Two Prosecutors.

I recently saw the Sergei Loznitsa movie Two Prosecutors and was impressed enough that I decided to read the novella by Georgy Demidov that it was based on. I’m glad I did so, and I’m glad I saw the movie first, because the movie is better and the comparison is instructive.

The plot is simply told: in the dread year 1937, an idealistic young regional prosecutor named Kornev receives a short message, written in blood, from a political prisoner held in the local prison requesting a visit. He manages not only to gain entry into the prison but to talk the astonished head warden (how did this kid even find out about it?) into letting him see the prisoner, who turns out to be an old professor of his named Stepnyak, who (after ascertaining that Kornev’s parents are dead and he is unmarried) shows him terrible wounds resulting from brutal interrogations demanding confession to crimes he hasn’t committed, tells him there is clearly a regional band of counterrevolutionaries who have taken over the local NKVD and are discrediting the Party, and says that if he’s willing to risk his own career and perhaps life he should bring the situation to the attention of the central authorities. Kornev realizes there is no time to waste — the warden may be alerting his fellow conspirators even as they speak, and an arrest warrant may soon await him — and as soon as he leaves the prison, without even returning to his office, takes a train to Moscow to tell his story to Vyshinsky, the highest prosecutor in the USSR, who will surely do the right thing and arrest the wicked perpetrators. As you will have guessed, this does not go well.

The story was written in the late 1960s, though not published until 2009 (well after the author’s death), and was part of a wave of writing inspired by the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich revealing the various horrors of Stalinist repression. It’s well done for what it is, giving a very convincing picture of how the system worked down to the smallest details of the ways prisons coped with the sudden waves of arrestees sent their way (how are we going to get new barracks built in time?) and how the guards behaved, but it spends a whole lot of time giving detailed histories of both Kornev and Vyshinsky (the titular prosecutors), and after the inevitable arrest of the former describes what happened to him afterwards, and frankly it drags if (as is true of everyone today) you are already aware of what happened to those who bucked Stalin’s system.

The movie dispenses with all that. After a brief prologue in which a haggard prisoner, assigned to light a stove with a large number of letters written by prisoners asking for their cases to be reconsidered, stashes one away to smuggle out (his background too is described in the novel), it shows Kornev arriving at the prison, making his way past the various obstacles, and talking with Stepnyak (their conversation is shown at length). When he takes the train to Moscow, he is kept from sleeping by a one-legged WWI veteran (played by the same actor who portrayed Stepnyak, though I didn’t realize it until I saw the cast list) telling a long shaggy-dog story about how he had visited Lenin in Smolny in 1918 and received a promise of alms that he never actually got, and was now determined to see Stalin to get his long-delayed recompense. This is not from the book, it’s a brilliant repurposing of Gogol’s story (from Dead Souls) of Captain Kopeikin, who lost an arm and a leg in the campaign against Napoleon — I laughed out loud when I recognized it (which very few viewers seem to have done, judging by the reviews). When he finally sees Vyshinsky, the great man appears sympathetic but tells him he needs more evidence and gives him a document authorizing him to conduct investigations. On the train back he finds himself in a compartment with a couple of chatty engineers who insist he drink with them and when they get to Bryansk (in the novel the city is not named) offer to drive him home, since it’s too early for a cab. When he notices they’re not going the right way, they reveal that they’re NKVD officers, tell him he’s under arrest, and pull up in front of the same prison gates we saw at the beginning. The end.

I was immensely glad Loznitsa (who wrote the screenplay) had had the gumption to jettison the background material and concentrate on the basic story, which is told with all the power the cinema makes available. It left me shaken in various ways, and I recommend it to anyone who’s intrigued by the description. And I hope that more moviemakers will show that kind of ruthlessness when adapting literary material; a movie is a very different animal from a book.