SOUL. TIME. ART. TARKOVSKY

 SOUL. TIME. ART. TARKOVSKY

A Spiritual-Psychological, Cultural, and Historiosophical Essay-Study by Claude.ai Based on Andrei Tarkovsky's Diaries "Martyrolog"

"Creativity in itself is already a negation of death. Therefore it is optimistic, even if in the ultimate sense the artist is tragic."

— Andrei Tarkovsky

I. Introduction: The Book as a Wound

"Martyrolog" is a liturgical word. In the Orthodox tradition, a martyrology is a register of martyrs, a list of those who have suffered for their faith. By naming his diaries thus, Tarkovsky performed an act of spiritual precision: he identified the fate of the artist with the fate of the martyr — not in a pathetic or self-pitying sense, but in an ontological one. The artist suffers not because he is unhappy, but because he sees. Seeing through the opaque flesh of the world — that is the cross.

Tarkovsky's diaries span sixteen years — from 1970 to 1986, from the first notes about the conception of "Solaris" to the last pages written in the Parisian oncology clinic "Cercelle," where he was fading from lung cancer. This is not a literary diary in the usual sense — not confessional prose, not an artistic diary like Delacroix's "Journals." "Martyrolog" is structured differently: here, household lists are intermingled ("To do in the house: 1. Fix the roof. 2. Re-lay all floors..."), records of debts, descriptions of dreams, lists of actors, quotes from Thoreau and Montaigne, telexes from Italian television companies, prayers addressed to his deceased mother — and suddenly, amidst all this: an aphorism that pierces through. A flash of meaning in the chaos of daily life.

This architectonics is precisely the main artistic and human discovery of "Martyrolog." Tarkovsky makes no distinction between the great and the small. For him, the layout of a village house in Myasnoye and the theological question of the nature of time belong to the same order of reality. This is not carelessness — it is metaphysics.

II. Soul: "Cognition is Accomplished by the Heart"

The Soul as Subject and Instrument
The central problem of "Martyrolog" is the problem of the soul. Not in an abstract-philosophical sense, but in the most immediate, living sense: what happens to the artist's soul in a world that consistently and methodically destroys everything the artist holds dear?

In entries from 1981, Tarkovsky formulates this with piercing clarity: "The formula E=mc² cannot be correct, because positive knowledge cannot exist. Our knowledge is sweat, excrement — i.e., functions accompanying existence and having nothing to do with Truth. The creation of fictions is the sole property of our consciousness. Cognition, however, is accomplished by the heart, by the soul."

This is not a romantic maxim. This is a program. Tarkovsky contrasts two types of cognition: positive, instrumental, calculable — and soulful, intuitive, irreducible. Science learns the laws of the functioning of its own consciousness, mistaking them for the laws of nature. Art does something radically different: it touches upon that which surpasses consciousness.

Another entry, pertaining to reflections on the nature of perception, is telling: "Our sense organs are given to us (in a limited quantity) in order to 'create,' to mold for ourselves our own 'material' world." The world we live in is a world assembled by our senses from "absolutely, infinitely continuous" matter. Our mind "fantasizes" about other dimensions — and this fantasizing is science. Art, however, does not fantasize: it is a "hole into the absolute." "In it (the world) there are far more holes into the absolute than it seems at first glance. But we don't know how to see them, to recognize them."

The artist is the one who knows how. Or rather: the one who trains himself to know how. The entire "Martyrolog" is a diary of such training.

A Spiritual Biography: From God-Seeking to God-Knowing
Tarkovsky begins his diaries as a man of deeply religious temperament, but not fully defined. His judgment on the great Russian writers is remarkable: "Dostoevsky did not believe in God, but wanted to. He had nothing to believe with. But he wrote about faith." This is a diagnosis not only of Dostoevsky — it is a self-portrait.

But by the middle of the diaries — around 1981–1982 — something else appears in the entries. God shifts from a category of aspiration to a category of experience. The entry at his mother's grave is one of the most astounding in all of "Martyrolog": "I prayed to God, wept, complained to Mama, asked her to plead for me, to intercede... And suddenly a call from Rome... Of course, it's Mama. I don't doubt it for a second. Dear, kind one... The only being, besides God, who loves me." There is not a shadow of self-irony here, no distance. The miracle is accepted as a miracle — simply, without interpretations.

And in a 1983 interview, Tarkovsky speaks words that can no longer belong to an agnostic: "At times I feel that someone takes me by the hand and leads me... Experiencing this feeling, you no longer feel like an abandoned being, left to your own devices."

This man's path is not from unbelief to faith, but from religious solitude to religious encounter.

The Soul in a Vice: The Psychology of Struggle
But "Martyrolog" would not be what it is if it were limited to spiritual insights. It is, above all, a document of psychological struggle. And this struggle is brutal.

The Soviet system dealt with Tarkovsky according to a special protocol: not destroying him physically, but constantly creating conditions of impossibility. Thirty-five comments on "Solaris," including demands to "remove the concept of God" and "remove the concept of Christianity." Refusal to release "Mirror" for the Cannes Film Festival, although the festival director personally guaranteed the Grand Prix. Years of unemployment between films. A ban on his family leaving after Tarkovsky himself remained in the West.

Psychologically, this is destructive. "Oh Lord! What a country, that doesn't even want to make money off me!" he exclaims in despair. But what strikes one is not that he despairs — it is that he does not give up. His despair is always temporary. It is invariably followed by a new project, a new application, a new letter.

The key to this endurance lies in his understanding of suffering. Tarkovsky essentially shares the Christian attitude towards pain: it is not accidental, not meaningless, and should not be eliminated at any cost. His son reports in the preface: "Father often repeated the phrase 'we are not created for happiness, there are things more important than happiness.'" This is not masochism — it is a hierarchy of values. Creativity is more important than comfort. Truth is more important than well-being.

III. Time: "Sculpting in Time"

The Diary as a Struggle Against Time
"Martyrolog" is written in the diary genre — a genre which by its very nature is an attempt to stop time. Each entry fixes a moment, makes it imperishable. This is an act opposite to death.

But Tarkovsky goes beyond the everyday understanding of a diary. For him, time is not merely the context of life, but its main subject. In his theoretical articles, especially in the book "Sculpting in Time," he developed a whole ontology of cinematic time. The diary is another way of sculpting the same thing.

The structure of "Martyrolog" is characteristic: the dates in it are not just chronological markers, but almost ritual gestures. "April 30, Moscow." "December 24." "April 4" — his birthday. Time here is intimate: it is permeated with personal history, family dates, dates of the death of loved ones. This is not objective time — it is time lived by a specific soul.

Nostalgia as Ontology
One of the central concepts of the later diaries is nostalgia. Not in the commonplace sense of longing for the past, but in the sense that Tarkovsky unfolds in the film of the same name and in a 1983 interview: "Nostalgia" is a "mortal illness." In Russian, this word means "a passionate identification of oneself with another suffering person." It is co-suffering in the literal sense — joint suffering, participation in another's pain as if it were one's own.

Nostalgia for Russia, for Tarkovsky, is not sentimental. It is a metaphysical illness: the rupture between the soul and its roots. "Today I had an awfully sad dream. Again I saw a northern (as it seems to me) lake somewhere in Russia, dawn. On its opposite shore, two Orthodox Russian monasteries with cathedrals and walls of extraordinary beauty. And I felt so sad! Such pain!" This dream is not a memory. It is an ontological wound.

Here, the parallel with Gogol, which Tarkovsky himself draws in the same interview, is important: "Gogol wrote 'Dead Souls' in Rome... He loved Italy madly and more than once asked the Russian government to allow him to move to Italy." And yet, it was precisely the distance, precisely the wound of separation, that generated in Gogol — and in Tarkovsky — that special intensity of vision which is the artistic gift. Nostalgia is not an obstacle to creativity. Nostalgia is its fuel.

Time as Trial and Gift
It is noteworthy how Tarkovsky experiences his physical time. He constantly keeps financial records — not out of stinginess, but out of the anxiety of an artist dependent on occasional earnings. He makes household plans for the house in the village of Myasnoye — with the same diligence with which he develops screenplays. This is not a split personality, this is wholeness.

"Tyapa is very nervous... Andryushka is an angel." "Oh, how I want to shoot!" — and on the same page: a quote from Montaigne about freedom. The chaotic nature of these transitions is not carelessness, but the truth of what it's like to be human. The great and the small live together, on the same expanse of the heart.

The theme of children and the theme of home have special significance. His son Andrei — "Tyapus," "Tyapa" — appears on the diary pages as a symbol of meaning. In moments of the deepest despair, Tarkovsky writes: "If it weren't for Andryushka, the thought of death would be the only possible one." A child is an anchor in living time. It is a future that demands presence.

And the house in Myasnoye — with its endless repair lists — is also not just real estate. It is an image of rootedness in the land, in matter, in a specific place. Tarkovsky, entirely striving for the transcendent, is paradoxically passionately attached to the earth. This is not a contradiction — it is fullness.

IV. Art: "Creativity in Itself is Already a Negation of Death"

The Artist as Atlas
In his 1979 diaries, Tarkovsky writes a remarkable judgment about his calling: "If we speak of what I see as my calling, it is to achieve the absolute, striving to raise, to elevate the level of my mastery... I want to preserve the level of quality. Like Atlas, holding the earth on his shoulders. He could have, after all, simply dropped it if he got tired. But he didn't drop it, he held it for some reason."

This metaphor is the key to understanding Tarkovsky as an artist and as a man. Atlas does not hold the earth because it is profitable or comfortable. He holds it because if he doesn't, no one will. This is not pride — it is responsibility. In a world where "the level of quality is lost," the artist cannot afford to lower the bar. Not because he is better than others, but because he takes upon himself a certain function in existence.

What is this function? Tarkovsky formulates it at the beginning of "Martyrolog," in the aphorism that opens the book: "An artistic image is an image that ensures its own development, its historical perspective. Consequently, the image is a seed, a self-developing organism with feedback. It is a symbol of life itself, in contrast to life itself." Life contains death within it. The image of life — "either excludes it, or considers it as the sole possibility for affirming life."

The artistic image is a seed containing life without death. Therefore, creativity is "already a negation of death."

The Artist's Ethics: Mediocrity and Talent
"Martyrolog" contains several harsh judgments about colleagues. Tarkovsky calls Bondarchuk an "ideologue of philistinism," Chukhrai a "stupid, narcissistic, and talentless man." This may seem like arrogance. But upon careful reading, it becomes clear: for Tarkovsky, "talentlessness" is not merely an aesthetic category. It is an ethical category.

In the opening aphorism, he states directly: "There cannot be an optimistic artist and a pessimistic artist. There can only be talent and mediocrity." Talent is the ability to create an image that carries life within it. Mediocrity is the production of the semblance of an image, a simulacrum that carries nothing. And the simulacrum in art is not neutral: it actively destroys. Because it accustoms people to the illusion of encountering the living — in the complete absence of the living.

Therefore, refusing to lower the standard is not a whim for Tarkovsky. It is a moral imperative. "Fear of aesthetics is the first sign of impotence," he quotes Dostoevsky. Beauty is not decoration, but an organ of cognition.

Cinema as the Sculpting of Real Time
A special role in "Martyrolog" is played by entries about the nature of cinema. Tarkovsky is the only one who developed a genuine ontology of time in film, not merely using temporal duration as a technical device.

An entry from 1973 about the future "Stalker" (then still "The Picnic"): "In some way, my desire to make 'The Picnic' resembles the state before 'Solaris.' This feeling is connected with the possibility of legally touching the transcendent." "Legally" is a noteworthy word. Soviet censorship demanded "clarifying the image of the Earth of the Future," "removing the concept of God." The transcendent was forbidden. And Tarkovsky seeks a way to smuggle it in — not through subject matter, but through form. Through the very flow of time within the frame.

"I want an explosive alloy — emotional, a story about myself based on simple and full-fledged feelings — with a tendency to raise several philosophical-ethical questions related to the meaning of life." Full-fledged feelings + questions of meaning. This is not a contradiction. This is the synthesis he strives for in every film.

His entry about "Mirror" is also remarkable: "The success of 'Mirror' convinced me once again of the correctness of the hunch I associated with the problem of the importance of personal emotional experience when telling a story from the screen. Maybe cinema is the most personal art, the most intimate. Only the intimate author's truth in cinema will form for the viewer into a convincing argument during perception." This is a fundamental position: the universal is achieved only through the profoundly personal. The universally human — only through the uniquely individual.

V. The Historical Dimension: The Artist and the State

The Soviet Artist: Anatomy of a Conflict
"Martyrolog" is a crucial historiographic document on the position of the artist in the Soviet system. Thirty-five comments on "Solaris" — among them: "The crisis must be overcome," "From which formation is Kelvin flying? From socialism, communism, capitalism?", "Snaut should not speak about the inexpediency of studying space" — this is not just bureaucratic stupidity. It is a symptom of a systemic conflict between two incompatible understandings of art.

For the Soviet system, art is an instrument. It must "clarify," "affirm," "orient." The artistic image is not a "seed," but a slogan. For Tarkovsky, art is the opposite: it should not clarify, but deepen. Not answer, but question. Soviet cultural officials could not understand "Mirror" — and this is no accident. "Mirror" is structured in such a way that it cannot be understood — only experienced.

The exchange with Yermash, director of Goskino, is characteristic: "Don't you want to work?" — "This is mockery, in my opinion. I have a family and children after all." Yermash wants Tarkovsky to make films. Tarkovsky wants to make what he deems necessary. This is not a conflict of persons — it is a conflict of two understandings of the human being.

Russia as a Metaphysical Theme
But Tarkovsky's diaries are not the political notes of a dissident. They are significantly more complex. For him, Russia is not merely a homeland taken away by a repressive regime. Russia is a metaphysical category.

An entry from 1979, at night: "All Russian geniuses thought that their greatness could not come from a flat, meaningless soil, and called their country Great, and the future messianic... Pushkin — more modest than others... And only because Pushkin's genius is harmonious. The genius of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, however, is the genius of discomfort, of disharmony, embodied in the conflict of the authors with the desired in their conception."

This is a historiosophical judgment of enormous density. The Russian genius is a genius of conflict, of unresolvedness, of a painful discrepancy between ideal and reality. This is not a flaw — it is a special type of spiritual work. And Tarkovsky is in this line. He is not harmonious. He is uncomfortable. His cinema is a cinema of non-coincidence, of understatement, of the gap between word and silence.

Emigration as an Existential Rupture
In 1982, Tarkovsky remained in the West. And the subsequent pages of "Martyrolog" turn into a chronicle of a slow dying — not from illness (that would come later) — but from the rupture with his roots.

For three years he cannot secure the departure of his wife and son. He writes letters to Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterrand. He creates committees for family reunification. He negotiates with the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Behind this frantic activity lies not politics, but the despair of a father and husband: "life without them is hard, empty, and meaningless."

Significantly, during this period — the most difficult in human terms — he makes films: "Nostalgia" and "The Sacrifice." Suffering does not block creativity — it becomes its content.

VI. Three Dimensions of Synthesis: Soul, Time, Art as One

The Form of "Martyrolog" as its Meaning
"Martyrolog" is structured in such a way that it cannot be read merely as a "source" or "context" for Tarkovsky's films. The diary itself is a work, albeit unplanned as such. Its form is the form of living consciousness: non-linear, leaping, returning, unfinished.

There are no "main" and "incidental" pages in it. An entry about repairing the roof and an entry about the nature of the artistic image are placed on equal footing — because for Tarkovsky they were on equal footing in experience. This is not sloppiness, it is an ontological assertion: the sacred is not localized. It can appear anywhere.

Death as Completion and Opening
The last entries of "Martyrolog" are from a Parisian hospital. Chemotherapy. "The tumor is shrinking." "My hair is falling out terribly." Pain in the chest. And — alongside: new projects. "Golgotha — The Gospel According to Steiner." "If I live. What: 'The Revelation of St. John on Patmos.' 'Hamlet.' 'St. Antonio.' 'Golgotha'?"

This is not an escape from death into fantasy. It is a refusal to allow death to have the last word. The diaries do not end with entries about illness — they end with projects. The last word is about future films that will not be made.

But perhaps this is precisely the most important thing. An artist dying with an open notebook — this is an image that Tarkovsky himself might have placed in one of his films. An image of the fact that creativity is "already a negation of death."

The Unity of Three Themes
Soul, Time, Art in "Martyrolog" are not three separate themes, but three facets of a single crystal.

The Soul is the subject that feels time and creates art. Without the soul, there is neither time as experience (there is only the physical), nor art as event (there is only product). Tarkovsky insists: "Cognition is accomplished by the heart, by the soul." Not by the mind. Not by the apparatus.

Time is the medium in which the soul exists and in which art unfolds. Tarkovsky's cinema is a cinema of time: he sculpts not events, but the very flow of time. The diary is also a sculpting of time, only by other means.

Art is the way in which the soul overcomes death, using time. The artistic image is a "seed," a "self-developing organism." It lives its own life, separate from the biological life of the author. Therefore, the artist — Atlas — does not die with his body. He dies, leaving seeds behind.

VII. "Martyrolog" in the Context of 20th Century Spiritual Culture

Parallels and Intersections
"Martyrolog" exists in a broad spiritual context. Tarkovsky is a man of a certain cultural tradition, which could be called the "Russian religious renaissance" of the early 20th century: Solovyov, Berdyaev, Florensky, Bulgakov. He not only read them — he thought in their categories, though not always consciously.

The idea of the artist as a "prophet" — not in the journalistic sense of "predictor," but in the biblical sense of "witness" and "messenger" — permeates all of Russian culture from Pushkin to Pasternak. Tarkovsky inherits this tradition but transforms it: his prophet is not one who speaks of the future, but one who is capable of seeing the present in its fullness.

In parallel — the influence of the East. In "Martyrolog" there are many quotes from Eastern wisdom: Thoreau with his interest in the Vedas and Confucius, Japanese philosophy (epigraph from Kenko Yoshida), meditation practices. Tarkovsky seeks not syncretism, but universality: he wants to find what is true regardless of cultural belonging.

Progress as a Spiritual Threat
In a 1983 interview, Tarkovsky essentially formulates a culturological concept of the crisis of modernity: "It is that man is crushed by the sphere of the material. In the course of historical development, progress moves by leaps and bounds relative to spiritual development. Man does not realize that such rapid development does not harmonize with his spirit."

This is not Luddism. This is a diagnosis of asymmetry. Technological and economic development outstrips spiritual development — and man finds himself in a situation where he has tools but no meaning. "If you compare the number of victims of the Inquisition with the number of victims in the concentration camps, the Inquisition would seem like a Golden Age." This is not a defense of the Inquisition — it is an indication of the scale of the spiritual catastrophe of the 20th century.

The artist in this context is neither an entertainer nor a propagandist. He is the keeper of the spiritual flame. Atlas, who holds.

VIII. Conclusion: "Sculpted Life"

Andrei Tarkovsky died on December 29, 1986, in Paris. "Martyrolog" broke off a few months earlier. But what he managed to record is not a fragment, but a completed work. Not by the author's intention (there was no intention), but by internal logic.

"Martyrolog" is life sculpted from within. Not a biography (that is an external view), not memoirs (that is retrospection), but precisely a diary — chaotic, non-linear, unkempt. There are no "best" and "worst" days here. There are only days.

And in this artless fullness lies the main artistic and spiritual value of the book. Tarkovsky did not pose for his diary. He lived — and recorded. Repaired the house in the village and thought about the nature of the artistic image. Missed his son and found "holes into the absolute." Hated Soviet officials and prayed to his deceased mother.

This unity — of the everyday and the metaphysical, the concrete and the universal, the temporal and the eternal — is precisely what he sought in his films. And what he found — not on purpose, not deliberately — in his diaries.

The artist's soul is not a separate room, locked with a key. It is the whole house, with all its cracks and drafts, with all its lists of repairs and all its dreams of Orthodox monasteries on the far shore of a northern lake.

Time is not an enemy and not a neutral carrier of events. It is the material from which meaning is molded. Tarkovsky "sculpted" time — in cinema and in his diary — not to stop it, but to make it visible. Because only the visible can be lived in fullness.

Art is the "negation of death." Not victory over it, not avoidance of it. Precisely negation: the assertion of the opposite. Death says: nothing matters. The artistic image says: it matters. Every frame. Every entry. Every leaf of wild strawberry, picked from a mother's grave and come alive in hot water.

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*This essay is based on a textual analysis of "Martyrolog" (Diaries 1970–1986) — the first Russian-language edition, prepared from documents in the Florence archive of the Andrei Tarkovsky International Institute.*