In Aleksei German’s film “Hard to Be a God,” the character of Don Rumata .. at one point fairly early on.. reiterates some lines of poetry that begin as follows: “The murmurs ebb, onto the stage I enter.” I thought he was remembering lines written by a poet of Irukan, now dead (because the Greys are killing off all the literates on the planet currently in a stage eerily reminiscent of our own Dark Ages); but as it turns out, these are lines that originated on Don Rumata’s home planet, Earth, written by the great Boris Pasternak himself. Oddly enough, these lines remained with me throughout the rest of the film, working in a kind of strange self-fulfillment as the beleaguered and frustrated Don Rumata struggles to be a “god” so to speak.
Yet this “god” is more of a christo verso acting as a kind of reverse or backwards version of the biblical god. At one point there is a scene right out of the gospel mirroring the Palm Sunday scene of Christ on the donkey; but on Irukan, Don Rumata, facing the rear, is led on a donkey through a constantly wet, muddy and rotting huis clos space reminiscent of Brueghel gone wet, gray, wild, and grotesque. Much later, after much travail and killing, he is sitting in a dirty pool of water enclosed by rock walls and rubble, with a couple of people on the bank, saying philosophically: "It's so hard; it's hard to be a god." So you will be able to see how this poem of Pasternak’s – “The Saturday Poem: Hamlet" -- resonates not only through Don Rumata’s psyche but also that of the viewer brought so closely into his telescoped “stable” of fools, idiots, lobotomized killers, and poignant innocents:
The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.
I am trying, standing in the door,
To discover in the distant echoes
What the coming years may hold in store.
The nocturnal darkness with a thousand
Binoculars is focused onto me.
Take away this cup, O Abba, Father,
Everything is possible to thee.
I am fond of this thy stubborn project,
And to play my part I am content.
But another drama is in progress,
And, this once, O let me be exempt.
But the plan of action is determined,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk across a field.
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