REVIEW: DOSTEVSKY'S TRAVELS
It was a nice warm Saturday yesterday, in between bursts of rain.
Warm enough for me to dispense with clothes for most of the day,
for the first time in a while. So between laying around in the sun
naked and cutting open old engine oil filters to compare their
internal construction, I decided to combine my own quirky habits
with a lunchtime viewing of one of the quirkier documentaries I
know, caught recently with its film reel poking out of the BBC's
vaults into the unknown depths of YouTube.
Dostoevsky's Travels (1991):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PxkeFhzItE
On Vimeo (untested):
https://vimeo.com/307839240
If you're into quirky documentaries, then this screen-grab alone is
probably enough to convince you it's worth a watch, but I'll talk
about it more regardless:
https://jff.org.il/sites/default/files/styles/slide_show/public/dostoevskys_travels_-_cat.jpg
Dostoevsky's Travels follows Dimitri Dostoevsky, St Petersburg tram
driver and great-granson of the famous 19th centry Russian author
Fyodor Dostoevsky, on his first journey to Western Europe at the
beginning of the 1990s, just as the Communist government in Russia
was collapsing. A 52min documentary made early in the career of
Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski and published by the BBC in
1991, this observational film tags along with Dimitri when he's
invited into Germany to speak with a newly founded German
Dostoevsky society. In spite of the literary association, this film
isn't really about the works of the famous auther, who I haven't
read myself. Instead it captures a unique time in history where the
western european ellite was facinated with the new cultural, and
most particularly, business, potential of an open capitalist Russia
then ermerging from behind the iron curtain.
Dostoevsky's 19th century novels seem to have been a good match for
the right-wing visions of Russia's future being juggled around by
the european aristocracy which had been cut off from the country
since the Russian Revolution. From a German casino looking to
expand into St Petersburg, to people trying to restore the Russian
Monarchy, and the mayor who secures him a visa in exchange for some
promotional work, Dimitri mages to stumble between various people
interested in using his name, though not his own artistic talents,
to their own ends.
Yet Dimitri doesn't really care about any of that, all he wants is
to make enough money to buy a Mercedes and drive it back home to St
Petersburg.
Altogether this makes for a funny, tragic, and insightful film. At
one point he's translating for a blind German car dealer selling
cars at a shady maket for Russian soldiers said to be offereing
anything from weapons to wives in exchange for a western motor. He
stays with a monk claiming to have been exiled from Russia by word
of God rather than by the Communist government. Then later he
drives a borrowed Ferrari into Lichtenstein to meet his only
relative in the West, Baron von Falz-Fein, at his villa where he
meets a young man who the baron hopes to place as the next Tsar of
Russia.
Presenting itself in a purely observational style, there are
certain aspects to this documentary which my cynical side has to
proclaim as a little 'too good'. Besides the almost perfect
beginning, middle, and end to the storyline, some shots are too
well framed and timed to have been taken without a degree of
staging. Indeed you can easily see how the director has since
transitioned to making fictional feature films.
Indeed a skeptic like me begins to wonder how much of the story
itself is actually true, although it's hard to imagine how many of
the important scenes could be completely faked on the budget of a
one-hour foreign BBC documentary. Research online isn't terribly
rewarding. There's no corresponding Dimitri Dostoevsky known to the
internet today except through references to this documentary, plus
a very odd biography of a Russian actor by the same name, starring
in Soviet-era film versions of Fyodor Dostoevsky's works, but who
is said to have died in 1985:
https://guidedoc.tv/people/dimitri-dostoevsky-39199/
But IMDB doesn't list a Dimitri Dostoevsky in the credits for those
films!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062757/fullcredits/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051762/fullcredits/
It seems like this is another case of the internet consciousness
being corrupted by a wayward AI website content generator that's
worked out there's an association with Dimitri Dostoevsky and
Fyodor Dostoevsky in film work due to the documentary, then
spiraled off from that into completely senseless fiction.
Then again, the documentary does mention Dimitri helping in an
unspecified way with 'The Posessed', a later film adaptation of a
Dostoyevsky novel. IMDB lists that as released in 1988 and there's
no Dimitri Dostoevsky in the credits for it either:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093765/fullcredits/
One person who I could follow up on was Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein,
a rather facinating figure himself who died in a fire at his villa
in 2018 at the age of 106. His biographies online seem to back up
everything shown in the documentary, including photos of the richly
furnished villa where he meets Dimitri in the film, and his
ambition to restore the Russian monarchy. He also seems to have
been extremely active in promoting his home country of Lichtenstein
to the world, whose prince at the time of the Russian Revolution
granted him and his family citizenship when they fled from Russia.
His promotion of the country was helped by, or perhaps more
cynically because of, his tourist shop business, positioned to
accomodate American tourists diverted to Lichtenstein for lunch
after he pointed out to US tour operators that this would easily
allow them to advertise touring eleven countries instead of ten.
The success of this business apparantly restored him his family's
traditional position of wealth and influence that would have been
impossible for the Dostoyevsky family back in Communist Russia.
A fun 1970s New York Times article on the baron:
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/08/archives/if-you-can-find-liechtenstein-the-baron-will-be-waiting.html
A 2023 Paper about the Baron's life "A Russian Aristocrat in the
Principality of Liechtenstein: Life Trajectories, Material Culture,
and Language":
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/culture-2022-0172/html
Gopherpedia page:
gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Eduard%20von%20Falz-Fein
Oh and it seems _he_ is on IMDB, as a production manager for a
1950s movie set in Lichtenstein, as well as appearances in a couple
of other TV documentaries:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4502417/
As for the documentary's director, Pawel Pawlikowski, there are a
few other documentary works from him available on the web. So far
I've only watched Tripping With Zhirinovsky from 1995 - a less
narrative-driven observational documentary following a right-wing
politician compaigning from a old Soviet-era cruise ship that
ironically still has a red star painted on its bow. The documentary
itself lacks many of the better qualities in Dostoevsky's Travels,
but the politician it documents, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, can be seen
sharing traits of right-wing western politicians such as Donald
Trump today. He makes innumerable promises on the shakiest of
policy ideas (forcing Germany to pay reparations to Russia for
deaths in WWII), and seems willing to try anything to further his
political career (launching his own vodka brand even though his own
campaign song mentions that he doesn't drink). Then again, I just
don't like politicians.
Tripping With Zhirinovsky (1995)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIbkR5NXVP4
"From Moscow to Pietushki" apparantly has a similar concept to
Dostoevsky's Travels, following a living Russian author, and was
released a year earlier.
From Moscow to Pietushki (1990):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orAZ6q35q0M
Serbian Epics documents the more serious topic of the Bosnian War,
and seems to have been Pawlikowski's most successful film before he
switched to fictional works.
Serbian Epics (1992)
https://archive.org/details/SerbianEpics1992
https://vimeo.com/308405461
- The Free Thinker
