Ukrainian cinema: belonging and identity during the Soviet Thaw

version of War and Peace 'borrows' from Tolstoy but does not aim at 'fidelity of transformation', which Bondarchuk would accomplish.And yet, as a Hepburn/Fonda vehicle, Vidor's film enjoyed success not only in the United States but also in the Soviet Union itself.Bondarchuk's subsequent film, Waterloo, about Napoleon's final defeat, is often understood as the sequel to War and Peace.My impression is that such a 'coda' did not warrant such an extensive analysis, on par with War and Peace itself.Instead, Youngblood might have summed up this film in the conclusion with some short interpretative sketches.Youngblood successfully rescues a film to which history has not been kind and I hope that her book will help bring Bondarchuk's epic into the Russian Studies curriculum.Nonetheless, I would have liked to see Youngblood more frequently key into the specificity of the Brezhnev era.For example, she writes on page 87 that Prince Mikhail Kutuzov's 'religiosity subtly subverts Soviet orthodoxy on religion', but does not examine the space of religion more specifically in the late 1960s, a period of relatively relaxed official attitudes towards Orthodox Christianity.Likewise, the author might have backed up her claim that Tolstoy's treatment of Masonic societies would have been politically off limits for Bondarchuk (88).Tolstoy treats Pierre's flirtation with Freemasonry with a fair degree of comedic condescension, which would have fit nicely with Soviet attitudes.Had Bondarchuk chosen to explore the connections between 1812 and 1825, implicit in Tolstoy's conclusion, Soviet historians such as the Decembrist scholar Militsa Nechkina would probably have commended him.Those few criticisms aside, I found Bondarchuk's War and Peace