Summary
Snow-mantled cupolas glint like cracked bones beneath a pewter sky as Fyodor Protasov—aristocrat, cuckold, theological prisoner—decides that only the grave can grant him liberty. He stages a suicide beside the frozen Neva, leaving behind a scarlet-splashed uniform and the echo of a pistol whose report never sounded; the Church, satisfied, blesses Lisa’s union with Viktor Karenin, while Fyodor slips into the catacombs of the living dead—taverns, monasteries, flophouses—his beard matted, eyes lanterns of self-disgust. Years erode; guilt festers. Viktor, now bourgeois respectability incarnate, buys the very mansion where Fyodor once toasted immortality. Lisa, corseted in silk and shame, glimpses a ghostly silhouette outside the frost-latticed window: her first husband, famine-thin, clutching a candle stub like a soul seeking transit. The apparition becomes rumor, rumor becomes scandal, scandal demands ecclesiastical justice. A tribunal is convened; candles gutter; icons glare. Fyodor, dragged from the cellar of a nameless inn, stands before the priests who once buried him—his resurrection more obscene than any murder. Lisa’s veil trembles; Viktor’s composure fractures. In the candle-smoked nave, Fyodor confesses not love nor hate, but the narcotic allure of obliteration: to be dead yet breathing, to haunt without dying. The film ends on a dolly-in so slow it feels like geological time: Fyodor reaching toward the altar’s crucifix, fingers inches from the carved wound in Christ’s side, cut to black before contact—salvation or second suicide forever suspended.
Synopsis
In ancient, Tsarist Russia. Fyodor Protasov's marriage to his wife Lisa is over. However, the Russian Orthodox Church does not approve of a divorce, and so Protasov fakes his own suicide, before Lisa move in with her lover Viktor Karenin. Fyodor himself becomes a "living corpse".
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