Lord, when did we see...?

For I was hungry, and you cut my SNAP benefits;
For I was thirsty, and you ran tar sands pipelines through my water;
I was a stranger, and you detained and deported me;
Naked, and you set the cops on me;
Sick, and you handed me a six-figure medical bill;
In prison, and you said I deserved to be there for life.

歌罢仰天叹

群鸡正乱叫
客至鸡斗争
驱鸡上树木
始闻叩柴荆
父老四五人
问我久远行
手中各有携
倾榼浊复清
苦辞酒味薄
黍地无人耕
兵革既未息
儿童尽东征
请为父老歌
艰难愧深情
歌罢仰天叹
四座泪纵横

- 杜甫，《羌村（3）》

Translation:

The flock of chickens starts to call wildly,
As guests arrive, the chickens begin to fight.
I drive the chickens up into the tree,
And now I hear the knock on the wicker gate.
Four or five elders from the village,
Ask how long and far I have been travelling.
Each of them brings something in his hands,
We pour the clear and thick wine in together.
They apologise because it tastes so thin,
There’s no one no-one left to tend the millet fields.
Conscription still continues without end,
The children are campaigning in the east.
I ask if I can sing a song for the elders,
The times so hard, I’m ashamed by these deep feelings.
I finish the song, look to heaven and sigh,
Everyone around is freely weeping.

- Du Fu, Qiang Village III

Rereading the Armament of Igor in a time of war

Were it not seemly to us, brothers,
To begin in ancient diction
The tales of the toils of the army
Of Igor, Igor Svyatoslavič?

Or to begin this song
In accordance with the ballads of this time,
And not like the invention of Boyan?

One of the few stabs I’ve made at reading again so far this year has been a reread of The Tale of the Armament of Igor. This poetic lamentation of a failed attempt by a prince of Rus’, Igor Svyatoslavič, to stage a raid on the attacking Cumans is the earliest extant example of literature in the Old Russian language, dating to the late 1100s. In addition to the themes of heroism in hopeless battles, grief and exile, the Tale also spends a great deal of time exhorting the princes of Rus’ to put aside their personal ambitions and greed, and unite in the face of a common enemy.

I found a great deal more in it on this third read-through than on my first. The poem rises and falls in mood, between the high triumphant martial imagery of Igor’s exhortations to the defence of the Russian land, and the vast desolate lamentation of Yaroslavna on the walls of Putivl, and finally returning again to a tone of hope in the voice of the poet Boyan. There is much in this poem that is still obscure to me, and that may be owing to my poor Russian.

However, I am still struck by the beauty of the natural imagery of the poem. One can almost hear the cries of falcons, the calls of magpies and crows, in the verse itself. The rivers speak, especially the Donets River with whom Igor converses in his Cuman exile (and which is today still the site of tragic bloodletting and destruction between brothers). The poet invokes the sun and the aurora borealis. Yaroslavna invokes the wind and the sky in her lamentations.

For brother spake to brother: ‘This is mine, and that is also mine!’
And the princes began to pronounce of a paltry thing, ‘This is great,’
And themselves amongst them to forge feuds…

I have found myself unable to write, and increasingly unable to read productively, on account of the war. I am caught between a love of Russia which rebukes their paranoia, and a love of the Ukraine which reproaches their pride and greed, and to see them fall upon each other with this insane bloodlust—Ukrainians against the civilians of Seversky Donets; and Russians against the Ukrainians—breaks the heart. Once again, ‘Kiev groaned with mourning, and Černigov with disasters.’ I find that I resonate much more, given the state of current events, with the lamentations of Svyatoslav over the deaths of his sons, and that of Yaroslavna over the fate of Igor.

This is a conflict which would not have happened, if the Russian leadership had not, under the fear of a threat to its borders, been goaded into an attack by the provocations of the Western powers on the Black Sea. This is also, much more so, a conflict which would not have happened if the Ukrainian oligarchs who foisted the Maidan upon them in 2014 at the instigation of the same Western powers, had not said to the people of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts, ‘this is mine, and that is also mine’—and then sent in the SBU and the fascist paramilitaries to destroy them. I hate that the people of the Donbass have been dying needlessly for the past eight years at the hands of their own government, and I hate more that Ukrainians are dying still in numbers equally great, at the hands of an attacking army. Most of all I hate the injustices and machinations and engineered policies of division and exploitation in Washington and London that brought all of this about.

Then in the time of Oleg, Boris wrought for evil: feuds were sown and grew apace.
The life of the scion of Dažbog was wasted,
In the factions of the princes and the generations of mankind were shortened.

What more can be said now? Perhaps the Russian band Aria said it already with their elegiac ‘Ballad of an Old Russian Warrior’:

Or perhaps the anonymous poet in the tradition of Boyan said it best: Далеко! Ночь меркнет.

Venerable Rōmanos the Melodist

Saint Rōmanos of Blachernæ

Today is the first of October. In China it is the lunar Mid-Autumn Festival, a festival which celebrates home and hearth as well as the moon, and it is also National Day, the seventy-first anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. But in the Orthodox Church, it is the feast day of two great saints of Antioch: Apostle Ananias of the Seventy, and also the venerable Saint Rōmanos, one of the easternmost Orthodox Church’s greatest hymnographers and liturgical singers. The tale of Rōmanos, who is himself a moon reflecting the celestial glories of the Most Holy Theotokos, urges us to recall and to strive for a heavenly homeland.

Saint Rōmanos [Gk. Ρωμανóς, L. Romanus, Ar. Rûmânûs رومانوس] was born in the city of Emesa (that is to say, modern-day Homs), toward the end of the fifth century. Tradition holds that he was ‘of Hebrew stock’. Recent scholars have suggested that according to the available evidence, which includes a number of Semitic turns of phrase in the hymns he wrote, his parents may have been Jewish, or they may have been Syriac Christians themselves.

He served the Church in his youth, and was elevated to the office of deacon and sent to Beirut to serve the Church there. Sometime after this, during the reign of Emperor Anastasius of Eastern Rome, he was sent to Constantinople and served as a sacristan in the great Hagia Sophia Cathedral. He spent his nights at prayer at the chapel of the Holy Theotokos in Blachernæ. Legend has it that Rōmanos suffered from some form of speech impediment, and one time during the Nativity season he was called upon to read the Psalms from one kathisma. Poor Rōmanos stuttered and faltered so badly that another reader had to assist him, and the other members of the congregation, including those among the clergy, cruelly mocked and ridiculed him.

That night, which was Christmas Eve, he went despairing and in tears to Blachernæ and held vigil there. He was visited that night by a vision of the Most Holy Theotokos, who comforted him and told him not to despair. She lay her right hand upon Rōmanos’s head, and produced in her left hand a small scroll, which she told him to take that scroll… and eat it. Unlike Garak, Our Lady was not joking. Rōmanos took the scroll and ate it. When he arose from his vigil some time later, he gave thanks to God and returned to the city. On Christmas the faithful gathered in Hagia Sophia and, to their chagrin, saw Rōmanos again in his place as reader. Grimacing, they braced themselves for the painful stuttering that they knew would ensue. But when Rōmanos went to the lectern and began reciting the Nativity hymn: ‘Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One’, the congregants stood transfixed, because a wonder had occurred: it seemed to them that they were hearing the voice of an angel. When he finished the whole of the nave was hushed and awed into silence, and the same priest who had mocked him the day before stood flabbergasted, and motioned him to continue.

The Theotokos had not only lifted the speech impediment from him, but she had also gifted Rōmanos with a sublime inspiration for lyric poetry, melody and rhythm. Because Rōmanos had swallowed a ‘kontakion’ which had been given to him by Our Lady, all of his subsequent hymns, written in a set structure of twenty-five strophes with twenty-one verses each, came to be known as kontakia. From that Nativity on, in Constantinople, he was given the epithets of ‘Glykophōnos’ (‘Sweet-Voice’), ‘Melōdos’ (‘Melodist’) and ‘Psaltēs Dikaiosynēs’ (‘True-Singer’). Rōmanos may have composed over a thousand of these songs – this may be pious exaggeration, though given that no complete compilations of his undoubtedly prodigious work are extant, we may never actually know. His style, as commented above, relied upon Semitic poetic conceits and turns of phrase – he may have been inspired by the hymns of Mâr ’Afrâm. However, he wrote in clear and unpretentious language, the common tongue of his day, which even the simple communicants in Constantinople could understand and appreciate.

No mention is made of Rōmanos having ever become a priest. It is entirely likely that he continued as a deacon throughout his life: in his iconography he is always portrayed in the robes of a deacon. He lived the rest of his life in Constantinople, continuing his vigils at Blachernæ and continually enriching the church with his divinely-inspired hymnody. He died in peace on the first of October, 556, and was buried in the Church of the Holy Theotokos at Blachernæ. It was not long at all before his memory was venerated by those who sang in the Church, and he was glorified by the Church at Constantinople as well as those of Armenia and the Rus’, he continues to this day as the patron saint both of Church singers and of people afflicted with impediments of speech. Holy and venerable Rōmanos, humble deacon with the voice of angels, pray unto Christ our Lord that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Rōmanos, Tone 4:

You gladdened Christ’s Church by your melodies
Like an inspired heavenly trumpet.
You were enlightened by the Mother of God
And shone on the world as God’s poet.
We lovingly honor you, righteous Rōmanos.

The four classical Chinese beauties

From left to right: Xi Shi, Yang Guifei, Wang Zhaojun, Diaochan

I did not note this until recently, but on this blog, it seems I have given each of the historical four great Chinese beauties of antiquity (Si Da Meinü 四大美女) her own blog post here. I feel I should not leave this happy incidence unremarked, particularly given my recent treatment of how a certain unnamed Wei beauty commemorated in the Odes seems to have touched off an entire prophetic-reformist tradition in Chinese philosophy on account of her influence over the imagination of the young Bu Zixia 卜子夏. If I were feeling a trifle frivolous, and sought to indulge for a moment my apparently incorrigible desire to draw comparative links between Chinese and classical Western philosophies, I could point out that each of the four beauties in Chinese literature appears to correspond to a Platonic-Aristotelian ‘cardinal virtue’. And since I just made for myself such a pseudo-exculpation, I’m gonna go ahead and do just that:

1. Shi Yiguang 施夷光 (also Xi Shi 西施) points to the virtue of moderation, or temperance. She exhibits a stern self-control, and also a fierce devotion to the Yue merchant fisherman Fan Li when she is given to Fuchai of Wu. She does not allow herself to be swayed by Fuchai’s affections, but delivers him over to Yue, even though it almost certainly means her death.
   
2. Wang Zhaojun 王昭君 points to the virtue of audacity, or fortitude. Though most of the women in Han Yuandi’s harem were appalled and frightened by the idea of being sent into Xiongnu territory to wed a khaghan of that people, Wang Zhaojun understood the benefits of peace, and although it saddened her deeply to leave China and the idea of entering the Xiongnu frightened her, she agreed to leave and be married to a foreigner she had never met.
   
3. Ren Hongchang 任红昌 (also Diaochan 貂蝉) points to the virtue of justice. She allowed herself to be used as a honeypot, seducing both Dong Zhuo and Lü Bu and urging the latter to kill the former, to save the Han Dynasty and to put an end to a bloody, murderous tyrant. In the popular telling of her story, she is motivated primarily by patriotism and by filial piety.
   
4. Yang Yuhuan 杨玉环 (also guifei 贵妃) points, albeit in an ironic way, to the virtue of sense or prudence. She did not exert any particular sound sense herself (except possibly when she showed appreciation for Minghuang’s gifts to her), but her tragic fate shows the way in which Minghuang ought to have done: he should have paid closer attention to state affairs, and not allowed Yang’s family to accede to high office.

This may be something of an exercise of philosophical whimsy on my part. However, it’s worth mentioning that each of these women was highly celebrated in traditional poetry (such as, to give one example, Bai Juyi’s ‘Song of Everlasting Regret’) and the popular operatic tradition, not so much for their abstract virtues as for their skill. Even the traditional Ru, despite their reservations about the female powers of suasion, had no objection to women being cultured, as evidenced by Ban Zhao’s literary output. And each of the four beauties did demonstrate a particular literary or artistic skill, being similar in these cases to Greek courtesans. Xi Shi, for example, was brought up ‘ignorant’, but she proved to be a skilled singer and dancer. Wang Zhaojun was a skilled pipa player, and is always depicted together with her instrument. Diaochan was deft at embroidery and was placed in charge of arranging the ornaments of high officials (which is how she earned her nickname, which means ‘Sable Cicada’). And Yang Guifei was not only a singer and dancer but was also apparently well-read and a witty conversationalist.

The other dimension of the poetic and operatic admiration for these women was the tragic bent of each of their lives. Despite their beauty being so intense that, in the realm of idiom, Xi Shi’s looks could cause fish to sink (西施沉鱼), Wang Zhaojun’s could cause geese to fall out of the sky (昭君落雁), Diaochan’s could shame the moon (貂蝉闭月) and Yang Guifei’s could cause flowers to hide themselves in embarrassment (贵妃羞花) – each of them seems to have gotten a tragic ending, at least in some versions of each woman’s tale. Yang Guifei was scapegoated for a political crime that was none of her own doing. Diaochan was, at least according to some versions of the story, killed by Guan Yu because her beauty was deemed too dangerous to him and his sworn brothers. Wang Zhaojun lived a long life with two husbands who dearly loved her, but still spent her life in exile from China. And Xi Shi – depending on which source you cite – was either killed after Yue’s invasion of Wu, or else ran off with Fan Li and spent the rest of her life quietly on a fishing boat on Lake Tai.

Despite being immortalised in song and poem and opera, in truth the main lesson, possibly a trifle Machiavellian, to be drawn from the beauties of Chinese history is that it could be highly dangerous for a woman – even a woman possessed of charm and physical pulchritude – to draw too close to men with high political power… unless she could be assured of wielding that power herself, like the Empress Wu Zetian 武则天. The classical Ru tradition would likely take strong exception to my philosophically-syncretistic attempt above to associate each Chinese beauty with a relevant Western virtue, as the followers of Confucius – particularly after the Tang Dynasty – have tended to frown upon such powers in women. This is analogous to Plato’s well-founded distrust of the ‘knack’ of Greek hetairai for telling men what they want to hear, as a potential danger to men’s self-control and thus to good order in the state. But Confucius himself seems to hint that it is not men’s desire for beauty that is itself evil, but the incorrect ordering of it: if it causes him to abandon the rites, justice and benevolence then such a desire becomes evil. But if, on the other hand, he is able to sublimate it the way Bu Zixia did… then such desire can deepen and quicken the pursuit of correct things – goodness for its own sake, and truth.

Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu: guts, but little glory

Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu

I honoured this past Victory Day by watching Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu, the 1975 war movie by (and starring) Sergei Bondarchuk that directly inspired the people’s film 28 Panfilovtsev. It belongs very firmly in the category of ‘gritty’ war films. That’s a category that Hollywood simply doesn’t and can’t do very well. I suspect the American film industry is simply too given both by financial pressure and by force of habit to sanitising war in various ways. The only two Hollywood films I can think of, off the top of my head, that come closest to being ‘gritty’ like this film – and even these ones don’t quite fit the bill – are Clint Eastwood’s 2006 companion films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

I have to wonder if one reason that Hollywood, in fact, doesn’t and can’t do truly unsparing war films like this one is because there is simply no parallel experience in American history. There is nothing in our collective memory to match the total, mechanised, genocidal slaughter to the tune of twenty-five million Soviet people on their own home territory. In general, we do not have to grapple with the presence of mass death on our literal front porches. We do have as part of our history the genocides of the American Indians on the frontier, but outside a very small and select (but growing) group of Native-produced films these genocides are only ever treated – if they are even acknowledged or mentioned at all – from a ‘revisionist’ outsider perspective, and that largely as a result of the Vietnam War. The closest we come to any sort of parallel experience is the Civil War. But even this is not a particularly good parallel because we tend to elevate the Civil War in our storytelling, generations after the fact, to the level of misty, shrouded mythology of glorious ‘gods and generals’: something which simply could not be done for the generation that fought the Second World War in their own front yards.

Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu is indeed a state-funded Soviet film about the Second World War – based on a novel by Mihail Sholohov – and there is of course a clear-cut villain that must be fought back. But it is also a film which does not shy away from showing us the brutal human costs of war – physical, mental, even spiritual. In more than one scene it comes close to showing the war as a total, meaningless waste: and this sentiment is even placed on the tongues of the more sympathetic characters. Oni srazhalis’ shows us, uncomfortably, the random and often meaningless deaths of characters we have begun to familiarise ourselves with. It shows us soldiers who become permanently disabled, who lose their hearing and who develop PTSD. It shows us families that have been torn apart. It alludes to wartime prostitution and the degradation of families. If films like Tuǵan jer show us a missing generation and an uprooted generation, then Oni srazhalis’ shows us what is happening to this generation as it is in the process of being torn apart at the seams and scattered to the winds.

Oni srazhalis’ follows a regiment of Soviet soldiers in retreat from the front, as they are being pushed back by the Wehrmacht across the Don. In this platoon are Pyotr Lopahin (Vasilii Shukshin), Nikolai Streltsov (Vyacheslav Tihonov), Ivan Zvyagintsev (Sergei Bondarchuk), the youngster Kopytovskii (Georgii Burkov), the cook Nekrasov (Yurii Nikulin) and the old veteran Poprishchenko (Ivan Lapikov). We see at once from their retreat that they have limited means of keeping their morale up, and the darkly-witty banter we see between them – about women, about families, about tobacco and alcohol and food – seem to alternate between attempts to stave off despair, and to genuinely build connexions with each other. Lopahin and Streltsov, early on, show very different attitudes to the war even though both of them are having the same sorts of internal struggles. Streltsov sees no point in being cheerful, while for Lopahin, staying cheerful seems the only way to stay sane. The relationships between these men, however, always remain on the level of the human: their jokes and their jealousies, their boasts and their stumbles.

In their retreat the beleaguered platoon still has to engage the enemy and halt their advance before they can pull away; the Soviet forces are show digging foxholes and trenches in a hurry before the air raids. These battles are necessary for these men, for the whole platoon, to survive… but at the same time there is very little glory in slowing a Nazi advance deeper into Russian territory in the hopes that a fresh wave of Soviet troops will advance. In these battle scenes there is a palpable sense of grim resolve, but very little of what American audiences would consider heroism. These are ordinary men who are forced to survive, to stave off the common end. They have rifles, Molotov cocktails and a limited supply of grenades against the grim mechanical might of the German Luftwaffe and Panzer divisions – and we are not spared the details as the German tanks roll over the foxholes. At the same time, we do cheer, as we should cheer for the underdog, when the vulnerable Soviets manage to take down a tank with their limited resources. Several more engagements with the Germans follow, and the soldiers make it to the Don River where they are meant to hold while a fresh platoon is called up to halt the German advance.

Filmic symbolism is heavily employed in these scenes, as at the beginning and end of the film. The ‘Rodina’ is repeatedly symbolised by wheat, by wheat fields, by barns and agricultural technology. In the first pitched battle against the Germans, the Wehrmacht sets fire to the fields and bombs a windmill which bursts into flames before Streltsov’s eyes, as he is wounded by a nearby mortar shell. Later, Zvyagintsev – who was a combine operator before the war – finds a few lonely strands of long grass in the field which have gone unburnt, plucks the heads and chews them, and mutters to himself: ‘What a waste… what a waste.’ We can tell by his expression that he is not simply talking about the fields themselves, but about the sum total of what has happened to the country. Later we see a German Panzer division deliberately destroying a village with its barns and food supply, burning it and running the tanks through the rubble. The minimalist scoring, often with only a choir singing softly in the background, and stretches of total silence that accompany these sequences, contributes to a filmic atmosphere that alternates between the grimly realistic and the surrealistic. In a certain sense, any attempt to portray the war realistically demands a certain level of this surrealism.

Perhaps surprisingly for a Soviet film of this era, religion – and in particular the Orthodox Christianity of the common soldiery – is portrayed with a significant degree of sympathy. It’s notable that the director’s own character in the film, Ivan Zvyagintsev, is the one who, trapped in his foxhole with the German tanks advancing on him, looks up at the sky and crosses himself and lifts up a heartfelt prayer to God. Later, Zvyagintsev mutters that he should not have been so silly, and that he should be allowed some leeway because he is not a Party member… but the intensity of that moment, in which Zvyagintsev is helpless and turning to God in his helplessness, is not lost on the viewer.

Again, the film does not spare us the grisly details of these engagements. Streltsov is the victim of a ‘near miss’ by a mortar: one scene of the film passes silently, in multiple vision, swimming before our eyes as it swam before his. Streltsov sees the advancing soldiers and tries to fire his gun, but cannot even manage to stand up straight or hold his head up. His ears are bleeding. We are made to think, after that engagement, that he is dead… but we are later told that he was evacuated to a field hospital. At the very end of the film we see Streltsov, deaf and suffering from what is clearly a degree of PTSD, coming back to his old platoon out of loyalty – though clearly incapable of fighting again.

Speaking personally, a particularly harrowing scene in the film is when Zvyagintsev – who is caught when a nearby landmine went off behind him – is evacuated to a field hospital and operated on. Zvyagintsev is clearly in excruciating pain as his back and legs are riddled all over with shrapnel, and the field surgeons are trying to operate on him. They have to cut off his clothes, and Zvyagintsev starts cursing out the surgeon for cutting away his boots, and then hitting on the nurse who sees him naked, before he breaks down and starts weeping into his pillow. Although it first seems as though Zvyagintsev is merely trying to stave off and master the pain through the cursing and banter, it becomes clear that he is in fact traumatised and has no willpower or control left. One has to applaud Bondarchuk’s superlative acting skill here in holding that tension for so long.

At the end of the film, the remnants of their regiment are assembled. We recall the beginning of the film when a long line of them is marching through a ravine; now there are barely 20 men left. We see poor Streltsov struggling even to stay standing straight as the regimental banner is unfurled and as Poprishchenko kisses it. This is undoubtedly a patriotic note on which to end the film, and the voice-over quotation from Sholohov’s novel cements that. But it is also a deeply ambiguous one, as though Bondarchuk is defying us – in our comfort, from our position as the audience – to share in that expression, to say too easily that Streltsov’s, or Zvyagintsev’s, suffering is somehow ‘worth it’. In this he places himself firmly head and shoulders above the trumpeting maudlin sentimentality of Spielberg’s ‘serious’ war films. Like Eastwood thirty years later in Flags of Our Fathers, Bondarchuk is not content to lay the sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War to rest in a simple expression of heroic resolve, not content to propagandise for any abstract cause. Unlike Eastwood, though, he doesn’t attempt to draw some sort of didactic lesson from the suffering of the soldiers. Instead, he lets them speak for themselves in their suffering, even when they don’t say anything at all.

It is very difficult to find a war film that says anything human about war. Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu comes damn close. It’s easy to see how Druzhinin and Shal’opa took this film as a direct inspiration for 28 Panfilovtsev: what with that film’s similar insistence on the ambiguity of its protagonists’ heroism, and the similar scenario of having to stave off repeated German advances with no supplies and dwindling reserves of human strength and will. As I think 28 Panfilovtsev bears witness, this is a Russian film but not exclusively so. It is one which is important for understanding the development of Kazakh film as well. If you want to understand – not simply acknowledge intellectually, but understand – how the Soviets experienced the Second World War, I recommend watching Oni srazhalis’, followed by Tuǵan jer, and then Oni srazhalis’ once more.

Amangeldy: Batyr and Kóterilis through a Soviet lens

Amankeldi İmanov (Elýbaı Ámirzaqov) and Balym (Shara Jıenqulova) in Amangeldy

Before, I made the claim that the Sergei Eisenstein film Ivan Groznyi (Part I) was the ‘birth of Kazakhstani cinema’. I still hold to that claim, in the sense that the logistical framework which was necessary to produce Eisenstein’s film at the tail end of the Second World War laid the material foundations for all of Kazakhstani cinema to come. Ivan Groznyi was not, however, the first feature film to come out under the Kazakhfilm label. That honour belongs instead to Moisei Levin’s and Vsevolod Ivanov’s black-and-white 1938 war drama and biopic Amangeldy, which treats the life and military career of the Kazakh national liberation fighter and peasant revolutionary Amankeldi Úderbaıuly İmanov, particularly his rôles in the Kóterilis of 1916 and the Sovietisation of Kazakhstan from 1917 on.

Amangeldy is an intriguing and multifaceted piece of Soviet cinema, in that it valorises and romanticises a particular image of the Kazakh people, and promotes them as a ‘progressive’ historical force. Though Paksoy would rebuke the later Soviet repression and censorship of the native Turkic dastanic epic literature, Amangeldy stands as a witness that the early Soviets were in fact not entirely averse to the epic. Moreover, Amangeldy can be seen as a prototype in Kazakh filmmaking, in that it lays down a template for the portrayal of the dastanic batyr on screen. Not only this, but it also demarcates the tradition of adopting the batyr for a political cause. It may thus be considered a spiritual progenitor of historical war films like Kóshpendiler, Mongol and Jaýjúrek myń bala.

It seems as though Amangeldy is also a progenitor of the Ostern and the forms of the revisionist Western that would later come out of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. The Kazakhs are shown as one of the indigenous peoples of Central Asia, and the main opponents of Amankeldi are the regimented, industrialised and mechanised White Army. The filmmakers clearly set out to draw a comparison and contrast to the general genre treatment of the American Indian in the Western film. Amankeldi is shown to be honest, righteous and noble (and, of course, on the side of the Bolsheviki); whereas the Tsarists are cruel and opportunistic, using their superior firepower to bombard an aul full of women and children while the men are away. Amangeldy præfigures the revisionist Western in its sympathetic treatment of an indigenous uprising against a ‘civilised’ government.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

A new governor is appointed by the Tsar for the Kazakh people, and announces a new conscription policy. A poor local bı named Amankeldi (Elýbaı Ámirzaqov) objects to conscription and is arrested by the gendarmes, over the voluble objections of his wife Balym (Shara Jıenqulova). While on the cart being transported to Siberia, he is joined by a political prisoner named Egor (Fedor Fedorovskii). Egor sympathises with the plight of the Kazakhs under the new levy, and informs Amankeldi that the Russian peasants and workers are facing similar oppression and exploitation, and dying at the front. Balym helps to organise an ambush which deals with Amankeldi’s prison wagon and releases both prisoners… and in so doing shows that she can handle a rifle as well as sew or dance.

Amankeldi returns to the capital, leading a significant crowd of poor Kazakhs and Kyrǵyz, where he confronts the local Kazakh han Jafar (Qanabek Baıseıitov) and the Tsarist official who are serving the conscription notice. Upon noticing Amankeldi among them, they back away. He tears the notice away from the clerk, and a fight breaks out. Amankeldi finds himself the leader of a full-fledged revolt against the Tsarist government, and taking to their horses they begin leading raids on the cattle of the handar who still support the Tsar. These men consult the governor, who issues a warrant for Amankeldi’s arrest and calls up the Russian Army as the Kazakh partizans arm themselves.

It becomes clear that the Kazakhs are woefully – literally – outgunned. The smithy can turn out shamshir sabres of high quality, but the rifles they produce burst at the stock when Amankeldi tries to fire one. When the Russian army arrives, the first thing they do is to attack the aul where Amankeldi’s wife is, along with the Kazakh women and children. They are interrupted and forced to wage a pitched battle when the Kazakh riders begin charging their line. The Kazakhs fight with sabres, spears, some rifles and mobile cannons made from hollow logs and fired from the backs of camels. Amankeldi comes to rely not only on Balym – who is present alongside him at nearly every engagement – but also on his lieutenants Beket (Seráli Qojamqulov) and Serik (Rahmetolda Sálmenov).

The Kazakhs under Amankeldi ally themselves with Russian working-class sympathisers and manage to triumph in battle against the armies of the Russian Army and of the other handar, and they force them to sign an agreement ensuring Kazakh self-rule. However, there is a dissension within the Kazakh movement. Some of them are unhappy with Amankeldi’s willingness to work with the Russians, and the nationalists in the movement, led by the treacherous Qarataı (Qapan Badyrov) begin plotting against him. They surround Amankeldi’s house, and he mounts a one-man stand against them with his rifle, sending Balym up through the roof and away for help. They capture him, however, and bind him. Balym stages a rescue and they ride off, with Amankeldi taking the rear against their pursuers to protect his men. Egor arrives with a Red Army contingent, but too late to help Amankeldi, who is mortally wounded by a gunshot from his fellow Kazakhs. He dies in Balym’s arms.

End spoilers.

I know that I really shouldn’t be shocked by the deftness with which some of these old black-and-white movies could be put together, particularly not after watching Eisenstein, but I confess that these older pics continue to impress me that way. In general, the acting is stentorian, full of pomp and bombast, as I suppose is all too well suited for an early Soviet flick about a revolutionary leader. (I can also see where Kuno Becker got his direction from in Kóshpendiler!) Elýbaı Ámirzaqov mounts a lively, if somewhat ham-fisted, performance in the title rôle – interesting to watch after seeing him as Bayan’s kindly old grandpa in Tuǵan jer! The hamminess leads to some instances of unintentional comedy, including the scene where Amankeldi shoots a gloating Qarataı with the pistol in his pocket, despite being hogtied.

The score is just what one might expect from an adventure or war movie from the thirties. Also, the backgrounds – though they are quite pretty – are static such that they are obviously painted: clearly the film was not shot on location. There’s quite a significant deal of ethnographic local-colour framing, including a game of kók bóri and a party where Shara Jıenqulova gets to show off her dance moves. These scenes feel slightly artificial: as though they are a demonstration of Kazakhness for a largely Russian audience. In short, I can see why it has something of a mixed reputation in modern Kazakhstan. In the words of reviewer Peter Rolberg:

Its title role, performed by [Elýbaı Ámirzaqov] with physical agility, self-confidence and dignity, must be regarded as a genuine achievement of national culture, whereas the film as a whole… was filmed in Chapaev-like fashion at Lenfilm Studio and is more a hybrid than authentically Kazakh.

Amangeldy præfigures the Kazakhstani dastan film in several important ways, though. There a batyr, a righteous martial hero, at the centre of the story, with a significant love interest who is intimately involved in the batyr’s struggle. (In an interesting twist from Kóshpendiler and Jaýjúrek myń bala, though, here it’s the woman who repeatedly comes to the rescue of her captured man.) There is also an attempt to overlay the dignity and honour of the nation as a whole upon the batyr’s noble, selfless and courageous deeds. This makes the tale of the batyr, and the mythmaking surrounding that tale, the locus of ideological formation. The singer, or jyraý, of the dastan occupies the same place as Homer does among the Greeks, and bears a similar degree of mytho-political power and power over the collective emotional life of the nation. This is one reason why Plato showed such distrust of the poets in the Republic, and also one reason why Abaı disclaimed for himself any desire to become a poet.

It is also one reason why the dastan became such a fraught form of oral tradition – here converted into a cinematic tradition – in the Soviet Union. The Soviets understood the dastan to be a powerful propaganda tool, but also an art form which could potentially be politically-subversive. In attempting to set up the historical Amankeldi İmanov as a heroic batyr through cinema, they were in essence legitimising as ‘true Kazakhs’ those who held to the Soviet party line. One sees quite clearly the ‘us-them’ distinction being drawn in Amangeldy, that would be reflected and echoed in later films like Kóshpendiler and Jaýjúrek myń bala. Amankeldi is the true Kazakh: noble, honest, self-sacrificing, hospitable – and in addition, an expert rider, a tenacious fighter and a winning lover. Against him are set the foils of Jafar and Qarataı. Jafar, a physical coward, sticks to working among the Tsarist officials. He wears fine silken robes and speaks insinuatingly in Russian. Qarataı is shown as fully-Westernised, wearing military uniforms and suits with ties, sporting a trimmed moustache. These are Kazakhs who have forgotten the steppe traditions and their true national feeling: quite the damning indictment for the Kazakh nationalism of the Alash movement!

Amangeldy, the first feature of the new Kazakhfilm Studio, is therefore a critically-important film for understanding later Kazakhstani cinema, despite its having been shot in Moscow. In many respects it is a template for later Kazakh and Russian directors, from big-budget heavyweights like Aqan Sataev and Sergei Bodrov, Sr to indie auteurs and purveyors of anti-hero stories, like Dárejan Ómirbaev.

Beloe solntse pustyni: a deserving cult-classic Ostern

Rahimov (Musa Dudaev) and Suhov (Anatolii Kuznetsov) in Beloe solntse pustyni

Ваше благородие, госпожа Разлука,
Все мы с ней не встретимся, вот какая штука.
Письмецо в конверте погоди не рви,
Не везет мне в смерти – повезет в любви!

I had forgotten just how much I love this film – the first Soviet film I ever watched as a callow youth of twenty-two. That’s to my chagrin. Still, I can and will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first release of Vladimir Motyl’s directorial masterpiece in 1970. It is traditional for Soviet and Russian cosmonauts to watch Beloe solntse pustyni (White Sun of the Desert) before launch, as a good-luck charm. That has something of an ironic echo in my own case, since I first watched this movie in preparation for my ill-fated but quite formative trip to Kazakhstan in 2009. Now, over ten years later, of course I can look back on that whole episode with a smiling eye – and I can watch Beloe solntse pustyni with a bit more appreciation and grounding in the Western (and Ostern) genre’s conventions. With all due thanks, of course, to Rich Hall.

Beloe solntse pustyni takes place in the deserts of Central Asia, and follows one adventure in the life of a Red Army veteran of the Caspian Regiment ‘Ferdinand August Bebel’, Fyodor Ivanovich Suhov (Anatolii Kuznetsov) as he attempts to make his way home to his wife Katerina Matveevna (Galina Luchai) from his posting in Turkestan. On the way back he meets and rescues a man buried up to his neck in the desert – Said (Spartak Mishulin), a sharpshooter on a quest for vengeance against his father’s killer. In the next city he finds a Red Army detachment led by Rahimov (Musa Dudaev) as they’ve taken charge of nine women who were the wives of a certain cruel and vengeful Basmachi rebel captain named Abdulla (Kahi Kavsadze). Rahimov manages to convince Suhov to take the young women into his charge while he gets reinforcements, and he commandeers a local museum to shelter the women and fend off Abdulla until Rahimov returns. Suhov, and his young helper Petruha (Nikolai Godovikov) are left to their own devices, appealing – at first unsuccessfully – to the local customs officer, Pavel Vereshchagin (Pavel Luspekaev).

There’s a great deal to appreciate about this iconic film, justly considered a cult classic and beloved by generations of Russians. The premise of the film, to begin with, is Homeric in tenor: Suhov, the veteran of a great expedition to the East, finds himself wandering back home with small hope of return, yet vividly remembering and cherishing the memory of the Penelope to his Odysseus, his wife Katerina – to whom he composes mental letters, which serve as narration in the film. And on his travels he faces trials and temptations both, all of which seem to offer contemporary parallels to the monsters and beauties which grace the Odyssey. When I watched this film many years ago I lavished praises on the character of Said, whose laconic charisma and sang-froid is even now quite compelling to me. But despite his continuing ‘coolness’ as the hired gun who never misses, I’ve found that the other characters in the film, particularly Petruha and Vereshchagin, have taken on intriguing dimensions and meaning in light of a classical reference which I had little conception of on my first watch.

If there is a Greek chorus to observe Suhov’s feats, actually, it’s a silent one – but no less eloquent for all that. The four aqsaqaldar, literally white-bearded old men, who sit by the wall on the Caspian seaside hardly say a single word the entire time, but they are there watching, often with patient bemusement, all the outlandish and violent events unfold in front of them. As seems appropriate in a film like this, there is a deliberate contraposition of the bleak desert with its vast dunes and rugged stone architecture with the idyllic, green and red flower-covered meadows of Suhov’s home with his beloved Katerina standing patiently among them, only glimpsed in flashbacks or daydreams. (Suhov spends a lot of his time on screen reclining or napping on the sand, often to comic effect.) The colour schemes are entirely different, and they offer us tantalising hints into Suhov’s inner psychology and motivations.

As seems to be a commonplace in Westerns, the weapons are reflections of the characters of the people who wield them. Suhov wields a Nagant revolver, while Abdulla wields a Mauser C96 – the weapons of ‘gentleman’ cavalry officers. The ill-fated Petruha wields a rifle with a bayonet attached, which never manages to fire except on accident. The Basmachi bandits all wield carbines. Vereshchagin either fights with his bare fists or hurls sticks of dynamite – both a testament to his temper and a foreshadowing of his tragicomic demise. Said, the survivor, successfully improvises with whatever is closest to hand, whether it’s stealing an enemy’s gun or throwing a knife.

The relationships between men and women are another filmic motif: Suhov’s devotion to his wife notwithstanding, his suddenly being placed in charge of Abdulla’s harem, together with a green youngster who clearly has no experience with women, places a significant temptation on him, as we are made to see through his daydreams. The fundamentally decent Suhov represents a familial ethic which is new and Soviet as far as his charges are concerned: one woman for one husband, and one husband’s affections for one wife. Suhov gains the attentions – or at least curiosity – of one of Abdulla’s burqa-wearing wives, the fifteen-year-old Gúlchataı (Tatyana Fedotova), whom Petruhov also admires despite not ever being able to see her face. Gúlchataı struggles to understand the benefits of Christian-slash-Soviet monogamy, seeing the lot of a single wife in charge of an entire household’s chores as drudgery – but it also seems she’s the most receptive to the idea. This motif of a progressive versus an Islâmic-patriarchal understanding of sexuality does not actually shy away from subtly ribbing the Soviet position. Suhov posts big red propaganda posters around the museum reading – in Russian – things like ‘Women are human beings too!’ But at the same time, Suhov does occasionally entertain the fantasy of keeping a harem, with Katerina as the chief wife and supervisor…

And then there is the relationship between Vereshchagin and his own wife Nastasya (Raisa Kurkina): the old customs officer is torn between a certain degree of domestic security, bought at the cost of compromises with Abdulla’s gang at the behest of his wife, and his formerly glorious and daring military past – which is symbolised in the film by a kind of sæcular iconostasis on one wall of the customs-house, with paintings and lithographs, maps and old photographs – these of himself with his much-younger wife in his military attire and medals. There are hints and flashes of the old fire in Vereshchagin, and these are brought out mainly by his meeting with young Petruhov, to whom Vereshchagin takes an instant liking. It is strongly implied by the film that Petruhov reminds Vereshchagin of his own deceased son, whose military grave is far-off and unattended. Vereshchagin is also the one who strums and sings the folk song ‘Ваше благородие, госпожа Разлука’ quoted above, and which forms something of a theme for the film. It reflects also something of Vereshchagin’s predicament, being estranged from his old home, being unlucky in death but lucky in love with a devoted (but somewhat smothering and overprotective) wife.

The overall tone of the film is light, however – even comic. It is brisk-paced, well-choreographed with regard to the gunfights and standoffs, and has the benefit of never taking itself too seriously, allowing for its saturnine humour and its immortal one-liners: ‘The East is a delicate matter,’ for instance; ‘His grenades are the wrong type!’; and ‘Save at least one bullet, Abdulla, to shoot yourself!’ The main locations for filming were Dagestan (on the other side of the Caspian) and Turkmenistan for a few of the desert scenes. Luga, south of Saint Petersburg, was chosen for the pastoral location for shooting Suhov’s daydreams and flashbacks with Katerina. The palette for the film is notably warm, even gaudy, when compared with other films of the time. This is counterbalanced by a certain staid realism in the cinematography: lots of slow pans and flat, static takes, allowing the audience to have the same sort of ironic detachment from the action that the aqsaqaldar have, sitting outside in the sun.

If it weren’t already obvious, I consider Beloe solntse pustyni to be fully deserving of its status among the classics of Soviet film, full stop. Not for nothing was it added to the register of culturally significant films in Russia in 1998! It can easily bear the comparison to any Western of its time. It’s shot against starkly beautiful Caspian desertscapes. Its characters are all entirely and understandably human – even the homicidally jealous villain. It hits just the right notes of comedy and melancholia, action and emotion to solidify its place in cinema, and its classical literary moorings take it just that extra step beyond into the category of high art. This one’s absolutely a keeper.

Our righteous father Mâr ’Afrâm as-Sûryâni

Saint ’Afrâm as-Suryâni

Today in the Orthodox Church is also the feast-day of Mâr ’Afrâm as-Sûryâni – Saint Ephraim the Syrian. Indisputably the single most important, and also the most sublime and inspired, hymnodist of the early Syriac tradition, Mâr ’Afrâm was also a teacher in the Church and a defender of Nicene Orthodoxy in an area of the world where hæresy and syncretic beliefs were often far more popular. His poetic and figurative interpretations of Scripture set the standard for all subsequent Syriac Scriptural hermeneutics. And of course, his well-known prayer of self-reflection and repentance is used throughout the Orthodox Church, particularly during Great Lent.

Mâr ’Afrâm was born in Nisibis – modern-day Nusaybin in southeastern Turkey, right on the border with Syria, in 306. His parents were Christians. At the time Mâr ’Afrâm lived it was an important commercial centre and had been so for a full millennium before. As a hub of trade situated between two large empires – Rome and Persia – it was at once cosmopolitan and vibrant, and vulnerable to wars and political upheavals. It was home to Arabs, Armenians, Jews, Persians, Kurds, Greeks and Romans; and its religious landscape was equally variegated. The Christian community there, to which Mâr ’Afrâm belonged, was probably quite small. Its character was probably close to the Gnostics or the more Judaïsing elements of early Christendom. At the time of ’Afrâm’s birth, the Christian community of Nisibis was still recovering from the persecutions it had suffered under Diocletian.

In ’Afrâm’s infancy, the bishop who had been appointed to the see of the Christians in Nisibis was a westerner and a Roman subject – Mâr Ya‘qûb. It was no doubt Mâr Ya‘qûb’s efforts that strengthened the Christian community in Nisibis in terms of the steadfastness of their doctrine, as ’Afrâm singles him out for praise for his paternal wisdom and the ‘tough love’ he gave to his flock. However, it was also the case that Emperor Saint Constantine at this time ended the persecutions of Christians in the Empire, affording Mâr Ya‘qûb the opportunity to safely build a church, which he did around 320. Mâr Ya‘qûb also attended the Council of Nicæa five years later at Emperor Constantine’s invitation, and is listed among the holy signatories of the Council.

Mâr Ya‘qûb was also the spiritual father of ’Afrâm, who was baptised as a youth or a young adult. Quick to recognise ’Afrâm’s raw untrained intellect and poetic talents, after his return from Nicæa Ya‘qûb ordained the neophyte ’Afrâm as a deacon and also appointed him as a malfâna ملفان or ‘teacher’ – a position which accorded him significant social respect among the community. He did not, however, preach only to the educated. His songs and verse are remarkably careful and exact in their language particularly with regard to their doctrinal import – ’Afrâm, a loyal student of Ya‘qûb, is scrupulously and vocally Nicene in his Christology. But his works are not inaccessible to the layman. He writes in a popular, folk language that even the unlettered can understand. His songs were set to the folk tunes of his day. It’s important to remember that hymnody was still at this time a fairly new art form, and Christianity was adopting and transfiguring the cultures that surrounded it. It’s worth bearing in mind that Mâr ’Afrâm was as much a folk artist – a Ralph McTell or a Woody Guthrie – as he was a creator of holy art.

Mâr ’Afrâm, serving as deacon to Mâr Ya‘qûb in 338, was present and assisting when Mâr Ya‘qûb ascended the city walls of Nisibis during the first siege of the city by the Persian šâh Šâpur II, when Persia and Rome fell to war once again: what started as a proxy war in Armenia. Mâr Ya‘qûb did not pick sides, but he prayed that his city might be delivered from the siege – and as it turned out, the siege was lifted by a plague of gnats that broke out among the Persian cavalry. Unfortunately, the Christians in Persia were treated as a potential Roman fifth column by Šâpur and his descendants. As a result, Christian populations along the Roman border with Persia began to suffer the effects of a new persecution from the east.

On the other hand, Šâpur II and his heirs in the Persian Empire had no particular problems with Jews, and were even friendly toward Jewish interests. Naturally, the political climate as long as Persia and Rome remained at war created a dramatic rift between the Christian and the rabbinical Jewish communities. Polemics on both sides tended to ramp up, as did increasingly-sophisticated apologetics and proofs. Mâr ’Afrâm was drawn into many of these polemical disputes, and many of his hymns include imprecations of Jews and refutations of the unresolved Jewish messianism in favour of Jesus as Christ.

Mâr ’Afrâm also had a good relationship, it seems, with Ya‘qûb’s successor in office as bishop, Babu. Mâr Babu was apparently also a generous patron of the poor and needy; but he was primarily called upon to be the city’s chaplain in time of war. Much of his energy was spent ransoming captives, comforting the bereaved, repairing buildings and giving moral strength to a beleaguered and often-besieged populace. Nisibis was indeed besieged again in 346, and for a third time in 350. This time Šâpur attempted to divert the Nahr Jaghjagh from its course in an attempt to flood the city, but the residents of Nisibis quickly built up an emergency rampart to keep the floodwaters out – turning them back on the besiegers. The Persian war elephants in particular were not fond of the resulting mire and once again Šâpur was forced to withdraw. Mâr ’Afrâm wrote about this siege, likening the flood to the Great Flood, and the salvation of Nisibis to the promise God made to Noah.

The reign of Constantius in Rome was unfortunately followed by that of Julian the Apostate in 361, who made a point not only of venerating the local pagan deities but also of humiliating the Christians of the Middle East whenever opportunity allowed. Mâr ’Afrâm turned his hymnographer’s pen against the idol-worshipping Roman Emperor, and exhorted the Christians of Nisibis to remain steadfast in response to the persecutions of Julian. After Julian’s death at the hands of Šâpur on the twenty-sixth of June, 363, following an ill-advised offensive against Ctesiphon, Rome was forced to seek a peace with Persia. This peace included the cession of the long-suffering Nisibis.

Mâr ’Afrâm, for all his old enemies had taken control of the city he lived in and loved, was insistent that the Persians had treated the Christians fairly when they took Nisibis. Only Julian was responsible, in his eyes, for having lost Nisibis to the Persians, and that on account of his embrace of paganism and idolatry. In fact, the Persians had only destroyed the pagan temples of the Romans as a rebuke to Julian – they left the Christians well alone. Even so, Mâr ’Afrâm and the rest of the Christian community there could not stay in Nisibis. ’Afrâm accompanied a group of Nisibean Christians first to Âmida (now Diyirbakır in Turkey), and then to Edessa, or ar-Ruhâ (now Urfa), where he settled and spent the rest of his earthly days. In Edessa as in Nisibis, Mâr ’Afrâm found a cosmopolitan city which was home to a great panoply of religious beliefs ranging from the various cults of Roman and Semitic paganism to neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Mazdaism, Judaism, Arianism, Marcionism and Orthodox Christianity.

Indeed, in order to distinguish them from the other sects in Edessa, Nicene Christians in Edessa were called ‘Palutians’, probably after Mâr Mâri, whose given name prior to his consecration was ‘Palut’. This state-of-affairs pleased Mâr ’Afrâm not at all, for it contravened the Holy Apostle Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians in the very first chapter of his first letter to them. He encouraged the Christians of Edessa to call themselves so, and to insist that they were true followers of Christ and not of any earthly self-proclaimed teacher or hæresiarch. Mâr ’Afrâm continued to write verse apologetics, with varying degrees of polemical edge, against Arianism and against Gnosticism while he remained in Edessa. Mâr ’Afrâm founded a school in Edessa as his master had in Nisibis, and continued to teach there as a malfâna. He also taught music not only to men but also to choirs of women in the Church. As a deacon of the Church and as a good student of Mâr Ya‘qûb, ’Afrâm spent much time caring for the poor and the sick in his Edessan exile. The blessed hymnodist reposed in the Lord in 373 after succumbing to an outbreak of pestilential disease, whose victims he was comforting and treating. In the Orthodox Church, Saint ’Afrâm is remembered together with Saint ’Ishâq of Nineveh on the twenty-eighth of January.

Mâr ’Afrâm is well remembered in the Church as a teacher of profound and holy things – the right glory due to Christ and the veneration of the Theotokos; prayer; abstinence; almsgiving; repentance – to ordinary people, through just such hymns as our Lenten one. As a malfâna he took a sæcular art form, that of folk music, and placed it at the service of God for the edification and strengthening of the young and unlearnt Nisibeans in his care. Yet he did not neglect the prosaic aspects of the faith either; as we can see, he took up his master’s emphasis on care for the poor and suffering among his fellow-exiles, and in the end he shared in their death and thus earned the heavenly crown. Holy Mâr ’Afrâm, righteous deacon and sweet hymnodist, pray unto Christ our God that we too may see our own faults and not judge our brothers and sisters.

By a flood of tears you made the desert fertile,
And your longing for God brought forth fruits in abundance.
By the radiance of miracles you illumined the whole universe!
Our Father ’Afrâm, pray to Christ God to save our souls!

Ancient church in ar-Ruhâ

Holy and Right-Believing Elaeth ‘Frenin’, Monk of Anglesey

St Eleth Church, Amlwch, Wales

On the eleventh of November we celebrate the feast of Elaeth of the Welsh Age of Saints, a sixth-century Brythonic king of the Old North who lost his kingdom and subsequently became a monk on the holy island of Ynys Môn. He is venerated today primarily in northern Wales, and is associated closely with the other saints of Anglesey.

Elaeth ‘Frenin’ ap Meurig ap Idno belonged to the chieftains of Yr Hen Ogledd, who apparently did not have a particularly sterling reputation among the bards of old Britain in the years that they ruled, as Elaeth’s father Meurig is ‘clearly vilified’ in the Black Book of Carmarthen – a compilation in which two poems are attributed to Saint Elaeth himself. Their reputation apparently suffered on account of their inability to hold off the Picts. Elaeth was born to Meurig and his wife Onnengreg, probably at some point in the 610s or 620s, and acceded his father as a king or sub-king in Yr Hen Ogledd. He lost his kingdom, however, to the invading Picts and had to flee west and south into northern Wales.

Specifically, he fled to the isle of Anglesey, and sought shelter at Penmon Priory where Saint Seiriol ‘Gwyn’ was the reigning abbot. This happened around the year 640. Seiriol took a liking to the exiled king, and at the latter’s wish to quit the sæcular world gave him the monastic tonsure. It was probably after he became a monk that he wrote seven exhortatory poems under the title of ‘Cyngogion Elaeth’, collected in the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales.

Saint Elaeth also founded, according to tradition, St Eleth Church in Amlwch, which today belongs to the (Anglican) Church in Wales. Nearby this church is Ffynnon Elaeth, a holy well whose waters were held to have great healing powers, and which remained a common site of pilgrimage on Anglesey to the present – in the words of Angharad Llwyd, ‘the ancient well… is still held in some degree of repute’. Saint Elaeth lived out the rest of his life as a monk on Anglesey, and reposed probably shortly before the year 700. Holy Father Elaeth, king and poet and monk, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion of Saint Elaeth, Tone 8:

Thou didst exchange armed combat with the heathen
For the spiritual warfare of the monastic life, O Father Elaeth.
Look on those who now hymn thee,
O thou who didst praise God with thy poetic talents He gave thee,
And intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.

Alpamıs and Kazakh cinema

Alpamıs batyr

I recently read HB Paksoy’s English translation of (and commentary on) the 1901 Abubakir Ahmetzhanovich Divaev edition of Alpamıs, the archetypal and, in many senses, most important Turkic epic dastan. Divaev, it deserves to be said, is a formidable (and formidably-brave!) Bashkir scholar who bears with him the same mixture of leftist political commitments and complex feelings of national belonging, and that led him to commit to writing this traditional Turkic epic which had been primarily an oral tradition. On the other hand, much of Paksoy’s commentary on Divaev’s work ranges from amusing to grating, giving voice as it does to a Turkish nationalism that is justifiably seen as clueless and arrogant by most or all of Turkey’s neighbours. For example, his insistence that pan-Turkism is an insidious invention of Russian and British imperialists, and his subsequent assertion that the political goal of the Turkic nations should be a commonwealth exactly like Britain’s, seems to embody both excesses. But his scholarly work in translating and parsing the Divaev text of the Alpamıs is a remarkable – and to the English speaker, invaluable – feat.

I was surprised by the Shî’ite, and specifically red Shî’ite, aspects of the story. Paksoy tries to play these down a bit by attributing them to interpolations from an earlier transcriber of the Alpamıs legend, Yusufbek bin Hoja Şeyhülislam oglu, who was apparently a Shî’a Muslim. However, in the tale as presented by Divaev (a Sunnî Muslim), whenever the name of Hz. ‘Alî is invoked, he always comes to the aid of the weaker, the younger, the friendless, the alien, the outnumbered, the wrongful victim of violence. He always thwarts the designs of them who rely on strength or riches or numbers to get what they want. I found this aspect particularly interesting.

Reading the dastan also brought a number of thematic considerations into focus for me, as a connoisseur of Kazakh cinema. The Alpamıs story has absolutely had an impact on the way Mansur and Sartaı are portrayed in the films Kóshpendiler and Jaýjúrek myń bala, respectively – and of course, Jaýjúrek myń bala referenced the Alpamıs explicitly at two points.

In the broad strokes, the Alpamıs legend goes like this. Alpamıs and Gúlbarshın (or Barshın) are born to two beys of the Qońyrat tribe, Bórı and Sary, who at first betroth them to one another, but then have a falling-out. Barshın’s father Sary migrates into the land of the Kalmyks, where he raises his daughter. When Barshın is old enough, word of her beauty reaches the ear of the khan of the Kalmyks, named Taıshy (= taizi 太子, a Chinese title in common use among the Mongols), who tries to coerce her into marriage by sending horsemen to fetch her. One of the horsemen, Qarajan, sees her and falls for her, and a dispute arises. Barshın uses this to her advantage by proposing a race after a six-month grace period – that the fastest rider should win her hand. This does not prevent a battle between Qarajan’s men and Taıshy’s, in which many Kalmyks died.

In the meanwhile, Barshın sends word under her father’s notice to Alpamıs, who is supposed to ride to her rescue. Alpamıs wins the loyalty of a magnificent legendary winged tulpar horse named (Baı-)Shubar, which he enters into the race for Barshın’s hand. During the race, he meets another rider with a tulpar – this is Qarajan. The fourteen-year-old Alpamıs outrides Qarajan on Shubar, then forces him to the ground, where Qarajan wrestles with him. ‘Alî comes to the aid of Alpamıs as Qarajan tries to overpower him with brute strength, and Qarajan is thrown to the ground. He accepts to convert to Islâm and becomes the sworn friend of Alpamıs.

Qarajan offers to take Alpamıs’s place in the race on Shubar, and rides him to Barshın to tell her of Alpamıs’s arrival. Barshın mistakes Qarajan for her chosen champion Alpamıs from a distance, and weeps when she sees not her countryman but a Kalmyk on his horse. Qarajan comforts her, and tells her he will ride in Alpamıs’s stead in the race. Qarajan rides Shubar back to his camp, where his son Dostmuhamed – who has designs on Barshın himself – conspires with the other Kalmyks to bind Qarajan fast as he sleeps, and injure Shubar by driving nails into his hooves. Qarajan awakens, flies into a rage on finding himself bound, takes Shubar and overtakes Dostmuhamed. Qarajan pleads with his son to give up Barshın, appealing to filial piety and offering him many girls like Barshın from his own folk; but Dostmuhamed does not listen to him. Qarajan throws his own son from his horse and kills them both. Qarajan mourns the loss of his son, but the poet praises his devotion to his friend.

Qarajan rides the bleeding, wounded Shubar over the finish line, but Alpamıs beholds his horse collapse from the wounds in his hooves. Qarajan and Alpamıs bring the bleeding horse to Barshın, who pulls the nails from his hooves, soothes his wounds with warm water and cares for both horse and rider until they are again healthy. Alpamıs takes Shubar on practice rides until he fully recovers his strength and speed. Then Barshın takes Alpamıs to her tent and they are wed, with Qarajan in attendance as witness.

Taıshy-khan will not accept the outcome of the race, nor relinquish his claim over Barshın. His advisers tell him to set a trap for Alpamıs in a wrestling match. Taıshy invites Alpamıs to the match, and tells Alpamıs can have Barshın if he can best ninety of his wrestlers. Outnumbered and surrounded by the khan’s warriors, Alpamıs prays to God and girds himself up for the wrestling match. Again ‘Alî comes to the aid of the fourteen-year-old boy, and he overthrows one wrestler after the other. All the Kalmyks leap upon Alpamıs at once in an attempt to kill him, and one of Taıshy’s men, Kókaman, treacherously draws his bow and tries to shoot Alpamıs in the back. Only then does Alpamıs draw his sword, take Barshın up with him, and ride away on Shubar.

Divaev’s 1901 version ends with Alpamıs, Barshın, Qarajan and Sary all returning to the land of the Qońyrats in triumph. However, Paksoy adds an appendix relating longer versions of the same story. In these versions, Taıshy rustles all of Bórı’s cattle in revenge, and Alpamıs is forced to return to the Kalmyk lands to get them back. He is captured for seven years and held underground, where he escapes with the help of a shepherd as well as Taıshy’s love-struck daughter. There follows an episode similar to the homeward return of Odysseus. Alpamıs returns to Qońyrat to find a usurper, Ultan, ruling his homeland. The Telemachian son of Alpamıs, Jádıger, acquaints him with the situation. Ultan has reduced Alpamıs’s father Bórı to penury and destitution, persecuted Jádıger, oppressed the Qońyrat and is courting his wife Barshın. Alpamıs, disguised as Ultan’s father Qultaı (the same man who had given him Shubar), meets Ultan at the feast wherein he is supposed to marry Barshın. After some repartee with his wife, ‘Qultaı’ discovers that she has, like Penelope to Odysseus, been faithful to him. Thereupon he throws off his disguise and slays Ultan, restoring justice to the Qońyrat and reuniting his household.

Again, reading Paksoy’s translation of the 1901 Divaev Alpamıs drove home to me how remarkably the two epic films produced by Kazakhfilm follow the basic storyline of the dastan even as they reference it. In these ‘official’ filmic retellings of the dastan, the Kazakhs clearly understand themselves to be the heirs of the Qońyrat; and the they-us distinction drawn between the Qońyrat and the Kalmyks clearly parallels that between the Kazakhs and the Dzunghars (who are historically the same people as the Kalmyks). The Kalmyks are ‘godless’, greedy, lascivious and treacherous; while Alpamıs and Barshın – faithful Muslims, hospitable, true to their word, possessed of both physical and moral bravery – embody the virtues of the Qońyrat. Paksoy underscores in his commentary the political subversiveness and national awareness-building potential of the Alpamıs legend. Indeed, the filmmakers of Kóshpendiler and Jaýjúrek myń bala seem to have had the same thought. There a clear line is drawn in epic tradition between the characters of Alpamıs to Abylaı Khan / Sartaı, and thereafter by extension to the Big Bread, Nursultan Nazarbaev himself – the batyr who presided over the independence and unification of the Kazakh people.

At the same time, the Kazakh films that I have watched so far demonstrate that the modern Kazakh national consciousness is particularly sophisticated, not one-dimensional in the slightest. The dastan-derived national mythos clearly still has sway over the popular imagination. The heroes of the films of Ermek Tursynov, Kelin and Shal, hearken back to a decidedly præ-Islamic set of Kazakh virtues, better-suited to survival in an unforgiving taiga clime. There is also a crypto-Christian, Russian-influenced folk tradition which values the underdog-heroism of Shıza, whose virtues rest more in his cagey ‘foolishness’, his ‘simple’ desire to do right by his family and his sense of fair play; one can also see Gagarin and especially Nazira in Baikonur as fitting this mould. These are all ‘ideal types’, of course, and I deeply suspect an average Kazakh watcher of these films would find not only substantial overlap between all three models of ideal Kazakh manhood or womanhood, but also echoes or subversions of the same basic dastanic themes.

Bu Zixia and the beauty of Wei

Bu Zixia 卜子夏

Confucius’s disciple Bu Shang 卜商 or Bu Zixia 卜子夏 is referenced in the Analects as having a good grasp of the Odes, such that Confucius found him worthy of discussing them with him. From the Analects:

子夏問曰：「『巧笑倩兮，美目盼兮，素以為絢兮。』何謂也？」子曰：「繪事後素。」曰：「禮後乎？」子曰：「起予者商也！始可與言詩已矣。」

Zi Xia asked, saying, ‘What is the meaning of the passage – “The pretty dimples of her artful smile! The well-defined black and white of her eye! The plain ground for the colours!”?’ The Master said, ‘The business of laying on the colours follows (the preparation of) the plain ground.’ ‘Ceremonies then are a subsequent thing?’ The Master said, ‘It is Shang who can bring out my meaning. Now I can begin to talk about the Odes with him.’

　 　 - The Analects 《論語》 4.8

And yet, Bu Zixia is best-known today as the traditional transmitter to posterity of the Gongyang learning 公羊學派 – the school to which belonged Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒, He Xiu 何休, Gong Zizhen 龔自珍, Wei Yuan 魏源 and China’s first modern socialist Kang Youwei 康有為, and of which the Confucian constitutionalist Jiang Qing xiansheng 蔣慶先生 is the most prominent modern exponent. I have often described the Gongyang learning as a ‘revolutionary conservative’ political school of Ru, but its exponents have as often been on the most radical edge of Chinese politics. It is also one whose adherents have imbued the Ru tradition with a ‘religious’ spirit, a spirit of moral revolt, which I have often likened to the Slavophils of Russia.

But the Gongyang hermeneutic of the Classic of History (that is to say, the Spring and Autumn Annals 《春秋》), is best described as a work of historiosophy, not of politics tout court. The concern of the Gongyang commentary is with the inner workings of history: with the moral meaning of human agency down the generations; with the contention of propriety against libido dominandi; with the possibility of salvation within history, even conceived of as a ‘long defeat’. The much commented-upon (thanks to Kang Youwei) historical progression within the Gongyang Commentary actually indicates a kind of ‘fall’ within history, from a state of antique simplicity and high moral standards toward a state of lawless, tyrannical rule by the greedy and violent. The abrupt appearance of the lin 麟 at the end of the History is interpreted as an apocalyptic interruption in history, the coming of the sage-king heralded by the prophetic work of Confucius himself.

Let us take the attribution of the Gongyang commentary to the oral teaching of Bu Zixia as read. So – how did this happen? How did Bu Zixia go from being a profound student of the Odes to an authority on the Classic of History?

I think this question may take a slightly ‘Platonic’ – that is, one informed by the Symposium – interpretive reading of the Analects to answer. Let’s examine Zixia’s reading of the Odes as he commented upon it to his teacher. Zixia’s curiosity is provoked by a particular Ode of Wei, ‘Shuo Ren’ 《衛風•碩人》 which sensually describes the beauty of a young Wei girl with a coy, dimpling smile and big brown eyes. One may say, with some justice, that the young man is aroused by the image.

And yet, Confucius doesn’t at all scold him as lewd for invoking this sensual imagery. Merely having desire does not make one a ‘petty person’. As such, Confucius’s response is instead ambiguous. Like the Socrates of the Phædrus or the Symposium, it’s unclear if he’s being serious or playful with his pupil’s adolescent sexual interest in the subject of the Ode, but it does appear that – as Socrates does with any of the ‘perilous youths’ he tutors – he is subtly nudging Zixia toward philosophical themes, toward something beyond preoccupation with the allures of the Zhongyuan beauty described in the poem. Zixia is led, it seems, to a conclusion that ‘ritual is subsequent’ (「禮後乎？」). This answer meets with Confucius’s unguarded approval.

It is tempting to see in this Analect the raison d’être for Bu Zixia’s historiosophical interest of which the penultimate manifestation is the Gongyang Commentary on the Classic of History. Confucius encourages Zixia’s intellectual and moral exploration of ‘prior’ and ‘subsequent’ in the context of the Odes, the purpose of which is (as we see in Analects 8.8) indeed arousal (xing 興). Bu Zixia draws everything into this intellectual and moral exploration, and establishes the ‘prior’ and the ‘subsequent’ in the sum of human endeavour itself, both the virtuous and the vicious.

The richness and versatility of the Ru tradition is evident here, and we may, perhaps, liken Bu Zixia a bit more fruitfully to the Orthodox Christian sophiologists of later times (Solovyov in particular), at least in the sense that he was able to sublimate his adolescent hormones into a sophisticated and spiritually-profound understanding of human endeavour within history, the potentials for human heroism and the ‘long’ tragœdies of its inner logic. Let us take a moment to recognise the Gongyang Commentary’s singular – and for a classical text, unusual – treatment of the historical personage of Lady Gong of Song, the Eldest Daughter of Duke Cheng, upon whom the Gongyang catechist heaps such hagiographical panegyrics. Was Lady Gong perhaps something of an avatar, for Bu Zixia, of the dimpling brown-eyed beauty of Wei he had worshipped in his youth – a beauty to be reached by imitation of her selfless and self-giving virtue?

This much is speculation, as is my potential position of the Wei beauty of ‘Shuo Ren’ as the philosophical Helen or Diotima who launched the Chinese political left. But the exchange in the Analects is a testament to Bu Zixia’s deep sensitivity, his erotic profundity and the sublimity of his philosophical mind. It must be acknowledged of Zixia, the source of the Gongyang tradition, that he awakened within the broad Ru stream of thought a singular – but persistently-recurring – eschatological hope and apocalyptic consciousness that has historically opened it to Daoist cross-pollenisations and politically-radical ‘popular’ interpretations.

An artistic rendition of the dimpling beauty of Wei in ‘Shuo Ren’