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Seeking God and Spiritual Salvation in Russian Cinema

This chapter will investigate various Russian cinematic treatments of the salvific aspiration invested in either the nation or the individual as conceived in the Russian Idea. The works of the selected directors are looked at against the backdrop of this national narrative with which they engage directly or indirectly. The chapter argues that from Andrei Tarkovsky, whose oeuvre has come to epitomize the spiritual search in Russian cinema at its most intense, to contemporary filmmakers Alexander Sokurov, Pavel Lungin, and Andrei Zviagintsev, the portrayal of Russian society has increasingly lost the idealized spiritual aura of its messianic destiny, leaving salvation as an individual solution.