Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

We have agreed before not to see it as pure sentimentality. Earth is not empty of other human beings when an astronaut is in the space, not physically so—and yet, by his wife it is seen as psychologically empty. You see, the absence of someone whom we would normally describe as our ‘date,’ or ‘partner,’ or ‘boyfriend,’ can hardly create this painful feeling of emptiness, I guess because our boy- or girlfriends are easily replaceable, as both you and I know, whereas our ‘significant others’ are not. Can we, shall we ‘move on’ from the culture where this feeling of emptiness inevitably gives us so much suffering to the culture where we easily can ‘do the repair job’ by ourselves and replace one partner by another in the same way in which de Saint-Exupéry used to replace one broken detail in his plane’s engine by another? Isn’t there something that gets irretrievably lost when we apply this mechanistic approach to our emotionality? What is it, given that there is something to lose?

And there is still more for us to explore. ‘Tenderness’ features in Three Poplars in Plyushchikha, a 1968 romantic drama film directed by Tatyana Lioznova which in itself is an iconic Soviet movie. The plot of the film is, in terms of today, upsettingly simple. Anna, who is a married woman and mother of two children, comes from a village to Moscow to sell home-made ham. There is a meaningful conversation between Anna and her husband Grigory before she departs. Anna complains that she doesn’t get much tenderness from Grigory to which he nonchalantly replies, ‘Well, I don’t beat you, and it is something at least.’ Grigory is very patriarchal, so no ‘mild feminism’ comes into question in Anna’s case.

The first person Anna meets in Moscow is Alexander, an intelligent taxi driver, who must pick her up to her husband’s sister. The drive to the ‘Three Poplars,’ a location in the Plyushchikha street, is long, and Alexander is in no hurry—at one moment, he stops and resets the taximeter. A feeling gradually unfolds between the two of them; towards the end of the film Alexander dares ask her on something resembling a date. Anna eagerly agrees—but when Alexander comes to her in-law’s apartment to take her to the cinema she never leaves the flat although at forty minutes past seven, she is very close to do it. She cannot unlock the door—or maybe, when her first rush of emotions is over and she has finally found the key, she doesn’t want to. She is perhaps painfully aware of the fact that the development of this connection would crush her married life and make her a ‘dishonest woman,’ someone like her husband’s sister Nina whom Anna both criticises and envies. Alexander is expecting Anna for an hour—she still can see him from the window of her apartment. Then he finally drives off, and this is how this very plain and piercingly powerful story ends.