At home among strangers: The national in Pavel Chukhrai’s The Russian Game filmed “based on the play The Gamblers by Nikolai Gogol”
Authors:   Tomsk State University, Tretyakov Evgeniy O. 
Published: December 2024

In Pavel Chukhrai’s film The Russian Game (2007), which was created “based on the play The Gamblers by Nikolai Gogol”, the national motif becomes meaningful due to the change of nationality of the main character from Russian to Italian. Chukhrai’s film differs from Gogol’s play primarily in that it has a distinct imagological character. The Italian cheater Luchino Forza arrives in Russia, convinced of his superiority over the “naïve”, “kind people”, and is left out in the cold. The apple, which a peasant woman timidly puts into his hand at the end, should signify his awareness of his own delusions and his readiness to abandon them. The film does not give an answer to the question whether the notorious “card sharp, adventurer, and bigamist” will embark on the path of spiritual rebirth. It ends with an image of the road, sacramental for Gogol, as a symbol of Russian life; this road takes the trinity of rogues who fooled Forza away into the unknown. Indeed, the true “Russianness” in the film is not represented by the images of the heroes but is rather shown by some analogues of Gogol’s famous “lyrical digressions” – a landscape of the boundless steppe, which symbolizes the unlimited potential of Rus-Russia, or poetic sketches of rural life. They are an organic part of the content and poetics of the picture and become the embodiment of the genuine spirit of the national substance. Without this, it may seem that the message of the film boils down to the fact that a European who is used to the fact that in a civilized society cheating is marginal, finds himself in a space where it appears as a norm of life, and the film itself is exclusively a satire. But Chukhrai admits his strange yet sincere love for Russia, inseparable from a passionate appeal to solve its essential problems, and therefore the film has elements of satire. Despite the fact that in The Russian Game a generalized Europe is often shown as a designation of a different culture, the context of Gogol’s work forces us to pay close attention to the fact that Forza is an Italian, not a representative of another European nation. Chukhrai emphatically and polemically makes the Italian the central character of the film and argues that he does not fit Italy, just like an inhabitant of the endless Russian expanses does not harmonize with its inexhaustible possibilities, mainly spiritual ones. This disunity creates the essential unity of the spaces of Russia, depicted in the film, and Italy, only indirectly present in it. Their identity in philosophical terms is caused by the author’s longing for the lost harmony, for universal human values. At the same time, as in the case of Gogol’s play, Chukhrai’s film remains a comedy, conveying these ideas without pressure. So, if Gogol’s The Gamblers is a “human comedy”, then The Russian Game is a national-philosophical comedy. And such a departure of Chukhrai as a director from the literal following of Gogol’s text, leading to its productive reception and the creation of a vivid author’s work, is a clear evidence of the enduring relevance of Gogol’s dramatic heritage.