because it is precisely in this meaningless, secondary, parochial, repeatedly reflected, one expectation of something indefinite, spiritualized existence that the only emotional, somehow not yet truly meaningful truth about that first emigration is found? Emigration, at the time of writing the play is already completely crushed, degenerated, stiffened, thinned, scraps and scraps of which are about to be picked up by the wind of future cataclysms and dispel without a trace ... Ashpai and his cast felt it amazingly. The younger generation is ghostly transparent, the older one smells like a corpse. And everything would be just fine, if not banal, gorgeous, tasteless nostalgic insert in the final. But you can turn off the movie a few minutes before the end, right?
