Cargo 200: a bricolage of cultural citations

Abstract

Persistently revisiting the notion of a Godless society, Aleksei Balabanov directly dialogued with Fedor Dostoevskii’s cursed question and established a permanent touchstone for his own representations of Russia/the USSR, with the help of William Faulkner’s potboiler Sanctuary, in Cargo 200 (Gruz 200, 2007). Balabanov assembled a cinematic text for viewers, drawing on philosophical ideas articulated by the character Ivan Karamazov, filtered through a vulgar reinterpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche and constructed within the context of socialist realism’s own version of the Grand Inquisitor. Faulkner’s entire novel was forcibly relocated to the Soviet Union, where the degradation of the American South is offered as the wreckage of an industrial civilization tottering on the verge of collapse – or the late Stagnation period. Through the bricolage of Dostoevskii and Faulkner, Balabanov explores the realities of a Godless, morally corrupt Soviet society in which anything and everything is permitted. In so doing, Balabanov invites audiences to reassess Vladimir Putin’s new national unity that relied heavily on sanitized memories of a Soviet past, a Soviet Union that had demanded that citizens renounce personal freedom in order to enjoy collective economic and social stability.