1. Shumiatskii, Boris, Sovetskaia kinematografiia segodnia i zavtra: Doklad i zakliuchitel´noe slovo na 7-m Vsesoiuznom proizvodstvenno-tematicheskom soveshchanii, 13 i 15 dekabria 1935goda(Moscow, 1936)Google Scholar, 5. Translations from Russian here and throughout are mine unless otherwise indicated.

2. Komsomolka for 26 March 1933, quoted in Aleksandrov, G. V., Epokha i kino (Moscow, 1983), 205.Google Scholar

3. Ardov, Mikhail, “Kakim ia ego pomniu (O moem ottse),” in Ardov, Viktor, Velikie ismeshnye (Moscow, 2005), 425.Google Scholar For the original play, see Viktor Ardov, Zolushka (Moscow, 1940).

4. Grigor'ev, Z., Kino gazeta, 4 October 1940.Google Scholar

5. The Russian film historian Ekaterina Khokhlova discusses this little-known and unpublished report: Khokhlova, “Kino totalitarnoi epokhi,” Isktisstvo kino, 1990, no. 1:118. History films, and in particular features involving revolutionary history, were obviously the easiest in terms of the successful marriage of form and content.

6. Highest ranked were heroically themed features that drew upon revolutionary history; second came films dedicated to the issues of life at the moment of transition from capitalism to communism; lowest ranked (but most produced) were the entertainment films.

7. Altman, Rick, The American Film Musical (Bloomington, 1987), 4.Google Scholar

8. The self-referential quotation is deliberately comical, if aggrandizing, since in the year in which the scene takes place—1930—“March of the Jolly Fellows” was four years away from being written.

9. In the early 1930s elaborate taxonomies documented and analyzed the music of various demonstrations only to find the repertoire of the masses lacking in truly revolutionary marches. See quotes from Proletarskii muzykant cited in Rothstein, Robert A., “The Quiet Rehabilitation of the Brick Factory: Early Soviet Popular Music and Its Critics,” SlavicReview 39, no. 3 (September 1980): 373–88.Google Scholar

10. Adorno, Theodor W., “Marginalia on Mahler,” in Adorno, Theodor W., Essays onMusic, ed. Leppert, Richard, trans. Gillespie, Susan H. (Berkeley, 2002), 617.Google Scholar

11. Kaminsky, Stuart M., American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of PopularFilm (Dayton, Ohio, 1974), 141.Google Scholar

12. Gunning, Tom, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American Film Comedy,” in Karnick, Kristine Brunovska and Jenkins, Henry, eds., Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York, 1995), 97–99.Google Scholar Henri Bergson, Laughter AnEssay on the Meaning of the Comic, at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/4352-h.htm (last accessed 15 March 2011).

13. Stewart, Garrett, “Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self- Reflection,” Critical Inquiry?), no. 2 (Winter 1976): 297–98.Google Scholar

14. On Chaplin's popularity and imitators in early Soviet Russia, see Tsiv'ian, Iurii, “O Chapline v russkom avangarde i o zakonakh sluchainogo v iskusstve,” Novoe literaturnoeobozrenie81, no. 5 (2006): 99–142.Google Scholar

15. Boris Shumiatskii, dien head of Soviet film industry, visited the United States in 1935 and was shown a rough cut of the film that he later praised: Shumiatskii, B. Z., “Za sovershenstvo masterstva,” Iskusstvo kino, 1936, no. 7.Google Scholar Chaplin's popularity with the head of state supposedly led Stalin to watch—repeatedly—City Lights (1931), identifying himself in the melodrama of the Tramp's adventures. Iurii Arabov, “Telets i Molokh,” in Maliukova, Larisa, ed., 90-e: Kino, kotoroe my poteriali (Moscow, 2007), 191.Google Scholar The newspaper Kino of 28 July 1936 announced die screening of Modern Times'm Moscow.

16. In his autobiography Aleksandrov writes: “Friendship with Charlie Chaplin and knowledge of musical revues … augmented … my comedic education.” Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino, 191-92.

17. Bytovaia komediia is the Russian cognate of the comedy of manners.v

18. Kaminsky, American Film Genres, 148.

19. While already present in the original play, the shifting of emphasis from mere comedy to heightened social content is made evident in the changes in the script. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 2450, op. 2, d. 1295.

20. Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 108.Google Scholar

21. Gor'kii, Maksim, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow, 1953), 27:320.Google Scholar

22. Reid, Susan E., “All Stalin's Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s,“ Slavic Review 57, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Schrand, Thomas G., “The Five-Year Plan for Women's Labour: Constructing Socialism and the ‘Double Burden,’ 1930-1932,” Europe-Asia Studies 51, no. 8 (December 1999): 1456.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Middle-class women, usually educated, were seen as having already “arrived” at emancipation and were therefore expected to concentrate on family life. Working women, though, particularly peasants, were still in need of emancipation and education and were expected to join the workforce as well as perform the traditional duties of a housewife. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘“Middle-Class Values’ and Soviet Life in the 1930s,” in Thompson, Terry L. and Sheldon, Richard, eds., Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham (Boulder, Colo., 1988), 20–39.Google Scholar In 1934 the Commissariat of Heavy Industry (Narkomtiazhprom) and its chief, Grigorii (Sergo) Ordzhonikidze (who figures as a point of reference in Aleksandrov's film), began promoting the ideal of kulturnost´ (culturedness) and correct social values. A movement of “Wife-Activists” (obsshchestvennitsy) was born, mobilizing housewives for socially minded volunteer work and the improvement of domestic standards of living. Neary, Rebecca Balmas, “Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-Activists’ Movement and the Soviet Culture of Daily Life, 1934-1941, Russian Revieio 58, no. 3 (July 1999): 396–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Oksana Bulgakowa reads Orlova's image as an allegory of a pan-Soviet transformation. Bulgakowa, Oksana, “Sovetskie krasavitsy v stalinskom kino,” in Gunther, Hans, Balina, Marina, Dobrenko, E. A., and Murasov, Jurij, eds., Sovetskoe bogatstvo: Stat'i o kul´ture,literature i kino (St. Petersburg, 2002), 391–411.Google Scholar

26. Azhgikhina, Nadezhda and Goschilo, Helena, “Getting under Their Skin: The Beauty Salon in Russian Women's Lives,” in Goscilo, Helena and Holmgren, Beth, eds., Russia, Women, Culture (Bloomington, 1996), 94–121.Google Scholar On the recalibration of bourgeois values, see Kelly, Catriona and Volkov, Vadim, “Directed Desires: Kul´turnost´ and Consumption in Post-Revolutionary Russia,” in Kelly, Catriona and Shepherd, David, eds., ConstructingRussianCulture in the Age of Revolution: 1881-1940 (Oxford, 1998).Google Scholar It is important to note that Svetlyiput´ sought to capitalize on the rehabilitation of the fashion industry by releasing the film along with a merchandizing campaign (perfume and matches printed with the film's title). The campaign stumbled when Stalin changed the film's title at the last minute. Razzakov, Fedor, Seks-simvoly Rossii, 30-60egody (Moscow, 2000), 13.Google Scholar

27. Dmitrii Bykov, “Blud truda,” Iskusstvo kino, 1996, no. 4: 124. Bykov's title is borrowed from an ingenious line in Osip Mandel´shtam's poem, “Polnoch v Moskve. Roskoshno buddiiskoe leto,” dating from June 1931.

28. While in Svetlyiput´ the shuttle acquires a sexual connotation, in traditional fairy tales it was the spindle that signified penetration (for example, Charles Perrault's “Sleeping Beauty“). For a classical exploration of the weaving/sexuality axis in fairy tales, see Fromm, Erich, The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales,and Myths (New York, 1957)Google Scholar.

29. This again is a wordplay (albeit not at all intriguing), since the Russian for “beating“ and “achieving” are cognates. Anne Eakin Moss offers a fascinating account of the peculiar erotic gaze of Stalinist cinema, diverted as it was to Stalin himself and the partystate, basing her analysis on Svetlyi put´ as well as other films of the era. Moss, Anne Eakin, “Stalin's Harem: The Spectator's Dilemma in Late 1930s Soviet Film,” Studies in Russian andSoviet Cinema 3, no. 2 (August 2009): 157–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. This scene draws on some well-known and ideologically driven predecessors: the factory/castle echoes a similar image in Dziga Vertov's paean to socialist labor, Enltiziazm (Enthusiasm, 1931); while the dramatic wrought-iron gate references an analogous opening in Sergei Eisenstein's Oktiabr’ (October, 1928—on which Aleksandrov worked as an assistant).

31. Paperno, Irina, “Vera Pavlovna's Fourth Dream: The Kingdom of Heaven,” Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism (Stanford, 1988), 210–13Google Scholar.

32. Chernyshevskii, N. G., Chto delat'l h rasskazov o novykh liudiakh (Leningrad, 1975), 281–82Google Scholar.

33. Richard Dyer's seminal analysis of musicals as embodiments of a Utopian sensibility is operative here as well, as are the categories he oudines. Dyer, Richard, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Altman, Rick, ed., Genre: The Musical (London, 1981), 175–89Google Scholar.

34. On socialist realism and Utopia, see, for example, Giinter, Hans, “Sotsrealizm i utopicheskoe myshlenie,” in Gunther, Hans and Dobrenko, Evgenii, eds., Sotsrealisticheskiikanon (St. Petersburg, 2000), 41–49.Google Scholar

35. From a review of Svetlyi put´ in A. Iakovlev, Komsomol´skaia pravda, 11 October 1940.

36. I. Bachelis, Izvestiia, 5 October 1940.

37. Ardov's play was criticized for being bourgeois in its all-too-naked transformation, its lack of emplotments, and its general mediocrity. Quoted in Igor, Frolov, GrigoriiAleksandrov (Moscow, 1976), 112 Google Scholar.

38. There are visual parallels that connect this shot of Aleksandrov's film to Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) produced a decade earlier.

39. Projection work—and in the 1930s only rear projection was in use—entails placing actors against a screen onto which a setting would be projected, then refilming the whole ensemble from the front.

40. Gorbachev, B., Tekhnika kombinirovannykh s'emok (Moscow, 1961)Google Scholar.

41. The sequence that has Tania flying over Moscow in her shiny black automobile might remind a contemporary viewer of a similarly fantastic flight in Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (1966-67).There is a possibility that this connection is not an entirely accidental one. Around 1936 Aleksandrov and particularly Orlova, became friendly with the writer and his wife, visiting their home (Elena Bulgakova notes their presence a couple of times in her diary, although it is unclear from its text whether they were present during Bulgakov's reading of drafts of his novel).

42. Immediately following the revolution, fairy tales and their narrative devices were “condemned as ‘idealism'” by newly minted experts in child development, chief among diem Vladimir Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaia. Balina, Marina, Goscilo, Helena, and Lipovetsky, Mark, eds., Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales (Evanston, 2005), 105–7.Google Scholar On the resurgence of the fairy-tale genre under Stalin, Katerina Clark conwrites: “In order to describe homo extraordinarious one needed more fabulous forms, such as fairy tales.” Clark, Soviet Novel, 147.

43. The fairy tale of Cinderella, one of the oldest and most globally common motifs in folkloric literature, was first written down by Charles Perrault in Contes de ma MereL'Oye in 1697. His collection was translated into Russian in 1768 as Skazki o volshebnitsakhs nravoucheniiami.

44. The theme of a domestic servant who aspires to a better life was already featured in Aleksandrov's first film VeselyerebiataasweHas, for example, Boris Barnet's 1928 film Domna Trubnoi (A House on Trubnaia Street). The fairy tale of Cinderellawzs finally made into a film in 1947, but even then it was not based on the rather innocuous Perrault original, but on a Soviet adaptation by the playwright and children's book author Evgenii Shvarts.

45. Elena Stishova writes in an essayistic piece that “the archetype of Zolushka, as a sign for an oppressed woman liberated by the Soviet regime for a new, happy life,” originated in Lenin's famous quote that had a common cook governing a state. Stishova, Elena, “Prikliucheniia Zolushki v strane bol´shevikov,” in Engel, Christine and Reck, Renate, eds., Frauen in der Kultur: Tendenzen in Mittel- und Osteuropa nach der Wende (Innsbruck, 2000), 233.Google Scholar In the 1930s Zolushka was also treated by writers such as Shvarts and the once-futurist poet Semen Kirsanov.

46. Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino, 255. The song in question is the popular “March of the Aviators.“

47. Z. Grigor'ev, Vecherniaia Moskva, 7 October 1940.

48. Bergson, Laughter. Bergson's theories had a wide circulation in Russia at the time.

49. On comedic films as restricted economies, see Trahair, Lisa, The Comedy of Philosophy:Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (Albany, 2007)Google Scholar.

50. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Tvorchestvo Fransua liable i narodnaia kul´tura srednevekov'ia i Renéssansa (Moscow, 1965).Google Scholar

51. Locally and historically, medieval Russia had developed two interconnected traditions of laughter: holy fools (iurodivye), inherited from Eastern Orthodoxy, whose performance of folly was seen as prophetic and wise, and the satirical folly of kromeshnye prazdnestva (dark celebrations), a type of ritualistically staged courdy laughter that was popular with Ivan the Terrible. For the Russian tradition of laughter and its political aspects, see Lotman, Iu M. and Uspenskii, B. A., “Novye aspekty izucheniia kul´tury Drevnei Rusi,” Voprosyliteratury, no. 3 (1977): 148–67Google Scholar; Likhachev, D. S., Panchenko, A. M., and Ponyrko, N. V. , Smekh v Drevnei Rusi (Leningrad, 1984)Google Scholar.

52. Aleksandrov, Epohha i kino, 189.

53. Two points need to be made here. The first is that changes in the script of Svetlyiput´ seem to bear out this supposition—evidendy the subject matter demanded a more socially aware treatment. RGALI, f. 2450, op. 2, d. 1295. Second, Stalin, who adored Volga,Volgaund its bureaucratic fall guy (even making jokes about their resemblance), allegedly found Svetlyi put´ to be lacking in bite, commenting to its director that “we value your courage, but in this picture you aimed to please us. You wanted to please die boss.” Mark Kushnirov, Sveltyiput´ Hi Charli i Spenser (Moscow, 1998), 195.

54. Dobrenko, Evgeny, “Soviet Comedy Film: or, the Carnival of Audiority,” Discourse 17, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 48–57 Google Scholar; and Dobrenko, , “Gossmekh, ili Mezhdu rekoi i noch'iu,“ Kinovedcheskiezapiski, no. 19 (1992): 39–45 Google Scholar.

55. Brooks, Jeffrey, Thank You Comrade Stalin: Soviet Public Culture from the Revolution tothe Cold War (Princeton, 2000), 89.Google Scholar

56. Thomas More, Utopia, at http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/more/utopiacontents.html (last accessed 15 March 2011). Marx famously connected laughter and revolution: “The people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted widi loud and irreverent laughter.” Marx, , “Manifesto of die Communist Party,” in Robert Tucker, C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, 1978), 491.Google Scholar Fourier, meanwhile, thought that comic writers would provide yet more pleasure in his already pleasurable vision of a future society. Fourier, Charles, The Utopian Vision of CharlesFourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, trans, and ed. Beecher, Jonathan and Bienvenu, Richard (Columbia, 1983)Google Scholar.

57. Hazlitt, William quoted in Gantar, Jure, The Pleasure of Fools: Essays in the Ethics ofLaughter (Montreal, 2005), 94.Google Scholar

58. Clark, Soviet Novel, 15-16.

59. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958).Google Scholar

60. Thompson, Kristin, Eisenstein's “Ivan the Terrible“: A Neo-Formalist Analysis (Princeton, 1981), 292–93.Google Scholar

61. For a discussion of the operation of cinematic framing, its procedures of selection and delimitation, see Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema I: The Movement Image (Minneapolis, 1986)Google Scholar.

62. The choice of Tania's profession, no matter how much motivated by Soviet reality (her character was based on Dusia Vinogradova, a real-life prizewinning Stakhanovite master weaver) contained a suggestive set of built-in fairy-tale connotations, connecting it not only to the idea of sexual initiation mentioned earlier but also, self-reflexively, to the act of telling a story (made explicit, for example, in the English expression “spinning a tale“)—and, in this case, the making of a film. This metaphor is actualized by the many visual homologies that couple cinematographic procedure with the process of weaving

63. Virilio, Paul, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (New York, 1991), 61.Google Scholar

64. Shklovskii, Viktor, Dnevnik (Moscow, 1939), 119.Google Scholar

65. See, for example, Taylor, Richard, “But Eastward, Look, the Land Is Brighter: Towards a Topography of Utopia in the Stalinist Musical,” in Holmes, Diana and Smith, Alison, eds., 100 Years of European Cinema: Entertainment or Ideology? (Manchester, Eng., 2000)Google ScholarPubMed; Trudy, Anderson, “Why Stalinist Musicals?” Discourse 17, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 38–48 Google Scholar; and Haynes, John, New Soviet Man: Gender and Masadinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema (Manchester, Eng., 2003).Google Scholar Finally, Emma Widdis reads Svetlyiput´ geographically, as domestication and subjugation of periphery to the center. Emma Widdis, Visions ofa Neiu Land: Soviet Film fromthe Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, 2003).

66. Peter Kenez makes the parody assessment: see Kenez, Peter, Cinema and SovietSociety: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (New York, 2001)Google Scholar. Maria Enzensberger, ‘“We Were Born to Turn a Fairy Tale into Reality': Grigori Alexandrov's The Radiant Path,” in Taylor, Richard and Spring, Derek, eds., Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London, 1993), 106.Google Scholar Enzensberger's analysis builds on Maiia Turovskaia's groundbreaking study of fairy-tale conventions in Ivan Pyr'ev's films: Maiia Turovskaia, “I. A. Pyr'ev i ego muzykal´nye komedii: K probleme zhanra,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 1 (1988): 111-46.

67. Clark, Soviet Novel.

68. Propp, Vladimir, Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki (Moscow, 2000), 61.Google Scholar

69. Mark Lipovetsky, “Introduction,” in Balina, Goscilo, and Lipovetsky, eds., PoliticizingMagic, 240. The twentieth-century tradition of the fairy tale as a vessel for antitotalitarian content includes such authors as Evgenii Zamiatin and Evgenii Shvarts.

70. Glasgow, R. D. V., The Comedy of Mind: Philosophers Stoned, or the Pursuit of Wisdom (Lanham, Md., 1999), 129.Google Scholar