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By producing and starring in a film adaptation of Eugene Onegin, the Russians' favourite work of literature by their most revered writer, Alexander Pushkin, Fiennes is sticking his neck out. Had he taken a film of the Koran to Iran, his audience would have been no less sceptical than was the case in St Petersburg yesterday.
After Onegin's press screening, the massed ranks of St Petersburg's underpaid critics and intellectuals arrived at Fiennes' press conference, determined to chop the impostor's head off.
'Thank for your efforts Mr Fiennes, but why did you make so many departures from the text?"
'How would you feel if a Russian had adapted Hamlet without including the soliloquy 'To be or not to be'?"
'Why did you make St Petersburg look so depressing?"
Sitting next to his sister, Martha, who directed Onegin, Fiennes replied with charm, determination and intelligence. 'It's a process of adaptation, not of replication," he explained.
Three and a half hours later, no blood had been spilt and no duels fought in defence of Pushkin's honour. Fiennes made heroic progress.
'The biggest thing one comes up against is their determination to compare the literature with the film, which is natural, of course, rather than respond to it as a film in its own right. Our challenge is to respond as film-makers," he said after his grilling.
To his pride and relief, St Petersburg's cultural commissars have included the Onegin film in this year's official celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Pushkin's birth.
'They could have decided not to take it. So that in itself has give a stamp of approval, whatever the critics might say."
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is a classic story of passion, death and unrequited love, which is universally acknowledged as the 'encyclopaedia of Russian life".
Russian film directors have understandably kept their distance, further deterred from trying to adapt it by the condemnation that Tchaikovsky's operatic version received.
'You have to understand that Pushkin is a kind of pagan god in Russia," said Lev Luria, a St Petersburg critic.
'The Soviet authorities made things worse by trying to turn him into a political institution. People responded by telling rude jokes about him almost in the same way they told jokes about Lenin. Only now are we able to think of Pushkin as just a brilliant writer and Fiennes is contributing to this process."
Russia's businessmen are also helping debunk Pushkin by cashing in on the bicentenary. The chocolate company, Red October has launched a line of Pushkin chocolates. Coca-Cola is using a line of his poetry in one of its adverts. Smirnoff has produced a brand of Pushkin vodka.
'Thank God for all this kitsch," said Mr Luria. 'More reverence for Pushkin would suffocate him."
Yuri Luzhkov, the Moscow mayor and presidential hopeful, has raised portraits of Pushkin around ther city. Excerpts from his poems about Moscow are quoted underneath his image. Not to be outdone, Mr Luzhkov's St Petersburg counterpart, Vladimir Yakovlev, has done the same, quoting intead Pushkin's love for St Petersburg, where he grew up and first gained fame.
The anniversary celebrations will culminate on his birthday, June 6, when political, religious and artistic elites gather across the country for recitals and praise.
'It will be awful. They will try to recite him and no doubt make terrible mistakes," said Mr Luria. 'But Pushkin will survive. The great thing about him is that he can appeal to everyone but no one can own him."
Such is the variety of Pushkin's work that communists, nationalists, liberals, atheists and Christians can all embrace him. Though exiled to the Crimea for mixing with the Decembrist revolutionaries, Pushkin also praised the tsar. While some of his poems are bawdy, he was also devout. His death at the age of 38 was very Russian. Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel with a French officer whom he accused of insulting his wife.
Resentment at a British film star apparently gatecrashing this massive Pushkin party is perhaps understandable from a divided nation increasingly dependent on foreign aid. But some are also flattered and relieved.
' Fiennes is a great actor, who, thank God, has made a good film about Russia without the usual cliches of vodka and bears," said the film critic Danil Segal. ' Onegin is a lot better than the last James Bond."
Despite his stressful press conference, Fiennes returned the compliment. 'Their questions were very intelligent. They were not interested in Hollywood gossip."
But one journalist almost flummoxed him with a question on philosophy. Did he believe in the conclusion to Eugene Onegin that happiness was 'so possible' or did he subscribe to the view expresed in one of Puskhin's later poems that there was 'no happiness on earth, only tranquillity and will'?
'I'll go for the second option,' replied Fiennes amid laughter.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on June 16, 1999
EL STEPHO