Sergej Jutkevič, one of the ‘three Musketeers’ of FEKS (along with Grigorij Kozincev and Leonid Trauberg) from the late 1930s onward made the portrayal of Lenin one of his specialties, in three exquisite films: The Man with the Gun (which along with two Mikhail Romm films was the first full-scale depiction of a fictional Lenin), Tales of Lenin, and Lenin in Poland, the finest of the three. Here at last was an intimate Lenin, with humorous touches. The director shared with the great actor Maxim Strauch the conviction that it would be dull to make a film about an innovator without thinking about avant-garde form: they wanted to create a synthesis through emotion and poetic impression. Lenin in Poland presents a man behind the legend, an inner view. Purely political events are not central, but thoughts and emotions are, with a clever use of inner monologue, meaning that everything is reflected through Lenin’s eyes, with his thought process and the structure of his memories playing a more important role than the events, or in this case an eventless period of his life, although it was heavy with historical meaning given that these are the months leading to WWI and immediately following the war’s outbreak. (This detail thus contributes one more facet to our 1914 theme.) It is like a silent movie, with only Strauch’s voice describing what happens and pondering the meaning of disparate news. Henri Langlois must have been inspired by this remarkable film when he wrote the following lines: “The entire evolution, the entire outline of Sergej Jutkevič’s work lies in this refusal, in this attachment to the real spirit, that is fundamental to the idea of the avant-garde. His work is that of a man who never stopped changing, while remaining entirely faithful to his point of departure, and it is this perpetual refusal, combined with this fidelity, that gives his work unity, in a multiplicity that is all the more subtle because he never betrayed nor renounced any of the ideas of his youth, allowing them to mature”.

Peter von Bagh