REVIEW: DOSTEVSKY'S TRAVELS It was a nice warm Saturday yesterday, in between bursts of rain. Warm enough for me to dispense with clothes for most of the day, for the first time in a while. So between laying around in the sun naked and cutting open old engine oil filters to compare their internal construction, I decided to combine my own quirky habits with a lunchtime viewing of one of the quirkier documentaries I know, caught recently with its film reel poking out of the BBC's vaults into the unknown depths of YouTube. Dostoevsky's Travels (1991): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PxkeFhzItE On Vimeo (untested): https://vimeo.com/307839240 If you're into quirky documentaries, then this screen-grab alone is probably enough to convince you it's worth a watch, but I'll talk about it more regardless: https://jff.org.il/sites/default/files/styles/slide_show/public/dostoevskys_travels_-_cat.jpg Dostoevsky's Travels follows Dimitri Dostoevsky, St Petersburg tram driver and great-granson of the famous 19th centry Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, on his first journey to Western Europe at the beginning of the 1990s, just as the Communist government in Russia was collapsing. A 52min documentary made early in the career of Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski and published by the BBC in 1991, this observational film tags along with Dimitri when he's invited into Germany to speak with a newly founded German Dostoevsky society. In spite of the literary association, this film isn't really about the works of the famous auther, who I haven't read myself. Instead it captures a unique time in history where the western european ellite was facinated with the new cultural, and most particularly, business, potential of an open capitalist Russia then ermerging from behind the iron curtain. Dostoevsky's 19th century novels seem to have been a good match for the right-wing visions of Russia's future being juggled around by the european aristocracy which had been cut off from the country since the Russian Revolution. From a German casino looking to expand into St Petersburg, to people trying to restore the Russian Monarchy, and the mayor who secures him a visa in exchange for some promotional work, Dimitri mages to stumble between various people interested in using his name, though not his own artistic talents, to their own ends. Yet Dimitri doesn't really care about any of that, all he wants is to make enough money to buy a Mercedes and drive it back home to St Petersburg. Altogether this makes for a funny, tragic, and insightful film. At one point he's translating for a blind German car dealer selling cars at a shady maket for Russian soldiers said to be offereing anything from weapons to wives in exchange for a western motor. He stays with a monk claiming to have been exiled from Russia by word of God rather than by the Communist government. Then later he drives a borrowed Ferrari into Lichtenstein to meet his only relative in the West, Baron von Falz-Fein, at his villa where he meets a young man who the baron hopes to place as the next Tsar of Russia. Presenting itself in a purely observational style, there are certain aspects to this documentary which my cynical side has to proclaim as a little 'too good'. Besides the almost perfect beginning, middle, and end to the storyline, some shots are too well framed and timed to have been taken without a degree of staging. Indeed you can easily see how the director has since transitioned to making fictional feature films. Indeed a skeptic like me begins to wonder how much of the story itself is actually true, although it's hard to imagine how many of the important scenes could be completely faked on the budget of a one-hour foreign BBC documentary. Research online isn't terribly rewarding. There's no corresponding Dimitri Dostoevsky known to the internet today except through references to this documentary, plus a very odd biography of a Russian actor by the same name, starring in Soviet-era film versions of Fyodor Dostoevsky's works, but who is said to have died in 1985: https://guidedoc.tv/people/dimitri-dostoevsky-39199/ But IMDB doesn't list a Dimitri Dostoevsky in the credits for those films! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062757/fullcredits/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051762/fullcredits/ It seems like this is another case of the internet consciousness being corrupted by a wayward AI website content generator that's worked out there's an association with Dimitri Dostoevsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky in film work due to the documentary, then spiraled off from that into completely senseless fiction. Then again, the documentary does mention Dimitri helping in an unspecified way with 'The Posessed', a later film adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel. IMDB lists that as released in 1988 and there's no Dimitri Dostoevsky in the credits for it either: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093765/fullcredits/ One person who I could follow up on was Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein, a rather facinating figure himself who died in a fire at his villa in 2018 at the age of 106. His biographies online seem to back up everything shown in the documentary, including photos of the richly furnished villa where he meets Dimitri in the film, and his ambition to restore the Russian monarchy. He also seems to have been extremely active in promoting his home country of Lichtenstein to the world, whose prince at the time of the Russian Revolution granted him and his family citizenship when they fled from Russia. His promotion of the country was helped by, or perhaps more cynically because of, his tourist shop business, positioned to accomodate American tourists diverted to Lichtenstein for lunch after he pointed out to US tour operators that this would easily allow them to advertise touring eleven countries instead of ten. The success of this business apparantly restored him his family's traditional position of wealth and influence that would have been impossible for the Dostoyevsky family back in Communist Russia. A fun 1970s New York Times article on the baron: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/08/archives/if-you-can-find-liechtenstein-the-baron-will-be-waiting.html A 2023 Paper about the Baron's life "A Russian Aristocrat in the Principality of Liechtenstein: Life Trajectories, Material Culture, and Language": https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/culture-2022-0172/html Gopherpedia page: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Eduard%20von%20Falz-Fein Oh and it seems _he_ is on IMDB, as a production manager for a 1950s movie set in Lichtenstein, as well as appearances in a couple of other TV documentaries: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4502417/ As for the documentary's director, Pawel Pawlikowski, there are a few other documentary works from him available on the web. So far I've only watched Tripping With Zhirinovsky from 1995 - a less narrative-driven observational documentary following a right-wing politician compaigning from a old Soviet-era cruise ship that ironically still has a red star painted on its bow. The documentary itself lacks many of the better qualities in Dostoevsky's Travels, but the politician it documents, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, can be seen sharing traits of right-wing western politicians such as Donald Trump today. He makes innumerable promises on the shakiest of policy ideas (forcing Germany to pay reparations to Russia for deaths in WWII), and seems willing to try anything to further his political career (launching his own vodka brand even though his own campaign song mentions that he doesn't drink). Then again, I just don't like politicians. Tripping With Zhirinovsky (1995) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIbkR5NXVP4 "From Moscow to Pietushki" apparantly has a similar concept to Dostoevsky's Travels, following a living Russian author, and was released a year earlier. From Moscow to Pietushki (1990): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orAZ6q35q0M Serbian Epics documents the more serious topic of the Bosnian War, and seems to have been Pawlikowski's most successful film before he switched to fictional works. Serbian Epics (1992) https://archive.org/details/SerbianEpics1992 https://vimeo.com/308405461 - The Free Thinker