60 years of A Night Before Christmas

On January 8, 1962, Alexander Rou's film "A Night Before Christmas (Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka)" was released on the screens of Soviet cinemas.

For the sake of fairness, it should be noted that three weeks before the release of the film on the screens of cinemas, its premiere took place in the Palace of Culture of the city of Kirovsk, Murmansk region, in the vicinity of which a Ukrainian village was "built". But the audience at the premiere was mainly residents of this city, who participated in the crowd scenes during the filming of the movie, playing Ukrainian villagers. So, we can assume that it was an internal screening for the members of the crew.

The film "Evenings in a Farm near Dikanka" became, one might say, a masterpiece of two classics. Firstly, this is Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, a classic of Russian and Ukrainian literature, based on whose story "A Night Before Christmas" this picture was filmed. And a filmmaker of this movie - Alexander Rou- was a classic of Soviet cinema, who created 14 movie fairy tales that are still very popular and loved by children in Russia and the former republics of the Soviet Union.

The well-known Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev, in his review of the film, noted a certain courage shown by the director so that in the midst of Khrushchev's persecution of the religion, when the word "Christmas", although it was not banned at all, was written with a small letter and no holiday for the Soviet people was. True, Alexander Rou still had to go to some trick: the film was called not "The Night Before Christmas", but "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" - as the cycle of works that included this story was called.

According to Kudryavtsev, "a fairly detailed reproduction in the film of long-standing Christmas rituals, including the rite of caroling and folk fun, served, of course, with humor and sometimes even with satirical sharpening, is just surprising, if we take into account that in 1961, the display of scenes of celebration of a religious celebration, albeit in a national refraction, could well be perceived by the authorities as admiring and glorifying supposedly obsolete traditions. ...The version of "A Night Before Christmas" seems to be to some extent a successful trick of Rou, who managed to express on the screen, in the midst of the next persecution of the church, a truly popular and ineradicable craving, first of all, for carnival culture, and not so much for religion as such. Perhaps now this argument will look blasphemous at the time of almost universal "overcoming atheism", but after all, Orthodoxy has always seduced parishioners with the pomp and carnivalization of many religious rites."

Judging by the almost complete lack of reviews for the film "A Night Before Christmas (Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka)" by professional film critics on rottentomatoes.com, large audiences in the West remain ignorant of this masterpiece, which combines Russian-Ukrainian literary classics with Soviet film classics. The more valuable is the assessment of the American writer and screenwriter Jeff Kuykendall, who in his 2017 review noted: "Overall, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka can be clumsy, goofy, or downright bizarre, but at its best it feels invaluable as a window into 19th century life in the Ukraine, with the religious and supernatural thriving alongside mundane reality and everyday problems of frustrated romance and cheating husbands."

As a true classic, Alexander Rou's "A Night Before Christmas (Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka)" enjoys great love among modern moviegoers, even several decades after its release. 72% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this movie ratings from 8 to 10. And 30% of users rated the movie with the highest score - "ten".

With that said, the rating of Alexander Rou's film "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka" according to FilmGourmand was 8.038, making it 672nd in the Golden Thousand.