by Cheryl Rofer
The very famous Sergei Eisenstein film Alexander Nevsky is out in a new print. I hadn’t ever seen it, so I went last Monday night.
Alexander Nevsky turned back the Teutonic Knights from Russia in their march across northern Europe. It’s a long story, a history that we in the United States (and I suspect western Europe) don’t hear much of.
I wanted to make this a post about the film, but like so much about that part of the world, my personal experiences intrude. Let me try to separate the two. And then there’s the history, about which I have many questions.
The film
The film is indeed extraordinary. The sets and costumes are perfect; there might be quibbles about historical accuracy, but Eisenstein seems to have done that pretty well. The look of things was wonderful, and the scenery was convincing, even the shores of frozen Chudskoye Ozero, some of which were obviously in a studio, but faithful to the reality. The cinematography is stunning, not at all dated. One scene, where people coming to the defense of Mother Russia move through tall grass, stays in my mind for its beauty.
The acting style was a bit dated, but not as much as I expected. And the battle scenes were among the best I’ve seen, because they focused on those inflicting the wounds, not the wounds themselves. And none of the excesses of blood we have had far too much of in my humble opinion. Ever since Bonnie and Clyde, I’ve been quite willing to close my eyes.
The music is by Sergei Prokofiev, one of my favorite composers. The music for the charges seemed a bit too comedic, and the sound track is less than full-fidelity, however.
Go see it, particularly if you haven’t already. Or see it again.
More personally…
I’ve been to Chudskoye Ozero, or, as the Estonians call it, Peipsijärv. It’s a beautiful lake, the third largest in Europe. I have stayed mostly on the north shore, but I have also visited the Old Believer villages on the western shore and have a lovely little Virgin Mary icon given to me by a woman in one of the churches. Yes, I was encouraged to deposit something in the collection box.
That photo above isn't Peipsijärv, it's the Baltic Sea from Sillamäe a few tens of kilometers north of Peipsijärv. I’ve been at Peipsijärv only in the summer, when the lake is warm for swimming, with boats on it. I am now thinking that I should go when it’s frozen to see what that is like. The water tends to be brownish in places. The first time I saw that kind of water, with a parchment-colored foam on it in the rivers of northeastern Estonia, I thought that it was a horrific example of pollution from the oil-shale mining. And people were fishing in it. But over time, I have realized that it is more likely that the water is what would be called in English “peaty” (turbaline in Estonian?). Peaty water carries complex organic acids, and the brownish water feels soothing on my skin, as would be expected of peaty water. That’s not entirely scientific, but the brown water is much too widespread in Estonia simply to be from oil-shale pollution.
Peipsijärv is one of the few places on earth where you are pretty much isolated from the sound of machines. Walking along the shore is very quiet, only a few automobiles on the road on the other side of the sandhills and trees. Once a day, you can see and hear the Moscow-New York Delta flight, but that’s one short time out of the day. And I’ve looked down from that flight to see Sillamäe and Peipsijärv. Or a night when I woke up to a nightingale’s song. One of my very favorite places on earth.
And that brings us to the history…
There are a couple of English names for this lake, although I am more comfortable with the Russian and Estonian names. You hardly ever hear the English names, Lake Peipus and Lake Chud. I suspect that Peipus is a Swedish Latinization of Peipsijärv. The Swedes were into that sort of thing for a while, and they built textile mills along the Narva River, which is the lake’s outlet to the Baltic Sea. (The map above is the best I can find, from the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.)
Lake Chud is an obvious Englishization of Chudskoye Ozero, but without much sense. Chud is what the Russians call(ed?) the people of that area, Finno-Ugrics who include Estonians, Votes, Ingrians, Izhorians and others. ”So,” said one of my Estonian friends, “the Russians admit that the lake is ours.” The boundary between Estonia and Russia goes through approximately the middle of the lake. I have seen boats far out on the lake that seem to be patrolling the boundary. The boundary between Estonia and Russia has been a matter of dispute, partly because Russia believed that such a dispute would prevent Estonia from joining the EU and NATO. Didn’t work.
Alexander Nevsky defeated the Teutonic Knights in 1242. That’s a long time ago. Russia was quite a different place. Its center was Great Novgorod, which is off the map, several tens of kilometers northeast of Pskov. If the border were drawn to please the Estonians, Pskov (which they call Pihkva) would be a part of Estonia.
At that time, Moscow was controlled by the Mongols, who make a cameo appearance in the beginning of the movie to show that they had indeed reached almost to Novgorod, which was certainly the commercial center of Rus at that time. The Teutonic Knights had just taken Pskov and had Novgorod in their sights.
The Teutonic Knights were part of that phenomenon known as the Crusades. Their ostensible mission was to convert and save the pagans living along the Baltic Coast of Europe. This sometimes involved killing them, as it did in other places, and almost always involved establishing control over the land. Germans were the nobility in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania until Hitler called them “home.” However, Sweden, Denmark and Russia laid national claim to those territories at various times up until the early twentieth century.
This history isn’t all that available to us, though, for reasons I don’t understand, most likely a lack of documents. So Jamie could have a little chuckle a couple of weeks ago over obscure wars against obscure peoples. The names are indeed intriguing and not at all familiar to Westerners.
Jamie also cited what is probably the one book that covers that campaign in any detail, The Northern Crusades, by Eric Christiansen. It’s fairly dry and hard reading, though, perhaps to acquaint us with the sort of biscuit the Teutonic knights had to exist on when they were on campaign.
I suspect that part of the reason for that dryness is that not many records are available. That also would account for the gaps that provoke many of my questions.
Who are the Rus(sians)?
That’s the biggest of my questions. Nevsky defeated the Swedes on the Neva River, up near St. Petersburg, before he took on the Teutonic knights, which was why the good citizens of Great Novgorod asked him for his help.
The people living around the Gulf of Finland at that time all spoke Finnish-related languages, many of which are close to extinct now. They are all close to Finnish and Estonian, and I can pick out words from the songs in those languages that Veljo Tormis has preserved and modernized.
There are other Finno-Ugric groups spread across modern Russia (Komi, Mari, Udmurts, for example), and archaeology suggests that they have been there for five thousand years or so. In southern Russia, many groups of nomads from the plains to the east have swept across, sometimes making it all the way to Europe.
Before Novgorod, Kiev was the big city of Rus. Kiev is now located in Ukraine, which suggests part of the reason modern Russia is so attached to Ukraine. Some say that Kiev was founded, or became powerful, through the efforts of the Vikings, who followed the rivers in the landmass across the Baltic from their home in Sweden. In my struggle to find a coherent history, I consulted Nicholas Riasanovsky’s A History of Russia, which assures us that the Norman (Viking) theory has been thoroughly discounted (although he does not provide much in the way of references), and we can assume that the Russians in Kiev were Slavs.
The Slavs appear in this area at something like the same time the Vikings may have been there. My sub-question is where they came from. Southeastern Europe, probably. Riasanovsky locates their homeland as being “in the valley of the Vistula and the northern slopes of the Carpathians.” That’s today’s southwestern Poland. More secondary questions: why did they move eastward? How long did it take? And all those other things we’d like to know about epic journeys.
So perhaps Nevsky was fighting cousins at the Neva River, or perhaps not. Perhaps his people had arrived only a few hundred years earlier from the south. In any case, those who are there defend against the invaders, and the Germans were the invaders. Nevsky’s victory over them helped to define the land of the Rus. Whoever they might have been, they knew who they were.
The battle on the lake
The climactic battle was in April 1242, on Chudskoye Ozero, near Raven Rock, with which I am unacquainted. I suspect it must have been toward the southern part of the lake, perhaps even that extension called Lake Pskov. None of that is really between Pskov and Novgorod, but that may have been part of Nevsky’s brilliance, to have encountered the enemy so far from the enemy’s objective.
The lake was still covered with ice, and the battle took place on the ice. April, even that far north, seems like a poor time for such activities. Indeed, the Germans found out just exactly how poor. According to the accounts, they were more heavily armored than Nevsky’s troops, and the ice gave way beneath them.
More questions, again probably unanswerable because of lack of reliable sources. Combat in those days was close: hand-to-hand or mounted, with swords, axes and spears. How is it that the ice broke under the Germans and not under the Rus? Were they retreating? The movie shows the Rus prudently closer to the sandy, piney shore, inviting a German attack which they then enclosed in a pincer movement. Eisenstein shows the ice breaking during the retreat, which seems the only way that the Rus could have avoided the Germans’ fate.
The thirteenth century was a real turning point in European history, I believe, and not necessarily for the better. But that’s another post for another day, or perhaps many posts.
Comments