Director Nikita Mihalkov, USSR, 1979. In the roles of Oleg Tabakov, Yuri Bogtyrov, Elena Solovei and others.
The novel of Russian writer Ivan Goncharov was released in 1859. It is the second part of the trilogy, which also includes the novels «Normal History» and «Failure». The Bummer contrasts the character of the main hero, a man who is kind and intellectually developed, but apathetic, and who prefers to live in peace with the dream, and his friend Stoltz, a man who is active and practical.
The attitude towards the novel at the time of its publication is mixed, ranging from the charges of celebrating a lazy one to the recognition of it as a «sign of time». But the notion of «brokenness,» introduced by the criticism of Nikolai Goodlubov, remains in the history of Russian literature a symbol of social phenomena, in terms of criticism created by the environment and by serf law. In the USSR, the novel Goncharova was on the list of compulsory studies at the school of literature, serving as a vivid example of critical realism and of the passivity of Russian nobility.
The images of heroes are largely complemented by brilliant camerawork (Pavel Lebeshev) and partly unexpected to screen Russian classical prose, but successfully lying in the context of the film by electronic music (Eduard Artemiev), which informs the story of the main hero’s face-to-face recollections of some of the magical reality.
Nickita Mihalkova’s film, despite a perfect attachment to domestic soil, was awarded a number of international awards: the National Council of Film Critics Award (as the best foreign-language film), the first prize in the International Film Week in Benalmaden, Spain, and others.