The Instance of the Letter in the Psychobiography of A. Tarkovsky

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

There are few central themes in Tarkovsky’s cinema and
life (as it’s described in his diary), in particularly, those of grass
(trava), expense (trata), and hunting, persecution (travlja).
«Trava-trata-travlja» makes up a signifying complex that defines
the essential Tarkovsky’s imagery, circling around the fantasy of
House. Lacan’s model of chains of significers that establish sym-
bolic trajectories of representations thus maintaining their dis-
tance from the Real (das Ding) and presetting their modes of as-
sociations and displacements of aects, allows us to grasp the
symbolic mechanisms underlying Tarkovsky’s artistic imaginary.
The next move of analysis historicises Lacanian thought pro-
viding an opportunity to go beyond the formal order of signi-
ficers and revealing the historical peculiarity of the Soviet aw
modernity (urban communities of intelligentsia, creative labour,
restructuring of power, ambiguity of money) as a symbolic force
structuring both artistic and biographical imaginary.