“The Creation of Adam” (1993, dir. Yu. Pavlov)

The film Sotvorenie Adama (The Creation of Adam) was released in Russia in 1993—the same year that saw the repeal of Article 121 of the Russian Federation’s Criminal Code, which had prohibited sexual relations between men. The film is an unusual specimen of early post-Soviet film, exhibiting the daring novelty of strong homoerotic motifs. For most of the film, these elements are confined to narrative zones that bour the boundary between real and imaginary.

 

The film’s protagonist, Andrei, who is experiencing a crisis in his marriage, encounters a strange man named Philip. A series of uncanny, quasi dream-like homoerotic encounters ensue between the two, unsettling Andrei. In the end, Philip reveals that he is Andrei’s “guardian angel” and guides Andrei back to his wife—whom he reveals to be pregnant. The film’s title is taken from Michelangelo’s famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel (1508-1512), an image of which appears on a vinyl record cover shown in Philip’s apartment. Michelangelo, whose name contains the Italian word for “angel,” was a crucial reference point in 1990s-era Russia for people who tried to legitimize sexual pluralism by observing that LGBTQIA artists (to use contemporary terminology) had been responsible for creating many of the defining works of Western culture.

 

The film leaves open the question of whether Andrei and Philip’s relationship is real or imaginary. Regardless, homosexual desire erupts into the diegesis through the character of Oleg, who appears in the sequence featured in this artifact alongside the film’s protagonist, Andrei. Earlier, Andrei had witnessed a group of men savagely beating Oleg and hurling homophobic slurs at him. Andrei intervenes to defend Oleg and ultimately rescues him, bringing him back to the apartment he shares with his wife. 

 

The character of Oleg represents a gay experience that recalls the trials of Soviet-era political dissidents—figures whose suffering found newfound respect, even reverence, in early post-Soviet culture. Like Soviet-era dissidents, Oleg has been surveilled by acquaintances and neighbors, dogged by rumor and innuendo, reported on, and fired from his job. His defiant resolve to express desires and sensibilities at odds with dominant norms, as well as his choice to live in pain and isolation rather than inauthenticity and conformism, mark Oleg as a heroic outcast akin to the Soviet dissidents glorified in 1990s-era Russian culture. As a resident of the smaller regional center of Saratov, where life for LGBTQ people would have been considerably harder than in the capitals, the character of Oleg speaks to the experience not only of personal, but systematic and geographic marginality.  

 

In the sequence above, Oleg describes his plans to find lodging for the night. He tells Andrei that he will visit a local pleshka, an informal meeting place for gay men often found in parks, train stations, and other public spaces, ultimately going home with a man who can offer him shelter for the night. It is clear that these precarious plans will further expose Oleg to the possibility of violent attack. Although Andrei, the film’s ostensibly heterosexual protagonist, plays with feminizing Oleg—for instance, by using the feminine form of the noun when asking Oleg if he is a hospital orderly or sanitarka—he chooses to defend his new friend against violence, welcomes him into his home, and listens calmly and respectfully to Oleg’s honest answers to questions about his sexuality and life. 

 

The film’s hero, even as his trajectory ends in a restored heterosexual, procreative family structure, thus seems to model a kind of tolerance of sexual pluralism. The film as a whole is something of a cinematic representation of a widely observed phenomenon documented in sociologist Laurie Essig’s 1999 book Queer in Russia: a perception of homosexual desire as part of most people’s “normal” experience—yet a part that, theoretically, should remain private and, if not confined to fantasy, certainly isolated from one’s social world and public self-presentation.