Balabanov’s terrifying power. Literary tradition in "Brother"
The St Petersburg University Representative Office in Spain invites you to an online lecture titled "Balabanov’s terrifying power. Literary tradition in 'Brother'", dedicated to the iconic Russian director Alexei Balabanov. The lecture will be given by Dmitry Baranov, a lecturer at the Department of the History of Russian Literature at St Petersburg University.
We will discuss how Balabanov’s work combines elements of both mass and intellectual cinema. Using a complex system of repetitions at the level of dialogue, shot, and scene, the director constructs a multifaceted system of motifs characteristic of classical literature. The focus will primarily be on the tradition of the Petersburg text and the complex of themes and tropes that are reminiscent of Romanticism. Perhaps Balabanov was consciously inspired by Gogol, who was the first to interweave these literary strands.
The introduction of a character named Hoffmann, who warns the protagonist that the city is a terrifying force, suggests us the angle for interpreting the film. The songs used in the film, whose lyrics are closely matched to what is happening on screen, also point to this. A motif and intertextual analysis leads to the following conclusion: in «Brother» is a transformation of the romantic narrative.
The film can be understood as the story of a young man who comes to St Petersburg, betrays his ideal — his love of music — is unable to resist the temptation of money and power, and pays for it by turning into his evil double — his brother Viktor. Thus the story, seemingly set in the specific socio-historical reality of the 1990s, becomes a potentially timeless plot about a confused romantic hero who changes his ideals after entering the confusing space of St Petersburg.
Lecturer
Dmitry Baranov specialises in literary theory and Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century. His main research interests include the study of the works of authors associated with the postmodern tradition: Sasha Sokolov, Sergei Dovlatov, Viktor Pelevin, Evgeny Grishkovets and others. A separate area of Baranov’s research is the study of the possibilities of projecting classical methods of literary analysis onto new media, such as film and mass literature.
The lecture, part of the celebrations to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University — Russia’s oldest university — will be broadcast online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish.