Sakrale Grundlagen slavischer Literaturen by Hans Rothe (review)

Abstract

274 Reviews general for their camera movement, and secondly, that Arsenal contains one of the most extraordinary tracking shots in the history of Soviet cinema (the sequence in which the Bolshevik soldiers take their dead comrade back to his village on galloping horses). The assertion that Pudovkin's career in the 1930s became more conventional (p. 60) ignores Dezertir (The Deserter, 1932), an innovative and experimental soundfilm . Gillespie's critical stance in relation to the films made by these avant-garde directors in the 1930s and 1940s is undeniably warranted, but the complexities of the period in terms of its cultural politics are treated only superficially. Typical of this problem is the reference in his book to the celebrated argument between two prisoners in Solzhenitsyn's Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1962) about the artistic merits of Ivan Groznyi (Ivan the Terrible, 1944-45) (P- 57)It would have been helpful here if Gillespie had indicated that the conversation as presented in this novella could not for historical reasons have taken place: Tsezar', the character allegedly modelled on Lev Grossman, refers in his argument to the 'Dance of the Oprichniki'?yet this sequence appears in the second, banned part of the film (released only in 1958), and for this reason could not have been seen by the characters concerned. Sadly, this undermines Solzhenitsyn's (and thus Gillespie's) point entirely. There are also a number of unfortunate factual errors. Space precludes a detailed presentation of these, but the following might be taken as representative: the still from Oktiabr' (October, 1927) on the front cover is the wrong way round; Oleg Frelikh, not Esfir Shub', directed Prostitutka (The Prostitute, 1926) (p. 9); the director Iakov Protazanov did not make a 'star' of Ivan Mozzhukhinin 1916 (p. 10)?he was already famous fromthe filmsmade with the Khanzhonkovstudio; Aleksandr Rodchenko did not design the sets for Aelita (1924) (p. 11), these were created by Isaak Rabinovich on the basis of sketches produced by Aleksandra Ekster (neither, incidentally, does the film boast a cast of 'thousands', as claimed by Gillespie (p. 10)?it is probably about one hundred at most); it is a bull, not a cow, which is poisoned by kulaks in the second half of Staroe i novoe (p. 52); Zvenigora was released in 1927, not 1928 (p. 83); and Vasil', the hero of Zemlia (Earth, 1930), dances in the early morning, not in moonlight (p. 89)?whatever the indications in the screenplay, this is clear from the quality of the light. School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London Philip Cavendish Sakrale Grundlagen slavischer Literaturen. Ed. by Hans Rothe. (Vortrage und Abhandlungen zur Slavistik, 43) Munich: Sagner. 2002. viii+133 pp. ?14. ISBN 3-87690-802-7. This volume contains five separate studies based on contributions to the German Slavists' Convention in Potsdam in 2001. They have been written by members ofthe Section of the Patristic Commission at the North-Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Science (Bonn). What is presented to the reader here are the results of philologically based fundamental research on translated sacral source texts,which have been mostly ignored in the literary histories of the Slavic Middle Ages although?according to what has been handed down to us?they represent the basis of medieval literatures and have always held a clearly dominant position in the body of manuscripts. These are liturgical books (hymnography), biblical texts, and non-liturgical religious chants. In his thoroughly researched introductory study ('Sakrale Grundlagen der slavischen Literaturen', pp. 1-26) Hans Rothe expounds in great detail the manuscript tradition of the Church Slavonic and Latin texts presented in this volume, from the Orthodox East and South Slavs respectively, of the Latin Slavs from the CyriloMethodian period well into the modern age, a subject frequently complicated by the MLR, 99.1, 2004 275 difficultquestion of the sources' reliability. Rothe then describes the differences in the development of these basic texts, their mutual influence in various Slavic countries, and finally the impact of the sacral corpus on vernacular writings. His chapter ends with a daring general conclusion, that all Slavic literatures from the beginning until the early nineteenth century were...