“It is not by chance that director Pavel Petrov decided to take the additional name of ‘Bytov’, as it means ‘one coming from everyday life’. He was indeed fascinated by the idea of portraying everyday life, in particular about downtrodden slum dwellers, and this interest brought him closer to Maxim Gorky’s poetic approach. However, while working on the film script he decided to strengthen as much as possible the political meaning of the story by the father of Socialist Realism, by adding to it some scenes depicting the birth of revolutionary awareness in Artem, a Russian stevedore educated by Kain, a Jewish shoemaker. However, as Adrian Piotrovsky, one of the most authoritative cinema thinkers of the time, has written, the Petrov-Bytov method, although ‘well meant’, is quite often closer to the mystic and decadent style of Leonid Andreev than Gorky’s realism. In several instances (for example in the scene at the inn) we may perceive the influence of German Expressionism in the film style, its light and shade at play, but the director seems capable of reconciling it with the lively and true expressions in the faces of poor people from the Volga. Anatolij Lunaciarsky, a leading figure in Soviet cultural life of the time, has defined Kain i Artem ‘one of the masterpieces of our cinema’. In 1932 sound was added to the film in Paris by Abel Gance, and then it was brought back again to the Soviet Union where it enjoyed a second life as sound movie”.

(Natalia Noussinova)