Background
Mark Donskoi was born on 6 March 1890 in Odessa.
Mark Donskoi was born on 6 March 1890 in Odessa.
Donskoi fought in the Civil War and was taken prisoner by the Whites before he entered films in 1925, first as an assistant to Eisenstein. He did a variety of jobs, including acting and writing. His early films showed an interest in homely, emotional stories, but it was clearly his own friendship with Gorky that gave an extra imaginative intensity to the trilogy.
During the war, Donskoi made patriotic films, including The Rainbow, a melodramatic, inspirational story of partisans resisting the Nazis. After the war, he was persuaded to repeat his Gorky success: both Mat and Foma Gordeyev were based on the writer’s work. Nothing equaled the trilogy until Serdtsye Match and Vernost Match, two films about the earlv life of Lenin, but concentrating on the character of the mother. Again, potential hagiography stimulated Donskoi’s feeling for the turn of the century and allowed his sympathy for matriarchal actresses to conie through: Elena Fadeyeva was moving in these films as Varvara Massaltinova held been as Gorky’s grandmother.
The “Gorky trilogy has been one of the better influences on Western liberal attitudes to the Soviet Union. It was not as rigorously geared to propaganda as many other Russian films; indeed, when the films were made, Donskoi himself was not a member ol the Communist party. The Gorky films have had rather the same appeal as the Pagnol movies: they are based on rich, authentic emotional treatment; they deal with human beings in terms of the family and traditional aspirations. In that sense, Gorkv is a Copperfield-like hero, and the charm of the films, backed up by Donsko is skill at period re-creation, is partly one of nostalgia for social solidity and the unflawed hopes of nineteenth-century youth. The sentiment, the sense of family, and the dense texture of everyday reality in those films will have won more friends than the montages of Eisenstein or Dziga Vertovs cameraman protagonist.
Tsena Cheloveka
1928Pesnya o Schastye
1934Kak Zakalyalas Stal
1942Dorogoi Tsenoi
1958