Across the past week I’ve had the opportunity to watch the Russian film adaptations of the Boris Vasilyev 1969 novella The Dawns Here Are Quiet. It is adaptations, plural: there is a 1972 version from Stanislav Rostotsky, and a 2015 version from Renat Davletyarov. The story itself is well worth the watch, and the existence of the two films offers an opportunity for comparison.
Vasilyev, himself a veteran of the Soviet war against the Third Reich — wounded in action with the Third Guards Airborne Division in 1943, which ought to be sufficient testimony to his experience — was one of a handful of Soviet writers who emerged in the first three decades of the postwar era, having served mostly as junior officers at the front. Vasily Grossman and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are far better known, and I am not aware of a meaningful corpus of Vasilyev’s work in English, but the latter has the distinction at least of having inspired some of the most affecting war cinema of the past half-century.
There is a lovely phrase in Russian describing the work of writers like Vasilyev: лейтенантская проза, literally “lieutenant’s prose,” signifying not just the author’s own background in the lower ranks of the combatants, but also the general focus of their literary work. These are not heroic portraits of great men, and still less the ideologically driven narratives of Soviet officialdom. They are the small, claustrophobic, and intimate experiences of the men and women who endured the single greatest cataclysm in the history of mankind: the titanic Eastern Front of the Second World War. Twice in 1944, that year of years, Churchill remarked to the House of Commons that it was the Red Army that shouldered the human burden of the war against the Third Reich: “it is the Red Army that has torn the guts out of the filthy Nazis,” he said that October, and this after both Overlord and Market Garden. The butcher’s bill at the end was calculated in the tens of millions, soldiers and civilians alike. If it has become the stuff of state-sponsored myth since, who can blame the state? Who can gainsay the unnumbered individuals who lived through it and penned their memories, whether as poetic nonfiction, as Solzhenitsyn a weary and shocked young officer in Prussian Nights — or as literary fiction, as with Vasilyev’s small band of Soviet soldiers in The Dawns Here Are Quiet?
The novella and the films center upon a tale of a tired and isolated Soviet NCO, Fedot Vaskov, upon whom has befallen the command of a small depot in a small village deep in the forests of Karelia. The soldiers who pass through the depot, and the village, occupy themselves with its women, as Vaskov fights a futile battle to keep order in the dissolution of war. Vaskov’s village has almost no combat role excepting an antiaircraft battery whose manning rotates through the transient soldiers. He is in a backwater, but he is in no hurry to get to the big war. Vaskov is not a coward: but his heart is elsewhere, in a wife who has left him, and in a son who has died. He asks to be sent soldiers who won’t drink, and won’t chase the peasant girls, and he is. One morning, Vaskov is shocked to find he has been sent an all-female antiaircraft company.
This could be the stuff of comedy, and there are comedic moments, but The Dawns Here Are Quiet is not interested in exploiting the scenario for levity. (The 2015 version is, though, interested in exploiting it for salacious content, which is deeply unfortunate on several levels, not least in that it otherwise respects the women’s characters nearly as well as the 1972 predecessor.) Vasilyev understands that each of these women has been traumatized in some fashion, and they are very much in the war by reason of their own pasts and purposes. There is the beautiful Zhenya Komelkova, a junior-enlisted gunner whose entire family has been put up against a wall and slaughtered in summer-1941 Tallinn. There is the intelligent Sonya Gurvich, who used to be a student at a Jewish institute in Minsk, and whose parents are now dead at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen. There is the intense and sorrowful Rita Osyanina, herself a low-level NCO, who saw the love of her life killed in the war’s first days.
Modern Hollywood would handle these backstories in a predictable and ham-handed fashion, leveraging presentist strong-woman archetypes to build to something like a feminine version of a revenge movie. Osyanina, Gurvich, Komelkova, Brichkina, or any of the others might deliver an arch one-liner before finishing off an SS sniper; or perhaps the peasant women of the village would band together with the Red Army women to fend off a panzer assault. Either way, Vaskov would learn he’s not needed, and the women would learn they’re all they need. You don’t have to imagine it much, because this kind of movie has been made again and again. At its best, it would be Kill Bill. At its worst, Captain Marvel. The Dawns Here Are Quiet doesn’t do any of that, perhaps because you simply couldn’t get away with it in 1969 or 1972, when easily half the prospective audience directly remembered the war. Nor does the 2015 version, either because the original is so well known and respected, or because modern Russian popular culture lacks some of our own social pathologies. At one moment, a woman dies in combat, and Vaskov says that it is doubly tragic because she could have had children — and now her line is broken. The other women, her comrades in arms, agree, and weep. It is a moment simply impossible to imagine in an American film now.
Both the 1972 and 2015 films occupy their first halves with extensive flashbacks: you meet the women of the unit, and then the main characters among them receive extended backstories explaining how they came to be here, in this unit, in this forest, in this war. The differences between the two films here are revelatory. The 2015 film adds in a new backstory, a heartbreaking tale of a woman who was orphaned by Stalin’s purges. You see the secret police drop her off, as a child, at a state orphanage — as her mother, screaming her daughter’s name, is forced into a Black Maria. The little girl’s head is shaved, and she is treated with contempt by the staff at her new home: she is, after all, the daughter of an enemy of the people. No such thing in 1972, but that first film makes a superior artistic choice in its treatment of the backstories. The Dawns Here Are Quiet of 1972 is filmed in black and white — except for the modern-day and flashback scenes, which are rendered in well-saturated full color. Rostotsky’s superiority as a filmmaker comes into sharp focus here. It is the war that is stripped of all color and content, and peace — and memory — that is glorious and full. This thing they are in, says his cinematography, is death, not life. It is a choice that becomes shocking and moving once you grasp what is underway.
Another telling difference in the 1972 and 2015 versions comes in a first-half episode, in which Rita Osyanina mans an antiaircraft battery and shoots down a Junkers transport overhead. Both films show her driven, intense, moved by a killing instinct born of great suffering. She shoots down the aircraft, and a German parachutist emerges. He floats helpless in the gray sky. Osyanina gazes upon him through her gunsight. She lingers upon his figure drifting downward — and then blows him apart in midair. His riddled corpse plunges to the earth beneath the flaming streamer of his parachute. In the 2015 version, Vaskov is shocked, and his anger is moral. He threatens Osyanina with consequences if she does anything like that ever again — kill a man in a parachute — and the women of the battery silently close ranks about her. In the 1972 version, Vaskov is again appalled: but only because he wanted to interrogate the airman. A society not thirty years from the war was pitiless. A society seventy years from it could indulge pity’s luxury.
The Dawns Here Are Quiet is packed with illuminating moments like this, and seeing both films has the effect of amplifying them. It is a rich tale, and it is easy to see why it would be popular in its native Russia. It is also easy to see how a particular sort of American audience might find it a film, or films, to watch again and again. It manages the difficult task of being both sentimental and hard, embracing warmth and humanity while unsparing with the tragedy and terribleness of war.
The second half of both films puts Vaskov and a handful of the women to the test: a small German platoon has dropped into the lush forests of Karelia, and Vaskov decides to take five of the women with him to surveil and harry them until the real soldiers can arrive. The real soldiers do not arrive, and the women step up to the task. They are killed, one by one, across bleak days in the northern forest — there is no purpose in discussing how, except to say that the how is surpassingly important — but they kill in return. The last of them dies, in a quiet moment as moving as any war-movie death you’ll ever see — not in an instant of violence, but of stillness and beauty — and Vaskov is left alone, broken, and loathing himself for bringing them into this verdant hell. At the very end, when he stares down the clutch of surviving Germans, pistol in hand, he writes their epitaph as he says — they were just five girls, and you couldn’t get past them.
It is worth sharing that Vaskov too finds his redemption, as his story intersects with Osyanina’s, in a way that is especially moving in the 1972 version, and should not be revealed here.
The Dawns Here Are Quiet does what good cinema does. It stays with you and grows in the remembrance. Most movies these days evaporate upon watching, a rush of imagery and feeling that cannot persist because there is nothing beneath it. There is something in this one, and as we move into our own century of great events and the intimate experiences of men and women in cataclysm, it deserves your time and attention.
The 2015 version is available on both Amazon Prime and YouTube. The 1972 version is available on YouTube.
One more thing —
I am a couple of years late to the resurgence of Japanese citypop, but having rediscovered it, it is terrifically enjoyable: the sonic wallpaper of days gone by. It isn’t clear to me what the younger generation who mostly drive its resurrection find in it, but I also do not especially care. The smooth ‘80s synth with Japanese lyrics (plus, of course, the obligatory lines in English) calls to mind a bygone era. I remember quite well east Asia of the citypop era, when it seemed as if the Tokyo metropolitan region was the global epicenter of gadgetry and all things cool. It was a land of devices that each did one thing, and did them well, brushed metal and miniaturization, mutability of form married to uniformity of function. Citypop recalls it all, the soundtrack of long night walks with a Sony Walkman in some Asian metropolis, foam earpieces and dangling wires, a future at once thrilling and here.
We’ll never get it back.
Anyway, here’s the citypop ur-track, Mariya Takeuchi’s 1984 “Plastic Love.”