The world I grew up in was not built for dreaming. It was a place of long queues and short tempers, where the winters stretched on like unfinished sentences, and the summers were brief, almost apologetic interruptions of heat and dust. The Soviet Union did not care for fairy tales, not really. It had its stories, yes, but they were hard, unyielding things—like the stone walls of old fortresses, meant to keep out everything soft, everything uncertain.
Yet, somehow, through the cracks, two films found their way into our lives. Two films as different as night and day, yet bound together in ways that only stories of war, fate, and the bowstring can be. Andrei Rublev (1966) and Ruslan and Ludmila (1972). One was an ordeal of suffering, the other a vision of impossible beauty.
I sat in dark cinemas, watching both, and in each, I saw something of myself.
The Weight of the Bow – Andrei Rublev
Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev was not a film. It was an execution stretched across three hours, a slow suffocation beneath the weight of history. No one in the Soviet Union needed to be told what suffering looked like—we saw it in our fathers’ hands, in our mothers’ quiet exhaustion—but Tarkovsky did not just show suffering. He made you live it.
The film moves like an old, unmerciful chronicle, its images raw and relentless. It follows the icon painter Andrei Rublev through a world of mud, fire, and silence, a world where faith flickers weakly against the wind of cruelty. It is not a story so much as a pilgrimage through brutality, through the slow erosion of the soul.
And then, the siege.
The Tatars storm the city. Fire leaps into the sky. And the archers come. Not the noble archers of legends, not the proud warriors of old songs. No—these are men who kill without hesitation, who smile as they loose their arrows, knowing each shaft is a death sentence. They are ghosts, mercenaries of destruction, and the bow in their hands is not a weapon of honor—it is a tool, no different from the axes that split skulls or the torches that reduce homes to cinders.
I remember watching that scene with my uncle, in a cramped apartment that smelled of cold cabbage soup and cigarette smoke. He sat hunched forward, elbows on his knees, a deep furrow in his brow. “This,” he muttered, half to himself, “this is how it was.” He had lived through war, through hunger, through nights where the only thing keeping a man alive was the promise that one day, it would end.
But Tarkovsky knew better. He knew it never really ends. It only changes shape.
Archery in Andrei Rublev is not a skill. It is not a sport. It is survival. And sometimes, survival is the cruelest thing of all.
A World That Might Have Been – Ruslan and Ludmila
And then there was Ruslan and Ludmila, arriving six years later like a fever dream. It should not have existed. Not in that time, not in that place. But somehow, Aleksandr Ptushko made it—a vision torn straight from Pushkin’s poetry, wrapped in gold and wonder.
I was older by then, and wearier. But I sat in the theatre, and for two hours, I forgot. I forgot the cold, the queues, the whispers in dark hallways. The screen was filled with knights and sorcerers, with forests that shimmered in an unreal light. And there were archers, too—but this was no brutal slaughter. These archers fought for love, for honor, for kingdoms that never truly existed. Their arrows flew like shooting stars, cutting through the air with a grace I had never known in life.
For many, Ruslan and Ludmila was a fairy tale. For me, it was an ache. It was the world we might have had if history had been kinder. The world where a bow was not just a weapon, but a bridge between fate and legend. The world where archers did not kill for survival, but fought for something greater.
In that darkened theatre, I saw a dream—not my own, but one that had been buried deep in the bones of my people. The dream of a past untarnished by war. A past where warriors rode through enchanted forests, where love was won by steel and wit, and where magic had not yet been bled dry by history’s iron teeth.
I left the theatre that day and walked home through the grey streets, past the factories and the apartment blocks that loomed like stone giants. I felt something break inside me, something I had not realized was there.
Hope, perhaps.
Between the Arrow’s Flight and Fall
Two films. One that crushed me beneath the weight of history, one that lifted me into a dream of what might have been. But both, in their own way, told the same story. The story of men and war. The story of archers.
And what is an archer, if not a man caught between two worlds? Between the tension of the string and the release of the arrow? Between life and death, between past and future?
There were archers in my own life, though they did not carry bows. My father, my uncles, my neighbors—they were all men who had fought battles, some in the field, some in their own minds. Some had survived the war. Others had survived the years after, which was often harder.
One of them, an old friend of my father’s, once told me something I never forgot. He said that when you draw a bow, you hold time itself in your hands. The moment before the release is everything—the past, the present, the weight of every choice you have ever made. And then the arrow flies, and nothing can be undone.
I wonder if Tarkovsky thought about that when he filmed Andrei Rublev. I wonder if Ptushko did, too, in his own way.
The Soviet Union is gone now, and its ghosts whisper in empty buildings, in the yellowed pages of old books. But still, I remember those dark theatres. I remember the arrows, their silent flight, their inevitable fall.
And sometimes, I wonder—when I sat in those seats, watching the Tatars slaughter, watching Ruslan ride through forests of gold—was I ever truly watching them?
Or was I, all along, watching myself?
