Alexander Dovzhenko | |
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| Born | Alexander Petrovich Dovzhenko (1894-09-10)September 10, 1894 Sosnytsia, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) |
| Died | November 25, 1956(1956-11-25) (aged 62) Peredelkino, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Resting place | Novodevichy Cemetery,Moscow, Russia |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1926–1956 |
| Spouse | Yuliya Solntseva |
Alexander Petrovich Dovzhenko, alsoOleksandr Petrovych Dovzhenko[1] (Russian:Александр Петрович Довженко,Ukrainian:Олександр Петрович Довженко; September 10 [O.S. August 29] 1894 – November 25, 1956), was a Soviet film director and screenwriter of Ukrainian[2] origin.[3][4] He is often cited as one of the most important early Soviet filmmakers, alongsideSergei Eisenstein,Dziga Vertov, andVsevolod Pudovkin, as well as being a pioneer ofSoviet montage theory.
Oleksandr Dovzhenko was born in the hamlet of Viunyshche located in theSosnitsky Uyezd of theChernihiv Governorate of theRussian Empire (now part ofSosnytsia inChernihiv Oblast,Ukraine), to Petro Semenovych Dovzhenko and Odarka Yermolayivna Dovzhenko. His paternal ancestors wereChumaks who settled in Sosnytsia in the eighteenth century, coming from the neighbouring province ofPoltava. Oleksandr was the seventh of fourteen children born to the couple, but due to the deaths of his siblings he was the oldest child by the time he turned eleven. Ultimately, only Oleksandr and his sister Polina, who later becomes a doctor, survived to adulthood.
Although his parents were uneducated, Dovzhenko's semi-literate grandfather encouraged him to study, leading him to become a teacher at the age of 19. He avoided military service duringWorld War I because of a heart condition, but during theCivil War he may have served for some time in the army of theUkrainian People's Republic.[5] In 1919 inZhytomyr he was taken prisoner and sent to the prison on suspicion of intelligence for the UPR army. At the end of 1919, he was released at the request ofVasyl Ellan-Blakytny. After his release, for some time he taught history and geography at the officers' school of the Red Army. In 1920 Dovzhenko joined theBorotbist party. He served as an assistant to the Ambassador inWarsaw as well asBerlin. Upon his return toUSSR in 1923, he began illustrating books and drawing cartoons inKharkiv. At that time, Dovzhenko was also a member ofVAPLITE.
Dovzhenko turned to film in 1926 when he landed inOdessa. His ambitious drive led to the production of his second-everscreenplay,Vasya the Reformer (which he also co-directed). He gained greater success withZvenigora in 1928, the story of a young adventurer who becomes a bandit and counter-revolutionary and comes to a bad end, while his virtuous brother spends the film fighting for the revolution, which established him as a major filmmaker of his era.[6]
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His following "Ukraine Trilogy" (Zvenigora,Arsenal, andEarth), are his most well-known works in the West. The trilogy was produced by theAll-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration during theNew Economic Policy(NEP) and the 'korenizatsiya'. These provided an interesting environment for the revival of Ukrainian culture in the Soviet Union.Arsenal was badly received by the communist authorities in Ukraine, who began harassing Dovzhenko - but, fortunately for him,Stalin watched it and liked it.[7]
Dovzhenko'sEarth has been praised as one of the greatest silent movies ever made. The British film directorKarel Reisz was asked in 2002 by the British Film Institute to rank the greatest films ever made, and he putEarth second. The film portrayed collectivization in a positive light. Its plot revolved around a landowner's attempt to ruin a successful collective farm as it took delivery of its first tractor, though it opened with a long close-up of an elderly, dying man taking intense pleasure in the taste of an apple - a scene with no obvious political message, but with some aspect of autobiography. The film was panned by the Soviet authorities. The poet,Demyan Bedny, attacked its "defeatism" over three columns of the newspaperIzvestia, and Dovzhenko was forced to re-edit it.[8]
Dovzhenko's next film,Ivan, portrayed aDneprostroi construction worker and his reactions to industrialization, which was then summarily denounced for promoting fascism andpantheism. Fearing arrest, Dovzhenko personally appealed to Stalin. One day later, he was invited to the Kremlin, where he read the script of his next project,Aerograd, about the defence of a newly constructed city from Japanese infiltrators, to an audience of four of the most powerful men in the country -Stalin,Molotov,Kirov andVoroshilov. Stalin approved the project but 'suggested' that Dovzhenko's next project, afterAerograd, should be dramatized biography of the born inUkraine communist guerrilla fighter,Mykola Shchors.
In January 1935, the Soviet film industry celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with a major festival, during which the country's most renowned directorSergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, who was in trouble with the authorities, and had not been allowed to complete a film for several years, gave a rambling speech that jumped from one esoteric topic to another. Dovzhenko joined in the criticism, raising a laugh pleading: "Sergei Mikhailovich, if you do not produce a film at least within a year, then please do not produce one at all... All this talk about Polynesian females, I will gladly exchange all your unfinished scenarios for one of your films." At the end of the conference, Stalin presented Dovzhenko with the Order of Lenin.[9]
Later, Dovzhenko was summoned to the Kremlin again, and told by Stalin that he was a "free man", who was not under "any obligation" to make the film about Shchors. He took the hint, and paused work onAerograd to follow Stalin's 'suggestion', and sent the dictator a draft of the screenplay for Schors. He was then summoned in front of the boss of the Soviet film industryBoris Shumyatsky to be told that the script contained serious political errors.[10] His request for another meeting with Stalin was ignored, so he wrote to the dictator on 26 November 1936, pleading: "This is my life, and if I am doing it wrong, then it is due to a shortage of talent or development, not malice. I bear your refusal to see me as a great sorrow."[11] Stalin's response was a brief note to Shumyatsky, in December, listing five things that were wrong with the script, including that "Shchors came out too crude and uncouth."[12]
Dovzhenko completedAerograd in 1935. Before its release in November, Dovzhenko had begun work onShchors. According to Jay Leyda, who was employed in the Soviet cinema industry at the time:
Shchors taught him the new difficulties of executing a suggestion from Stalin. In the three years before its release, Dovchenko had to submit every decision and every episode to a seemingly endless series of people 'who knew what Stalin wanted'. There were nightmare interview, some bitter, with the Leader himself, who was beginning to show signs of megalomania and infallibility...Dovzhenko later told friends about one frightening arrival in Stalin's office, when he refused to speak to Dovchenko, andBeria accused him of joining a nationalist conspiracy.[13]
Several of Dovzhenko's colleagues were shot or sent to labour camps during theGreat Purge, in 1937–38, including his favourite cameraman, Danylo Demutsky, who worked with him onEarth.[14] But when, at last, he had completedShchors, which was released in January 1939, he was paid a huge fee - 100,000 rubles[15] - and awarded theStalin Prize (1941).
When theSoviet Union was invaded by Germany in June, 1941, theKiev Studio was evacuated to theUrals and then toAshgabat inCentral Asia. Dovzhenko's elderly father was beaten to death during theGerman occupation. With the Soviet film industry in disarray, Dovzhenko was sent to the front as awar correspondent, writing articles and leaflets to be dropped by planes in the occupied Ukrainian territory. Witnessing thehorrors of the Nazi invasion, Dovzhenko resolved himself to pay tribute through art to the suffering and strength of his fellow Ukrainians.[16] He wrote to his wife, Julia:
I have made a firm decision. [...] I will write about the sufferings, heroism, and tragedy of my nation. I have thought and planned much, and I shall undoubtedly be able to accomplish something before I die.[16]
Due to the chaos of the war, Dovzhenko spent more time writing than directing, including penning a few dozen short stories largely about Ukraine's wartime suffering. The writings of the period include a new genre of ‘film novels’ such asUkraïna v ohni (Ukraine in Flames, 1943).[17]
Ukraine in Flames, which was denounced for its alleged 'veiled nationalistic moods'. There are two versions of who was behind the denunciation.Nikita Khrushchev, who was head of the Ukrainian communist party at the time, paid tribute to Dovzhenko in his memoirs as a "brilliant director", and described the denunciation ofUkraine in Flames as a "disgraceful affair" initiated by the head of the political administration of the Red Army,Aleksandr Shcherbakov, who "was obviously trying hard to fan Stalin's anger by harping on the charge that the film scenario was extremely nationalistic."[18] Dovzhenko had read the scenario aloud to Khrushchev, but he claimed not to have paid much attention to it because he was focused on the war.
But a police report sent at the time by the head of theNKVDVsevolod Merkulov to the party secretary in charge of culture,Andrei Zhdanov, said that Dovzhenko greatly resented the behaviour of Khrushchev, and leaders of the Ukrainian writers' union, who had praised the scenario on first reading, but then denounced on orders from above. Dovzhenko was quoted as saying "I don't hold anything against Stalin. I hold something against .. people who throw malicious slogans at me after all their admiration of the screenplay - these people cannot guide the war and the people. This is trash."[19]
Although most of his time was spent writing, Dovzhenko requested to work as adocumentary filmmaker for theCentral Newsreel Studio, resulting in two documentary films.[16] During the war, Dovzhenko also wrotePovist’ polum’ianykh lit (Chronicle of Flaming Years, 1945), which was later adapted into an award-winning 1961 film directed byYuliya Solntseva.[17] Earlier, Solntseva adapted another Dovzhenko work:Poem of the Sea.
After being hauled in front of the Central Committee, Dovzhenko was excluded from various official organisations, cut himself off from fellow artists, wrote novels, and applied himself to writing a screenplay about the biologist,Michurin. The filmMichurin earned him another Stalin prize, in 1949, although it was revised so many times, in order to get political approval, that according to one historian, "a large part of the final version was made without him."[20]
Khrushchev claimed that with his rise to power after the death of Stalin and the execution of the police chiefLavrentiy Beria, the persecution of Dovzhenko ended, and he was able to "live a useful active life" again.[21] He embarked on two projects, a film adaption of the novella,Taras Bulba, byGogol andPoem About a Sea, neither of which was completed before Dovzhenko died of aheart attack on November 25, 1956, in hisdacha inPeredelkino - though the latter was completed by his widowYulia Solntseva.[22]Over a 20-year career, Dovzhenko personally directed only seven films.
Dovchenko was a mentor to the youngSoviet Ukrainian filmmakersLarisa Shepitko andSergei Parajanov.
TheDovzhenko Film Studios inKyiv were named after him in his honour following his death.
In 2016, after the Ukraine government had announced a programme of 'decommunisation' of place names,Karl Liebknecht Street inMelitopol, in East Ukraine, was renamed Oleksandr Dovzhenko Street. On 30 January 2023, after Melitopol had been occupied by the Russian army during the2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine,Melitopol's Russian-installed Mayor,Galina Danilchenko announced that the street would be given back its previous name.[23]
*codirected byYuliya Solntseva
A film award called theOleksandr Dovzhenko State Prize was named after him for his great contributions in the film sphere.[24]
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