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Last night's premiere in St Petersburg was hailed as Britain's contribution to festivities for the 200th anniversary of Pushkin's birth next Sunday. But Saturday's press showing turned into a game of "spot the mistake".
At one stage the audience hooted with laughter and burst into mock applause when a young lady of the early 19th century Russian aristocracy launched into a song from a notorious Stalin-era propaganda film. Not only was the song first performed by a choir of collective farm girls in the 1950 movie Cossacks From the Kuban, it is also a firm favourite at drunken parties in today's Russia.
Fiennes, who plays the title role and is also executive producer, played down the slip at a press conference yesterday, saying: "I trust you saw that Onegin looked bored when he heard that song from the Soviet period."
However, the 36-year-old British star had been a good deal less relaxed when the gaffe was pointed out to him on Saturday. According to one onlooker, "he turned as white as a sheet". There was more laughter from the audience when it read a clumsy Russian translation in subtitles of the English prose version of some of the novel's most famous lines of poetry.
Eugene Onegin - which tells of unrequited love, cynicism and a duel in upper-class society at the beginning of the last century - was Russia's first proper novel and Pushkin the father of the country's literary language. So Fiennes had been understandably nervous about how ordinary Russians would take to his £11 million adaptation, called simply Onegin.
"They know it so well, it's almost like making changes in the Gospel story," Fiennes said last week. His fears were proved right. Members of Saturday's audience - who, like most educated Russians, knew huge passages by heart - said they were distracted by the film's anachronisms and departures from the original text.
One journalist likened the cutting of the famous dream by the novel's main heroine, Tatyana - played by Liv Tyler - to axing Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Elsewhere in the film the characters dance to a waltz immediately recognisable as dating from the beginning of this century; Tatyana's name-day ball is held in summer, instead of January; and she marries a young, rather than grey-haired, husband.
The slips overshadowed what for many members of the audience was a hugely enjoyable piece of cinema and an electrifying performance by Fiennes himself. However, at least one Pushkin scholar hated the film, which is directed by Fiennes's sister, Martha, and compared it unfavourably to Tchaikovsky's opera based on the novel.
"The British film-makers have carried out a more radical experiment than Tchaikovsky: they have subtracted not just the author but the poetry from Pushkin's novel," complained Leonid Dubshan. "All that is left is something comparable in the wretchedness of its plot with a fairy tale. The film's creators have committed a profound act of anti-culture."
[TO READ RF'S RESPONSE TO THIS ARTICLE PLEASE SEE THE NEXT ARTICLE]
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on June 16, 1999
EL STEPHO