More Graves for More Fireflies: Grigory Chukhrai�s Ballad of a Soldier

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The Soviet Union�s Mosfilm Studios certainly pumped out a lot of war movies, but they really reached their apotheosis in the late fifties and early sixties.  This period saw the release of Mikhail Kalatozov�s The Cranes are Flying(1957) and Andrei Tarkovsky�s Ivan�s Childhood (1962), both of which share a spiritual and deeply impressionistic approach to the horrors of war and the intensities of human feeling that they evoke.

Sandwiched in between these films is Grigory Chukhrai�s Ballad of a Soldier, a picaresque which depicts a brief period in the life of nineteen-year-old Alyosha Skvortsov, a Red Army soldier who has earned a few days of leave from the front to go home and see his mother.  The film opens with a voice-over reporting that Alyosha has died a hero and a liberator in some foreign land (I�m sure there are plenty of Poles who might see the matter differently) and that �we� (the voice-over? The filmmakers?) will recount what we knew of him.  And so all of Alyosha�s adventures play out with the knowledge that he�s going to die, and soon at that.  What does Alyosha do on his leave? A bit of everything: he helps a soldier who lost a leg in the war reunite with his wife; he undertakes to bring a gift of soap from a soldier at the front to his wife back home; and perhaps most importantly, he meets a young woman name of Shura on a supply train and they fall very chastely in love (Alyosha is a secular saint one step away from being a holy innocent, so it makes sense that there�s not a trace of anything sexual to his romance).

Shura and Alyosha.

In the Criterion Collection�s essay on Ballad of a Soldier, Professor of Russian film and culture Vida Johnson quotes the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Gerassimov (we are getting many degrees removed here) as saying, �The pathos of Fellini in La Dolce Vita[released the same year] could be put this way: One Should not Live Like This; the pathos of Chukhrai in Ballad of a Soldier could be summed up as: We Should Live Like This.� Alyosha is in many respects a quintessentially �good� person, and not in an insufferable or implausible way.  He does good things because it is in his nature to do so; he�s not trying to score points with anyone, he just does good as an end in itself.  Rarely do we see such depictions of people delighting in goodness as Chukhrai presents in this film.  Shura has a great line where she says, �It�s so pleasant when you think badly of someone, only to discover that he�s good.�

I made reference to the Poles earlier, and I think it�s interesting that this film about the goodness of a Russian soldier in WWII takes place when the fighting was still confined to the Soviet Union.  The Russian Army had not reinvaded Poland, nor had it begun its campaign of large-scale rape and ethnic cleansing against the ethnic German population of Eastern Europe (although the ethnic cleansing of Ingushetians, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars may very well have been underway already).  The film�s narrator says that Alyosha died somewhere �foreign,� so who knows what atrocities he might have witnessed.  And even if he was too holy for us to even conceive of him participating in them, he would still have been there, on the scene.  In The Idiot, Dostoevsky makes it clear that there�s no place in the modern world for a truly innocent person, like Prince Myshkin.  Perhaps this holds true of Alyosha, and perhaps this is why he has to die when he does.