Vanya and Nyurka’s excellent adventure

Печки-лавочки [Pyéchki-lávochki] (Happy-Go-Lucky) 1972 Gorkii Film Studio U.S.S.R. (96 minutes) written, directed by and starring Vasily Shukshin.

This entertaining Soviet comedy contrasts a pair of collective farm country mice with more sophisticated urban Soviet fauna in the heyday of the Brezhnev era in the 1970s.

The humor is sunny. The story has a quietly personal political intensity at its core that made the movie resonate for Soviet audiences. Without being fatally ‘anti-Soviet,’ it has fun showing how ungrounded contemporary Soviet urban life might look to down-to-earth farmers with a foot in the nineteenth century.

The film opens with the expanse of the wide-open steppe and the rhythm of the lives that husband it. It is filled with the bustle of modern train travel, Moscow's quick tempo and Coney Island-like summer crowds on a Black Sea beach. It ends with the protagonist sitting on a home field with his bare feet on the ground.

Vasily Shukshin, the Soviet writer, actor and director, wrote, directed and stars in the film; his is one of the many great Soviet faces beautifully shot in black and white by cinematographer Anatoly Zabolotskii. Shukshin grew up in Srostki, a remote village on the Katun’ River below Biisk in the Altai region of southwestern Siberia.

Vasily Shukshin as Vanya Rastorguyev among family in Shul'gin Log in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

He shot the film on location in Srostki and the nearby village of Shul’gin Log (as well as in Moscow and Crimea, and aboard trains) with a mix of professional actors and local people which give it a ‘nonfiction’ flavor that makes it homely and also enlivens it. His actress wife Lidiya Fedoseyeva Shukshina and their daughters Mariya and Ol’ga play the protagonist’s wife and daughters.

The story is simple. Vanya—Ivan Sergeyevich Rastorguyev (Shukshin)—a Siberian ‘hero tractor driver’ (though only shown scything manually, like a Tolstoyan peasant), takes his wife Nyura (Shukshina) on a two-week summer holiday to a Black Sea resort in Crimea.

Vanya and Nyura have lived in Shul’gin Log all their lives and never ventured outside their region. They travel 2400 miles by train to Moscow, stay in the city several days with a retired philologist they meet on the train, and then continue their trip to the Black Sea coast, another 900 miles to the south.

As Vanya’s neighbors celebrate his leave-taking, he makes sure they understand he would be just as happy to take the time off at home.

‘Hey…I don’t need a vacation,’ Vanya says. ‘I’ll go along with this resort thing if you really think I should. I’d just as soon take my fishing pole, sit on the river bank, and chill out. That’s all: happy-go-lucky.’

(Вот…не отдых мне не нужен, сдались мне этот саниторий если уж вы думаете, что я. Я вон пошел с удочкой, набережку посидел, и отдохнул. И все, печки-лавочки.)

The title comes from the Russian expression, pyéchki-lávochki, translated ‘happy-go-lucky,’ which means something more like ‘loosey-goosey’ or ‘come what may.’ Vanya uses the expression again, later on the train. After he and Nyura unwittingly encounter a thief, a retired professor with the same kind of suitcase comes into their compartment.

‘Here we go again with the happy-go-lucky,’ Vanya tells her, aggressively eyeing their pleasantly unsuspecting new fellow traveller.

It turns out that the professor, Sergei Fyodorovich Stepanov (Vsevolod Sanayev), is a philologist interested in regional dialects and folklore. He enjoys speaking with the couple and invites them to visit him in Moscow before continuing their trip to Crimea. This gives Shukshin license further to enliven his story with nonstandard words and folk expressions that go along with Fyodor Teleletskikh’s lovely background balalaika music.

Shukshin’s narrative style isanecdotal. In addition to the professor, the couple encounters a variety of Soviet types, from petty bureaucrats and policemen to students and a scam artist.

Lidiya Shukshina, Vasily Shukshin and Vadim Zakharchenko in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

A Phil Silvers-like ‘business traveller’ (Vadim Zakharchenko) offends Vanya by suggesting to him that he should leave his country ways of speaking and acting in the country when travelling among more sophisticated people, such as having his wife hide their money in her stocking. (Others offer similar advice, in that sublimely Chekhovian manner of being not all that more sophisticated themselves.)

Vanya angrily calls the interloper a ‘prostitute in trousers, and a hat, and a raincoat’ which, true to the art of Russian insult and like many a Bob Dylan song, uses incongruous, euphonious words for the sounds they make to shape the sense one wants them to mean (profursyétka v shtanákh, i v shlyápe, i v plashché—профурсетка в штанах, и в шляпе, и в плаще).

The film’s best sketch is Vanya and Nyura’s time with Viktor Aleksandrovich (Georgii Burkov), a smooth-talking charmer who talked his way on the train without a ticket. Viktor tells the couple he is a ‘konstruktor,’ or designer, first of trains, then of aviation, and the originator of System ‘Y’ (sistema ‘i-grek’).

'Floating in the air': Vasily Shukshin, Georgii Burkov and Lidiya Shukshina in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

Viktor describes to these wide-eyed country folk a train he is working on that can levitate across spaces such as rivers that once required bridges. He gives them gifts from his suitcase—to which he incidentally lost the key, thus must borrow Vanya’s knife to pop the locks. In the end, he finds a practical application for his system right before Vanya and Nyura’s eyes—not to mention those of a curious police sergeant (Viktor Filippov).

‘Well there you go, Ivan, you asked for an explanation of System “Y”,’ Viktor says after the policeman leaves the compartment.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Just then, right before your eyes, System “Y” went into operation.’

‘Huh?’

‘Well, there we were in the air. We ever so gently rose up and then ever so gently touched down.’*

The exchange gives Vanya an inkling of what he soon will discover. Shukshin’s humor works by putting together lively characters from different walks of Soviet life, letting his characters have fun at each other’s expense while treading lightly on the edges of state organizations, institutions and ideology.

Vanya and Nyura scratch their heads throughout at the odd ways of ‘sophisticates’ whose mild patronization makes the couple the more sympathetic.

Having identified Vanya as a ‘type,’ the professor they met on the train gets him to speak to a group of university students on a subject of his choice. Vanya frets over what to say, thinking that his views must be too narrow, his learning to shallow to say anything useful to these privileged intellikents. He ends up telling them what he thinks is a silly story about shearing a horse’s mane, which he wraps up with a French ‘merci’ for the benefit of his learned audience.

In doing so, he turns the tables on the educated folk without really understanding what he has done; the professor gets it though.

Nyura and Vanya on holiday in Crimea in Happy-Go-Lucky 1972.

 *‘Вот, ты сейчас, Иван, спрашивал насчёт системы “игрек”?’

‘да.’

‘толко что, на ваших глазах, сработала система “игрек”.’

‘эх?’

Так вот, мы были в воздуке. Мы так плав-нень-ко поднялись, и плав-нень-ко опустились.’