"Earthly paradise" in Alexander Dovzhenko films

Popova Liana Vladimirovna ORCID: 0000-0002-9766-7535 PhD in Cultural Studies Senior lecturer, State University of Management 109542, Russia, Moscow, Ryazan Avenue, 99, office U-404 pliana@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

In Soviet times, the work of director A. P. Dovzhenko was studied quite widely. Monographs were written by R. N. Yurenev (1959) ^[1], A.M. Maryamov (1968) ^[2], R. P. Sobolev (1980) ^[3].

The literary work of A.P. Dovzhenko was studied by such authors as I. I. Andreeva ^[4], Y. Y. Barabash ^[5], V. O. Pertsov ^[6], I. A. Rachuk ^[7] and others. V. B. Shklovsky ^[8], Yu. Ya. Barabash ^[9], A. S. Vartanov ^[10], Yu. M. Khanyutin ^[11], V. O. Pertsov ^[12], I. A. Rachuk ^[13], Yu. A. Krasovsky ^[14] and others studied the aesthetic views of A. P. Dovzhenko. Among those who studied the philosophical component of A. P. Dovzhenko's films, it should be noted N. A. Khrenov ^[15], S. I. Freilikh ^[16], I. K. Moiseeva ^[17].

The work of A. P. Dovzhenko has also been studied abroad by such outstanding theorists as Zh. Deleuze ^[18]. It should also be noted such researchers as B. Amengual (France) ^[19], L. Molnarova (Slovakia) ^[20], V. Kepley (USA) ^[21].

A number of works appeared in the early 2000s. A. A. Cherny examines the work of A.P. Dovzhenko from the point of view of the philosophy of human existence, sees existential philosophical ideas in his films ^[22]. Of course, A. P. Dovzhenko was a dialectical philosopher, he was preoccupied with questions of human existence. Consideration of his work from the point of view of such categories of dialectics as space and time seems especially relevant. E. Dobrenko called A. Dovzhenko's films "creative space" ^{[23, p. 566]}. According to A. Dovzhenko, the earth, as a place of human residence, is a "creative space". The purpose of this study is to consider the "earth" as a special space, as a "garden of Eden", "earthly paradise". The novelty of this study lies in the fact that the "garden" is considered as a "creative space", as an "earthly paradise".

Choosing a research methodology, we cannot limit ourselves to one method. This study uses a comprehensive cultural approach, including comparative, dialectical, phenomenological and psychological methods.

It is possible to single out films by A. P. Dovzhenko that most strongly meet the objectives of the study: "Zvenigora", "Earth", Arsenal", "Aerograd", "Shchors", "Michurin". Analogies can also be made with films based on scripts by A.P. Dovzhenko and films by other directors.

"Earth" as a "garden of Eden"

In 1930, Alexander Petrovich Dovzhenko created an epic poem about the earth. According to Irakli Andronnikov, A. Dovzhenko's "Earth" can be put on a par with Homer's "Iliad", N. V. Gogol's "Dead Souls", L. N. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in its philosophical, figurative and political content ^{[3, p. 93]}.

The theme of "Land" is associated with a difficult period in the history of the USSR ? collectivization, a period when peasants were forced to join collective farms, while taking their property and land. In the film "Earth" we see literate kulaks reading newspapers reporting on the process of collectivization, but the main characters of the picture are not peasants, not collective farmers, but the "earth" itself. From the first frames of the film, A. Dovzhenko paints a picture of the "earth". The earth, A. Dovzhenko, has a "creative space" ^[23]. We see how the ears of wheat are moving, how the heroine of Y. Solntseva, the daughter of the fist of Opanas Trubenko, appears against the background of sunflowers. Apples are filled with ripe juice. Grandfather Semyon is preparing to die, but he dies without regret, a blissful smile shines on his face. He is in the family circle, next to him is his son Opanas with his wife and sons. One son of Opanas is very small, the other, Vasil, is an adult. There is also a friend of Semyon Petro, who asks to send a message from the other world, he wonders where Semyon will go: to heaven or hell. People's lives are subordinated to the earth: a person is born, dies and goes into the earth. Ripe and fallen apples symbolize the life of a grandfather who fulfilled his mission on earth. The earth not only nourishes, warms, but also becomes a subject of contention. The son of kulak Opanas Vasil joins the collective farm. A tractor appears in the village. Dovzhenko's mounting solution shows the conflict: we see kulaks standing in a defiant pose, horses, cows, opposed to the tractor on which Vasil plowed the Kulak boundary.

Vasil is also opposed by Homa Belokon, the Kulak son, who kills him at night. Vasil dances a hopaka before being struck down by a kulak bullet. Vasil's death is a kind of sacrifice to the earth. Dovzhenko's "Earth" can be compared to Stravinsky's ballet "Sacred Spring", where an ancient ritual is reproduced. The girl dances to exhaustion to awaken spring, and falls dead. N.A. Khrenov also points out that the film "Earth" reproduces the structure of an archaic ritual associated with sacrifice ^{[15, p. 70]}. Sacrifice is a condition for the rebirth of the cosmos. According to N. A. Khrenov, for the Russian people of the 1920s, socialism was such a cosmos. At the same time, it does not matter what was built: a city, a collective farm or a power plant. This should be understood as the birth of a new cosmos, which was a kind of utopia, the roots of which go back to antiquity ^{[15, p. 71]}.

A. Dovzhenko's man is inseparable from the earth. Vasil's death is mounted parallel to the sky covered with clouds. Dovzhenko here uses the technique of S. Eisenstein, who called this phenomenon tonal editing, namely graphic tonality ^{[24, p. 247]}. At the same time, S. Eisenstein cited the example of the "Battleship Potemkin", the episode "Fogs in the port of Odessa" and the beginning of "Mourning for Vakulinchuk" ^{[25, p. 511]}. We see something similar in Shchors, the 1939 film by A. Dovzhenko: Commissioner Bozhenko dies ? the tone of the frame changes ? day turns into evening, evening turns into night.

The earth is fraught with beauty and wealth. Even "Zvenigore", a 1927 film-parable, tells about the earth, concealing treasures, about Scythian treasures, which the "eternal grandfather" is trying to find. The film begins with the events of the XVII century, with the confrontation of Poles and Gaydamaks. Then the events turn to the XX century, to the confrontation between the reds and whites. "The Eternal Grandfather" tells his grandson Timosh the legend of Roxana, a girl from the Scythians, about the Varangians trying to seize the treasure, about the curse of the treasure by the Varangian leader. Two grandchildren of the "eternal grandfather" find themselves on different sides of the barricades: Timosh is on the side of the Reds, Pavlo becomes a Petliurist. Timosh combines a trilogy that includes Zvenigora, Arsenal and Earth. It is noteworthy that the appeal to the historical theme is peculiar to Dziga Vertov. In the film "The Eleventh", shot in 1928, we see the skeleton of a 2000-year-old skiff from a burial in the steppes of Ukraine, as well as the bank of the Dnieper, the construction of the Volkhovskaya HPP. D. Vertov shows the victory of modernity over history. A. Dovzhenko treats historical memory more carefully, wrapping it in a beautiful legend. According to S. Eisenstein, the painting "Zvenigor" increasingly begins to sound like the irresistible charm of a peculiar way of thinking, the interweaving of the real with a deeply national poetic fiction, the cutting-edge and mythological, humorous and pathetic, something Gogol ^{[26, p. 440]}.

Critics wrote about the mighty Dovzhenkovian optimism, about the "Hesiodian" perception of nature, based on faith in the power and eternity of life on earth ^{[3, pp. 89-90]}, about pantheism and biologism ^{[3, p. 90]} Dovzhenko. In 1994, a conference was held dedicated to the 100th anniversary of A. Dovzhenko, where two opposing points of view about the director were revealed. A. G. Rutkovsky had the idea that Dovzhenko was a principled, organic atheist who is an apologist for natural, natural, domestic, agricultural, natural principles ^{[23, p. 567]}. Dovzhenko is a pre?Christian who lives before the Birth of Christ ^{[23, p. 567]}. V. I. Mikhalkovich also spoke about the programmatic anti-Christianity of the painting "Earth" ^{[23, p. 567]}. Again, thoughts were expressed, in particular, by S. V. Skits, that the philosophical basis of the "Earth" is naturalistic pantheism ^{[23, p. 567]}. According to B. Alpers, the pantheistic features in the worldview of the heroes of "Earth" are far from being outlived by Dovzhenko himself, his work is still ambivalent in many ways. In his opinion, A. Dovzhenko is primarily an artist of the peasantry ^{[23, p. 567]}.

All these thoughts were not without foundation, but at the same time one more trend was overlooked ? the Christian one, namely, the idea of the garden as an earthly paradise. A. Dovzhenko balances between pantheism and Christianity. In his diaries, you can see an entry from April 5, 1942: "Today is Easter. The most revered holiday of people who cultivate the land, and the oldest, of course, is pre-Christian. The spring festival, the feast of warmth, the feast of revival ? the life of the genus ? birth, continuation. The sun was playing and everyone was happy, and all the people on this day were unusual..." ^{[27, p. 88]}.

A. Dovzhenko lived in the era of developed atheism, but in his diaries you can find entries that speak of his deep, natural and long-lived religiosity. On January 9, 1946, he wrote: "I began to pray to God. I haven't prayed to him for thirty-seven years. I hardly remembered him. I threw it away. I was a god myself, a God-man. Now I have comprehended a small drop of my pretense. No, I'm not who I thought I was.... Shevchenko, Franko, and the great Russian thinkers were wrong. Shevchenko, it seems to me, because of the lack of culture. “There is no Lord in heaven.” Of course not. And there is no Mother of God. He doesn't exist. He is there. Or it doesn't exist. And I began to think that it was scary and miserable in the world when he wasn't there, like now, for example. It exists, Pavlov, Michurin had it, and, obviously, Darwin had it, as people of the deepest synthesis, as a kind of infantile, therefore, primitively personified idea of beauty, the idea of goodness, which means that what raises the spiritual structure of a person above the usual sum of its physiological processes, makes a person good, humane spiritually high, giving a person a sense of compassion, without which a person is not a person. God is in man. It is there or not. But his complete absence is a big step back and down. In the future, people will come to him. Not to the priest, of course, not to the parish. To the divine in itself. To the beautiful. To the immortal. And then there will be no oppressive gray longing for a brutally cruel, stupid, boring and joyless everyday life." ^{[27, p. 398]}.

A. Dovzhenko grew up in a patriarchal peasant family, where they professed Orthodoxy. Recalling his childhood, he wrote on 2.04.1942.:

 "I had a grandfather who looked like a god.

And when I prayed to God, I saw in the red corner like a portrait of my grandfather, and my grandfather himself was lying on the stove and coughing..." ^{[27, p. 80]}. These lines, with some changes, sound in the autobiographical film "Enchanted Spring", shot according to his script by Yu. Solntseva in 1964. Grandfather A. Dovzhenko was the prototype of the "eternal grandfather", whom we see in "Zvenigor" and "Earth".

In his diaries, A. Dovzhenko wrote about the Catholic Dolmatovsky in 1942: "Dolmatovsky is a typical example of a cold, narcissistic, absolutely anti-national trash: a Catholic who does not believe in God..." ^{[27, p. 193]}. The assessment is, of course, subjective, but we see the opposition of the Catholic to the Orthodox. During the years of developed atheism, A. Dovzhenko remained an Orthodox Christian with elements of pantheism. According to R.P. Sobolev, Dovzhenko in his films reflected not only his own tradition, which arose in Zvenigor, Zemlya and some other films, but also a long-standing philosophical tradition and even born back in the Renaissance, the dream of gardens covering many utopian countries, the dream that gardens ? the only natural place of human life ^{[3, p. 231]}. According to D.S. Likhachev, the highest meaning of the garden is paradise, Eden ^{[28, p. 24]}. This idea of a garden as a paradise remains for a long time in all styles of garden art of the Middle Ages and Modern times up to the XIX century. The idea of a garden as a paradise was also studied by M.N. Sokolov, to which his study "The Principle of Paradise ..." is devoted ^[29].

A "garden" is a "creative space". Grandfather Semyon dies near a tree, which, in this case, symbolizes the biblical Tree of Life. According to M. N. Sokolov, the very etymology of the main plants of Eden confirms the double meaning, radically modifying the motif of the world tree as a cosmic axis ^{[29, pp. 59-60]}. The motif of the world tree is also found in early forms of religious consciousness, which is the subject of M. Eliade's research ^[30]. The same tree radiating energy was the "Tree of Knowledge" ^{[29, p. 60]}. A friend of Semyon Petro's grandfather, who asks to send a message from the other world, symbolizes the apostle Peter, who, according to Christian legend, holds the keys to paradise. R. P. Sobolev noted that in almost all of A. Dovzhenko's films we can find a symbol built on the phenomena of real reality and as if destroyed by precise and juicy vital, sometimes just everyday details. This is a technique that Dovzhenko introduces into his documentaries ^{[3, p. 77]}. Indeed, even in "The Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine", a 1943 film, we see shots similar to those of "Earth": stirring ears of wheat, blooming fields, sunflowers. Then follows the caption: "This was Ukraine. It was called "Blooming Sunny Ukraine." Vsevolod Pudovkin speaks in symbols differently. So in the film "Minin and Pozharsky", shot in 1939, he introduces us to the era of the Time of Troubles in one frame: we see a human skull in which bees have built a hive with honeycombs. The audience immediately understands that the farm is abandoned, there is devastation in the country. A. Dovzhenko tells about what happened and what has become. What happened ? Beauty that becomes a symbol. The garden, by A. Dovzhenko, is a space of "created Beauty", "earthly paradise".

On the one hand, the Christian tradition is what Dovzhenko is rebelling against. In the "Land", Opanas, after Vasil's death, banishes the priest, asks him to bury his son without priests and sing "new songs for a new life" for him. Vasil's fiancee Natalka smashes icons. On the other hand, the idea of planting gardens is fundamental in Dovzhenko's work, which originated in Zvenigor, continues in Zemlya, Shchors, Michurin and other films of the director. In "Shchors", the mouth of the main character says: "When we end the war, we will plant gardens all over the globe." The Christian idea of the resurrection is also reflected in Dovzhenko's films. Vasil will live in the memory of the people, in "songs about a new life." Shchors says that future generations will compose songs about war heroes: "It will be folk songs.... And we will be resurrected! And we will arise from the gray hair of centuries and pass in front of them in a mighty formation, full of solemn rhythm and beauty..." J. Deleuze noted the gigantic growth of Dovzhenko's characters, which people, according to Proust, acquire in time and which divides parts among themselves, prolonging their multitude. The director gives Shchors such growth in the film of the same name and all the legendary heroes of the fairy-tale era ^{[18, p. 85]}.

According to R. P. Sobolev, in the "Land" the death of grandfather "is mirrored in the death of Vasil ? in the same beautiful village, among the same gardens. Grandfather dies like a bird that flies away from the garden. Vasil's death is a tragedy, a violation of the laws of nature ^{[3, p. 89]}. Death is a violation of harmony. In Shchors, war, like death, is also a violation of harmony. The film begins with footage of the battle, with an explosion against the background of sunflowers. We see similar sunflowers in the "Earth". Dovzhenko conveys the horror of war with the help of graphic tonality. If in the "Earth" the frame is flooded with light, then here we see a gray sky, horses rushing to escape from shells. In Arsenal, filmed in 1929, we see famine and devastation. The film begins with the title "Oh, a mother had three sons." We see an old woman, an empty hut, lying pillars. An empty village, only old women sitting at the houses, a legless old man on crutches. The caption follows: "The mother does not have three sons." A woman falls into a field. All these shots also indicate a violation of harmony, which leads to war, confrontation. The film ends with an uprising and the execution of the rebels. Timosh turns out to be a hero who cannot be killed. He, like the "eternal grandfather", embodies the idea of "eternity of life". A. Dovzhenko considered the modern theme to be the main one in cinematography, and the main one in the modern theme is a simple Soviet man, who is the greatest phenomenon in the history of peoples ^{[31, p. 56]}.

Among those who appreciated the "Earth" as an exceptionally talented work, they expressed dissatisfaction with the fact, as, for example, A. Fadeev, that Dovzhenko allegedly did not show the true intensity of the class struggle in the countryside ^{[3, p. 85]}. But the greatness of A. Dovzhenko, as an artist, lies in the fact that he went beyond class and national contradictions. The land is an enduring value for him, in the biblical sense. This idea is best reflected in the lines from the book of Ecclesiastes: "Generation passes away, and generation comes, but the earth remains forever" (Ecclesiastes 1:4). A grandfather is being buried, and a little grandson is smiling next to him. Vasil is being buried ? the branches of apple trees caress his face. Vasil is carried through fields with sunflowers, the wind shakes the ears. Vasil's mother gives birth to a new son, his bride Natalka finds a new groom. Life on earth does not stop. As R. P. Sobolev correctly noted: "The cycle of life is eternal! And above all this is an impossibly beautiful, abundant, wise ... nature" ^{[3, p. 90]}. No wonder, at the beginning and at the end of the film, the blessed rain irrigates the earth. A. Dovzhenko himself wrote in his Autobiography that without a passionate love for nature, a person cannot be an artist ^{[8, p. 35]}.

A. Dovzhenko also wrote that as a child he had a certain tendency to contemplation, he was a very dreamy boy. For him, life existed in two conflicting aspects ? real and imaginary, but seemingly realized ^{[31, p. 35]}. This feature of Dovzhenko is seen in his films, where there is no sharp change of frames, as in S. Eisenstein. V. Shklovsky noted that Dovzhenko introduced "slow viewing" into cinema, he created "cinematography of a long piece", thus introduced cinematic slowness ^{[3, p. 43]}. It is also impossible not to agree with S. I. Freilich that Dovzhenko's landscape duration acquires an emphatically metaphorical meaning, he is a lyricist ^{[16, p. 274]}. All his life Dovzhenko glorified the beauty of nature, earthly beauty and, as if, devoted each of his films to the earth, which he dreamed of turning into a blooming garden, a kind of paradise on earth. The heroes of A. Dovzhenko are building exactly the "earthly paradise". The gardens that we see in the "Earth" are the work of human hands. Man not only cultivates nature, but also creates a "second nature" ? machinery, technical structures, filling the earth with them. So the hero of the film "Ivan", a peasant, leaves the land for the construction of the Dnieper River.

Aerograd, filmed in 1935, talks about the city of the future, a city that does not yet exist. Aerograd is a kind of "heavenly city", "earthly paradise". This is a city where planes from all over the country fly to the territory: Kamchatka, Chukchi, Commander, Khabarovsk, Spassky, Volochaevsky, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Ob, Lena, Yenisei, Baikal-Amur, Buryat-Mongolian, Ussuri, Dnieper, Volga-Don, Syrdarya, Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Zaporozhye. Studying the Far East, Dovzhenko comes to ideas close to Eurasians ^{[32, pp. 21-32]}. He came to the conclusion that the USSR is the concept of a colossal territory, a huge space, all kinds of climatic and geographical zones ^{[31, p. 287]}. He also noted that our role in the Pacific is extremely important as the role of the world order ^{[30, p. 286]}. The territory he was making the film about is the border of the largest continent of the old world, the coast of the largest ocean border, the border of the largest country ? Of the Soviet Union ^{[31, p. 287]}. On the one hand, Aerograd is a dream city. On the day of the city's foundation, the hero of the film Stepan Glushak says that his taiga dreams came to life. On the other hand, Aerograd, according to the author himself, is not an artist's fiction, but the reality of our days, and the fact that this city does not exist yet does not mean anything at all ^{[31, p. 291]}. Aerograd is a dream that will become a reality, a fairy tale that will become a reality: "Sometimes I think: what if during the production of the film they would have taken and built a city in Sovetskaya Gavan! Everything is possible with us. Magadan was built on the Okhotsk coast with monstrous speed, and everyone likes it and everyone is laughing happily now" ^{[31, p. 291]}. Dovzhenko's prediction came true: in the 1930s, many new cities and settlements appeared in the Far East. The trend of socialist construction is reflected in the films of Dziga Vertov, such as "The Eleventh" in 1928, "Symphony of Donbass" ("Enthusiasm") in 1930. A similar situation was described by V. Mayakovsky in a poem about the construction of Kuznetsk in 1929: "Clouds are running across the sky, // rain // twilight is compressed, // under the old / / cart // the workers are lying. // And he hears // a proud whisper // water // both under / / and above: // “In four / / years // there will be / / a garden city here!"" ^{[33, p. 426]}. "Garden city", "garden as a city" is also a "creative space", "earthly paradise".

Dovzhenko's heroes sing victory songs in "Earth", "Aerograd", "Ivan", "Shchors". According to J. Deleuze, this is a song about the earth, which is present in all human songs, even in the saddest ones, and is composed again as a great revolutionary song ^{[18, p. 250]}. The idea of the "garden" as an "earthly paradise" is present in many films by A. Dovzhenko, and, of course, in "Michurin".

Paradise on earth

The film "Michurin" ("Life in bloom") it was conceived before the Great Patriotic War ^{[27, p. 320]}. According to A. Dovzhenko, the film was supposed to tell the viewer about a person, life, work and the nobility of a high goal ^{[27, p. 320]}. The film begins with a panorama of a blooming garden. Michurin is working with an assistant in the garden. Americans come to offer the scientist a lucrative contract. "I am a Russian man," Michurin replies, "and there is no money or steamships that could take me away from my homeland." Especially noteworthy is the episode in which the young Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin and his wife Alexandra Vasilyevna walk across the field, and Michurin utters words reflecting the purpose of his life: "We will move our science. And we will turn the whole earth into a paradise. We will turn our miserable willow and aspen Russia into a garden as beautiful as humanity has never dreamed of." No wonder Dovzhenko felt himself in Michurin ^{[27, p. 37]}. The film "Michurin" was released in 1948, at the same time A. Dovzhenko laid an apple orchard near the walls of Mosfilm, which is still in bloom.

Dovzhenko cultivated the land, not only creating gardens, but also masterpieces. Michurin competed with nature, trying to make the earth better, more beautiful, because it is he who owns the words that Dovzhenko reproduces in his film: "We cannot expect favors from nature. It is our task to take them from her." Dovzhenko and Michurin are creators, demiurges.

As noted above, the theme of man and nature, their interrelationships, is a constant in Dovzhenko's work. According to R. P. Sobolev, starting with Zvenigora, nature is not only an object, but also the subject of Dovzhenkov's film stories ^{[3, p. 230]}, nature is not a background, not a medium of action, but an active acting force ^{[3, p. 230]}. This is clearly seen in the example of shots when an autumn whirlwind blows, leaves fly off trees, birds circle. We see bare trees. In the next frame, Michurin announces the death of his wife and cries over her portrait. Spring is coming, apple trees, cherries, roses, peonies are blooming, the earth turns into a blooming garden. It is noteworthy that Michurin was one of the first color films in Soviet cinema and Dovzhenko's first color film.

The meeting of M. I. Kalinin and I. V. Michurin also takes place against the background of nature:

Kalinin: We'll give you everything, just tell us what you need.

Michurin: 50 years of life.

Kalinin: No, my dear, no.

Michurin: I know.

Kalinin: But I'm sure our grandchildren will talk about this topic in a different way. This is an eternal, Faustian, eternal theme, and you solve it.

Michurin: I believe it. We are solving it with you."

The topic of "eternity of life" comes up again. The film ends with a panorama of orchards, ears of wheat, and a view of ripe apples, which resembles footage from "Earth".

"Love the Earth!" ? these words are uttered by the hero of the film "Poem about the Sea", chairman of the collective farm Savva Zarudny, as a final farewell. The film was shot in 1958 according to the script by A. Dovzhenko by his wife, colleague Yulia Solntseva, who was the co-director of his films Shchors, Aerograd, etc. The film tells about the drama that the construction of the Kakhovskaya HPP in the south of Ukraine turned into for the residents of one village, as a result of which the village went under water.

Yu. Solntseva shot two more films based on the scripts of A. Dovzhenko: "The Tale of the Fiery Years" in 1960 and "The Enchanted Gum" in 1964. The idea of the earth as a garden of Eden also finds its development in these films. The hero of the "Tale of the Fiery Years" Ivan Orlyuk has the image of a sower: "I love sowing so much, I love plowing, threshing, but most of all I love sowing, growing.... Nowhere has it given birth like where I sowed." Ivan carries a handful of native land in his pocket. The action takes place during the Great Patriotic War. Having shot the deserters, Ivan is brought before the tribunal. His speech about seeds, about the earth shocked the command, he was sent back to the front, where he was wounded, but survived and reached Berlin.

According to R. P. Sobolev, Dovzhenko, while working on the "Tale of the Fiery Years", introduces into his artistic palette techniques of expression that were previously not peculiar to him, for example, a dream ^{[3, p. 286]}. The severely wounded Ivan falls not to the ground, but into his grandfather's old boat, which carries him to his native hut past the gardens. All this, of course, resembles the footage from "Earth", when grandfather and Vasil are carried in the coffin. In addition, there is a reference to the ancient burial rite in the boat. The rook is connected with the water element, water ? with the transition to a new state. Ivan is at the junction of life and death, as a result, life wins. At first, the doctors do not believe that Ivan can be saved, but he gets up, reaches the operating room and requires surgery. According to R. P. Sobolev, Ivan's "Dream" is a method of expression ? as a form and installation method, it is used to show what we would call the subconscious mind to erase the shaky lines between reality and sensation ^{[3, p. 286]}. Then, R.P. Sobolev clarifies that this is not even a dream ? it is an attempt to express the dying state of a person (a technique that hit the screens only twelve years later in the film "Cranes are Flying") ^{[3, p. 286]}. The episode with Ivan's parents is also noteworthy. The enemies destroyed their hut, there was only one stove left, on which they freeze in a snowstorm and dream of a beautiful field with red poppies.

We also see blooming fields with red poppies, sunflowers, and flowering trees in the garden in "The Enchanted Gum", a film directed by Yu. Solntseva based on the script by A. Dovzhenko. His idea of the earth as a garden of Eden is also realized here. In fact, the film is his autobiography, built like the memoirs of a colonel writer. Dovzhenko recalled his childhood, describing family members ? mother, father, grandfather, "like God" and "great-grandmother". The mother in the "Enchanted Gum" says: "I love nothing in the world so much as to plant it in the ground so that it grows. When every little thing comes out of it, it's my joy."

The film ends with the writer's voiceover: "One should never forget and always remember that the people choose their artists mainly to show the world that life is beautiful.... And it sometimes seems surprisingly pathetic that sometimes it is not enough in the hour of clarity of spirit to feel the happiness of life. And that's why so much beauty passes by our eyes..."

Beauty, for A. Dovzhenko, as an aesthetic category, occupies a central place. He was a real movie artist. In his "Autobiography" he wrote that drawing had been his passion since childhood. He was convinced that if he had received the right upbringing and education, he would have been a more powerful artist in painting than in cinema ^{[31, p. 43]}. Each frame of the great director is a separate work of art. For example, in Aerograd, a frame depicting the evening taiga against the background of mountains resembles paintings by N.K. Roerich. Dovzhenko creates a "space of Beauty". The garden is one of these spaces.

The work of A. P. Dovzhenko influenced the entire poetic cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, both in his native country and abroad. His influence on Italian neorealists, as well as Soviet directors A. Tarkovsky, M. Kalatozov, A. Konchalovsky, G. Chukhrai is strong. For example, similar shots of a boy running along the riverbank from "Enchanted Gum" can be seen in A. Tarkovsky's "Ivanov's Childhood", and the "eternal grandfather" from "Zvenigora" reappears in A. Konchalovsky's "Sibiriad".

Conclusions

A. Dovzhenko creates a special "creative space" in his films. "Earth" as a "garden", as an "earthly paradise" is one of such spaces. The Biblical garden is a creation of God, the "earthly paradise" is a creation of man. In Zvenigor, the earth acts as a natural given. In the film "Earth", the garden appears as a creation of natural and human efforts. In "Ivan" and "Aerograd", the garden appears as a city of the future. The "garden" in the work of A. Dovzhenko is a "creative space" symbolizing the earthly paradise.