13/10/2020
"Milena and Vladimir Ilich are walking through a snowy park together. Finally, they kiss, and, as the soundtrack swells with plaintive violins, Vladimir Ilich soliloquizes about Beethoven:
Nothing is lovelier than the Appassionata. I could listen to it all day! Marvelous, superhuman music! With perhaps naïve pride, I think, “What wonders men can create!” But I can’t listen to music. It gets on my nerves!
It arouses a yearning in me to babble sweet nothings, to caress people living in this hell who can still create such beauty. But nowadays, if you stroke anybody’s head, he’ll bite your hand off! Now you have to hit them on the head. Hit them on the head mercilessly, though in principle we oppose all violence!
At the culmination of this speech, he strikes Milena for attempting to touch him.
These words, of course, are straight from Lenin’s mouth, via Gorky’s memoirs of the Great Leader. As the ultimate homo politicus, Lenin feared eruptions of strong feeling. From the perspective of the tactician, all sentiment should be strategic, all raw energy should be channeled into rationalized systems. In place of spontaneous expressions of love for humanity, merciless violence.
Mikhail Bakunin, the revolutionary anarchist, is also remembered for his love of Beethoven’s music. Yet he never fled from his passions. In Paris, he lived with a pianist so as to hear Beethoven every day. Shortly before the final uprising of the revolutions of 1848-49, Bakunin went to hear his favorite composition, the 9th Symphony, performed in Dresden; afterwards, he was accused of burning down the opera house in which it had been performed. In 1876, in the final weeks of his life, he set out on one last journey to visit the pianist one more time: “All this will pass away,” Bakunin confided to him, “but the Ninth Symphony will remain.”
In the contrast between these two Russian revolutionaries, we see two fundamentally different ways of relating to the tides of emotion that surge through us. On Lenin’s side, we see control, austerity, order, violence. On Bakunin’s side, freedom, indulgence, excess, passionate love, the river bursting its banks."
What Makavejev's classic film has to offer today's struggles against nationalism, fascism, and dogmatism.
