Here we have to state the obvious, sad though it is. Despite multiple attempts to establish a culture of cheese production in Russia’s vast expanses and poor soils, from Peter the Great through to Stalin’s Head of Food Production, Anastas Mikoyan, and today’s heroic Russian dairy farmers, cheese remains a product that is alien to the Russian soul. Its lifecycle is too long for Russian history and everyday life in the country. Like wine and olive oil, cheese is the product of a stable culture. Roquefort has been made since the eleventh century; Gruyère and Cheshire cheese since the twelfth; Parmesan, Gorgonzola, Taleggio and Pecorino since the fourteenth. But it’s less a question of the length of the tradition than it is the time it takes for the cheese to mature: thirty-six months for Parmesan; five to six years for mature Gouda. For cheese to able to spend such a long time maturing, you need political and social stability, guarantees of the rights of ownership, credit and a steady demand. Cheese is an investment in a reliable future.
In Russia they made tvorog (a kind of cottage cheese), which can be made quickly and which also goes off very quickly. You put the milk out in the evening, drain it the next morning, and eat it the following evening, by which time it’s already beginning to go sour. The Russian peasant had no certainty about the future: tomorrow there could be war, a military call-up, a corvée[14] or Bolshevik demands for extra produce. The peasant didn’t manage his own life or his own property; he didn’t have time to make cheese, he just wanted to stay alive. Russian production of both material goods and foodstuffs has always been the victim of the climate and the country’s history, which dictate quick production and use; and also the victim of weak institutions under which there is no right to ownership, nor the possibility for long-term planning and storage. There is just a single Leviathan state, which can never be satisfied and which will gobble up any surplus – and cheese comes about as the result of a surplus of milk.
As a result, the question of cheese (also, incidentally, of wine) is a question of roots, about a person being tied to a place; it’s about identity, locality and regionalism. It’s about a village that has stood for the past two thousand years, where there are houses that are three hundred years old. It’s about family traditions, generations of peasants, about handwritten housekeeping books, alfalfa, which is at its best on the western side of the hill. Charles de Gaulle asked the rhetorical question: ‘How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?’[15] In fact, the General was mistaken; there are at least 400 different cheeses in France. And it is precisely that variety of tastes, regions, cultures and traditions that has made France the most popular country in the world for visitors, attracting up to a hundred million people every year. In Russia, the tradition of producing cheese arose only in the non-Russian regions on the periphery of the empire, in the Caucasus, the Baltic States and Finland; in other words, in those areas where there was no serfdom and where the sense of kinship, soil and roots was strongest. In the central spaces of the empire, where there was serfdom, cheese never caught on; it never became a tradition or a favoured taste, but remained a sort of foreign amusement, the forbidden aroma of the West, of satiety – of freedom.
The present war against cheese in Russia is following in the footsteps of this long cultural tradition, and it is no coincidence that alert citizens continue to use the ‘hot line’ to report shops where they find ‘the forbidden fruit’, and the television stations continue to show the destruction of cheese in mobile crematoria, and the health authorities continue to tell people how bad Western cheese is for the Russian stomach. Wiping out cheese is eternal Russia’s answer to the mouldy West and to curious citizens: ‘Your predecessors didn’t have a rich lifestyle, why the hell should you start now?’ And at one and the same time, these are symbolic gestures of Russia’s political independence, a step into the future, where there won’t be 246 types of cheese, as de Gaulle had to cope with, but just one, Russian, like in Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik. True, it will be made of palm oil, but that’s like just about everything in our sovereign state.
THE LAND OF ABANDONED CHILDREN
Loveless, a film by Andrei Zvyagintsev about a boy who runs away from home after a row between his parents and disappears into the forest, hit the Russian screens on 1 June 2017, which happens to be the Day for the Defence of Children. Even though this was, no doubt, a complete coincidence, the timing is deeply symbolic.
Children have indeed become one of the painful subjects of our time, from the fake propaganda about the ‘crucified boy’ in Slavyansk (a well-known lie put out by Russian media supposedly to illustrate the cruelty of Ukrainians in the Donbass), to the hysteria in the Duma about the ‘groups of death’ in social media, which allegedly were trying to provoke schoolchildren into committing suicide. From ‘the children’s crusade’ of those school kids who unexpectedly took part in the protest rally in support of the opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, on 26 March 2017, to ‘the Arbat Hamlet’ – a boy who was reading Shakespeare aloud on the Arbat pedestrianized street in Moscow and was arrested for begging. With this film, Zvyagintsev hits right at the sore point where politics, propaganda and collective trauma all meet.
Just about all of Zvyagintsev’s films revolve around the subject of abandoned children. In The Return (2003), a prodigal father visits his two abandoned sons, and their lack of understanding ends in tragedy. In The Banishment (2007), the abortion of an unwanted foetus starts a chain of deaths. In Elena (2011), one of the central conflicts is between a father and his daughter (but there is also in the final scene the shot of a small baby writhing on a huge bed, as a symbol of thoughtless reproduction). In Leviathan (2014), the son of the main hero is taken off for adoption. Unborn, unwanted, abandoned children, children who are taken from their parents – this forms a key image for the director, and a symbol of the decaying cosmos and the moral catastrophe which he shows in every one of his films.
In Loveless (2017), a child is once again placed at the heart of the story; or, to be more precise, the child’s disappearance. The film has an overwhelming emptiness, a lacuna, which begins to grow like a funnel, drawing into it all the main characters, those close to them, their homes, the areas where they live, and the forest park. The aesthetics of absence, marked by traces of the boy who has disappeared – his jacket, notices about his disappearance, the cries of those searching for him in the empty forest – all heighten the suspense, turning a family drama into a psychological thriller. The tormented search for the child reminds us more than once of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Zvyagintsev always uses the same cameraman, Mikhail Krichman, whose lens gives even the simplest details a merciless sharpness and metaphysical depths; Krichman’s gripping shots and dim palette turn a Moscow suburb into the kingdom of the dead, relieved only by the fleeting beauty that is brought by the first snow, which just for a second turns the scene into a Bruegelesque winter landscape.
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‘Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?’ ‘Les Mots du Général’, Ernest Mignon, 1962.