In his cinematic credo, Sculpting in Time (1986), Tarkovsky compares the artist to a priest whose mission it is to reveal the beauty that is 'hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth'.202 Such a statement is in the tradition of the Russian artist stretching back to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and beyond - to the medieval icon painters such as the one whose life and art Tarkovsky celebrated in his masterpiece, Andrei Rublev (1966). Tarkovsky's films are like icons, in effect. To contemplate their visual beauty and symbolic imagery, as one is compelled to do by the slowness of their action, is to join in the artist's own quest for a spiritual ideal. 'Art must give man hope and faith', the director wrote.203 All his films are about journeys in search of moral truth. Like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, Andrei Rublev abandons the monastery and goes into the world to live the truth of Christian love and brotherhood among his fellow Russians under Mongol rule. 'Truth has to be lived, not taught. Prepare for battle!'
Tarkovsky said that Hermann Hesse's line from The Glass Bead Game (1943) 'could well have served as an epigraph to Andrei Rublev'.204
The same religious theme is at the centre of Stalker (1979), which, in Tarkovsky's own description, he meant to be a discourse on 'the existence of God in man'.205 The stalker of the film's title guides a scientist and a writer to 'the zone', a supernatural wilderness abandoned by the state after some industrial catastrophe. He is straight out of the Russian tradition of the Holy Fool. He lives alone in poverty, despised by a society where everyone has long ceased to believe in God, and yet he derives a spiritual power from his religious faith. He understands that the heart of 'the zone' is just an empty room in a deserted house. But, as he tells his travelling companions, the basis of true faith is the belief in the Promised Land: it is the journey and not the arrival. The need for faith, for something to believe in outside of themselves, had defined the Russian people, in their mythic understanding of themselves, since the days of Gogol and the 'Russian soul'. Tarkovsky revived this national myth as a counter to the value system of the Soviet regime, with its alien ideas of rational materialism. 'Modern mass culture', Tarkovsky wrote, 'is crippling people's souls, it is erecting barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.'206 This spiritual consciousness, he believed, was the contribution Russia might give to the West - an idea embodied in the last iconic image of his film Nostalgia (1983), in which a Russian peasant house is portrayed inside a ruined Italian cathedral.
It may seem extraordinary that films like Stalker and Solaris were produced in the Brezhnev era, when all forms of organized religion were severely circumscribed and the deadening orthodoxy of 'Developed Socialism' held the country's politics in its grip. But within the Soviet monolith there were many different voices that called for a return to 'Russian principles'. One was the literary journal Molodaia gvardiia (Young Guard), which acted as a forum for Russian nationalists and conservationists, defenders of the Russian Church, and neo-Populists like the 'village prose writers' Fedor Abramov and Valentin Rasputin, who painted a nostalgic picture of the countryside and idealized the honest working peasant as the true upholder of the Russian soul and its mission in the world. Molodaia gvardiia enjoyed
30. 'The Russian bouse inside the Italian cathedral'. Final shot from Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalgia (1983)
the support of the Party's senior leadership throughout the 1970s.* Yet its cultural politics were hardly communist; and at times, such as in its opposition to the demolition of churches and historic monuments, or in the controversial essays it published by the nationalist painter Ilya Glazunov which explicitly condemned the October Revolution as an interruption of the national tradition, it was even anti-Soviet. The journal had links with opposition groups in the Russian Church, the conservation movement (which numbered several million members in
* It had the political protection of Politburo member Mikhail Suslov, Brezhnev's chief of ideology. When Alexander Yakovlev attacked Molodaia gvardiia as anti-Leninist on account of its nationalism and religious emphasis, Suslov succeeded in winning Brezhnev over to the journal's side. Yakovlev was sacked from the Party's Propaganda Department. In 1973, he was dismissed from the Central Committee and appointed Soviet ambassador to Canada (from where he would return to become Gorbachev's chief ideologist).
