Russian Ruffians


By Brian Case
Time Out
November, 1999





Foot fetishism, a boxful of vaginas and pistols at dawn -- Pushkin was far from a dour man of letters. Ralph Fiennes gives flesh to his "Onegin," a story which Russians regard as the encyclopedia of their existence.




If it was brave of Ralph Fiennes to produce and star in an adaptation of Pushkin's verse novel "Eugene Onegin," it was braver still to premiere the film in St. Petersburg in May as part of bicentenary celebrations of Pushkin's birth, since Russians already feel that the West is stealing everything they have. The writer's iconic status has survived both Tsarist and Soviet epochs, so you mess with Pushkin at your peril. The poem foreshadows the nineteenth-century Russian realist novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and its stature was such that Turgenev said he'd trade both his little fingers for one line. Even Tchaikovsky was hesitant about basing an opera on it. At the celebrations there were Pushkin chocolates, Pushkin vodka, Pushkin plastic bags -- and the $23 million English film.

"We encountered different levels of Pushkin worship, from the overtly commercial to the purists who wouldn't accept that you can film "Onegin,"" explains Fiennes. "They see it as the encyclopedia of Russian life. At its most limited, "Onegin" is a love story and our film only did that. I only understood what this encyclopedia was when a radio journalist came up with the idea of talking to Russians now, and intercutting their comments on the condition of the roads, love and friendship with relevant quotes from "Onegin." Everything was in it!"

The story does not conform to any commercial formula. Nothing happens, twice. Ex-rake Onegin rejects the hand of simple, provincial Tatyana (Liv Tyler), but by the time he realises how much he loves her, she is married and rejects him. It is the out-of-phase emotions of "Send in the Clowns." The poem has obsessed Fiennes since his student days at RADA. While he was rehearsing Chekhov, the librarian recommended he read "Onegin," the first of these "superfluous men." "I became fascinated by the symmetry of the story and its simplicity. I only had about three pages left to read and I remember thinking, what is going to happen? She's turning him down and I've only got three more pages! Pushkin doesn't resolve it. He says "Okay, reader -- good-bye." And I love that! I love that! I love that!"

The film, directed by his sister Martha, with music by his brother Magnus, does not cheat. Should they kill him off, as Tchaikovsky promises to in the opera? Should he die in a duel with Tatyana's husband? Finally, they just allowed him to drift, as he does in the book. "A lost spirit. You can imagine him traveling around the world, just being one of those men in the corner of a brothel or gambling house or hotel, sitting, grey, nursing his drink..."

Filming in Russia, the unit experienced none of the expected local mafia interference -- "We didn't see the guys in the shiny cars and long black coats" -- but plenty of the vodka. "I got drawn into it. It seemed the natural thing to drink there. It has a different effect in sub-zero temperatures. It cures all your ills. Everything gets sorted out with a glass of vodka." The route to Moscow echoed Pushkin's description of Tatyana's journey there for the season. The actor was particularly thrilled to include the exterior of Pushkin's St. Petersburg house in one scene.

"Russians say that to understand Onegin you have to understand the Russian soul. Well, I can't pretend I really understand the Russian soul. I'm intrigued by what it is, but I'm English. The character has become a sort of talisman for the Russians, but I think Onegin is actually very Europeanised. I don't think he's as Russian as Raskolnikov." Certainly, the character fits into the romantic "Childe Harold" and Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther," wandering outcasts of their own dark minds. The Penguin translation of "Eugene Onegin" defined the Slav version of this melancholia as "the Russian blues."

"Oh, I think Chekhov's "Ivanov" is much more the Russian blues. That sense of exhaustion. Ivanov is an idealist, someone who's tried to make society work better, and put his energy into running a local community and working hard on his farm like a labourer -- and he's just broken by it. It just didn't work because there's something endemic, an inertia that sits on things. Maybe it's the vastness of the landscape. We took "Ivanov" to Russia in 1997. I remember, when we did it in London I was the bluesy character who was always in anguish about his life being in ruins, and the other characters had a real comic rapport with the audience. I always felt that when I made these speeches about how depressed and frustrated I was, the audience was going "Oh God! Here he goes again!" But when we performed it in Moscow, I felt that the Russians wanted to see themselves in Ivanov. They all know this anguish, this what-do-we-do?

"They see Onegin differently too. We see him as a sort of Regency buck. We have a legacy of period drama and Darcy-type characters. They see much more the inner acidity of Onegin, the man who has opted out of society and who has developed a shell of boredom and apparent cynicism. He is someone who is playing a lot of roles. Pushkin himself says, who is Onegin? Is he an angel, is he a devil or is he a fraud? That makes him a challenge to play. He shouldn't ever be easily labelled." He leafs through a copy of the poem to recite a stanza. Sharp, intelligent, morose, disdainful, scornful, remorseful -- "I always found this helpful when I wanted to remind myself of the core of the character." Though still young, Onegin "could but await/Men's malice and the stroke of Fate." "That's so Russian! Having to wait for whatever happens. That's the key to him. It's a great character description -- he's not just superficial."

As a poet, Pushkin was as facile as Byron, sensuous as Keats and bawdy as Chaucer, As a man, he was a tearaway. Descended from an African slave who became a ward of Peter the Great, Pushkin was a blue-eyed mulatto with dangerous political affiliations. The anti-Tsarist Decembrists used his verse as a rallying cry. He kept a Don Juan list of his conquests, and duelled at the drop of a hat. Once, duelling in a blizzard, he ate cherries while his opponent took aim. The young Gogol tried to call on him one morning and was told he was still asleep. Was it true he works all night, he asked the servant? "What do you mean, works? He plays cards," was the reply.

"Pushkin was quite impossible as a young man. Very insulting. He was exiled from St. Petersburg because he irritated the authorities with a lewd, blasphemous poem about the Virgin Mary, and he was known to espouse very liberal views. He was always having affairs and whoring and getting into scrapes and insulting people for nothing. Deliberately confrontational." At the theatre, he once applauded on the bald head of the man in front. In an attempt to keep him indoors, the authorities stole his books. Exiled at 21 to the family estate at Mikhaylovskoe in the provincial Caucasus, for the next six years he read Byron, Richardson, Scott, Voltaire, played billiards alone, practised pistol-shooting, made a serf girl his mistress, gave her a son -- and, above all, wrote.

"I think he was very febrile. A tight ball of energy. Very touchy. Easily sparked. Easily aroused and leaping to passionate conclusions about a woman or a man. His bedroom was littered with bits of paper and he always wrote with stubby bits of worn-down quill." A foot fetishist? "Yes, he was. That's why we show the kissing of the courtesan's foot, licking her toes, at the beginning. The pedal digression." Fiennes chuckles over the line Pushkin tries to pass off on to Onegin: "Ah, little feet, how I did love them!" Fiennes also read Benjamin Constant's "Adolphe," a short, first-person novel about a waning love affair that was a favourite of Pushkin's. "The huge desire -- and then the cooling off - Pushkin is ironic about the process. For Russians, life is full of these inevitable tragedies, these pitfalls of human life. It's not seen as high drama. This is how it is."

There are passages where it is difficult to separate the poet from his creation. Onegin kills his friend, the poet Lensky, in the duel over a woman's honour. Tragically, Pushkin died in a duel in knee-deep snow with Baron Georges-Charles d'Anthes, his flighty wife's lover, after being told that he'd been elected to the Most Serene Order of Cuckolds. Pushkin was 37. All Russia mourned.

The description of the duel in "Onegin" is wonderfully graphic. "The gleaming pistols are held steady/As hammers on the ramrods knock/The bullets are crammed down already/You hear the clicking of a cock/Into the pan the powder's sifted/The jagged flint still harmless, lifted." But the motivation is trickier to put on screen. "The hardest thing to explain is the duel. Why does he kill Lensky? Why doesn't he shoot in the air? Maybe there's a sort of honesty here -- if Lensky wants to go through with the duel, let's absolutely go through with it. There's a dangerous streak in Onegin that wants to push things to the edge. Martha and I had a lot of debate about the duel. In the book, Lensky is about to shoot and Onegin shoots first. When we were developing the screenplay we felt that it gave Onegin more of a motive to return fire if he'd been shot at. If we set up the rules enough that you have to return fire until someone is hurt."

Most difficult of all for the actor was to convey a man possessed of a finer nature than his conduct suggests. On the surface a "most tyrannous young fop" who spent three hours before the mirror, yet capable of restraint when presented by letter -- "a pure love's innocent effusion" -- with Tatyana on a plate. "Onegin says things like "Shit, my friend! You are provincial and I'm bored" -- but the emotional courage of Tatyana in confessing her love forces him to handle things differently. She hits something in him. He is touched by her letter." He tells her he is too jaded to love, too inconstant for marriage. He preaches at her, but at least he doesn't seduce her.

"Martha and I discussed the fine line between Onegin's intelligence and his arrogance. I explored that in different takes. He's often slightly contemptuous of people like Lensky who he likes. When I read the book I wanted to know why he was like that, who is this man? I was intrigued. A lot of people said he mustn't be too cynical or the audience won't like him. I don't mind if they don't like him so long as they don't want to leave the cinema. I'd care if he bored the audience." And Fiennes annexed Pushkin's penchant for unkind caricature. "I said to Martha, why don't we let Onegin doodle people? He's watching them. He's a watcher." Unlike his brother, Joseph, in "Shakespeare in Love," he had not allowed his quill to splatter him so comprehensively. "Onegin's sartorial concerns are of a higher priority than Shakespeare's."

The actor's research into the material was comprehensive. Knowledgeably, he discussed the relative merits of the various Pushkin translations. But had he, I asked, read his poem, "Tsar Mikita And His 40 Daughters," in which the Tsar, discovering that his daughters have been born without genitals, sends a messenger to a witch to procure some, and not to open the casket on the journey back. Curiosity gets the better of him, and they escape. "With all the vaginas in the trees?" queries Fiennes. "How did he get them to fly back into the casket again?" An old babushka on the road advises him to flash his prick and that fixes it.

"Yes," he laughs. "That's what we're filming next." A perfect pause. "I'm only producing."

In fact, Ralph Fiennes' slate is already full, with "Coriolanus" and "Richard II" for Jonathan Kent on stage and Istvan Szabo's "A Taste of Sunshine" and Neil Jordan's "The End of the Affair" for release next year.

Onegin is released on November 19




 

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