Word: varlam
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...film, which Director Abuladze calls a "tragic phantasmagoria," uses allegory, fantasy and surrealism to evoke the terror of a totalitarian system. His central character is Varlam Aravidze, the mayor of a provincial town. Varlam combines Stalin's close-cropped haircut, Hitler's mustache and Mussolini's black shirt to embody the image of a universal tyrant. Although the setting and time are undefined -- secret police appear alternately as medieval knights or spear-wielding Roman centurions -- there is no doubt that the real subject is Stalinism...
...action begins with Varlam's funeral, which is soon followed by the appearance of his corpse in the family garden. He is reinterred, but reappears several times before the authorities capture the offending grave robber, a woman whose parents had been arrested and killed by Varlam, and take her to trial. Her testimony, studded with flashbacks and Fellini-like dream sequences, tells the story of Varlam's brutal reign. There are false denunciations, mass arrests and mad ravings by the tyrant, who utters such Newspeak absurdities as "Four out of every three persons is an enemy of the people...
...white loincloth, hanging by his wrists like the crucified Christ. It is one of several explicit religious images that portray the struggle of good against evil in a way that unfailingly identifies the latter with officialdom and the former with its victims. Lest the viewer miss this point, Varlam appears as the devil in one scene...
Some of the Soviet Union's most important writing has never been published there at all. Instead, it circulates widely from hand to hand in the process known as samizdat (literally, self-publishing). Varlam Shalamov's lapidary concentration-camp stories, some of which were recently published in the U.S. by W.W. Norton under the title Kolyma Tales, have been in samizdat for 20 years. Currently the most prized samizdat work is Venedikt Yerofeyev's Moscow-Petushki. The account of a phantasmagoric drunken excursion on a suburban train, Yerofeyev's novella may be the most innovative piece...
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