Summary
Petrograd, winter 1918: a city of frozen tram tracks and thawing ideologies. The film detonates like a futurist bomb hurled into a snowstorm—Mayakovsky, half poet, half urban guerrilla, stalks the gutters in a scarlet coat, pockets stuffed with manifestos instead of bread. Around him, Margerita Kibalchich (a soprano turned saboteur) rehearses arias on the lip of a trench, her voice ricocheting off factory chimneys while Yanina Mirato’s camera pirouettes on cracked ice, catching factory smoke as if it were silk. The plot, if you dare call it plot, is a splintered fever dream: a clandestine printing press hidden beneath a cemetery, a stolen coffin converted into a typesetter’s tray, a love triangle drawn in gun-oil and lipstick between Mayakovsky, Kibalchich, and the spectral Lev Grinkrug—an anarchist mime whose whiteface cracks under the heat of real revolution. Money is both corpse and fetish: banknotes are burned to warm hands, coins melted into bullets, yet every character is haunted by the same whisper—"not for money born." Burlyuk’s intertitles scream like newspaper headlines dipped in vodka; Jack London’s borrowed tropes (huskies, gold, icy fatalism) mutate into sleds pulled by poets across the Neva’s frozen skin. The finale is a freeze-frame on a red flare that never quite explodes, leaving the audience suspended between breath and history.
