ИСТИНА

The Poetics of Not Belonging: Andrei Khrzhanovsky in Dialogue with ‘Western’ Art A Russian animated film auteur and an enthusiastic adapter of different literary forms, Andrei Khrzhanovsky (There Lived Kozyavin, The Pushkin Trilogy, Room and a Half) has reworked images of world art extensively. The paper focuses on the Italian trace in his work demonstrating how an ‘elitist’ addressee of Khrzhanovsky’s films is constructed through images perceived as ‘western’, foreign. In Glass Harmonica, banned in 1968 (despite the text in the opening shot—about the depiction of bourgeois society), the director elaborates on the topic of contemporary world mesmerized and ‘saved’ by music and art (not unlike The Yellow Submarine). Paintings of many European artists are reworked in the visual narrative (Botticelli, Bosch, Raphael, Magritte, Arcimboldo, Dürer) while the central conflict is dramatized through the opposition of Italian Renaissance images to the images of modernism (in its national versions), the protagonist being Pinturicchio-esque and the antagonist inspired by Magritte’s self-portraits. Khrzhanovsky ascribes the meaning of artistic ‘not belonging’ to images and narratives of Italy, which has its development in his later work—animated film adaptations A Grey-Bearded Lion and A Long Journey, made in the 1990s in collaboration with a renowned Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra. A Grey-Bearded Lion reworks Guerra’s tale about an Italian circus; A Long Journey bases its visual narrative on Federico Fellini’s drawings and film plots. The paper will show how the aesthete’s autonomy, supported by ‘Western’ art, is maintained by Khrzhanovsky in the post-Soviet period.