War is (not) Our Home. Andrei Konchalovsky’s House of Fools (Dom Durakov, 2002) as a Russian Literary and Cultural Archive

Abstract

The article focuses on the film House of Fools (Dom Durakov, 2002) of Andrei Konchalovsky, who is one of the most recognized contemporary Russian directors. The selected work is analyzed from the point of view of its intertextual relationships with Russian literary texts and cultural phenomena. The motif of the train, the paradigm of jurodivyj and the reference to the artistic worlds of acclaimed Russian writers (Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Vyrypaev) are among the main parallels which are discussed in the publication. The eclectic nature of the film allows treating it as a cultural archive founded on the storage capacity of the cultural memory. In the context of war, the sphere of art and the imagined can be seen as the most stable reality.