229 Roman Karmen and Elena Konstanintovskaya seem to have married in Spain sometime 1936 and 1937, since Konstantinovskaya is said to have “brought back a husband from Spain.” When they divorced is unknown to me, but it might well have been as soon as 1938 or 1939, given the long trips which Karmen set out on almost immediately after their return to the USSR. In this book I have imagined that they married in 1936 and divorced in 1943, after Stalingrad and before Kursk.
229 “We were soldiers . . .”—Slightly altered from Roger Manvell, Films and the Second World War (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1974), p. 128.
229 Great Soviet Encyclopedia references to Roman Karmen—Vol. 11, p. 457 (biographical entry on Karmen himself), vol. 12, p. 368 (entry on filmmaking) and vol. 19, p. 214 (entry on film technology).
229 Yuri Tsivian: “He’s, well, let’s say he’s an official classic . . .”—Interviewed over the telephone by WTV, 2002.
230 Influence of Käthe Kollwitz on Karmen—Invented, as is his attendance at Otto Nagel’s exhibition of 1924. “The Sacrifice” would have been a plausible influence, since it not only was made shortly before the show (1922), but was also a very powerful image.
232 “Unusual angles, the most incredible positioning of the camera . . .”—Modern Art Museum catalogue, unnumbered second page.
232 Kara-Kum temperature of one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit (I am skeptical) —Modern Art Museum catalogue, unnumbered p. 9.
233 Vertov: “Link all points in any temporal order.”—Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. xxvi (“From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” 1929). (Vertov named himself; his original given name was Denis Arkadievich Kaufman.)
234 K. Simonov: “As we watched the films sent in by Karmen [spelled “Carmen” throughout this document] from far off Spain . . .”—Modern Art Museum catalogue, unnumbered p. 11 (slightly abridged).
234 Dziga Vertov: “The filmings in Spain represent an indisputable achievement . . .” —Op. cit., pp. 142-43 (“The Truth About the Heroic Struggle”). These two sentences were widely separated in the original.
234 Drobaschenko: “A man filled with energy and elegance.”—Roman Karmen: Retrospektive, p. 77 (Sergej Drobaschenko, “Roman Karmen”), trans. WTV.
235 Elena’s doings in Spain—All invented (except for her Order of the Red Star), since I could find out nothing definite about her. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 10, p. 603 (entry on Spanish history), more than two thousand Soviet volunteers, mostly pilots and tank operators, fought in Spain.
235 Footnote: Fates of Mirova, Koltzov, Ehrenburg—Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 308. Mirova disappeared on her return to Moscow in 1937; Koltzov was arrested in 1938 and died in the Gulag in 1942; he was eventually rehabilitated.
235 Same footnote: Date of first Spanish combat of Soviet tanks—Gabriel Jackson, p. 319.
236 The departure of Madrid’s gold reserves—Martin Blinkhorn, ed., Spain in Conflict 1931-1939: Democracy and Its Enemies (London: SAGE Publications, 1986), pp. 228-29. This source gives the figure of 500 metric tons.
236 The liquidation of Andrés Nin—Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931-39), intro. by Les Evans (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), pp. 267-68 (no. 66: “The Murder of Andrés Nin by Agents of the GPU,” August 8, 1937). Trotsky writes: “He refused to cooperate with the GPU against the interests of the Soviet people. That was his only crime. And for this crime he paid with his life.”
237 “I must always be there, whenever fighting breaks out”—Konstantin Slavin, undated Soviet Exportkino book about Karmen, cover missing; in Budesarchiv, Berlin; p. 5.
Information on orders, medals, titles and honors of the USSR (Elena’s Order of the Red Star, Chuikov’s Order of Lenin, and the Medal for the Defense of Leningrad, which I describe in “Opus 110”)—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 9, p. 241; vol. 15, p. 629; vol. 18, pp. 516, 658. Many details of Karmen’s doings during the war years are based on his Über die zeit und über mich selbst: Erzählungen über mein Schaffen, trans. into German by Henschel Verlag, typescript, Bundesarchiv cat. no. 92 28 / 87, pp. 23-37. Very likely this is the same as his About Myself and the Times, published in 1968 by the Publicity Office of the Soviet Film Industry. I have not located a copy of this document. Thirty-six hundred words of Über die zeit were translated into English for me (17¢ per word; $613.19) by Elsmarie Hau and Tracy Bigelow. A number of my descriptions, attributions, colleagues and witnesses, etcetera, are entirely invented.
238 Karmen: “How precious this footage will be for all of us . . .”—Somewhat “retranslated” from Ibid., orig. p. 24; Hau-Bigelow, p. 1.
239 Akhmatova: “The Leningraders, my heart’s blood, march out even-ranked . . .” —Selected Poems, p. 72 (“Courage,” 1942), “retranslated” by WTV.
239 The plot of “Scout Pashkov”—Von Geldern and Stites, pp. 338-39.
240 Aspektverhältnis and zeichen—Thomas Melle to WTV: “‘Zeichen’ to me seems too general for a nonphilosophical grammarbook,” which was precisely my intention.
241 Karmen to Comrade Alexandrov: “Since everything in that court followed a strict consequential logic . . .”—Slightly abbreviated and “retranslated” from Über die zeit, orig. p. 37; Hau-Bigelow, p. 8.
242 V. I. Chuikov: Berlin “rained rivers of red-hot steel on us.”—Op. cit., p. 176 (“raining” in original).
242 The two extracts from the unhealthy old book in Berlin—The Nibelungenlied, trans. A. T. Hatto (New York: Penguin, 1969, repr. of 1965 ed.; original German ed. ca. 1200), pp. 23, 54 (chs. 3, 5), “retranslated” by WTV.
242 The non-appearance of Karmen in the credits to “Stalingrad”—Very occasionally we do find him listed—once even as codirector of “Stalingrad,” in Dr. Roger Manvell, gen. ed., The International Encyclopedia of Film (New York: Bonanza Books, 1975, repr. of 1972 Rainbird ed.), p. 174.
243 “A fellow traveller,” writing about “Stalingrad”: “Simple and heroic in the finest sense of the word”—Thomas Dickinson and Catherine De la Roche, Soviet Cinema (London: The Falcon Press, Ltd., 1948), p. 67 (De la Roche writing).
243 Karmen’s non-appearance in Wakeman’s compilation—John Wakeman, ed., World Film Directors, vol. 1: 1890-1945 (New York: The H. W. Wilson Co., 1987), pp. 1122-25.
244 The relationship of Roman Karmen and Elena Konstantinovskaya—Suppose that they had never married. In that case I imagine the following two episodes: (1a) For her birthday he once gave her a long folding screen comprised of still portraits he’d made of peasant women in Kara-Kum. M. Ia. Slutskii, with whom he codirected several documentaries, assured him that the faces were stunning. Of course it was a very large object, an egotistical thing, really, and he would have resented it if anybody gave him something that size and expected him to hang it on the wall; at four meters long, it would certainly dominate a room. So he showed it to Elena first. She told him that she thought it was beautiful. He asked her if she would like to have it. He assured her that if she didn’t want it, he wouldn’t be insulted; the only reason that he wanted to offer it to her was that he was very proud of it and he wanted to give her something he was proud of. She’d acted happy and overwhelmed; she hung it on the wall of her apartment. And then one day it wasn’t there. He didn’t say anything about it. The next time he visited, it still wasn’t there, and the next time she said casually that she was redoing the wall, and it would go back up eventually. But he knew that it never would. (1b) He truly believed that his images on the screen were beautiful. If they were mediocre, he didn’t know better. He only wanted to make Elena happy. Elena loved art. She always said so. She admired visual art especially, although she also enjoyed music; she had quite a few records, many of which he supposed that Shostakovich had given her, and she rarely failed to listen to Shostakovich’s latest on the radio. Sometimes th
at made him very jealous, but he never said anything. (2) Then there was the time he’d given her a print of an old Kalmuck woman, an image he was particularly proud of; and a month later he found it on the floor of her car, creased and with a footprint on it. She was running him over to Boris Makaseyev’s in the car, and he was just about to get out when he saw it. He handed it to her and said: Maybe this could be put in a better place. When she came back to pick him up two hours later it was still in the car, but in the back of the car. Makaseyev’s wife saw. She was a very sweet, rather shy woman who was fond of Karmen. She knew that he and Elena were having difficulties.—Why, what a lovely print! she said. May I see it?—Elena handed it to her and said: I feel a little guilty about the fact that it’s damaged, because Roman probably thinks I don’t care about it.—Karmen said nothing, and Makaseyeva took it in her hands and said: It’s beautiful. Elena, don’t ever treat his work that way again or I’ll slap your face.—Sorry, I was only joking, she quickly said when she saw Elena’s expression.
256 Information on the cast, credits, etc., of the movie “Zoya”—Vsesoyuznuii Gospudarstvennui Fond Kinofilmov, Sovyetksie Khudozhestvennuie Filmui: Annomiyobannui Kamaloy, vol. 2: “Zvukovuie filmui (1930-1957)” (Moscow: Gosudartvennose Isdatelstvo “Iskusstvo,” 1961), pp. 331-32. “Zoya” is item 1789. We find it defined as a drama, released by Soyuzdetfilm on 22 September 1944. Arnshtam listed first and third, Shostakovich listed fourth (as the composer, obviously), Karmen not at all. Zoya was G[alina] Vodyanischkaya; Zoya as a child Katya Skvortsova; V. Podgornui was the German officer; R. Plyatt was the German soldier. (There were far more Russians than Germans in the cast.) “Zoya” won a Stalin Prize in 1946. It got praised in Pravda on 22 September 1944, in Izvestiya and Komsomolskaya Pravda the following day; and two times more in Komsomolskaya Pravda; in Iskusstvo Kino in 1946, etc. The New York Times for its part concluded that Galina Vodianitskaya “plays the heroine elaborately” but that the movie was “tediously constructed”—too many newsreels intercut with too many flashbacks to Zoya’s sentimentalized childhood (The New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1968, vol. 3 [New York: The New York Times and Arno Press, 1970], p. 2058 [B. C. (Bosley Crowther?)], “Zoya,” April 16, 1945, 18:6).
257 “Film is the most important art form . . .”—Very loosely after Shostakovich and Volkov, Testimony, p. 149.
258 Footnote: The New York Times’s opinion of Karmen’s documentary on the Nuremberg Trials (“Judgment of the Peoples”), The New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1968, vol. 3 (of 6): 1939-1948, p. 2184 (Bosley Crowther, “The Nuremberg Trials,” May 26, 1947; 24:2), full sentence substantially abridged by WTV. As for his film on Albania, the Times considered that less effective than I. Kopalin and P. Atasheva’s documentary about the liberation of Czechoslovakia (p. 2128, “At the Stanley,” July 15. 1946, 21:1).
258 Burt Lancaster: Karmen’s “passionate love for life and people . . .”—Roman Karmen: Retrospektive, p. 78 (Sergej Drobaschenko, “Roman Karmen”), trans. WTV.
259 Great Soviet Encyclopedia on “Far and Wide My Country Stretches”—Vol. 19, p. 214. The New York Times ridicules this movie for its excess of high-speed automobile driving and the stiffness of the alternating male and female narrators (the former is Karmen himself; the latter is E. Dolmatovsky). All the same, the Times enjoys the steel mills of Magnitogorsk, the oil fields of the Caspian and the log raft in the Carpathians. “Far and Wide” seems to be almost all travelogue (The New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1968, vol. 5 [1970], p. 3134 [Bosley Crowther, “Great Is My Country,” July 1, 1959; 26:1]).
259 Castro: “In the name of our people we thank you . . .”—Roman Karmen: Retrospektive, p. 69, trans. WTV.
259 Allende: “My friend Roman Karmen”—Ibid., p. 70, trans. WTV.
259 Moscow Kinoslovar on the character of Karmen’s films—After S. I. Yutkevich et al., p. 674, trans. WTV. I have somewhat reordered and abridged the items on the original eye-glazing list. In spite of my italics, this is not a direct quote at all, but a second-generation paraphrase.
BREAKOUT
260 Epigraph: “With few, but courageous allies . . .”—Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 287 (entry for 8 January 1944).
262 Footnote: Vlasov’s wife: “Andrei, can you really live like that?”—Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Émigré Theories (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 39. Vlasov’s wife was actually not the allegorical Moscow figurine of my conception, but a doctor from a tiny village in the province of Nizhni Novgorod. She was indeed arrested and executed after his defection. They had a small son, whose fate I don’t know.
261 Vlasov’s recommendations to Stalin—Not much is known about them, although the two men did have some such conference. Given that Vlasov was in good odor after the Battle of Moscow, I decided to put into his mouth the strategy which actually got followed.
261 Stalin: “Anybody can defend Moscow with reserves”—Harold Shukman, ed., Stalin’s Generals (New York: Grove Press, 1993), p. 304 (Catherine Andreyev, “Vlasov”).
261 Number of Twentieth Army’s tanks during the Battle of Moscow—Erickson, p. 534.
265 “What the enemy called Kesselschlacht, cauldron-slaughter.” Mr. Thomas Melle notes (letter to author, September 2003): “A little semantic confusion crept in here: ‘to slaughter’ means ‘schlachten’ (animals, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc.); ‘Schlacht’ means ‘battle’ or ‘fight’ and the plural of ‘Schlacht’ is “Schlachten’—‘to slaughter’ and ‘battles’ being the same word in German. I think ‘cauldron battle’ would be more appropriate. In a dictionary it says ‘battle of encirclement and annhilation.’” I myself rest my artistic and semantic case.
265 General K. A. Meretskov: “If nothing is done then a catastrophe is inevitable.” —Shukman, p. 305.
266 Guderian: “These men remain essentially unable to break free . . .”—Heinz Guderian, Achtung-Panzer! The Development of Tank Warfare, trans. Christopher Duffy (Reading, Berkshire, U.K.: Cassell Military Paperbacks; orig. German ed. 1937), p. 24 (“retranslated”).
266 Vlasov’s commissar: “Everything you say may be correct from the military viewpoint . . .”—Roughly after Sewern Bialer, ed., Stalin and His Generals: Soviet Military Memoirs of World War II (New York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 252 (memoir of Marshal I. Kh. Bagramian).
271 Vlasov’s capture—Accurately told, except that he was captured with a woman named Maria Voronova, who was the family servant in Nizhni Novgorod and whom Vlasov’s wife actually dispatched to him to take care of him. Since her presence raises several issues not relevant to the parable, I decided to leave her out.
272 Vlasov to General Lindemann and Lindemann’s reply: “Would a German officer in my place have shot himself?”—“Capture’s no disgrace for someone like you, who’s fought with his unit up to the very last instant . . .”—Loosely after an exchange between Vlasov and the German intelligence officer who captured him, Captain von Schwerdtner, indirectly quoted in Sven Steenberg, Vlasov, trans. Abe Farbstein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970 trans. of 1968 German ed.), p. 28.
275 The German policeman-poet: Vinnitsa, where “we saw two worlds, and will permit only one to rule”—Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, trans. Deborah Burnstone (Old Saybrook, Connecticut: Konecky and Konecky, 1991, repr. of 1988 German ed.), p. 123 (my trans.; the English given on the following page differs slightly).
277 Jewish casualties at Babi Yar—Most Western sources estimate that about thirty-three thousand people were murdered. Soviet sources sometimes say seventy thousand. The eyewitness A. Anatoli Kuzentsov gives the figure of one hundred thousand in his “documentary novel” Babi Yar.
277 Boyarsky: “When the Jews saw how easy it was to be executed, they ran to the pits of their own free will.”—Slightly rephrased from the statement
of a German customs official who saw the Jews being machine-gunned in Vinnitsa. The eyewitness estimated that “some thousands” were shot “over the total period” (Klee et al, p. 119).
279 Tukhachevsky: “It is necessary to observe the promise of privileged treatment to those who surrender voluntarily with their arms.”—Chaliand, p. 916 (“Counterinsurgency”).
281 Strik-Strikfeldt: “Vlasov spoke openly, and I did also, insofar as my oath of service permitted me”—Op. cit., p. 73 (slightly reworded).
281 Vlasov: “Only if I put human values before nationalist values . . .”—Ibid., p. 75 (a little altered).
281 Vlasov: “The Soviet regime has brought me no personal disadvantages,” “At Przemysl . . . my proposals were rejected,” “Two factors must entail . . . interference from the commissars.”—Ibid., pp. 253-54 (Appendix II: “General Vlasov’s Open Letter: Why I Took Up Arms Against Bolshevism”; somewhat abridged and altered).
283 Strik-Strikfeldt: “It’s an admirable document, but, as drafted, too Russian”—Ibid., p. 76 (slightly altered).
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