The past continued to serve as a template for the present, regardless of the artist's particular politics, but emphasis increasingly shifted to contemporary life. Conservative Iurii Bondarev and liberal Vasil Bykov both chose to link the Second World War with contemporary Soviet life by following 'the behaviour and actions of former soldiers and officers . . . through several decades after the end of the war, and [juxtaposing] the reactions to past events by representatives of different generations'.[83] The revolutionary and Stalinist past 'enters into every facet' of Trifonov's characters and informs - indeed, determines - the moral universe they occupy in the present.[84] In the late 1960s and 1970s, Trifonov, Georgii Baklanov and a handful of others succeeded inpublishing fiction about the cynicism and consumerism ofthe urban intelligentsia, the degraded state of'that handful of ideals in which scions of the intelligentsia still believed but were unable to act on', and to link the moral expediency of the nation's past with the spiritual degeneration of subsequent generations. Others - Shukshin, Valentin Rasputin - wrote about the 'victims of the transformation of Soviet society, people who had little understanding of and less control over their own lives'. Trifonov wrote from inside the transformation process itself, from 'the point of view of those members of the urban intelligentsia who had "made" the Soviet Union and must live with the results'.[85]
With the present pushing out the past as art's primary focus, village prose diminished in importance, although it remained popular among readers. The phenomenon of literatura byta, the literature of everyday reality, expanded, despite consistent official denigration of bytopisanie as trivial. (Attacks on byt included film: Marlen Khutsiev fielded similar charges against Two Fyodors (Dva Fedora, 1958), as did Tengiz Abuladze the same year for Someone Else's Children (Chuzhie deti).) Over time, 'this generally small-scale literature, with its focus on the everyday and the mundane (especially the domestic), carved out a niche for itself within the mainstream of Soviet literature while declining to link the individual with the universal, to resolve personal as well as more general problems, or to comment on ideological or philosophical matters'.[86]
While by no means gender-specific, the literature, drama and cinema of byt came to be identified with 'women's themes' and with women artists, especially writers, whose numbers increased dramatically in the Brezhnev years. In films like A Sweet Woman (Sladkaia zhenshchina, i976), A Strange Woman (Strannaia zhenshchina, 1977) and A Wife Has Left (Zhena ushla, 1979), and in the fiction of many women writers, a throng of lonely women work and raise their children in a feminised world in which men play little part, and that part seldom constructive. The characters live in ugly apartment blocks in neighbourhoods devoid of shops and greenery, miles from the nearest metro stop. They spend inordinate amounts of time acquiring basic foodstuffs and traversing mud- and rubble-filled streets to get to work. 'It is precisely the domestic aspect of life, with its inequitable distribution of labor, its family pressures, the inadequate social and economic services, and above all the necessity of living with alcoholism, that immediately and on a very basic level distinguishes women's lives from those of men.'[87] (That distinction is eroded in later fiction by younger women.) Often enough, these writers treated themes - such as the impact of drunken husbands on family life - that coincided with official concerns (the economic cost of ubiquitous alcoholism). As a result, 'they were able to graft themselves onto a mandate that was actively being promoted' by the authorities.[88]
Given the cost and logistical complexity of film-making, making films required working within the system. Rewards included access to scarce resources like imported film stock, larger shooting budgets, more leisurely schedules, opportunities to shoot co-productions abroad and well-paid managerial positions within the Union of Cinematographers, the studios and the Soviet Union's premier cinema training centre, the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). The state stringently controlled distribution: reluctant to ban products that represented substantial financial outlays, the system preferred to limit their impact. With movies, that meant controlling the number of prints made and the venues in which they were shown (in, for instance, central versus outlying locations).
In the 1970s, as cinema attendance sagged in inverse proportion to the rise in TV ownership, the regime tried to encourage the release of entertaining films. (Central TV went over fully to colour programming in 1978.) To that end Filip Ermash, an admirer of Hollywood, replaced the ideological and anti- commercial Aleksei Romanov as head of Goskino, the State Department of Cinema. Ermash ran Goskino from 1972 to 1986, and encouraged a tilt towards 'mass, lightweight film aimed at everyone',[89] like the extraordinarily popular slapstick (and skilful) comedies directed by Leonid Gaidai.
Films became more homogeneous, though generically more diverse, and decidedly less individualistic, especially towards the end of Ermash's tenure. However, not all successful Brezhnev-era film-makers were opportunists, ready to conform to the party's priorities. Eldar Riazanov and Vasilii Shukshin, two significant exceptions, believed no less strongly than Andrei Tarkovsky that film-making should be free of control and dedicated to improvement of society, but they 'rejected formal experimentation in favour of an aesthetic of maximum (or at any rate, widespread) popular accessibility'.[90] Each had occasional difficulties: for years Shukshin fought (unsuccessfully) to make a film on the seventeenth-century Cossack rebel Stenka Razin, and local party chiefs banned Riazanov's bleak 1980 satire Garage (Garazh), even though it had been approved for general release. Still, most of their films played in first-run theatres to huge audiences. Fifty million viewers saw Shukshin's Snowball Berry Red (Kalina krasnaia, 1974) in its first year; seventy million saw Riazanov's Irony of Fate, or Have a Good Sauna! (Ironiia sud'by, ili s legkim parom!) a year later. Lenfilm's exceptionally gifted Dinara Asanova made eight films in ten years as well as a series on juvenile delinquency for TV While party leaders censored Asanova's 'portrait of a generation, puzzling in its taste for Western music and punk attire and its search for a new identity',[91] and relegated her films to second-run or run-down theatres, they held none back, and Kids (Patsany, 1983) won prizes at several Soviet festivals.
After 1967-8 film-makers faced increasing resistance to experimental, folk- loric and stylistically inflected films, with structures based on 'analogical images rather than narrative logic'.[92] Nevertheless, both central and republican studios managed to produce such films until roughly 1975, when local and national pressures combined to promote pedestrian and derivative cinema. Ukraine's studio tried to perpetuate the legacy of Dovzhenko and the beleaguered Sergei Paradzhanov, at least until the latter's arrest in 1974 on fabricated charges. Iurii Ilenko's highly stylised Spring for the Thirsty (Rodnik dlia zhazhdushchikh, 1965) was shelved for twenty years, but two later films, On St John's Eve (Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala, 1969) and the award-winning White Bird with a Black Mark (Belaia ptitsa s chernoi otmetinoi, 1971), ran in theatres, if only briefly. The explosion of cinematic energy that distinguished the studios of Central Asia in the late 1960s continued for several years, with Ishmukhame- dov's Sweethearts (Vliublennye; Uzbekistan, 1970), Mansurov's She was a Slave (Rabynia; Kazakhstan, 1970), Narliev's The Daughter-in-Law (Nevestka; Turk- menia, 1972), Okeev's The Fierce One (Liutyi; Kirgizia, 1974), and two films by Kirghiz director Shamshiev, Red Poppies ofIssyk-Kul (Alye maki Issyk-Kulia, 1971) and White Steamship (Belyi parokhod, 1976), both award-winning, though the latter minimally distributed.
83
N. N. Shneidman,
85
Josephine Woll,
86
Nicholas Zekulin, 'Soviet Russian Women's Literature in the Early 1980s', in Helena Goscilo (ed.),
89
Val S. Golovskoy with John Rimberg,
90
George Faraday,
91
AnnaLawton,