Anxiety and Rebellion after the Manège Affair: On the Film Adaptation of Arkady Averchenko’s Rat on a Serving Tray (1963)

• In Event: Identities Across Media and Languages

Abstract

This paper examines the short film Rat on a Serving Tray (1963, Mosfilm, director and screenwriter Andrei Tutyshkin) – an adaptation of several short stories of the 1910s by Arkady Averchenko – in the context of the large-scale ideological campaign against Modern Art in the USSR which started in December 1962. The anti-modernist film was a specific form of conservative rebellion against a growing sense of anxiety within the Soviet art establishment.
The first version of the script was ready on December 25, 1962 – four days after the unexpected publication of Averchenko’s short story Rat on a Serving Tray (1915) in Pravda, the country’s main newspaper. Production of the film was completed on March 6, 1963. That very same day the film was shown on Soviet TV without prior announcement (apparently, breaking into the advertised broadcast schedule). It becomes clear that the film’s release was timed to coincide with Khrushchev’s planned meeting with the Soviet intelligentsia on March 7 and 8, 1963.
The creative group at Mosfilm was faced with a difficult situation. The challenge was to make an ideologically “correct” movie based on the ideologically “uncorrect” short story by the bourgeois writer. They found the solution in careful editing, in the “sovietization” of the pre-revolutionary literary work.
This paper will consider the changes that Averchenko’s text underwent during its adaptation to film. Analysis of these transformations will help to reveal the logic and contradictions inherent in the Khrushchev Thaw’s cultural policy with regard to Modern Art.

Author

• Aleksandr Grishin, European U at St. Petersburg (Russia)