In the course of preparing a second edition of my 1992 translation of Griboyedov’s The Woes of Wit, I recently went on Youtube to see what new material might be available there. I wasn’t disappointed. There’s a lot new since last time I looked, most notably the complete 1977 Soviet film version of the Maly Theater’s production of the play. Watching it repeatedly and seeing how different parts are played has been quite a revelation. It’s easily the best of the three versions I’ve now seen (none of them live, though Oleg Menshikov’s video version was basically a recording of his stage production).
The actors playing Chatsky (Vitaly Solomin) and Sofya (Nelly Kornienko) in the Maly’s production were both superb. The latter role is probably the harder to do convincingly. Sofya, Chatsky’s childhood friend, fancies herself in love with Molchalin, her father’s obsequious live-in secretary. The witty, irreverent, and outspoken Chatsky, who loves her himself, is at first unbelieving, and finally, dismayed. It is this that drives the action of the play.
But Sofya is no shallow dupe. D.S. Mirsky in his History of Russian Literature says of her:
She is a rare phenomenon in classical comedy: a heroine that is neither idealized nor caricatured. There is a strange, drily romantic flavor in her, with her fixity of purpose, her ready wit, and her deep, but reticent, passionateness.
There’s the rub: Sofya is mistaken about Molchalin, but her mistake is an honorable one. One must feel, when she defends him in the face of Chatsky’s ridicule, that, but for that mistake, she is entirely justified in doing so. Beyond that, one must be able to see things from her point of view. Chatsky is admirable, intelligent, passionate, but seeing how uncomfortable he makes people, and what eventually happens to him, who can blame her for not wanting to tie her fate to someone like that? That is the way Kornienko, with complete conviction, plays her.
It is wonderful that Mosfilm has chosen to make so many great movies available online. Given that, I can’t complain too much about them blocking the excerpts from two of their unsubtitled films that I put up on Youtube with my own subtitles added. I know they’re just following a general policy. I have, however, received some disappointed queries from people who have tried to view them since then. In the three years that the 5-part Mozart and Salieri sequence from Shveitser’s malenkie tragedii was viewable, the first part had 6,555 viewers.
[UPDATE, 2016: These videos have again been viewable for some time now: Mosfilm has allowed them to appear with ads that you can click out of after 3 seconds.]
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