Kupala (2020) by Vladimir Yankovskiy

Author

David Kurkovskiy

Abstract

This review examines Kupala (Vladimir Yankovskiy [Uladzimir Iankoǔski], 2020, Belarus), a state-funded Belarusfilm biopic of the national poet Yanka Kupala (1882–1942) that was effectively shelved amid the repression following the 2020 protests. It argues that, although the film introduces audiences to the early Belarusian national movement and its literary tradition, its confinement of Kupala to the pre-1915 period and its reduction of his Soviet career to a single episode of political coercion reaffirm the myths surrounding the poet rather than subjecting them to historical scrutiny.

Keywords

Yanka Kupala; Vladimir Yankovskiy (Uladzimir Iankoǔski); Belarus; Russian Empire; Soviet Union; film Kupala; nationalism; biopic; poetry.

Kupala. Belarus. Directed by Vladimir Yankovskiy. Screenplay by Aleskandra Borisova, Vladimir Yankovskiy, and Alena Kaliunova. Cinematography by Ilya Pugachev. Edited by Yuriy Butko and Vasiliy Pereverzev. Produced by Irina Filipova, Vladimir Karachevskiy, and Igor Porshnev. Composed by Vladimir Sivitskiy. Principal cast: Nikolay Shestak, Veronika Plyashkevich, Elena Pobegaeva. Belarusfilm. 156 minutes.

On November 14, 2020, after much public speculation and a few delays, Kupala, the long-awaited biopic about one of Belarus’ preeminent 20^th-century national poets, Yanka Kupala (Ianka Kupala) (1882-1942), finally premiered.¹ It was screened out of competition, in the gala premieres programme of the Moscow film festival Moskovskaia prem’era (Moscow Premiere), where it received the organising committee’s prize for ‘Event of the Cinematographic Year’ (REFORM.news 2020). While the film was screened for a much smaller audience than originally planned, it was received with great enthusiasm. Fewer than 300 attendees filled the White Room of the House of Cinema [Dom kino], where the screening had been moved from the originally announced location of the Tretyakov Gallery. Despite the initial warm welcome, screenings of the film on the domestic and international arenas continued to be marred by mysterious (supposedly also COVID-related) delays.² The film’s director, Vladimir Yankovskiy (Uladzimir Iankoǔski), found the reasons for the film’s non-release to be obvious: the climate of political repression in the Republic of Belarus following the August 2020 protests against Alexander Lukashenka meant that the film’s portrayal of the early-20th-century Belarusian national movement, its use of the Belarusian language, and its critique of how the Belarusian cultural élite was denigrated in the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union were no longer permissible as a state-sponsored cultural project.³

Even prior to the 2020 protests, the shooting of Kupala produced no less than a media circus. Director Vladimir Yankovskiy, who in the early part of his career focused on developing largely Russophone music videos and commercials, was the fifth director to be offered this $1.5-million state-sponsored project by Belarusfilm (the country’s premier film studio).⁴ Why was this project so daunting to Yankovskiy’s would-be predecessors? There are a few explanations for this: tackling the literary cult of an East-Central European national poet was and remains no small task; moreover, for many Belarusian culture-makers of today, the Kupala cult is touchy or even passé for a number of reasons. For some, it is a nationalist minefield that is best avoided; for others, it is weighed down by decades of Soviet baggage. After all, it was Soviet Belarusian officialdom that first granted Kupala the title of “Narodny paėt” (national or folk poet) in 1925, gave him a car and a salary for the rest of his life, and continued to mark his literary celebrity on an All-Union level every half-decade or so.

Yankovskiy’s stated ambition was to address the problem that “few Belarusians speak in Belarusian, know their history, and read the national literature” (Katsialovich 2019).⁵ If we understand Yankovskiy’s project as one seeking to educate the Belarusian public about the country’s modern history and literary tradition, the biopic largely achieves the director’s goals. At the same time, the film’s major shortcoming is its elision of most of Kupala’s Soviet career, particularly after 1930; the contradiction between memory and selective forgetting is thus key to an evaluation of the film. The story of Kupala’s life is introduced through the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death at the Hotel Moskva (in the Soviet capital) on June 28, 1942. To this day, Kupala scholars speculate whether the poet had an accidental fall (possibly due to inebriation, as Yankovskiy seems to posit), was pushed by members of the Soviet secret police, or decided, for the second time in his life, to attempt suicide. The earlier events of Kupala’s life are depicted in the film through flashbacks prompted by the poet’s tortured conversations with his mother. These historical episodes are punctuated by cuts to a distressed, ageing Kupala and his mother, and some scenes begin or conclude with extradiegetic narration by the poet. Kupala’s mother emerges as an almost spectral or fantastical figure throughout the film, though, as we are informed in the closing intertitles, she did not pass away until a couple of days after her son’s own untimely death.

The recounting of Kupala’s life through flashbacks begins with the poet’s bucolic childhood in various Belarusian villages and his entry into writing poetry as a young adult – first in Polish, then Belarusian – following the death of his father and siblings in 1902. Kupala’s poetic inspiration is itself often portrayed through montage in the film. For example, a scene of the violent repression of the 1905 Revolution in Minsk is intercut with a vision, presumably from within Kupala’s mind, of an idealised Belarusian peasantry toiling under the sun and rising from the fields (0:46:30).

This inserted scene is accompanied by Kupala’s voiceover narration, reading aloud the words of his most famous poem, “A khto tam idze?” (“And, Say, Who Goes There?”, 1905–1907). After the publication of the poet’s first poem “Muzhyk” (1905, Peasant Man) and his first collection Zhaleǐka (1908, The Reed-Pipe) the film cuts to Kupala struggling to work as a poetry editor for the newspaper Nasha niva in Vilnius (Vilnius was the capital of the so-called “Belarusian National Revival” that followed the 1905 Russian Revolution, and Nasha niva was its chief newspaper and cultural institution). The next episode of Kupala’s life features Kupala’s sojourn in Saint Petersburg, 1909–1913, at the invitation of Belarusian publisher and patron Branislaǔ Ėpimakh-Shypila. After living in the imperial capital, the poet briefly returned to Vilnius. The last period was his contentious tenure as a national poet in Soviet Minsk. The film defines this last period entirely by the pressure Kupala receives from Soviet agents to sign a letter accusing the poet’s colleagues of counter-revolutionary activity (an event which dates to the end of 1930, roughly halfway into the poet’s Soviet career).

The film’s pre-1915 vignettes largely do justice to the history of one of Europe’s youngest literary traditions. For example, the question of whether the peasantry and its folk culture should form the basis of the nascent modern Belarusian literature is explicitly posed in the film by a member of one of the salons Kupala attends as a young poet. Throughout the film, Yankovskiy draws upon both legends and the historical record, and thus mixes fact and fiction, to narrate Kupala’s life story. When Kupala first meets the actress Paǔlina Miadziolka in Petersburg (played by Veronika Plyashkevich), his budding romance with “Paǔlinka,” who would reprise the starring role of the poet’s eponymous 1913 play, is thematised both as a love plot and a key moment in the development of the Belarusian national theatre. As an example of the latter, Kupala tells his patron Ėpimakh-Shypila that he is searching for a “Belarusian sound” [belaruskae huchanne]. Kupala’s first contributions to the Belarusian theatrical repertoire indeed mark a major watershed both in the poet’s literary biography and the larger history of modern Belarusian literature. It should, however, be noted that Kupala’s lifelong infatuation with Paǔlina is the subject of legend and much scholarly debate (cf. the depiction of Kupala’s courtship of, and eventual marriage to, Uladzislava Stankevich, played by Elena Pobegaeva). In the film, Kupala competes with fellow writer Ales’ Kushner, a fictional character played by Aleksandr Ilin, for Paǔlina’s attention; Kushner is clearly the main antagonist in the pre-1915 portion of the film. This antagonism is further developed in the film’s second half: Kushner becomes the main Soviet hack pleading with Kupala to sign a letter of self-criticism confessing to the poet’s nationalist deviations.