Haunted by the Past: Tarkovsky, Dostoyevsky, and Demons

Memory, Guilt, and Generational Cycles in Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Dostoyevsky’s Demons

My first attempt at film criticism—with a literary spin, of course.

“No art form should be studied in isolation.”

Several months ago, Megan Gafford and I presented our thesis on the importance of understanding the arts holistically: developing a robust understanding of a broad variety of art forms is crucial to fully comprehending the meaning of any given work of art. Watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror with my dad and my cat several weeks ago (my dad gave up about halfway through the experimental film and went home—my cat, an intellectual trooper, stayed awake for the entire thing), I remembered the essay I wrote with Gafford for her Fashionably Late Takes and was fascinated by how much more easily I was able to make sense of Tarkovsky’s cryptic cinematic masterpiece—a film that has baffled critics for decades—because of my familiarity with Russia’s great literary behemoth Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

If you haven’t seen Mirror, I recommend you do so right at this moment. We’ll be waiting for you when you come back. It’s available for free on YouTube here. You might as well read Demons—the novel we’ll be exploring—while you’re at it here.