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A Genie's Long Career
Khottabych, the popular fictional character created by Soviet author Lazar Lagin, gets resurrected in a slick new movie for teenagers.
By Alexander Bratersky
Published: August 18, 2006
It's a film that Donald Rumsfeld would love to see: A female FBI agent goes to Russia, where she falls in love with a brilliant hacker who happens to be friends with a powerful old man from an Arab country.
But this isn't a story about Russian-American cooperation in the war on terror. Instead, it's a new, Internet-age interpretation of an old Soviet children's book.
"Khottabych," which opened last week in movie theaters nationwide, focuses on a character who was loved by millions of Soviet children: the bearded, centuries-old genie Hassan Abdurrakhman ibn Hottab, or simply Khottabych, as he is named by the boys who discover him.
The genie, however, has undergone a drastic transformation over the years -- one that parallels the transformation of Russia itself. He made his debut in a 1938 children's book, and became immensely popular after a 1956 film that featured a heavy dose of Soviet propaganda. Now, he has re-emerged as the unlikely hero of a hip, teen-oriented comedy set in present-day Russia.
Khottabych was the brainchild of Lazar Lagin, a Soviet author best known for his work as a satirist and war correspondent. Lagin created the character in his book "Starik Khottabych" (Old Man Hottabych). In the book, a young boy named Volka finds a strange-looking pitcher while swimming in a lake. It turns out that the pitcher contains Khottabych, a genie who was thrown there thousands of years ago by evil forces. The book follows the adventures of Volka and Khottabych, who expresses his gratitude to Volka by granting him wishes, but turns out to be something of a fish out of water in Soviet society.
Following the 1956 movie by Gennady Kazansky, the book gained the status of a classic. But while youngsters saw it as a funny tale about miracles performed by a genie, Soviet propagandists saw it as an attempt to show the might of a country that provided miracles for its citizens.
In one part of the film, Khottabych and Volka fly to the summer resort of Sochi and end up in a gorgeous palace, a sanatorium built for miners. Impressed by the rich atmosphere of the sanatorium, Khottabych mistakes one of the miners for a shah.
Writing in the book's introduction, Lagin stated that such contrasts were precisely the point of the story. "What if a genie came to our country, where we have different views of happiness and justice?" he wrote. "I wanted to show what could happen if a genie were saved by an ordinary Soviet boy, one of millions living in our happy, socialist country."
Since the author's death in 1979, however, evidence has emerged indicating that he was privately unhappy with the way censors had distorted his creation. Mikhail Lezinsky, an amateur writer who met Lagin in 1974, relates on his web site how Lagin complained about the censors' changes. "I wrote a work of satire with a similar story as the book," Lagin told him. "But Khottabych was tortured, and they threw out several chapters and edited it in such a way that my satire became a fairy tale."
Karo Film The new film "Khottabych" puts the genie first created by Lazar Lagin in present-day Moscow. |  | |
Now, Khottabych has been changed even further. It's unlikely that Lagin would recognize his character in the new film, which is based on a 2000 book titled "Old Man Khottabych's Copper Pitcher" by Sergei Klado. In Klado's book -- an updating of "Old Man Khottabych" that is nowhere near as famous as Lagin's original -- Volka has been replaced by Gena, a computer whiz, and the genie comes out of a teapot that Gena buys over the Internet.
The film shows Khottabych playing Counterstrike with Gena's friends, fighting his bitter enemy Shaitanych in animated cyberspace sequences that resemble scenes from "The Matrix," and flying on linoleum instead of a more traditional flying carpet.
"Working in Soviet times, Lagin wanted to show how the country had changed after the Revolution. Today, we wanted to show how the world has changed after a scientific and technological revolution," said the film's director, Pyotr Tochilin, at last week's premiere.
Although the film may disappoint Khottabych purists, it has a good deal of charm thanks to Vladimir Tolokonnikov's performance as the genie. Tolokonnikov is best known as the dog-turned-man protagonist of Vladimir Bortko's 1988 "Heart of a Dog," an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical story. At the press screening, the actor admitted that his performance had been influenced by the 1956 film.
"It was a big pleasure for me to play the new Khottabych," he said. "I still had that good old Soviet version in mind."
But, while the good old Soviet version portrayed a pleasant socialist reality where greed didn't exist, the new film shows a capitalist Russia filled with neon ads, shopping malls and Internet cafes, as well as corrupt policemen and customs officials.
The young generation has become less innocent, too. Unlike Volka, who asks the genie for soccer tickets, the computer-minded Gena asks Khottabych for a billion dollars. He also asks the genie to make Annie -- the FBI agent who comes to nab him after he launches a hacker attack against Microsoft -- fall in love with him.
Khottabych fails to do either. Tearing a hair from his beard, he makes Gena worthless dollars out of papyrus, and he tells the love-lorn hacker that it's not within his genie powers to make a person fall in love with someone else (although he does give Gena some old-fashioned advice about how to do it himself).
So despite all the changes that Khottabych has endured, the moral of the classic genie story remains: Be careful what you wish for.
It's a moral that might apply to Russia itself.
"Khottabych" is playing in Russian at theaters citywide.
Copyright © 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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