Buried in the basement. Belarus remained in the feeling of a good (in all respects) part of the post-Soviet citizens by the standard and quintessence of Sovietism, and therefore it is not surprising that ideologically, aesthetically and even – far without this – politically it was she from all the republics of the former Union that fell to her share the role of a reserve, a peculiar Park of the Soviet period. As in any reservation, here is not naturally clean and safe, albeit with a taste of emasculation, the colors are extinguished, the sounds are muffled, and the animals, in theory wild and unpredictable, eat from hand, like Bialowiezh bison. However, the reserved silence and surface are deceptive: it was in Belarus - in Mogilev and Viscules respectively - that the collapses of the two greatest empires were documented, and the military working days of this land over the twentieth century, perhaps more, but the authorities came and went, and the bonds did not disappear: Belarus with unprecedented efficiency resisted all the heresies of cynicism, anybodry and self-aimed exposure and remained true - first of all, to itself. Only the lazy did not call Belorussov native partisans - and certainly not because of the alleged inherent innate resistance to any statehood imposed on their territory, but because in them, as perhaps in no other people, the instinct of recognizing and rejecting betrayal was strong.
An amazing thing, but the program of his story “The theme of a traitor and (or) a hero” Borges published in 44, at the height of Operation Bagration, and this can hardly be attributed to coincidence: the writer’s diary records indicate that in the Argentine peace silence he lived one Europe and everything that happened there, passed through him to the sharpest pain of the soul. He was particularly interested in the Belarusian Resistance: once in five variations in the diaries of Borges, the statement of the Nazi Minister of the occupied eastern regions Rosenberg is repeated: As a result of the 23-year domination of the Bolsheviks, the population of Belarus is so infected with the Bolshevik worldview that there are neither organizational nor personal conditions for local self-government. There are no positive elements to rely on in Belarus.” A convinced anti-communist, Borges seemed to be trying to explain the repeatedly proven inflexibility of the Russians in some other way, somehow bypassing (preferably on the right) the most obvious “see, there are such people in the Soviet country” (until later became common cliché that this inflexibility itself is only one of the manifestations of popular savagery and barbarism, however, and he was not invented – after all, some literary nobles still obliged him). Hence the double essences, the dialectic of the traitor and the hero in the memory of the people, the inexplicability of who is who and is generally a difference in any noticeable historical perspective, as well as the fundamental fictionality of any historical-ideological narrative. Probably unwittingly, Borges discovered the dialectic of reality in perception infected military literature for many years to come. And let the incubation period of his illness turned out to be long: it is indicative that at the end of his life Vasil Bykov himself - a partisan! hero! eyewitness! the most, hardly doubting, screened Soviet author! - fell victim to this ailment, falling from the "Cursed Height" in the "Wolf Pit". Shake off the universal (within the framework of the "mokretsy" - artists) moroko managed only recently, modest, but from the first of his films wonderful Belarusian director Vitaly Dudin, single-handedly revived native cinema with the film "Cadet".
Formally starting in the script from the story of Anatoly Zhuk, Dudin, with minimal plotted interference in it, so shifts semantic accents that the film is filled with a completely different, completely Pushkin sound. Already in the process of work, Dudin changed its name: “Methik” (the name of the alleged killer) turned into “Cadet”, and the story of more or less compromised attempts to survive – in “Captain’s daughter”, in “keep honor young”, in the narrative of “resistance of young people who do not shave their beards”. After all, no matter what Tsvetaeva saw, Marina Ivanovna, contrasting the “genius leader” Pugacheva with anarchic "unrestrained" his "colorless" Pushkin glorified Petrusha Grinev not by any means the beauty of a blazing rebellion, and not the generous natures to which “any street is cramped”, but the modest, quiet service of a natural nobleman to the sovereign never seen by him – but in fact Russia embodied by her. And Dudin’s semantic truth is also not on the side of a righteous, capable man and his fighting friend, “just wanting to live” – no matter where, no matter who, no matter what the cost. Right young cadets carrying in the border Belarusian wilderness Pushkin solar aristocracy, romantic, visionary nonsense balls, parquet, epaulet illuminating a frowning village cart. After all, participation in the great - whether Pushkin's language, or the capture of the Reichstag - connects much more reliably neighborhood and kinship. Another thing is that the great has to correspond, and therefore it is so terribly important to preserve the “purity and pride I put” that “heavy on a steep turn” (Tatiana Bek). Cadet saves it, and returns to the duty station in Kalinin on the Volga, Metyk and Anelka - no, and they are absorbed by the insatiable Mokosh, mother-cheese-earth. In general, the revanchism of urbanism in the film is amazing - and this is despite the fact that the city itself flashes only for a few moments in the memories (dreams?) of Cadet Deniska, and village life is not rich, yes, but bright and wonderful - bear dews, intoxicating grasses, golden stacks, and the forest and share of visions are full. Dudin will not be reproached with contempt for a way of life in which for a thousand years as “the cow is calved, the child grays, the twigs are dried, and the twigs are boiling”, but he does not treat him falsely, like many of the “villagers”. Villages are cultivated with one soil, they come out and are anointed with it with dirt, and the possibility of purification and incorporation still comes from distant cities, which is probably logical: in the end, mundialis and mundator are words of one root and close in spirit (like bello rus - Horatsiev's warring village - and Belarus), and they contrast civilization with all types of bestiarity. Homeland, locality. The town is a pigsty.