Herzog meets Gorbachev - a film review

Werner Herzog, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

Alone I set out on the road;

The flinty path is sparkling in the mist;
The night is still. The desert harks to God,
And star with star converses.

The vault is overwhelmed with solemn wonder 
The earth in cobalt aura sleeps. . .
Why do I feel so pained and troubled? 
What do I harbor: hope, regrets? 

I see no hope in years to come,
Have no regrets for things gone by. 
All that I seek is peace and freedom!
To lose myself and sleep!

But not the frozen slumber of the grave…
I'd like eternal sleep to leave
My life force dozing in my breast
Gently with my breath to rise and fall;

By night and day, my hearing would be soothed
By voices sweet, singing to me of love.
And over me, forever green,

A dark oak tree would bend and rustle.

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov.

Werner Herzog has made a moving documentary about the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. It’s available on Netflix (DVD, not streaming): Meeting Gorbachev, a film by Werner Herzog and André Singer, 2019.

Gorbachev is a hero of mine. He's a hero to Herzog, as well, and that no doubt explains why I found the documentary so compelling.

Or maybe it’s because it’s the life of a tragic figure, a man who, when asked what he’d like to have engraved on his headstone answered, “We tried.”

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev turned 88 this year. 

I’m now in my 80^th year, and I have a new appreciation for old men and women in their 80s. And a new interest in learning how to live in the skin of an old man, with not that many years left. I’d like to do it right.

When you're that old, people tend to want to ask you questions about your life. Dumb questions like "to what do you attribute such a long life?" 

All too often you get equally dumb answers, like “I make it a habit to drink hot chocolate every night before I go to bed.”

Less dumb is the question, “How would you like to be remembered after you’re gone?” It’s less dumb, but it’s kind of rude. What are you supposed to say, “I want to be remembered as a kind, generous, compassionate man, one who never turned away a hungry man from my front door, never said a racist, sexist, homophobic thing in my life, never failed to pay his taxes...”  

You can, of course, use the opportunity to say how much you loved your family and friends, but that doesn’t really leave anybody the wiser. They’ll go, “Awwwww, isn’t he sweet!” and shake their heads at the evidence you’ve entered into the doddering years.

We’re Americans. We’re not supposed to think about death, much less talk about it openly. We can go at it obliquely with bits of wisdom like  “Remember that nobody ever says, ‘I wish I had spent more time at the office,’”  the moral being, of course, to remind you to get your priorities straight before you go.

When Herzog asks this question of Gorbachev, Gorbachev responds by citing this Lermontov poem. That kind of puts him in the same category as the Dalai Lama. Somebody once asked him, “Now that the Chinese have forced you to leave Tibet, what do you intend to do with the rest of your life? The Dalai Lama responded: “I intend to prepare for my death.”

Very lovely Buddhist answer.

Here in America, where democracy is on life support, talking about death is assumed to be an admission of failure. It makes people angry and uncomfortable. “Why focus on the negative,” they wonder, when you’re supposed to keep a positive attitude toward life till the very end. They may consider you a bit of a kook for mentioning the subject, possibly recommend therapy. Prozac, maybe.

I was taken aback by the stanza in the Lermontov poem which runs:

I see no hope in years to come,

Have no regrets for things gone by. 

All that I seek is peace and freedom!

To lose myself and sleep!

Damn! What a gloomy thought.  “No hope in years to come?” Really? Something only a sick and dying person might say, somebody seeking relief from pain.

But read on. If you go on to the next two stanzas, you get a very different picture:

But not the frozen slumber of the grave…

I'd like eternal sleep to leave

My life force dozing in my breast

Gently with my breath to rise and fall;

By night and day, my hearing would be soothed

By voices sweet, singing to me of love.

And over me, forever green,

A dark oak tree would bend and rustle.

It’s a real answer. I don’t want heaven. I want life. I want the love I share with others to carry on. I recognize that I will walk that road alone, but the image I want is of my chest rising and falling. 

Some are capable of imagining life among the angels in a place of perfect bliss. Allow me to imagine a life where you doze under a dark oak tree and where love carries on.

Werner Herzog is my age. He’ll be 77 in a couple weeks.

Two old men sitting face-to-face across a historical divide. Herzog’s people once killed over twenty million of Gorbachev’s people. But this man Gorbachev is revered today in Germany as the man who brought about German reunification.

Gorbachev grew up at a time when people in his home town actually died of hunger. His socialism isn’t the stuff of academic debate; it’s the way out of a callous world where such things can happen. Herzog grew up feeling the shame of German atrocities and dreaming his nation might be put back together again in a way that would bring out the good he knows lives in the German soul. They are two old men who share an optimism despite having lived through unspeakable misery. When the two talk to each other, it’s history talking.

While Gorbachev is idolized in Germany and greatly admired in the West, in his homeland he is despised as the man who brought down the Soviet Union. That makes Gorbachev a tragic figure, since, if he had his way, the Soviet Union would still exist. He wanted reform. But perestroika got away from him and the union fell into pieces. Today Russia is controlled by vulture capitalists, just as its Cold War rivals are. The former Cold War antagonists, instead of building on perhaps his greatest accomplishment, the dismantling of nuclear weapons, are talking about building them back up again – in an age where they have become immeasurably more destructive.

Israelis and Palestinians might well burn both their houses down because the former are jerked around by a perverse religious belief that their God promised them the land the Palestinians think they have a right to, and the latter can’t find a non-violent response to the injustice inflicted upon them. Americans and Russians can’t stop behaving as imperial powers and meddling in each other’s internal affairs. Now that the Russians have acquired the capacity to destabilize the American political system and the Americans have surrendered to their basest instincts rather than rise above competition and petty rivalry, things don’t look good at all at the moment. We may both be doomed.

Let’s hope there will be somebody left standing to carve “We tried” on our tombstones.

I’m going to rent this documentary again. I expect I’ll want to watch it several times more.

At the height of the Cold War I was trained by the American military to spy on the Russians. They sent me to study Russian for a year. In an army uniform. In an environment so paranoid about the evil “rooskies” that even our bilingual dictionaries were stamped “Confidential.” Because they contained words in Russian.

The paranoia didn’t hold because the “evil empire” propaganda was so inept. What I came away with was a love of the Russian language and culture that has so enriched my life that it’s even today a source of comfort when the world gets too much for me. I have Alexander Malofeev. Who needs Xanax? I have the Igor Moiseev dancers.   Who needs psychotherapy? I have Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Who needs food and water?

Have a look at this old man, Gorbachev. And tell me where you can find a man who has led a more decent life.

He didn’t do everything right. But then nobody does.

This man, this Russian…

He tried.

Here's the Lermontov poem in the original Russian:

Выхожу один я на дорогу

• Выхожу один я на дорогу, • Сквозь туман кремистый пут блестит, • Ночь тиха. Пустыня внемлет Богу, • И звезда с звездою говорит. • В небесах торжественно и чудно, • Спит земля в сиянье голубом... • Что же мне так больно и так трудно, • Жду ль чего? Жалею ли о чём? • Уж не жду от жизни ничего я, • И не жаль мне прошлого ничуть, • Я ищу свободы и покоя! • Я б хотел забыться и заснуть! • Но не тем холодным сном могилы, • Я б желал навеки так заснуть, • Чтоб в груди дремали жизни силы, • Чтоб, дыша, вздымалась тихо грудь. • Чтоб всю ночь, весь день мой слух лелея, • Про любовь мне сладкий голос пел, • Надо мной чтоб, вечно зеленея, • Тёмный дуб склонялся и шумел.

And here's how it sounds when sung by a bunch of cool young Russian guys.

And here's how it sounds when the king of the world himself sings it.

photo credit