SRSC 7 (1) p.

3959 Intellect Limited 2013

Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema Volume 7 Number 1

2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/srsc.7.1.39_1

Tom Roberts Stanford University

Simply an anachronism: repetition and meaning in Kira Muratovas Chekhovian Motifs

Abstract
This article considers the formal and discursive functions of repetition in Kira Muratovas Chekhovskie motivy/Chekhovian Motifs (2002). Operating at visual and verbal levels, Muratovas poetics of repetition encompass a parody of the notion of figuration, as well as a broad critique of signification, giving expression to a crisis of representation specific to post-Soviet culture. Yet, despite the films contemporary cultural frame of reference, Chekhovian Motifs finds a formal and thematic precedent in its source material Chekhovs story Difficult People and one-act play Tatiana Repina. Through parallel readings of the film and these works, the author identifies similar techniques and concerns in Chekhovs writing, which Muratova develops and adapts to the postmodern mtier of her art. As such, the article demonstrates the fundamental relationship between Chekhovian Motifs and its literary sources, as well as the broader cultural and historical relevance of Muratovas return to Chekhov himself.

Keywords
Kira Muratova Anton Chekhov repetition signification film adaptation post-Soviet culture

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1. Adaptations of historical fiction and military events are predictably common; prominent examples include Kavkazkii plennik/Prisoner of the Caucasus (Bodrov Sr., 1996) and Taras Bulba (Bortko, 2009), adapted from the respective Tolstoy and Gogol texts of the same titles, and Russkii bunt/The Captains Daughter (Proshkin, 2000), which amalgamates Pushkins The Captains Daughter and The History of Pugachev. For a discussion of trends in post-Soviet literary adaptations, see Gillespie (1999) and Vernitski (2005). 2. The Krushchev-era Dama s sobachkoi/ Lady with the Lapdog (Kheifits, 1959), with its critical assessment of pre-Revolutionary social conventions, is exemplary of this tradition. On Soviet techniques of screen adaptation, including a discussion of several adaptations from Chekhov, see Dobrenko (2008: 10941) and Hutchings (2004: 77116). 3. Whereas Jane Taubman dates this transition to Peremena uchasti/A Change of Fate (1987) (Taubman 1993: 369), Eugnie Zvonkine reads Chuvstvitel'nyi militsioner/The Sentimental Policeman (1992) as initiating the directors second period (Zvonkine 2007: 14344). Though Nancy Condee offers a more detailed periodization of Muratovas career (Condee 2009: 11618), all of these critics mark a significant stylistic shift in her work during perestroika and the immediate post-Soviet period, which will be central to my argument below. 4. Muratovas initial attempts at literary

Muratovas Chekhovian precedent

The search for a usable past is common to periods of socio-political upheaval and transition, in art and politics alike. Such cultural retrospection is apparent in recent Russian cinema, which has repeatedly turned to historical subjects and the adaptation of canonical literary texts. The post-Soviet ekranizatsiia, or screen adaptation, frequently engages questions of national identity, approaching the literary heritage as an occasion to variously affirm and interrogate models of nationhood and empire.1 Though critics have observed that these adaptation projects reflect the cultural transition and identity formation of the post-Soviet period, they likewise extend a productive category of Soviet cinema. At the height of Stalinism, such screen adaptations facilitated the Soviet appropriation of the pre-Revolutionary Russian literary canon, with texts adapted in conformity with socialist realism. As one might expect, Soviet adaptations of Chekhov were common; in fact, by the late Thaw, Chekhov was the first choice for film adaptation from the literary canon, surpassing both Gorky and Pushkin in popularity (Condee 2009: 104). While adhering to an ideological mandate, these adaptations wield the moral authority invested in the literary canon a move of appropriation remarked in discussions of Russian cultural logocentrism, and the literaturotsentrizm dominant in both late-Imperial and Soviet intellectual cultures. In the case of Chekhov, sanitizing the author for Soviet consumption entailed refashioning him as an antibourgeois, proto-Revolutionary author.2 In light of this tradition, Kira Muratova would seem an unlikely candidate for the screen adaptation project. Famously marginalized by the Soviet film industry, the director was rehabilitated during the 1980s, and has since gained recognition as a leading auteur of Russian cinema. In her Gorbachev-era and post-Soviet productions, Muratova has developed complex visual and narrative aesthetics: her films of this second period often eschew a conventional plot structure, and display a stylized approach to character and mise-en-scne.3 Yet, Muratova has adapted numerous literary texts, displaying a predilection for the cultural canon and citation more broadly.4 Though Muratova has denied the particular influence of Chekhov, references to the writer figure in several of her post-Soviet productions, including the triptych Tri istorii/Three Stories (1997) and Nastroishchik/The Tuner (2004). Moreover, her Chekhovskie motivy/Chekhovian Motifs (2002) adapts Chekhovs early story Tiazhelye liudi/Difficult People (1886) and one-act play Tatiana Repina (1889), integrating the two texts in a single narrative. Reading these texts in tandem with Chekhovian Motifs reveals Muratovas transposition and development of formal and thematic features of the films literary sources. In particular, Chekhovs texts employ strategies of repetition and parallelism, and the clashing and fragmentation of discursive systems. Chekhovian Motifs retains these elements of Chekhovs project, reconfiguring and extending such motifs to reflect an underlying expressive deficiency endemic to language, but also specific to post-Soviet culture, in which they appear with a heightened clarity and immediacy. Chekhovian Motifs thus utilizes Chekhovian themes and devices to embody a particular crisis of representation, manifest in the continual failure of attempted communication and signification, as well as the dominance of visual and verbal repetitions in the film. Cultural anthropologists have demonstrated the necessity of symbolic and narrative forms in the comprehension and construction of reality, as evident in the shifting of political and social

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realities of the late- and post-Soviet periods (Humphrey 2002; Ries 1997). Serguei Oushakine has recently identified the inability of existing symbolic forms to express the nature of post-Soviet life in the absence of the greater Soviet metanarrative, suggesting that by the late 1990s this representational crisis had prompted the recycling of earlier forms in various nostalgia projects in popular and artistic cultures (Oushakine 2007; Oushakine 2009). Similar phenomena have been discerned in Russian political discourse of the 1990s, as evident in the myth-making projects of various parties competing for control of the symbolic fields of the Imperial and Soviet pasts (Smith 2002). While the screen adaptation potentially constitutes a similar recycling of past culture, which accounts for its popularity in the post-Soviet period, Chekhovian Motifs does not embody this phenomenon, but performs and critiques it; Muratova repeats Chekhov, and these particular, repetitive Chekhov texts, as a statement on the problem of semiotic repetition in post-Soviet culture. Muratovas characters manifest this problem of communicative and hermeneutic impasse in the literal repetition of phrases and gestures, while the film repeats themes, techniques, actors and even dialogue spanning Muratovas career. The films characters, for example, not only iterate their lines endlessly, but some even repeat lines spoken by the same actor in the directors earlier films. Critics have argued for an aesthetic formalism in Muratovas post-Soviet work (Plakhov 1999: 209; Aronson 2003: 206), in turn suggestive of the directors ahistorical orientation. Yet Muratova herself insists on the grounding of her art and the medium of film in general in everyday reality: ... film reflects everything that happens in life, and you cant abstract it from real conditions, from the material world [...], its connected with reality, with time, with space! (Muratova 1997: 6061). Across her body of work, and particularly in her post-Soviet productions, Muratovas nuanced technique and stylistic palette engage subtly with the directors own historical context. In her analysis of Astenicheskii sindrom/The Asthenic Syndrome (1989), for example, Irina Sandomirskaia grounds the films performance of heteroglossy, or discursive polyphony, in the contemporaneous developments of glasnost, by which time Sovietness had stopped making sense (Sandomirskaia 2008: 64).5 Similarly, Chekhovian Motifs is discursively situated in the post-Soviet cultural sphere not in spite of, but precisely because of the directors turn to the literary canon. Chekhov is integral to the content and context of Chekhovian Motifs, informing the works aesthetic and thematic dimensions in ways heretofore overlooked. Critics of the film have either downplayed its formal relationship to Chekhov, or focused on themes common to both artists work, particularly the problem of human communication (Kisel 2011). Muratovas project, however, exceeds concern with communication per se, extending to more fundamental structures of signification and predication: she interrogates not only the failure of people to communicate, but their inability to invest language with meaning. In pursuit of this project, the director locates an artistic and philosophical precedent of strategic repetition in Chekhov; ultimately, her turn to the writer reflects a postmodern engagement with the post-Soviet cultural context by way of the pre-Soviet cultural canon. Forestalling time and narrative alike, repetition opposes the historicist logic of diachronic progression and culmination. Much of Chekhovs writing displays this opposition to utopian historicism, challenging the positivist social and political theories prevalent in late nineteenth-century Russia. Whereas this position is explicit in such dark exposs of social and industrial conditions as Muzhiki/Peasants (1897), Sluchai iz praktiki/A Medical Case

adaptation were not happy ones. After her first two films, Korotkie vstrechi/Brief Encounters (1967) and Dolgie provody/Long Goodbyes (1971), were effectively banned (the first received limited distribution and the second was shelved before release), her next project, an adaptation of the Princess Mary chapter from Lermontovs A Hero of Our Time, never advanced beyond screen tests. Muratovas subsequent adaptation of Vladimir Korolenkos story In Bad Company, Sredi serykh kamnei/Among Grey Stones (1983) was subject to such severe censorship that Muratova removed her name from the project. Brief Encounters is itself adapted from Leonid Zhukovitskys socialist realist story A House in the Steppe, and Muratova later adapted Maughams story The Letter for A Change of Fate. For biographical details of this period of Muratovas career, including her early provincial melodramas and adaptation projects, see Taubman (2005: 244). 5. For additional discussion of heteroglossy in The Asthenic Syndrome and Brief Encounters, see Roberts (1997).

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6. This explicit correlation, between repetition and the fragment, derives from Omar Calabreses discussion of neobaroque aesthetics in Calabrese (1992).

(1898), and V ovrage/In the Ravine (1900), it is implicit to Difficult People and Tatiana Repina, in which this perspective is structurally integrated and advanced at the level of discourse. Both texts employ repetition as a means of narrative rhythm and discursive patterning, while engaging with social and religious models of meaningful repetition, counterposing instances of repetition that fail to produce fulfilment in the repeated figure. While repetition is more pervasive, and often more literal in Chekhovian Motifs, the film effectively adapts Chekhovs discourse to the post-Soviet context, generating a productive commentary on language, form and meaning. Repetition is a prominent feature in Muratovas recent films, in forms ranging from repeated dialogue and action to imitative posturing, and character pairing and twinning. As Nancy Condee suggests, the directors interest in repetition derives from a broader project of aestheticization and defamiliarization in her work, and likewise denotes her cyclical conception of time (Condee 2009: 128). Conversely, Eugnie Zvonkine attributes the device to Muratovas interest in the conventions of the fairy tale: her characters repeat their lines, for example, in an effort to access the correct formula in language (Zvonkine 2007: 13334). Building on these insights, and Oushakines discussion of the post-Soviet symbolic field, I argue that Muratovas interest in repetition derives from the acknowledged absence of a viable cultural metanarrative, capable of underwriting her characters attempts to signify meaning. Whereas Muratovas early films often undermine the ideological parameters of Soviet discourse, culminating in the discursive chaos of The Asthenic Syndrome, Chekhovian Motifs foregrounds the metanarrative vacuum resulting from the collapse of the Soviet project. The film consistently parodies alternative systems of cultural meaning, including the traditional family, Russian Orthodoxy and market capitalism the primary discursive models to emerge in the wake of Communism. In Chekhovian Motifs, these discursive systems consistently fail to embody meaning, generating the proliferation of repeated signifiers, fragments of discourse that fail to constitute a meaningful totality.6 This failure, however, derives ultimately not from the shortcomings of a given metanarrative, but rather from the very structure of signification itself. In the ensuing analysis, I approach Muratovas film through the vector of the poststructuralist critique of language, proceeding from Derridas observation that the presence of the signifier marks the inevitable absence of signified meaning, which transcends the referential sphere. Like religious ritual, language presupposes an original signified, capable of grounding signification in stable meaning, as evident in Christian discourses on the Word, or divine logos. In Chekhovian Motifs, Muratova incorporates the Russian Orthodox liturgy and other iterated forms of religious representation within her general panoply of repetition, rendering the homology between ritual and language explicit. Ultimately, ritual and language both substitute the sensible for the transcendent, the legible signifier for the elusive signified as ritual, Derrida notes, is a structural characteristic of every mark (Derrida 1984: 327). Just as Muratovas characters repeat words and statements with variations in dramatic inflection, or model poses and gestures on religious images, the directors exploitation of repetition stresses the tactile or haptic quality of the signifier, at the expense of its representational capacity (Sandomirskaia 2008). As if to pun on this materiality of the signifier, one of the characters in Chekhovian Motifs admits to employing her dictionary to support an unbalanced toilet, debasing language and its claim to the embodiment of meaning. In Muratovas film, performative presence displaces absent meaning, as the proliferated signifiers pile up, like so

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many repeated words, images and gestures, contributing to the ornamentation and sensory saturation typical of the directors represented world.

Rhyming with Chekhov

Repetition thats my mania havent you noticed? Those endless repetitions are from a desire to rhyme, a desire for a kind of refrain, concedes Muratova (Taubman 2005: 107). In Chekhovian Motifs, Muratova displays a similar interest in rhyming with Chekhov, iterating and extending the writers plots, devices and themes in their filmic presentation. I begin with a summary of these texts, and a description of their unified reconfiguration in Chekhovian Motifs, before proceeding to consider the complex operations of repetition within Chekhovs texts.7 In Difficult People, Shiriaev, a prosperous farmer, quarrels with his son Petia over money; storming out of the house, the latter walks some distance in agitated thought, then returns home, reprising the argument with his father before finally departing for Moscow to resume his university studies. Tatiana Repina was written as a one-act continuation of Alexei Suvorins four-act play of the same name, staged in Moscow and St Petersburg in 1888. In Suvorins play, the actress Repina is betrayed by her lover Sabinin, who proposes marriage to the widow Olenina as a solution to his financial problems. In retaliation, Repina commits suicide during a performance, ingesting real poison in place of a stage prop. Suvorins play was based on an actual occurrence, when an actress consumed poison during a performance of Aleksandr Ostrovskiis Vasilisa Melent' eva in 1881 (Meister 1988: 188). Chekhovs humorous response to Suvorins tendentious original extends the plays action, staging the wedding ceremony of Sabinin and Olenina amidst an unruly congregation and the eventual appearance of the shrouded Woman in Black, perceived as the avenging spirit of Repina. This ghost is ultimately revealed to be a copycat suicide: she is exposed in the plays climax and dies in the final lines, though not before driving the guilt-ridden groom to conduct a requiem at Repinas grave in place of consummating his marriage. While establishing a temporal and spatial continuity between the two Chekhov texts, Chekhovian Motifs essentially consists of two discrete parts, corresponding to the narratives of Difficult People and Tatiana Repina. The film begins on Shiriaevs farm, with the argument between Petia and his father; on leaving home, however, Petia decides to hitchhike to the train station, catching a ride with an eccentric New Russian in a late-model sport utility vehicle, lost en route to the wedding of Sabinin and Olenina. Petia agrees to direct the driver, the groomsman Patronnikov, to the church, in exchange for a ride to the train station after the ceremony. However, the student falls asleep during the wedding, misses his ride, and ultimately returns home for the final argument with his father, resuming the plot of Difficult People, and bringing Muratovas film to its conclusion with Petias departure for Moscow. Petias two arguments with his father thus frame the Repina sequence, situating the theatrical episode within the prosaic architecture of the film. Chekhovian Motifs also revises the climactic scene of Chekhovs Repina plot, as we learn that the films Woman in Black is the daughter of the presiding priest, who has feigned the poisoning in order to disrupt her fathers service. This episode of parentchild conflict binds the sequence more closely to Difficult People; moreover, in Chekhovs story, Petia is himself the grandson of a priest, though Muratova makes no mention of this.

7. The tendency to combine Chekhov texts in screen adaptations is not uncommon. Examples include Iakov Protazanovs Chiny i liudi/Ranks and People (1928), which combines several Chekhov stories, and Nikita Mikhalkovs Neokonchennaia p'esa dlia mekhanicheskogo pianino /Unfinished Piece for Player Piano (1977), which augments an early variant of Chekhovs play Platonov (1881) with elements from numerous Chekhov stories.

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Save for her recasting of the Woman in Black, Muratova is largely faithful to her source material, particularly in terms of dialogue, which is often repeated verbatim. In fact, the films shooting script includes text for intertitles, primarily drawn directly from passages and narrated action in Difficult People, though these do not appear in the completed film (Muratova and Golubenko 2002). The primary difference of presentation between the film and its sources is one of enunciation, as Chekhovian Motifs bears the signature of Muratovas trademark stylistic features: mannered and repetitive speech, visual ornamentation, musical overtures and interludes, etc. These devices function analogously to formal elements of Chekhovs writings, which Muratova deftly adapts by her translation of text to film. Repetition is integral to this formal relationship: it is clearly a central, even dominant device in Muratovas work, but it is also subtly integral to the form and content of Chekhovs Difficult People and Tatiana Repina. Despite its brevity, Difficult People is a literal exercise in repetition. Chekhov introduces Shiriaev amidst ritual behaviour (washing, praying, eating), stressing that the patriarch is anxious and upset as usual on account of the consistent bad weather: action, mood and environment are marked as repetitive in the opening paragraphs. Similarly, at dinner Petia repeatedly glances at his mother, repositions his spoon and clears his throat before initiating a contentious dialogue that has clearly taken place before: the story itself, in fact, is but one iteration of a conflict that precedes the narrative diegesis, and yet occurs twice in the storys brief duration. Chekhov emphasizes the routine quality of actions and statements, and characters repeat phrases, particularly idiomatic ones, several times. Repetition not only defines the storys action, but also underpins Chekhovs mode of characterization, as evident in Shiriaevs consistent anxiety. Conversely, identity is repeated across generations: Petia, we learn, was just as irascible and difficult as his father and his grandfather the priest (Chekhov 1976, vol. 5: 326), extending the Shiriaev lineage of difficult people. He subsequently invokes a common gesture, the narrator notes, when like his father he waves his arms and runs out of the house. Petia even, ironically, assumes his fathers abusive attitude towards his mother: though he reproaches Shiriaev for mistreating her, he directs his own anger at the blameless woman in the first argument. Chekhov even applies the same categorical description to Petias three younger brothers, Kol'ka, Van'ka and Arkhipka: snub-nosed, grubby, with chubby faces and long hair in need of cutting (Chekhov 1976, vol. 5: 323). The diminutive forms of their names, with its shared ending, extends the terms of their commonality from the visual to the phonetic, while the order of their introduction in Russian (Kol' ka, Van' ka i Arkhipka) actually scans as a trochaic rhyming couplet. Chekhov, in fact, employs grammatical repetition throughout the story, in numerous instances of syntactic parallelism, in addition to the lexical iteration of words and phrases across the text. The writers typical descriptive economy, moreover, which limits characters to specific traits, generates the repetition of selected metonymies, such as Shiriaevs red face. Difficult People, in short, abounds with repetition in plot constituents of action and dialogue, and stylistic features of grammar and diction. The device reinforces the interpenetration of the tragic and the mundane, typical of Chekhovs fiction, as discord seems to repeat itself illogically across events and individuals. As Petia wanders the countryside in the interval between the two arguments, he encounters an elderly neighbouring landowner and pauses to reflect on the difficult circumstances of the womans

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life her father incurred the tsars wrath, her husband was a gambler, and her four sons (possibly paralleling the four Shiriaev boys) had turned out poorly. Despite her wealth, the pretence for discord in the Shiriaev home, she leads an unhappy life. Petia, despite this realization, returns home and continues to generate conflict through his own repetitive actions: though later reflecting that he neither blames his father nor pities his mother, he voices blame and pity during the argument, as if his statements were simply rhetorical, even reflexive. At the climax of the second argument, Chekhov notes that: [Petia] had already lost his thread and was not speaking, so much as blurting out detached words (Chekhov 1976, vol. 5: 329). His statements lack content and even intention, as if endlessly manifesting themselves as mere sound and gesture. Above all, Difficult People stresses the senseless, even violent nature of repetition: far from achieving reconciliation at the family hearth, these repeated scenes foster mounting discontent. Not only does the familial context fail to justify the arguments between father and son, to assign meaning to repeated action, but the ongoing conflict threatens to undermine the symbolic integrity of the familial model. Whereas repetition is integrated at the thematic and stylistic levels of Difficult People, the device is foregrounded in very literal ways in Tatiana Repina. The play quotes at length from the Russian Orthodox rite of marriage, which is itself highly repetitive in language and gesture. The liturgical readings of the attending priests and deacon iterate consistent biblical references and conjugal motifs, while the choirs refrains contain the ritual repetition of liturgical phrases, typically sung thrice, as denoted in the plays stage directions. Chekhovs selection of the Orthodox liturgy as a dramatic setting, and his faithful citation of particular liturgical passages, suggest a deliberate attempt to mobilize the repetitive quality of the liturgy in the play. In addition to these local examples of repetition within the liturgy, the rite of marriage itself functions as a symbolic re-enactment of crucial New Testament events Christs first and final miracles, the wedding in Cana of Galilee and the Resurrection. The first episode recounts Christs conversion of water to wine, and features prominently in the Orthodox rite of matrimony. Christs miraculous intervention at the wedding, which marks the beginning of his public ministry, likewise prefigures his later Resurrection. Cana of Galilee and the Resurrection thus function as figure and fulfilment respectively a symbolic re-enactment, in Erich Auerbachs classic discussion, ascribing prophetic significance to the earlier event through its later realization, common to the Christian exegetical tradition. In this unique capacity, Christianity reconciles repetition with historicist teleology: mapping a transcendent narrative onto human history, Christian theology identifies Christs human life as the repetition and fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, while his anticipated eschatological return an additional repetition will mark the end of time itself. In its figural re-enactment of a Christian miracle, the Orthodox liturgy performs a similar doubling of biblical motifs, consistent with the function of the Churchs function as the historical manifestation and extension of Christian truth. Matrimony is thus meant to partake in the wider Christian miracle, in a form of human figuration. The bride and groom are consistently likened to Old Testament patriarchs and matriarchs, as if fulfilling the promise of these earlier figures. Just as these Old Testament narratives often focus on lineage, the wedding liturgy consistently references the desired progeny of the bride and groom the generational repetition of biological essence across time. Meanwhile, the bride and groom themselves

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are incorporated in the ritual gestures of the liturgy, as both drink wine and circle the altar three times, as likewise noted by Chekhov. Tatiana Repina thus borrows liberally, if selectively, from the rite of matrimony, demonstrating Chekhovs considerable background in Russian Orthodox rite and liturgy (Axelrod 1991: 7; Rayfield 1997: 1314). While these liturgical and biblical motifs are subtended by a model of meaningful repetition, of achieved fulfilment in the repeated figure, Chekhov also fashions a parodic counterpoint of profane repetition, manifest in dialogue and elements of characterization. Just as liturgical language structures the rhythm of the play, the consistent complaints and interruptions of the drunken congregation provide a contrapuntal movement; the plays episodic narrative is dispersed across these two iterative, interlocking cycles. As if to foreground the theme, one anonymous congregant even complains of the deacons repetitive readings. Characters themselves, meanwhile, either partake of repetitive action, or simulate the behaviour and roles of others. Olenina, we learn, is marrying for the second time, as remarked in passing by one guest (Shes used to it). The governor, also in attendance, is seen flirting with the actress Masha, likely a member of Repinas former theatre company, which is itself present at the wedding. The figural re-enactment of Repina, of course, is the most prominent repetition in the play: whereas Masha simply represents her profession, the Woman in Black re-enacts the identity and death of the deceased titular character. Notably, this shrouded guest is not even the first such copycat suicide, as four previous women have apparently taken their lives by poisoning, modelling their response to male desertion on Repinas gesture. In her death throes, meanwhile, the Woman in Black advocates further cycles of repetition, proclaiming that everyone should commit suicide by poison. Immediately thereafter, in the plays final line, she cries Save me! thrice, like the liturgical repetitions of the choir (Chekhov 1978, vol. 12: 95). In Tatiana Repina, the interpenetration of sacred and profane repetition, ecclesiasticism and banter, reveals liturgy to be a single, competing mode of cultural discourse among many. This delegitimization of liturgical language, in turn, denies figural significance or fulfilment to ritual: each instance is merely an additional iteration, akin to the chain of suicides, with no guarantee of ultimate or accrued significance. The ceremony is an example of repetition deprived of teleology and meaning. As Sabinin himself exclaims, horrified by the presence of the ghost in the interminable service, My God, its endless an acknowledgment, on Chekhovs part, of the repetitive quality of the play, and the theme of repetition therein (Chekhov 1978, vol. 12: 91). If ritual presupposes an auratic precedent, ensuring the ground and meaning of conventionalized behaviour, Chekhov here interrogates this claim to transcendental significance: liturgy is ultimately indistinguishable from secular modes of signification, and ritual from other forms of repetition. Chekhovs implicit critique of ritual discourse destabilizes the entire system of meaning it presupposes, and the significance assigned to its constituent elements. If the liturgy, in other words, is merely language, divested of a transcendental basis, it loses the power to redefine Sabinin in the miracle of matrimony: hardly an Abraham, the dignified father of nations, he remains an opportunistic Russian Lothario.

Repetition as aesthetic principle

Tatiana Repina derives both comedy and commentary from its repetitive structure, a feature it shares with Chekhovian Motifs. So consistently is repetition deployed in the film, and Muratovas work overall, as to account for the

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directors formal affinity to these particular texts the motive underlying her interest in Chekhovian motifs. The very title of the film contains this semantic bivalency, as the Russian motiv translates as motive as well as motif, a recurrent structural component in literature and music. Patterns of visual and aural (verbal, as well as musical) repetition dominate Muratovas Chekhovian Motifs, in which maddening cycles of repetition enacted in the film exceed any semantic or rhetorical function. Most prominently, Muratovas characters deliver their lines endlessly, until either interrupted or pre-empted by spectacle. Petias mother, for example, delivers her plea for Shiriaev to buy his son a sweater seven consecutive times, as the younger children chant random words (kasha, television) and rattle glasses in the background, before finally provoking Shiriaevs outburst. This technique, common throughout Muratovas post-Soviet work, extends the liturgical repetitions of the wedding scene to character dialogue, and also interpolates Chekhovs counterpoint between liturgical repetition and repetitive interruption, which here simply modulates between sacred and profane variants of literally repetitive speech. The element of religious parody innate to Chekhovs play is thus amplified in Chekhovian Motifs: it is structurally integrated in the shadowing of liturgy by conversational and non sequitur statements, which seem to lose meaning with each successive iteration. A similar pattern emerges in the films visual doublings, in which characters periodically assume poses citing religious conventions of visual representation. Petia, for example, participates in a series of visual configurations with his father and mother, framing background icons of the Virgin and Child, which hang in the bright corner of the Shiriaev home. Their iconographic posturing, enacted amidst open hostility, clearly parodies the compassionate familial ideal represented in the icons. While Petia and his mother more literally re-enact the sacred images, the mothers participation in this figural repetition exceeds the mere formal similarity, insofar as her pleas on behalf of Petias welfare mirror the intercessory role traditionally ascribed to the Virgin Mary, as manifest in the veneration of Marian icons. Similarly, on his exit from the church, Sabinin assumes the centre position in a frozen, dramatic pose with Olenina to his right, and the groomsman Kotelnikov to his left. The resulting tableau vivant is a visual citation of the Deesis triptych in Russian Orthodox iconography, of Christ flanked by the Virgin and John the Baptist, here inverted. Sabinins theatrical gesture also mirrors the image of Christ above the church door behind him, his arms raised triumphantly, in yet another ironic reference to the Resurrection. Notably, the three are departing for the cemetery, to ensure that Repina has not, in fact, been resurrected. These visual doublings denote a failure of meaningful repetition: in Chekhovian Motifs, as in Tatiana Repina, characters evoke the form, but not the meaning, of the imitated figure, generating parody in the elicited correspondence. Such visual repetitions partake of a broader phenomenon of framing in Muratovas work, localized in the abundance of framed images adorning the films settings of home and church. Even Chekhov himself is literally framed: among the icons and embroidered towels adorning the Shiriaevs wall is a print of Osip Brazs 1898 portrait of the writer, who presides over the unfolding drama. The viewer sees Chekhov observing the family, while the enormous ear on the tapestry below the portrait bluntly asserts his ability to hear their discussion.

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Figures 1 and 2: Framing icons in the Shiriaev home. Chekhovian Motifs likewise frequently interpolates doors and doorframes into the mise-en-scne, which serve to impose an additional frame on the represented action, within the shot itself. This spatial technique recalls Andr Bazins analysis of dcoupage in depth in the films of Orson Welles: the depth of field prompts the viewers participation in the ontological ambivalence of the image (Bazin 1972: 80), seeking not to augment or manipulate reality,

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Figure 3: Church exit as tableau vivant. as in montage, but only to reveal it (Bazin 2005: 28). Simultaneously, much like quotation marks, these manifold frames displace the meaning-generating function from actor to author: rather than the fulfilment of an assumed figuration (Shiriaeva and Petia as Virgin and Child, the Woman in Black as Repina, Sabinin as Christ, etc.), the viewer encounters the directors commentary on

Figure 4: Chekhov framed (upper left).

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the unfolding action, a deliberate framing that underscores the characters failed repetitions. The device thereby situates Muratovas ethical perspective within the visual field, just as Chekhov himself is literally placed on the wall a figure of authorship fulfilled by the films director. Such techniques also display Muratovas predilection for mise en abyme structures in Chekhovian Motifs, providing an internal mirror reflective of

Figures 5 and 6: Natalia Makarovas Dying Swan performance, televised.

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an aspect of the greater narrative in miniature (Dllenbach 1989: 43). The prevalence of religious imagery exemplifies this device: the Marion icons highlight, by comparison, the generational conflict of the Shiriaev family, while the Christ mosaic invokes the theme of resurrection, parodied by the ghost of Repina, as well as Sabinins social and financial resurrection in his advantageous marriage to Olenina. In imitating these images, Muratovas characters turn the mirror back on the images, setting them further en abyme: the images recapitulate the narrative, and visual doubling, in turn, repeats the images in character gesture. As Lucien Dllenbach remarks, reflexivity invariably subtends the mise en abyme, drawing attention to the artistic consciousness situating the embedded figure, the context of production and the audiences experience of the work. For example, in a more elaborate instance of framing in the film, Petias sister and mother enjoy a televised ballet performance, the films first musical interlude. The recorded performance features Natalia Makarova dancing Anna Pavlovas Dying Swan solo, set to Camille Saint-Sanss Le cygne movement from his symphony The Carnival of the Animals (1886). Muratova interpolates the entirety of the performance, which lasts over three minutes, by focusing the camera on the television itself. Notably, the frame includes the edge of the television screen, as well as the reflection of objects on the screen, throughout the sequence. In other words, Muratova incorporates the televised performance as television, drawing attention to the actual technology of its transmission. Like the icons, the liturgy and ultimately the film itself, Makarovas performance is deliberately delineated as an aesthetic artefact, bereft of verisimilar illusionism. The ballet scene may itself reflect the beleaguered status of the mother (who, as critics have observed, bears an unfortunate resemblance to the goose, a lesser swan, in the familys yard), or more likely the tragic death of the performer Repina, which precedes the films diegesis; but it also calls attention to the artistic intentionality framing and positioning this mirror, as yet another instance of doubling in the film. Muratova also accomplishes self-reflexivity via self-referentiality: through citation, the technique gestures beyond the film to the entirety of Muratovas work, constituting features of Chekhovian Motifs in the repetition of motifs, choreography and even actors from earlier films. Muratovas style is consistent, and she likewise employs a consistent set of actors, here augmented by the Ukrainian performance troupe Maski-Show, which comprises the church congregation. Kuz'ma, the church porter, is played by Leonid Kushnir, who often appears late in Muratovas films to deliver short philosophical speeches, as he does in Chuvstvitel' nyi militsioner/The Sentimental Policeman (1992) and The Tuner, and here as well. In Chekhovian Motifs, as in The Sentimental Policeman, Kushnir casts judgement over God himself, asserting that he doesnt listen to the liturgy, and thereby questioning their repetition of ritual language.8 Kushnir is also recognizable from Boiler Room No. 6, the first part of Muratovas Three Stories, which is itself a reference to Chekhovs story Ward No. 6. Moreover, Boiler Room No. 6 features Jean Daniel in the role of an opera-singing male prostitute, while in Chekhovian Motifs Daniels Sabinin is a literal opera singer (he breaks into song on his exit from the church) and figurative prostitute (he marries Olenina, after all, for her money). While the detail of Sabinins opera career does not appear in Chekhovs text, and in fact originates in Suvorins play, Muratovas foregrounding of the trait is an additional instance of auto-citation, even invoking, by way of Daniels

8. I am grateful to one of the articles reviewers for pointing out this particular iteration of Kushnirs role in The Sentimental Policeman, as well as other helpful comments.

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earlier performance, like Kushnirs, an earlier reference to Chekhov in the directors work. Other Muratova veterans, such as Natalia Buz'ko and Sergei Popov, also appear in Chekhovian Motifs, and one of them, Nina Ruslanova, even reprises a line from her earlier appearance in Muratovas Poznavaia belyi svet/Getting to Know the Big, Wide World (1978), which is prominently referenced: a song from the film, by frequent collaborator Valentin Syl'vestrov, surfaces twice in Chekhovian Motifs; and the earlier film, which casts Ruslanova and Popov as a romantic pair, likewise features a wedding ceremony (Taubman 2005: 100). Not only do we find the same actors across Muratovas films, we find them repeating their lines (Kushnir, Ruslanova) and dramatic functions (Daniel, Kushnir), as well as the behaviour of previous actors the wedding partys abrupt, seemingly arbitrary fit of yawning, for example, is in fact an echo of similar scenes in The Asthenic Syndrome and The Sentimental Policeman. Similar examples of repetition, whether within Chekhovian Motifs or across separate films, can be cited; but these should suffice to demonstrate the prevalence of the technique in Muratovas work. Repetition here serves to highlight Muratovas discourse on representation and meaning in post-Soviet culture, through consistent invocations of past cultural forms, including religious images, the ballet and Muratovas own Soviet-era films. The fragmentary, decontextualized deployment of these references in Chekhovian Motifs gestures towards the lost totality of their original context. And in many cases, the original context is Soviet: Makarovas performance, as Kisel points out, was broadcast frequently on Soviet television, while in Getting to Know the Big, Wide World, Muratovas nuanced take on the socialist realist construction narrative paradigm, she deals directly with Soviet culture. In Chekhovian Motifs, Muratova even references the building of socialism itself when Patronnikov stops to pick up the hitchhiking Petia, and greets him with a Soviet idiom: A tractor goes in the field, peace and justice we will build. The metaphor articulates the metanarrative dimension of Communism, in its historicized movement towards the goal of peace and justice. In this instance, meanwhile, the phrase merely conveys the wealthy Patronnikovs mockery of agrarian life, as symbolized by a passing tractor. Such metanarrative closure is lacking in the represented reality of Muratovas film, in which the Soviet past persists only in traces of ideology, memory and material infrastructure. As Oushakine notes, instantiations of post-Soviet nostalgia reveal a peculiar fascination with the temporal sequencing of the Soviet experience and its past (Oushakine 2007: 455). By no means nostalgic, Chekhovian Motifs accesses this temporal contiguity in a fragmentary, metonymic manner, thereby demonstrating the absence of such contiguity in the present. Following the first argument with his father, Petia derides the familys meal as simply an anachronism, and proceeds to define the term anachronism for his sister (who thought it was an obscenity) as an empty form that has lost its content. Just as this empty form is devoid of meaning, Muratovas anachronisms can reference but never reinstate the sacrificed cohesion of the abandoned metanarrative. But neither are they meant to: whether in instances of historical reference, the operations of self-citation or more literal cycles of repeated language and imagery, Muratovas anachronisms do not aspire to representational status. Rather, consistent with Deleuzes positing of repetition in opposition to representation (Deleuze 1994: 10), these repetitions frame the very failure to adequately represent post-Soviet life, at once constituting and highlighting a fragmentary cultural field.

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Interrogating meaning: substitution, silence, paradox

In developing repetition as a formal device and discursive strategy, Muratovas commentary on representation extends to a critique of language, and signification broadly. The consistent repetition of signifiers in Chekhovian Motifs undermines the process of signification itself, as semantic intent gives way to performative gesture: in Lacanian terms, this very elaboration of signifiers underscores the absence of the signified, the unnameable meaning positioned behind what is named (Lacan 1991: 211). Similarly, as Derrida argues, meaning derives from the presence of the signified, whereas its absence generates the endless sign-substitutions of signification (Derrida 1978: 280). Chekhovian Motifs displays a comparable process of sign-substitution in the performance of the absent Repina, and here too the film finds precedents in Chekhov. Tatiana Repina fails to embody its deceased titular character in the Woman in Black, who joins a line of pretenders in assuming Repinas original identity as a vengeful suicide. Chekhovian Motifs extends Chekhovs play of signification and simulation: Muratovas Woman in Black, performed by the priests daughter, does not even commit suicide, as if a still less perfect substitution for Repina. Such semiotic instability intensifies the representational conundrum at the centre of the film: not only do Muratovas repetitions evoke the paucity of existing symbolic forms, but the forms themselves seem to lack a stable identity. The flawed performance of Repina recalls the figural modelling of Muratovas characters on forms of religious representation a failure of figural modelling, denoting the failure of figuration itself. Chekhovs Woman in Black first appears during the priests reading from John 2: 111, the episode of Cana of Galilee. While the presiding Father Ivan reads Johns text in its entirety, it is repeatedly interrupted; and the groan of the woman herself, signalling her first appearance, halts the priests narration at the moment of Christs miracle, when the contents of the water pot are revealed to be wine. The irony of Chekhovs substitution is clear: in place of the narrated miracle resides the false miracle of the disruptive ghost, a mere parody of resurrection, and actual embodiment. The scene exemplifies Chekhovs troped deployment of substitution in the play, which generates chains of incomplete signification, propelled by the central absence of the referent, creating a series of frustrated, truncated attempts to speak in its place hence the inarticulate nature of the Woman in Black, until she is exposed at the end of the play. In this respect, Repina transcends not only the ontological realm of the play, but its very language. Chekhov evokes a sacred narrative of divine immanence, in order to substitute a profane narrative of referential transcendence: in place of Christs resurrected presence we encounter Repinas absence. Muratovas treatment of this thematic complex expands upon Chekhovs discourse. In the films shooting script, the scene closely parallels Chekhovs original treatment of the episode (Muratova and Golubenko 2002: 3940), though there are crucial variations in its choreography and execution in the film. The Woman in Black has already made her appearance before the scene commences, and here moves behind Father Ivan as he begins his reading from John. Following this initial shot, the camera shifts to focus on Sabinin, who points forward, in the direction of the viewer, at the off-screen ghost, and looks confusedly at Patronnikov: rather than staging the appearance of the Woman in Black, the scene focalizes Sabinins misidentification of the figure. Father Ivan pauses once more in his reading from John, the dilation of his presentation mirroring the frozen expression of Sabinin and others.

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Figure 7: The wedding party observes the Woman in Black. As the priest continues with the reading, and returns to the screen, the Woman in Black enters the frame behind him. While Sabinin still interrupts the priests reading at the same point as the first interruption in Chekhovs text (following Christs response to his mother), the groom here mutters I dont understand, twice in succession. Though Father Ivan, meanwhile, resumes his reading of the Gospel account, his voice is relegated to the background as the shot shifts back to the wedding party, who resume their outlandish behaviour. In contrast with Chekhov, Muratovas treatment of the scene foregrounds the confusion of the characters, as well as their induced silence: they stare wordlessly into the camera, periodically exchanging glances, for over 20 seconds. As an emblem of failed communication, the breach of signifier and signified, the Woman in Black provokes the renunciation of speech. Father Ivan even suspends his own reading, prompting a temporal dilation that mirrors the onset of silence. Moreover, the priest lingers over the passages opening phrase on the third day, repeating a temporal figuration evoking Christs final miracle, his resurrection on the third day. Repinas resurrection, by comparison, articulates the transcendence of meaning, as opposed to Christs victorious transcendence of death, which is parodied in her return to Sabinin. Silence, Muratova suggests, is an appropriate response when language falls short of its representational object, and silence is a dominant motif throughout Chekhovian Motifs. Muratovas typically noisy characters demand silence so frequently as to pollute it: the wedding guests, for example, call for quiet ostentatiously and even aggressively, while one particularly drunken attendee enters the church while narrating the earlier debauchery of the wedding feast, only to subsequently censor herself: Not a word of this! Be quiet, fool! The theme returns among more central characters: Shiriaev repeatedly demands silence from his family, while other characters avow silence even amidst the act of speech. Following Shiriaevs outburst, his wife claims she is silent as she mutters hysterically, while

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Sabinin later demands silence of the Woman in Black, and promises to act in kind, even as he repeats this proposal again and again. As these examples demonstrate, Chekhovian Motifs inscribes an interplay between silence and cacophony, discursive renunciation and discursive chaos, as alternating modes of expressive deficiency. While these strategies differ from those of Chekhovs characters, they emerge in response to a similar representational crisis, framing the impossibility of meaningful articulation. Heteroglossy and silence are both hallmarks of Muratovas cinema.9 In Chekhovian Motifs the incessant shouting of the church congregation is emblematic of the broader clash of symbolic systems across the film, encompassing forms of language (liturgical, profane), cultural affiliation (New Russian, prosperous farmer, impoverished student), ethnic identity (Russian, Jewish), and even biological genera (human, animal). These systems generate competing cultural values and valences, which the film refuses to reconcile. The resulting semantic ambivalence, moreover, is figured in the prevalence of paradox and self-contradiction in character speech. Shiriaev, for example, tells his son to take my old boots, theyre completely new. Later, one wedding guest asks another whether Repina underwent an autopsy, learns she did not, and responds: Yes, I remember the autopsy. Early in the film, two of Shiriaevs boys debate whether their father has commissioned construction of a barn or a store, as if the buildings identity were inevitably shrouded in mystery. These instances reveal the secondary, superstructural quality of language, as an arbitrary form of explanation, description or identification that fails to embody an elusive signified. The problem of speaking in the absence of a stable referent already inheres in Muratovas reflexive manoeuvres, which gesture not towards any particular message, but merely other signifiers (statements, images, gestures, etc.) in the directors oeuvre. Here, by extension, the prevalence of paradox and competing cultural discourses denotes the very absence of a symbolic system capable of figuring the represented world of the film in a stable or consistent manner. As opposed to a discursive hierarchy, evincing a unified perspective and cohesive reality, Muratova stages a non-committal layering of discursive fragments. Applied to language, this democratic impulse amounts to reductio ad absurdum: the building is at once a barn and a store, the autopsy did and did not occur. By enabling the synchronous coexistence of contradictory predicates, Muratovas use of paradox reveals the predominance of space over time in Chekhovian Motifs. Temporal paradox is already inherent to repetition itself, insofar as the phenomenon exists in time, but also destroys the very notion of time (Rimmon-Kenan 1980: 158). Muratovas spatial dominant follows logically from the films circular narrative structure, as well as subtle stylistic features, including the aforementioned creation of depth in the mise-enscne, the gestural quality of the acting and the textural, tactile settings typical of Muratovas work (Widdis 2005). Additionally, the film frequently spatializes temporal motifs, layering competing historical markers in a heterogeneous temporal palimpsest. Though presumably contemporary, the Shiriaev farm bears traces of a domestic and pastoral past in its technology, in its decoration and even in its identity, insofar as the agricultural family stands in sharp contrast with the affluent wedding guests. A liminal figure, Petia appears to have emerged from the past, his foppish appearance (scarf, coat, fedora) at odds with his contemporary context. When his mother intervenes on his behalf, she claims it is no longer appropriate for him to wear worn (or dated) clothing, repeatedly reminding her husband that it is no longer

9. On the interplay between speech and silence in Brief Encounters, Long Goodbyes and The Sentimental Policeman, see Ferguson (2005).

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10. The films dilatory tendencies, and the generally static quality of the wedding sequence, also contribute to its self-reflexive quality, insofar as Muratovas cinema of delay or stillness arguably references the still photography at the basis of film, and thus the material reality of the medium itself (Mulvey 2006: 30).

the old times. Muratova consistently indexes these shifting historical reference points through visual motifs, such as the films taxonomy of transportation vehicles: Petia encounters Patronnikovs SUV as it passes a tractor on the road, and departs for the train station in a horse-drawn carriage in the closing scene. Similar to the strategies of repetition and character inactivity, the films schizophrenic temporal imaginary forestalls diachronic progression, in turn confounding discursive confusion. Ostensibly a narrative film, Chekhovian Motifs frequently enacts temporal dilation, exemplified by the veristic handling of the Repina sequence: the wedding scene, nearly 45 minutes in duration, approximates the length of the actual Russian Orthodox rite of marriage, inviting the audience to experience the restless boredom of the congregation.10 Given Muratovas unique approach to temporal reference in Chekhovian Motifs, it is appropriate that the films central signifier, as in Chekhovs play, is that of the ghost the figural embodiment of the past. The persistence of the past is a prominent theme throughout the film, elsewhere articulated in a musical interlude as the narrative transitions from farm to church. Initially mourning the passage of time, the lyrics describe how spring, a light thread of music extending, reinstates an earlier time of horizons bright as ever a past perspective on a future infused with hope and meaning: Oh, how wondrous is the blossom of spring! Quietly flows the days radiance! The world is once more discovered! Far, faraway well be taken by spring, When suddenly, amid silence, From the window it would sing. The elegiac lyrics suggest the capacity of song to induce meaningful repetition, to invoke the form and meaning of the past. Set to images of construction work and farm animals, the piece soundtracks a series of visual repetitions, grouped by common species (workers, pigs, geese, horses, etc.). The sole instance of non-diegetic sound in the film, the song combines Syl'vestrovs piano melody, reprised from Getting to Know the Big, Wide World, and the vocal accompaniment of Jean Daniel, the actor playing Sabinin, who later sings the song on his exit from the church. The song therefore repeats an earlier performance and is itself repeated later in the film. Striking as it is, the song promises no temporal escape, or even progression: the lyrical subject remains spatially confined, accessing the past from the window through sound and scenery, the signifiers of present experience. Though Muratova evinces no particular nostalgia for the past per se, Chekhovian Motifs does explicate an important aspect of her relationship to past culture, in the directors productive return to Chekhov. Muratovas programme, I have suggested, can be traced to a broader representational crisis in post-Soviet culture, amidst the historical and ideological interregnum of the films production. Though they perform her scepticism towards language and the capacity of the human subject to communicate meaning, Muratovas characters invoke a multiplicity of expressive strategies. Similarly, even as Chekhovian Motifs frames this state of semiotic and hermeneutic uncertainty, it remains beautifully expressive the legible trace of Muratovas discourse on expression itself.

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Figures 811: Species aggregate during a musical interlude.

Acknowledgments
Initial versions of this article were presented at the 2011 StanfordBerkeley Conference on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Varieties of Post-Socialism, as well as the Stanford Slavic Colloquium. I am grateful to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Hoyer, Michael Kunichika, Gabriella Safran and Nariman Skakov for their helpful comments and suggestions on early drafts. I also wish to thank Birgit Beumers and the reviewers of Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema for their insightful feedback.

References
Aronson, Oleg (2003), Ekstsentrika priema i materiala: O fil'makh Kiry Muratovoi, Metakino, Moscow: Ad Marginem, pp. 20517. Auerbach, Erich (1984), Figura, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1176. Axelrod, Willa Chamberlain (1991), Russian Orthodoxy in the Life and Fiction of A.P. Chekhov, Ph.D. Diss., Yale University. Bazin, Andr (1972), Orson Welles: A Critical View, New York: Harper & Row. (2005), The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, What is Cinema, vol. 1, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. 2340.

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Calabrese, Omar (1992), Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chekhov, A.P. (19741983), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 30 tomakh, 30 vols., Moscow: Nauka. Condee, Nancy (2009), The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Dllenbach, Lucien (1989), The Mirror in the Text, Cambridge: Polity Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1978), Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 27893. (1984), Signature Event Context, Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 30730. Dobrenko, Evgenii (2008), Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ferguson, Helen (2005), Silence and Shrieks: Language in Three Films by Kira Muratova, Slavonic and East European Review, 83: 1, pp. 3870. Gillespie, David (1999), New Versions of Old Classics: Recent Cinematic Interpretations of Russian Literature, in Birgit Beumers (ed.), Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, pp. 11424. Humphrey, Caroline (2002), The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Hutchings, Stephen (2004), Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: The Word as Image, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Hutchings, Stephen and Vernitski, Anat (2005), The Ekranizatsiia in Russian Culture, in Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitski (eds), Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 19002001: Screening the Word, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 124. Kisel, Maria (2011), Kira Muratovas Chekhovian Motifs, KinoKultura, 13, http://www.kinokultura.com/reviews/R104chekhovmotifs.html. Accessed 11 October 2011. Lacan, Jacques (1991), The Seminar, Book II: The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 19541955, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. Meister, Charles W. (1988), Chekhov Criticism: 1880 Through 1986, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company. Mulvey, Laura (2006), Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion. Muratova, Kira (1997), Mne vsegda khotelos' sdelat' tikhii, skromnyi, normal'nyi fil'm ..., interview by Jane Knox-Voina and Vladimir Voina, Iskusstvo kino, 11, pp. 5963. Muratova, Kira and Golubenko, Evgenii (2002), Chekhovskie motivy, Kinostsenarii, 56, pp. 3154. Oushakine, Serguei Alex (2007), Were nostalgic but were not crazy: Retrofitting the Past in Russia, Russian Review, 66, pp. 45182. (2009), Byvshee v upotreblenii: Postsovetskoe sostoianie kak forma afazii, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 100, pp. 76092. Plakhov, Andrei (1999), Kira Muratova: Vpolne marginal'naia maniia velichiia, Vsego tridsat' tri: zvezdy mirovoi kinorezhissury, Vinnitsa: Akvilon, pp. 20112.

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Rayfield, Donald (1997), Anton Chekhov: A Life, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ries, Nancy (1997), Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (1980), The Paradoxical Status of Repetition, Poetics Today, 1.4, pp. 15159. Roberts, Graham (1997), Look Whos Talking: The Politics of Representation and the Representation of Politics in Two Films by Kira Muratova, Elementa: Journal of Slavic Studies and Comparative Cultural Semiotics, 3: 4, pp. 30923. Sandomirskaia, Irina (2008), A Glossolalic Glasnost and the Re-tuning of the Soviet Subject: Sound Performance in Kira Muratovas Asthenic Syndrome, Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema, 2: 1, pp. 6383. Smith, Kathleen (2002), Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory During the Yeltsin Era, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Taubman, Jane (1993), The Cinema of Kira Muratova, The Russian Review, 52, pp. 36781. (2005), Kira Muratova, London: I.B. Tauris. Vernitski, Anat (2005), Post-Soviet Film Adaptations of the Russian Classics: Tradition and Innovation, in Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitski (eds), Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 19002001: Screening the Word, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 194205. Widdis, Emma (2005), Muratovas Clothes, Muratovas Textures, Muratovas Skin, KinoKultura, 8, http://www.kinokultura.com/articles/apr05-widdis. html. Accessed 26 July 2011. Zvonkine, Eugnie (2007), The Structure of the Fairy Tale in Kira Muratovas The Sentimental Policeman, Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema, 1: 2, pp. 13145.

Suggested citation
Roberts, T. (2013), Simply an anachronism: repetition and meaning in Kira Muratovas Chekhovian Motifs, Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema 7: 1, pp. 3959, doi: 10.1386/srsc.7.1.39_1

Contributor details
Tom Roberts is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Thinking Matters Program at Stanford University. His primary research field is nineteenthcentury Russian literature, with related interests in Russian and Soviet film, Eastern Orthodox art and theology, and critical theory. He is currently developing his doctoral dissertation (Stanford, 2010) as a book project, exploring the relationship between transcendence and prose technique in nineteenthcentury Russian fiction. Contact: Thinking Matters Program, Sweet Hall 2nd Floor, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. E-mail: roberts4@stanford.edu Tom Roberts has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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