Russian film classic Alexander Dovzhenko conceived the picture “Life in Flower” in the 44th. Having undergone all sorts of ideological and censorship transformations (at least the fact that they ended in a heart attack for the director indicates the seriousness of the battles), by the 48th it had turned into a large-scale biopic Michurin, the brightest example of developed socialist realism and high imperial style, scolded to pieces by generations of critics.
The main role was received by a brilliant theater artist (later - teacher) Grigory Belov. In the First World War he fought as an artilleryman, in the Great Patriotic he traveled along the fronts with agit brigades. The role of Michurin became his debut in the movie.
So, at the turn of the century, Russian scientist and gardener Michurin lives in the vicinity of the provincial town of Kozlov. He sits and digs up, frapps the inhabitants and quarrels with neighbors. Numerous correspondence and foreign delegations flock to his garden, dreaming of taking the Russian genius abroad along with all his priceless seedlings. While he himself, in order to continue the experiments, is forced to earn by repairing the clock.
Michurin is awarded the Order from the Sovereign and at the same time surrounds the thresholds of stupid tsarist officials, fiercely fights with the stagnation and obscurantism of fellow scientists and bitterly swears with a neighbor-priest. It appears alternately - in the image of a good grandfather, who, having caught a boy thief in the garden, drinks him with tea, then a nasty and grumpy old man, full of a sense of his own greatness.
Events occurring in the hero’s life rhyme with seasonal cycles and seasons. Happiness is a heavy cherry color, grief is shreds of rusty leaves that are ripped from the branches by a merciless wind. Winter numbness is replaced by spring awakening, the return of bird flocks.
The central image is dual. Michurin is a Faustian daring, encroaching on the world order. He doesn’t study evolution, he does it. Working with a shovel in the garden, he is engaged in creativity, he creates art. What is happening outside the garden is not interesting.
He is a wise man who sees things. “I have been sitting on a bed since I was four years old and observing,” he says of his own scientific method.
The sentence to the family happiness of the hero is a dream that he tells his wife: in it he sees their daughter first in the form of cherry, then Japanese cherry. Tree children are shielding their own children.
At the same time, Michurin personifies the opposition of human inertia. His main opponent is the inexorable time itself. Yes, the garden is more important and pleasant to him than living people, but his main desire is to turn the whole of Russia into a flowering garden. Turn the whole planet into paradise. He is engaged in the transformation of the Earth.
For the inhabitants, he is a difficult, even dangerous man. A kind of Dr. Frankenstein, obsessed with the God complex, who not only plants but makes trees. An old eccentric, a romantic with a Don-Chiotian beard and, at the same time, a wells Moreau wrapped in a black coat, which goes against the elements, plunging a grated cane into the ground.
The culmination in the life of a scientist is the loss of his wife - not just a loved one, but an assistant, a like-minded person, a colleague. Only after losing it, the hero fully realizes the depth of his feelings.
It seems that he will not recover from the tragedy, life loses meaning. But, with the cyclical renewal of nature, a new element comes to the country - the Revolution. This is a second chance for an experimenter with a difficult character, who at some point, as if jokingly, proposes to burn to hell half of Russia for the needs of selection and evolution.
Separately, I want to note an impressive soundtrack. The name of Dmitry Shostakovich speaks for itself. The film is extremely musical - in an unforgettable scene, Michurin literally conducts a blooming garden, flowers on the branches open as if by the wave of his hand!
Michurin’s relations with Lenin and Stalin, which “bring out” the USSR in the same way as he himself deduces a hybrid of apples and pears, look not only as a necessary curtsey towards party leaders, present in every work of socialist realism. These historical figures for him are really important, valuable and understandable, because he himself is a demiurge, an eternal rebel and improver, who does not recognize any accidents in nature, who completely denies its incomprehensibility.
The pathos of Soviet peace-building is the bringing of science to the fields, the struggle for abundance. The golden glow of wheat fields is not inferior in brightness to the sewing of kumach banners, the gloss of ripe fruits competes with the blush of komsomolok and the diversity of pioneer ties ... Here even a lecture on a new variety of apples is epic, like a sermon at the Old Testament Tree of Knowledge, while the lecturer himself is in a hurry to destroy this ambiguous metaphor. Because for him Cognition is a fact, now is the time to take up the oculeur knife and watering. That's just where to get extra twenty years, because everything is just beginning, and so much to do, and in the mirror - only these damned gray hair and wrinkles!
It is not a matter of union with nature, it is a matter of its complete submission to man. Michurin does not approve of revolution, he is revolution.
