'I Know These Places Well': Epistemological Malaise and Soviet Modernity in Frunze Dovlatyan’s 'Hello, It’s Me'

• In Event: Art and Anti-Colonial Resistance in the South Caucasus

Abstract

Frunze Dovlotyan’s 1966 Hello, It’s Me is an Armenian new-wave classic based on the life of the Soviet-Armenian physicist, Artem Alikhanian. Alikhanian was famous for breakthrough research on beta decay, gamma rays, and cosmic rays and who founded an innovative cosmic ray research center on Mt. Aragats. The film depicts the young scientist's early research in Soviet Russia, love for the Red Army sergeant, Lyusya, and deep friendship with his collaborator, Oleg, modeled on the Soviet theoretical physicist, Issak Pomeranchuk. Hello, It’s Me offers meditations on the burdens of the life of scientific inquiry, the personal tragedies of war, and the heavy weight of memory. It explores and, in certain ways, subverts the center-periphery hierarchy that defined Soviet Russia's relationship to Soviet republics like Armenia. A 2023 restoration of the film features, for the first time, the original dual-language, Armenian-Russian sound mix, offering viewers important insight into the linguistic dimensions of the formation of Soviet-Armenian identity. The film does not offer a clearly-articulated, anti-colonial critique of Soviet power. Rather, it gives voice to an ambivalent experience of modernities, Soviet and western, while deflating any nostalgia for a lost national past or nationally-defined ambitions for the future. Soviet Moscow loses its institutional status and attraction as the nexus of scientific inquiry, but with it withers the heroic revolutionary period in Soviet science.

Author

• Jason Andrew Cieply, Hamilton College