Men Wanted: Female Masculinity in Sergei Livnev's "Hammer and Sickle"

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Men Wanted: Female Masculinity in Sergei Livnev's "Hammer and Sickle" Author(s): Lilya Kaganovsky Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 51, No. 2, Special Forum Issue: Resent,

Reassess, and Reinvent: The Three R's of Post-Soviet Cinema (Summer, 2007), pp. 229-246Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20459475Accessed: 29-09-2015 20:47 UTC

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MEN WANTED: FEMALE MASCULINITY IN SERGEI LIVNEV'S HAMMER AND SICKLE

Lilya Kaganovsky, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

1 Around 1931, lury Olesha made the following observation in his diary:

Saw a man at the barber's, the kind I would like to have been myself [kakim khotelos' by samomu byt']. He was getting a shave. A peasant, probably. The face of a soldier, maybe forty years old, healthy, lips like Mayakovsky's, blond. It's the kind of face you want to call modem [sovremennoe], intemationally masculine: the face of a pilot-the modem type of manliness [muzhestvennost']. A man like that stands somewhere between courage, magnanimity, and tech nology. He flies across the ocean, he loves his mother, he stops a car from sliding into the river by grabbing on to one of the wheels, he turns up when an electric cable falls onto the street and he materializes atop the fire ladder that has arrived on the scene of an accident, wearing his rub ber gloves. (Olesha 37-38)

Olesha's diary entry encapsulates the fantasy of "extravagant virility"' at the heart of Stalinist culture, a culture obsessed with pilots, arctic explorers, steel workers, and other models of ideal masculinity. The diary's private observa tions reflect the collective fantasy of what it means to be a man-or, at the very least, what it meant, in 1931, to be a New Soviet Man.2 This fantasy re lies on the metaphors of health, youth, strength, and virility to bring together

masculinity and the male body, myths and fantasies that "guarantee that male ness and masculinity cannot be pried apart" (Halberstam 1). Writing about "female masculinity," Judith Halberstam suggests that the

Western dominant paradigm of masculinity is securely tethered to the male body. "Female masculinities," she notes, "are framed as the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity in order that male masculinity may appear as the real thing" (Halberstam 1-2). Livnev's Hammer and Sickle is first and foremost a nightmarish comedy about a sex change operation that produces a New So viet Man from the body of woman. It is therefore the perfect vehicle for think ing about sex and gender, and masculinity and the body, as notions that do not always or necessarily map onto one another.

1. I borrow the phrase "fantasy of extravagant virility" from Toby Clark.

2. For literature on the construction of the New Soviet Man, see Bonnell; Haynes; Hellebust; Livers.

SEEJ, Vol. 51, No. 2 (2007): p. 229-p. 246 229



230 Slavic and East European Journal

Strikingly, however, Olesha's slippage between the three terms ("saw a man at the barber's," "It's the kind of face you want to call [ ...] masculine," "the modern type of manliness"), between seeing a man whose likeness elic its a long string of masculine qualifiers and recalling all of the ways in which "men"9 can appear as "manly," problematizes the very notion of masculinity, of what it means to be (that is to say, to look and act like) a man. Here, mas culinity does not necessarily "reduce down to the male body and its effects" (Halberstam 1), but rather, seems to exist as a separate set of concerns that

may or may not always successfully map onto the male subject ("Saw a man at the barber's, the kind I would like to have been myself").

This perception of masculinity as a set of attributes that may, but do not necessarily naturally belong to the male subject, pervades Sergei Livnev's 1994 film Hammer and Sickle (Serp i molot). Sergei Livnev directed one ear lier film, Kiks (1991), whose plot focused on a substitution of a pop-star by her look-alike. In early interviews about Hammer and Sickle, Livnev claimed to be making a "remake" of Kiks- another film about doubles, substitution, and replacement (see Trofimenkov).

Livnev has written seven screenplays for both movies and television; and has worked as a producer on a number of projects, including collaborations with V. Todorovsky and I. Tolstunov, and joint Russia/USA productions. From 1995-1998, he was the director of the Gorky Film Studio. Hammer and Sickle was barely screened in Russia: because of a lawsuit, it was not released in theaters and appeared only at Film Festivals. However, it has been avail able on VHS and is now available on DVD.

The film is a story of an ordinary girl that becomes an extraordinary man. Through a sex change operation, Evdokia Kuznetsova, a young peasant woman from the provinces, is transformed into Evdokim Kuznetsov, a Stakhanovite worker, a builder of the Moscow metro, a member of the Supreme Soviet, and Vera Mukhina's model of a worker for the Worker and Collective Farmer

[Rabochii i kolkhoznitsa, 1937] monument. In every way, Livnev's film makes the construction of Stalin's New Man literal: everything about Evdokim-his sex, his gender, his body, his desire -is "given from the outside,"3 created and imposed on him by others (by doctors, by Soviet culture, by Stalin). Evdokim appears to have no choice but to go along with his assigned path, marrying the woman picked out for him by the NKVD, adopting a daughter chosen for him

among the orphans of the Spanish Civil War, rising through party ranks to oc

cupy better and higher posts. Unable to sustain his own myth as the perfect Soviet subject, however,

Evdokim attacks Stalin, hoping to take back some measure of control over his life. Instead, he is shot by Stalin's bodyguards and his wounded body be comes the site of the second fantasy of Stalinist masculinity: the mutilated

3. On the performativity of gender and the construction of sex, see Butler 1990, 1993.



Men Wanted: Female Masculinity in Sergei Livnev's Hammer and Sickle 231

body as a cultural fetish.4 Paralyzed from the neck down, Evdokim spends the remaining third of the film immobilized on a giant bed with a hammer and sickle headboard, in a museum dedicated to acts of bravery he never commit ted, and surrounded by objects he never possessed. Finally, he is shot and killed by his own daughter-and the smile on his face, given to us in close up, indicates that he has finally been released from this particular form of symbolic (and physical) captation.5

Livnev's Hammer and Sickle is a dark comedy, a post-Soviet take on some of the myths and fantasies of Stalinism, which tries to understand what it might have meant to be a "man" in a world where the relationship between the male body and masculinity, and between maleness and power, was denat uralized and unhinged.6 The comedy here relies on taking some of the tropes of Stalinist culture-the desire to produce the New Soviet Man, subjects without will that exist at the behest of the state, Stalin as the Master Signifier from which all meaning proceeds -to their literal and absurd extremes. And yet, the film struggles against its own comic hyperbole, wanting to find "au thenticity," a way for the (male) subject to escape the confines of his rigidly structured and prescribed self. Despite its emphasis on the production and construction of (male) subjectivity throughout the film, the ending of Ham mer and Sickle nevertheless proposes a naturalized relation between maleness and power, between masculinity and action. In a world where everything was produced and nothing was innate, what avenue of escape was left for the sub ject? Could a man ever act "as a man"?

2 Livnev's Hammer and Sickle stages the Stalinist fantasy of constructing the

New Soviet Man in an extreme and absurd form: by taking the body of a woman and grafting onto it the organs of a man. This new man becomes the

4. As I have argued elsewhere, despite the overwhelming presence of hyperbolically virile

men in Socialist Realist art, Stalinist masculinity found its incarnation in another figure as well:

the mutilated male protagonist, the heroic invalid. Injured Semen Goncharenko, paralyzed Pavka Korchagin, maimed Aleksei Kovshov, legless Aleksei Meresiev, one-legged Aleksei

Voropaev?these and many other lesser-known protagonists of Stalinist novels and films help

paint a different picture of the Socialist Realist hero and the New Soviet Man. On Nikolai Os

trovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered and the other model of exemplary Stalinist masculinity, see Kaganovsky 2004.

5. The psychoanalytic term "captation" borrows from the French juridical meaning of cap tation, meaning "illegal securement" (from the Latin root meaning "capture" or "seizure"). For

Jacques Lacan, the term describes the way particular images, as well as elements of external re

ality, can "catch hold" of the psyche and become important formative agents for the subject. For

example, Lacan refers to "the spatial capture manifested by the mirror stage" (Lacan 2002, 77). 6. As Birgit Beumers has noted, contemporary filmmakers (Tengiz Abuladze, Aleksei Ger

man, Nikita Mikhalkov and others) have gone out of their way to demythologize the Stalinist

heritage. Only Livnev, however, has "re-created myth in a postmodernist tradition to highlight the false nature of the myth in the first place" (Beumers 188).




model Stalinist subject: handsome, brave, strong, healthy, heterosexual, granted all of the privileges of Soviet citizenship, including a lovely and ded icated wife, a convertible car, and a large apartment. But before he can become this model Stalinist subject, Evdokim must first learn what kinds of words and actions constitute Stalinist masculinity. An early moment in Hammer and Sickle stages precisely the fluidity of sex and gender, and the distance between "maleness" and "masculinity." Just prior to the sex-change operation, we catch a brief glimpse, among the jars of formaldehyde holding different surgical tools, of the male member, erect and isolated in its jar, being rolled before us on a cart. Because the cart with the organ is immediately followed by the table with Evdokia Kuznetsova's unconscious body, we can read this image for the radical distance between maleness and masculinity, penis and phallus. The organ will be grafted onto the unwilling body of a woman, creating the new man and conferring upon him all the privileges of Stalinist masculinity. And yet, because it was surgically attached in the first place, this organ (and sym bol of male privilege) can easily be taken away, returning Evdokim to his pre operative status -not of woman, but of a docile and castrated body- in this way, an even more useful and exemplary Stalinist subject. The distance be tween the sexual organ and the body serves as a marker for the distance be tween the body and masculinity (its "learned" characteristics) and between masculinity and power. Instead of a conflation of all these terms (of the kind we find in Olesha's diary), here we have a radical separation. The (male) body does not confer masculinity, which in turn, does not guarantee access to power.

In her introduction to Female Masculinity, Halberstam writes, "masculin ity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects." In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman names the fan tasy of the commensurability of maleness with masculinity and masculinity with power, the "dominant fiction," and Halberstam, similarly, refers to "dominant masculinity" as a naturalized relation between maleness and power.7 Yet, where the dominant paradigms of Western culture insist on such commensurability, Stalinist culture seems often to stage the incommensura bility of these terms, giving us strange hybrids of female masculinity, of in jured and paralyzed male bodies, of weakness that appears as strength, and powerlessness that appears as power. This is the Stalinism that Livnev's film parodies and constructs, making us believe in the fluidity of gender and the arbitrary nature of its construction. Here, masculinity does not "reduce down" to the male body; indeed, the male body must be put through a series of

7. Halberstam 1-2. As Silverman has described it, writing about the post-World War II

United States, America's "dominant fiction" solicits our faith above all in the "commensurabil

ity of penis and phallus"?that is, an equation of masculinity with the mechanisms of power. Stalinist dominant fiction, though appearing at first glance to do the same, actually stages the

radical incommensurability of the two. On the concept of the "dominant fiction," see Silverman,

"Ideology and Masculinity," 15-124.




learned and sometimes tasking steps in order to assume masculinity in its het eronormative, traditional form.

In Livnev's vision of Stalinism, there is little room for "inherent" or "nat ural" gender assignment. Instead, gender is treated here in its "performative" function, the product of studied practice and reiterative discourse.8 As Alek sei, the NKVD officer who authorizes the sex change operation, explains in a conversation he supposedly has with Stalin, "There are some women in our country for whom it is not enough to be a woman, they want to be something more -a man." Biological sex is not a determinate of gender identity, but merely an inconvenience one could either ignore or change. Masculinity here is offered as the potential goal of every Stalinist subject, and as a result, its as sumption is made both desirable and impossible -if anyone can be a man, how will we tell "real men" from everyone else?

To produce man from the body of woman, the doctors wipe the slate clean, returning Evdokia's body to its (imaginary) prior, unsexed and ungendered state. Preparing for the operation, the main surgeon reviews the course of ac tion with Maria, the doctor responsible for this new invention. "The plan of the operation is clear to me," he says. "There is only one question left: should we increase the dosage of hormones?" "No," replies Maria, "remove them al together [sovsem uberem]." Here we have the body in its "natural" state, with out the imposition of difference that will take place as soon as the penis is at tached and the process of the assumption of masculinity begins. This process is visually signaled to us when we see post-op Evdokim enclosed in a large upright metal tube, a phallic structure that is meant to show from the outside what it cannot show from the inside: Evdokia being transformed into Evdo kim (fig. 1). The tube marks Evdokim's assumption or donning of the "armor of an alienating identity," that, as Lacan tells us, "will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure" (2002, 78). The "rigid structure" (of masculinity, of Stalinist subjectivity) is made visible from the outside.

To assume his new "alienating identity," Evdokim begins a series of per formances, by means of which he comes to inhabit his new body and his new role: he lifts weights, does push-ups, learns to urinate standing up and to make love to a woman. These acts are "performances" in the sense that they are acted, studied attempts at masculinity rather than the products of "natural" de sire or need. For instance, Evdokim must think first about how to urinate like a man, before remembering to do so the unequivocally male way. These acts are also performances in that somebody is watching: Vera lurks in the bath room doorway and her smile lets Evdokim know that he has passed the first test. Finally, the performance must be rehearsed, must be made believable. Vi sually, Evdokim is still caught between the two gendered spaces: he exercises

8. What Judith Butler has called the "performativity" of gender, that is, "not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of dis

course to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (1993, 2).




Fig. 1. EvdokimlEvdokia (frame enlargement)

by doing bicep curls with two tea kettles and is at first too weak to do a real

push-up. Thus, when he first tries to kiss Vera, he is slapped and called "dura"

(fool, n. fern.). "A woman must be proud," Vera tells him, to which he replies, "And a man must be decisive -and what am I? Neither one nor the other?"

As Livnev's film makes clear, masculinity is a series of learned behaviors and it is also a learned language (both bodily and verbal) that must be studied and practiced and that does not and cannot come from "within," as some kind

of innate or natural effect of the body.9 Evdokim's next step as an actor in his new role is to make love to Vera. This is the second instance in which Evdokim ".acts as a man" and here his performance involves learning the right lines, as

well as the right moves. Asked to "say something [chto-nibud' govori]," Evdokim repeats the lines that Evdokia's lover had repeated to her: "We'll

plow the tundra, we'll seed it with flowers, turn it into a garden [... ] we'll make

fairytales come true [Tundru raspashem, tsvetami zaseem, v sad prevratim [ ... ] skazku byl'iu sdelaem]." As we watch, Evdokim's face is replaced by the face of an unknown man, moving in and out of focus of a point of view shot. We hear him chanting the meaningless slogans and lyrics of Soviet propaganda,

9. Attempting to mark the initial distinction between sex as "given" and gender as "con

structed," Butler writes, "If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then

a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the

sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally con

structed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that

the construction of'men' will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that 'women' will in

terpret only female bodies [...]. But 'the body' is itself a construction, as are the myriad 'bod

ies' that constitute the domain of gendered subjects. Bodies cannot be said to have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender" (1990, 10, 13).




and then we hear and see Evdokim repeating these same lines to Vera.'0 The cliched nature of the dialogue serves to underscore language's iterative and performative function. Evdokim does not speak in his own words -indeed, no one ever does -but his word choice makes it possible for him to be what he needs to be, to "perform" masculinity. (Stalinist) masculinity, Livnev's film tells us, is "given from the outside," "citational," learned rather than innate."1 It does not proceed "naturally" from the male body, but is instead a set of co herent traits and behaviors (and lines) that can be appropriated by anyone.

Showing again how gender is "given from the outside," Evdokim's final ac ceptance and assumption of masculinity is marked by two prominent signs. The first is a memorial plaque for Evdokia Kuznetsova (1911-1936) that Evdokim finds on the wall of the Novodevichy Monastery. The second, which immediately follows, is the sign "Men Wanted [Trebuiutsia muzhchiny]," ad vertising jobs building the Moscow metro (figs. 2-3). Between them the two signs produce Evdokim as a male subject. The first clearly marks the death of his female self, while the second sign "hails" him as a man.'2 No longer con sciously performing masculinity (as he did with Vera, while in the confines of the monastery/ prison/hospital), Evdokim now recognizes himself in and an swers the call of the state: "Men Wanted." In the next sequence, shot as docu mentary footage, we see Evdokim on the front lines of Moscow's underground construction project, wielding a massive sledgehammer and instructing others on how to do the job right-a fine specimen of the "fantasy of extravagant virility" produced by (in this case, a parody of) Stalinist culture.

Indeed, throughout Hammer and Sickle, we are reminded that Stalinist "masculinity" and Stalinist "subjectivity" are closely linked. As Evdokim be comes an exemplary "man"' he also becomes a model Soviet subject: a Sta khanovite decorated with the Order of the Red Banner for his superhuman achievements on the work front; married to an equally successful peasant woman-turned-tractor-driver-turned-brigade-leader; adoptive father to a Span ish Civil War orphan named Dolores; a member of the Supreme Soviet. His every move is chronicled by a photojournalist and the sculptor Vera Mukhina, who uses Evdokim and his future wife Elizaveta as her models for the "Worker and Collective Farmer" monument being prepared for the 1937 Paris expo. Evdokim's status as model speaks precisely to the notion of gender as a "copy with no original."'93 Evdokim is a construction of male attributes grafted onto

10. "Mm pokernd, hto? CKa3Ky c^ejiarb ?bijibio, / npeo^ojieTb npocTpaHCTBO h npocTOp, /

HaM pa3VM flan cTanbHbie pyKH-KpbiJibfl, / a bmccto cep/jija?njiaMem?bi? MOTOp. [We were

born to make fairy tales come true, to conquer expanse and space, our reason gave us arms and

wings of steel, and a fiery engine for a heart]." "The March of the Aviators" [Marsh aviatorov,

1921-22, lyrics by P. German]; later known as "The March of Stalin's Aviation" [Marsh stalin

skoi aviatsii]. 11. On performativity as citationality, see Bulter 1993, 1-23.

12. For the notion of the ideological "hail" see Althusser 116-18.

13. On imitation and gender insubordination see Butler 1991, 13-31.




4~~~~~

Fig. 2. Then "hail"d (frame enlargement)

.. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Fig. 3. Mhen Whanted (frame enlargement)

a biologically female body, which nevertheless achieves the iconic status of

exemplary and desirable masculinity. As Birgit Beumers suggests, Evdokim is an "6artifact,

9 which is to say he is an object made by a human being; but he is

also an "artifact" in another way as well: he is a remainder, something extra

produced as a byproduct of an operation. As such, Evdokim is infinitely repro ducible: photographs, newsreels, monuments all repeat Evdokim as an endless series of hollow constructs.

Indeed, as Aleksandr Prokhorov suggests (32), the site for the production of these hollow images -the projector that can be started and stopped, the photo




journalist herself, the inclusion of historical documentary footage of the assem bly of the monument always works to remind us of the "making" of the Stal inist subject. The photojournalist and the sculptor continue to produce Evdokim in the same way as his doctors did earlier. Like his post-operative metal tube, the frozen film-still and the giant steel monument limit and define what Evdokim is and is not allowed to be. Again, we are here in the presence of the "assumption of an alienating identity," an identity that is given from the outside and that marks the subject with a rigid and foreign structure. Asked to identify with his own on-screen image, Evdokim in fact fails to achieve the proper cin ematic or even psychological identification. Asked if he likes the movie, Evdo kim can only answer: "It's strange to see yourself from the side [Stranno na sebia smotret' so storony]."

3 I believe that this moment of non-recognition (rather than the misrecogni

tion we would come to expect, what Lacan (2002) refers to as meconnais sance, "Hey! That's me!") marks the turning point in the film, the point when Evdokim begins to resist the mechanisms of his production. The use of the cin ematic device is important here, because it not only repositions Evdokim as a witness to his own construction, but it also ensures that any identification we as viewers may have been experiencing during the first half of the film is now undone. Cinematic identification works by the double mechanism of character and camera. We identify with the characters on the screen because they (more often than not) represent our ideal selves; but we also identify with the cam era-eye, because we see what it sees. Once we are shown the site of produc tion, however, once we are reminded that we are watching a movie, staged, played, directed, and filmed for our pleasure, the mechanisms of identification are broken and our pleasure at being lost in the narrative is shattered.

The scene-during which we see, alternately, Evdokim and Elizaveta in a newsreel, then as an image passed through the projector, then as a film strip that can be started and stopped, then as an idea for a monument, then the produc tion of that monument (and newsreels about the production) and finally, as a film shown in the theater, with a reverse shot to show us that the "real" Evdokim and Elizaveta are also watching-marks the moment of the film's breakdown, the moment when Hammer and Sickle is no longer interested in telling the same story of Stalinist absurdity. Livnev suggests that the second half of the film is a "tragic love-story" and I would agree that the tone of the film shifts here from comedy to tragedy. This shift may reflect the two poles of response to Stalinism, as depicted by late or post-Soviet film. On the one hand, Stalinism is treated as a surreal, impossible, and nearly fantastic occurrence, with emphasis placed on the comic, parodic, and surreal: for example, Abu ladze's Repentance (Monanieba, 1987) or Petr Todorovsky's Encore, Once

More, Encore! (Ankor, eshche ankor!, 1992). On the other hand, it appears in




the guise of an impassible and unworkable trauma, dark, severe, paranoid, and inhuman: for example, Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun (Utomlennye solntsem, 1994) or German's Khrustalev, my Car! (Khrustalev, mashinu!, 1998).

The shift from comedy to tragedy comes as Evdokim begins to realize his limitation as a Stalinist subject and-perhaps more importantly-his inabil ity to truly be a "man." Speaking about the film at the International Film Fes tival in Rotterdam, Livnev said in his interview that "The hammer and sickle were for years the symbols of my country. People recognized these frighten ing and sinister symbols of proletarian labor as the umpteenth variation on a theme: the relation between man and woman. The hammer is the vagina, the sickle is the penis. I wanted to show how normal human emotions are born and live and die in abnormal conditions under the Stalinist regime. That is why it starts as a political adventure and ends as a tragic love story" (Livnev, interview, Rotterdam). Neither the sex change operation, nor Stalin's role in arranging his mar

riage to Elizaveta, nor his status as a "model" Soviet citizen, prepares Evdo kim for the realization that Stalinist subjects are constructed and mobilized according to the requirements of the state and not according to their desires. As he sits sullenly at his desk surrounded by typical items of Stalinist luxury (art deco lamps with green lampshades, busts of Lenin, and other items of Stalinist high style), ignoring phone call after phone call, we realize that something has gone wrong with this model Stalinist subject. What follows is a break-down that leads Evdokim first to abandon his job and his family, then to drunk and disorderly conduct, and finally, to the Kremlin screening room and his confrontation with Stalin. It is exacerbated, on the one hand, by Evdokim's reunion with Vera and her sudden death, and on the other, by his unexpected meeting with his former lover, the man whose words Evdokim ar dently repeats to Vera during love-making.

It may be worthwhile to pause briefly on this last encounter, because it leads up directly (both in terms of the film's plot and thematically) to Evdo kim's meeting with Stalin. Drunk, disappointed, and confused, Evdokim sud denly finds himself face to face with a group of sailors, one of whom he im mediately recognizes as his former lover. We might recall that this man is Evdokim's model of masculinity, the role on which he bases his own perform ance. But this man cannot see (or refuses to see) past Evdokim's male appear ance, he cannot "recognize" Evdokim, cannot provide him with the answer to his fundamental question: "Who am I?" Indeed, as Livnev's film goes on to show, this answer can only come from one source: Stalin himself. Evdokim's encounter with Stalin takes place in the Kremlin screening

room, while the latter is watching Charles Chaplin's City Lights. The choice of City Lights, of course, is not incidental, but provides the proper backdrop (or back projection) to the events taking place before it. City Lights is a film about a tramp mistaken for a rich man by a blind girl. Eventually, he pays for




an operation to restore her sight, but is himself arrested and thrown in prison. In the final scene (which plays out in the background as Evdokim struggles to understand the "truth" of Stalinism), the girl recognizes the tramp as her rich benefactor. The final close-up of her face is famously inconclusive. Her illeg ible expression does not tell us whether she will reject the tramp or whether they will live happily ever after. What is vital for Hammer and Sickle, how ever, is that this scene, once again, reveals the distance between "penis and phallus," between the tramp and the rich benefactor, between the voice of power that she has been hearing and the man to whom this voice cannot pos sibly belong. In his essay on Hammer and Sickle, Prokhorov reads the mo ment of Evdokim's confrontation with Stalin in similar terms, the moment when the disembodied "master-voice" of Stalinist discourse is temporarily embodied in the aged and weak body of Stalin (Prokhorov 37-38). And yet, perhaps, the message of this scene can be read in another way as

well. The final shot of City Lights-the girl smiling into the camera as the tramp walks away-marks in part the unbridgeable gap between self and other, between the imaginary and symbolic registers on the one hand and the register of the real on the other. 14 In the opening shots of City Lights the tramp appears as a kind of "stain of the real," a dark spot in the middle of an other wise untroubled world. This, perhaps, is the status to which he returus at the end. He is what cannot be assimilated; he is that which has no place in the or derly structures of the symbolic or even in the disorderly fantasies of the imaginary. Similarly, in Hammer and Sickle, Stalin represents a kind of "stain of the real." Like the tramp, he may be laughable when seen up close, but he is nevertheless the "master-voice," the big Other from which all meaning pro ceeds and without which no subject can be recognized as such. Evdokim's at tack on Stalin, like his earlier attack on the sailor, is driven by the desire to understand who and what he is, to be recognized as a subject of a master dis course- of love, of masculinity, of Stalinism.

In attacking Stalin, Evdokim is seeking a response from the Other, an ac knowledgement of his own existence as a subject. This acknowledgement, however, comes at a price: in order to be recognized as a subject of a master discourse, one must first recognize that entity from which the discourse pro ceeds. "In true speech," writes Lacan, "the Other is that before which you make yourself recognized. But you can make yourself recognized by it only because it is recognized first. It has to be recognized for you to be able to make your self recognized [...] It is through recognizing it that you institute it, and not as a pure and simple element of reality, a pawn, a puppet, but as an irreducible ab solute, on whose existence as subject the very value of speech in which you get

14. The three essential orders of the psychoanalytic field are: the Imaginary (characterized

by the prevalence of the relation to "the image of the counterpart"?for example, the mirror

image); the Symbolic (phenomena structured like a language, systems of signs); and the Real

(that which lies outside of symbolic signification). See J. Laplanche and J-B Pontalis, 1973.




yourself recognized depends" (1993, 51). In other words, before getting his an swer to "Who am I?" Evdokim must first acknowledge the existence of some one capable of giving him that answer. He must first recognize Stalin as ab solute master, before he, in turn, can be recognized as a subject, and as a "man." At first, Evdokim does not realize that in Stalin he faces "an irreducible ab

solute," the big Other. He sees a small, aging man, weak and docile, watching a Chaplin comedy. Evdokim asserts his independent existence by claiming that, since he is a man and "the master of his life [khoziain svoei zhizni]," he has the right to quit his job, leave his wife and daughter and, most importantly, cease to be the model Stalinist subject that the masses expect him to be. At the same time, Evdokim seeks recognition. He wants Stalin to see him as "the master of his life," an equal. Thus, in some sense, Evdokim here is aware of his symbolic captation. Even the choice of language-the use of the word "khoziain"-hints at the power given to Stalin by Soviet rhetoric. There is only one Khoziain and, by extension, only one man: Stalin himself. Again, the slippage here between Stalinist subjectivity and male subjectivity cannot be overlooked. Evdokim wants to know if he is a man, if, as a man and "master of his life," he can do as he wishes. He is taught instead that he is "comrade Dusia [tovarishch Dusia]," an insult that points back to Vera's insult ["dura"] and Evdokim's constructed and unnatural existence. "You were a hysterical country broad," says Stalin, "And now you want to be the master of your own life? Impossible, comrade Dusia! [Ty byl isterichnoi derevenskoi babenkoi, a teper'khochesh'stat'khoziainom svoei zhizni? Ne vyidet, tovarishch Dusia!]." Butler (1993, 7-8) writes that naming is the "setting of a boundary," a moment that shifts an "it" into a "he" or a "she," and we see in this case, how Stalin's use of "Dusia" immediately undoes all the previous gender construction un dertaken in the film, setting up a boundary that effectively prevents Evdokim from laying claim to his masculine identity. Evdokim, in other words, gets the recognition he has been seeking. Looking ardently into the sailor's eyes, Evdokim tried to make him see that he is the same as before-he is still the Evdokia the sailor once loved. The sailor may be Evdokim's model of mas culinity, but he is not the big Other that possesses ultimate knowledge. Only Stalin can see Evdokim for what he really is, a "hysterical country broad," a "comrade Dusia."

4 If Stalinism's fantasy of "extravagant virility," its desire to construct the

New Soviet Man, is clearly parodied by Livnev's film, then we might con sider the conclusion of Hammer and Sickle as an instantiation of the second modality of that desire: the fantasy of the mutilated male body, the Stalinist subject as a heroic invalid. The scene in the Kremlin screening room ends as Evdokim nearly succeeds in killing Stalin and is shot by Stalin's bodyguards. The movie might have ended at this point- and indeed the blackout at the end




...... ... . . ..

Fig 4. The living mummy (frame enlargement)

of this episode suggests that we have reached the end- and we would have been left with the knowledge that Stalinism manipulated and constructed its subjects, and got rid of them when they became dangerous or disruptive or simply insubordinate. Instead, the film opens onto yet another scene taken di rectly from Stalinist mythology: a paralyzed invalid, "a living legend," living in a museum named after himself, his house a "site of countless pilgrimages and an object of the greatest interest for foreign journalists."'5 In the final seg ment of the film, Evdokim is seen lying prone on a giant bed in the middle of the museum (fig. 4), with a cutout of the hammer and sickle on the headboard. He is paralyzed, but dressed in military uniform and surrounded by editions of his numerous novels, said to have been written after the accident and dic tated to his wife via the merest of glances, each of which she has learned to interpret correctly. His body, still an artifact of the state, has been deployed for one final purpose: instead of a traitor that nearly kills Stalin, Evdokim be comes Stalin's savior, the man who (legend has it) takes a poisoned bullet in order to protect the great and wise leader. From Stakhanovite worker and model Stalinist subject (literally, the model for the "Worker and Collective

15. I am borrowing here Lev Anninsky's description of the Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky

(How the Steel Was Tempered [Kak zakalialas staV, 1932-1934]), who, blind and paralyzed,

spent the last fourteen months of his life in a house the government built for him in Sochi, on

the Black Sea coast (Anninskii 17). Ostrovsky wrote his novels with the help of a "trans

parant"'. a paper folder with sections, about eight millimeters in width, cut out of the top to

match the lines on a page. Numbering the pages and never lifting his hand off the folder so as

not to lose his place, Ostrovsky was able to stay within the lines of the page as he was writing. The following day, his family and friends would transcribe the text in notebooks.




Farmer"), Evdokim has come to fulfill the second role accorded to Stalinist masculinity: the docile, mutilated male subject.

Like the earlier attempt on Stalin's life, we might read this final sequence for its elements of post-Soviet fantasy-that is to say, a fantasy that could only have been imagined after Stalinism and the Soviet Union had ceased to be, a fantasy that expresses the desire to give back to its protagonist some sem blance of subjective will. In Livnev's film, Evdokim wants to give up his place as a Stalinist subject- something that no actual Socialist Realist hero can or is willing to do. If we take, for example, such heroes as Pavka Korchagin and Aleksei Meresiev, we might notice a curious pattern: the more they are hurt, wounded, and removed from power, the more fiercely they insist- in a way that reminds us of the psychoanalytic notion of "drive" -on participating in a system that no longer has any need for them. Unlike Korchagin or Meresiev, Evdokim is perfectly willing to give up his beautiful wife, his membership in the Supreme Soviet, his large apartment, and his famous daughter. Unlike true Stalinist heroes, Evdokim wants to be the "master of his life," a desire that is incompatible with the demands of the Stalinist subjectivity.

Paralyzed and permanently chained to his bed a la Nikolai Ostrovsky, Evdokim lives out his days in a museum built for him by the state of which he is the main attraction. His wife Elizaveta is the museum's curator. No longer an uneducated peasant girl learning to operate a tractor, Liza is now a severely dressed bureaucrat whose pleasure at Evdokim's simultaneous immobility and heroic status is expressed through her perverse sexuality- she manages to have sex with the paralyzed and unwilling Evdokim in the fully aestheticized environment of the museum. The museum's other occupant, Evdokim's adopted daughter Dolores, has also been transformed. Cross-dressed as a boy (indeed, as a young Evdokim, who, in his new history, performed many heroic acts even as a young boy), Dolores studies sharp-shooting and plays war games modeled on Evdokim's false past. What we are seeing here, of course, is the next transformation of girls into boys, and women into men. Both Eliza veta and Dolores, through dress, through action, through fantasy, are perform ing masculinity. And, in Dolores's case in particular, this performance is every bit as studied, imitative, citational as Evdokim's assumption of masculinity had been earlier in the film.

Because the gender performances and transformations in Livnev's film carry the aura of the Frankensteinian and the horrific, because they are staged as a totalitarian culture's attempts at controlling its subjects, the final message delivered by the ending of Hammer and Sickle can only be called conserva tive and reactionary. The film suggests that there is, finally, a core and authen tic self, with a gender that maps directly onto sex. When Dolores asks permis sion to borrow Evdokim's gun, he knows very well that there is one poison bullet left in its barrel. He also knows that Dolores will aim and pull the trig ger (fig. 5). As a result, Evdokim's death is a suicide, as the final close-up of




_ |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~_

L~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .. . .

Fig 5. Dolores as a young Evdokim (frame enlargement)

. . ....

Fig 6. The final shot (frame enlargement)

his smiling face reveals (fig. 6). The suicide, the act through which Evdokim finally becomes the "master of his life," redeems his masculinity, as it might be imagined in post-Soviet fantasy. No longer a pawn of the Stalinist state, Evdokim finally regains control over his life that he lost when his body was subjected to the medical experiments of the state. Indeed, the film wants to argue, anyone that succumbs to the myths and fantasies of Stalinism is a kind of "tovarishch Dusia"-a feminized subject, used and abused by the Stalinist state. Evdokim's final moment of triumph is what Lacan and Slavoj Zizek (1992, 46) have called the "true ethical act" of "symbolic suicide," the mo




ment of the subject's erasure from the symbolic network by which s/he had been produced and sustained. The last sequence of Hammer and Sickle allows Evdokim finally to ascend to this status of true subjectivity. Through this sui cide Evdokim severs the ties to Stalinist culture and acts "decisively" and as a "man"; in other words, he appears finally to be the "master of his life."

This concluding fantasy, however, is a compensatory fantasy that tries to undo the models of exemplary masculinity produced by Stalinist culture and imitated through the remaining years of Soviet rule. The compensatory fan tasy says that a true man, no matter how manipulated and limited by his cir cumstances, will be able to find his way out of the "alienating armor of iden tity" that Stalinism imposes. In producing this fantasy of final resistance, Livnev's film, I think, actually erases what initially makes it so radical: the staging of Stalinism not via the mechanisms of resistance, as so many post Soviet films have done, but via total submission and acceptance. As Zizek contends, "Power can reproduce itself only through some form of self-dis tance, by relying on the obscene disavowed rules and practices that are in conflict with its public norms," "overidentifying with the explicit power dis course [...] taking power discourse at its (public) word, acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises) -can be the most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning" (Butler, Laclau, and Zizek 218, 220; emphasis in the original). Hammer and Sickle makes this point obvious. After Evdokim attacks Stalin, the latter uses the act of resistance to incorporate Evdokim even more fully into the system. In this way, Stalinism is not dam aged, but strengthened. At the same time, the true horror of the overidentifi cation with the explicit power discourse may be found in the monstrous Liza, a figure that the film cannot forgive, one that continues to "stick out" in a way that Zizek, writing on Hitchcock, has termed "phallic" (1991, 88-91). This overidentification with the mechanisms and structures of power is marked in Livnev's film by a wonderful moment, in which the young Evdokim and the young Elizaveta are unable to start the expensive convertible given to them by Aleksei. Facing each other, they begin to laugh -hysterically, idiotically a laughter that is not meant to signify joy but something entirely different. Knowing that Aleksei is still watching from the window, they fake happiness, but in such a way that they themselves begin to believe in it. Like the greater portion of Livnev's film, this scene is disturbing precisely because it mimes Stalinist culture so well, because in capturing the idiotic (in the sense of lack ing intelligence) optimism of Stalinist rhetoric, because in its overidentifica tion with Stalinist fantasies it succeeds in rendering them absurd. By the final sequence, however, the film is no longer laughing at/with

power. While Liza makes love to Evdokim's immobilized body, a close-up of Evdokim's face shows tears -a melodramatic gesture that speaks to the hero's helplessness. Similarly, the final close-up of his smile is meant to signify his final triumph. By the end, Hammer and Sickle delivers a conservative message of the need for stable gender identity and the desire to resist totalitarian struc




tures of power. The "fairy tale" that Hammer and Sickle wants to turn into "re ality" is the fantasy of truly empowered masculinity, of the ability of (male) subjects to resist Stalinism.16 And yet, this post-Soviet fantasy achieves, per haps, the opposite of its intended goal. The act of true suicide, as it is formu lated by Lacan and Zizek, is a female act. In saying "no" to power, in break ing off ties to the symbolic structures on which subjectivity rests, one acts not "as a man" but as a woman. "Perhaps we should risk the hypothesis," writes Zizek, "that, according to its inherent logic, the act as real is "feminine," in contrast to the "masculine" performative, i.e., the great founding gesture of a new order [...]. The very masculine activity is already an escape from the abysmal dimension of the feminine act. The "break with nature" is on the side of woman, and man's compulsive activity is ultimately nothing but a desper ate attempt to repair the traumatic incision of this rupture" (1992, 46). "No," is Antigone's answer to Creon, the final rejection of patriarchy and of its sym bolic supports. Livnev's film, in other words, helps us to posit, in response to Halberstam, not a "female masculinity," but a male femininity-a way in which, by acting "as a man," Evdokim finally acts as woman.

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IIaMATHHKa Bepbi MYXHHOii <<Pa6o'liHi H KoJIxo3HHiUa>>, cTaxaHoBiUeB, H yJaapHHu TpaKTopHCTOK, 4O HCHiaHCKHX geTeH, HHKOJIas OCTPOBCKOrO, H BparOB, rOTOBbIX y6u4Tb CTaJIiHHa. ()I4JIbM MapKHpyeTCq KaK COBeTCKOe npomJloe, paCKpbIBaq MexaHH3MbI 4DOpMHpOBaHHA ?HOBoro COBeTCKOFO qejIoBeKa>>. B CTaTbe pa3pa6oTaHbl KOHileiiiUHH ?MyKeCTBeHHOCTH4/IoJIa>> H ?masculinity/gender? KaK CHCTeMbI 4OpM HPOBaHHL HgeHTHjIHOCTH, a TaK xce, KaK CHCTeMbI Ha43opa H HaKa3aHHM, JIHMHTH

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Documents

Men Wanted: Female Masculinity in Sergei Livnev's "Hammer and Sickle"