Old Man Dnieper

Mark Twain, Moscow-style

Tom Sawyer's carrot-colored hair peeked out from under a floppy fishing hat, and his bare feet dragged in the muddy water as he and Huck Finn floated lazily down the river on a makeshift wooden raft. Nothing could have been more American--only the river was not the Mississippi; it was the Dnieper. And the actor playing Tom Sawyer was freckle-faced Fedya Stukov, 9, from Moscow.

Despite the cooling of detente and the fading of cultural exchanges between the two superpowers, the Soviets have created a three-hour, three-part television production of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that is astonishingly faithful to the spirit and detail of the book. Says Director Stanislav Govorukhin, 46, who has treasured Twain's novel since he was Tom Sawyer's age: "I treated it with the same care that I would a work by Tolstoy or Chekhov."

Govorukhin, who is known for his television productions of literary classics, discovered that the lush banks of the Dnieper were a mirror of the Mississippi valley. Casting Tom and Huck, however, took months. In the book, Tom and Huck are adolescents, but Govorukhin decided to use younger boys because, he felt, "we live in an era of age acceleration. Today's twelve-and 14-year-olds are thinking about discos and sports rather than playing pirates and Indians."

After announcing a competition in Pionerskaya Pravda, the Soviet equivalent of the Scout newspaper, Govorukhin received up to 400 letters a day. From a pool of several thousand, he chose an unknown ten-year-old for the part of Gekel-berry (the Russian pronunciation of Huckleberry) and a professional child actor to play the wily Tom Sawyer.

Casting the role of the black slave Jim required more ingenuity. Govorukhin searched the universities for likely black students from Ethiopia, Angola or Mozambique. He finally selected an Ethiopian named Behailu Mengesha, who was studying at Moscow's Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University. Mengesha, who is now back home in Ethiopia, resisted pressures from friends, who advised him that playing the role of a slave would be demeaning.

Throughout the filming, Govorukhin was obsessed with being faithful to the text. When Huck wakes Tom for their midnight expedition to the graveyard, Tom opens his bedroom window by pulling the lower pane upward. There are no such windows in the Soviet Union, so Govorukhin studied 19th century American architecture and had his carpenters build an American-style window. Mississippi steamboats were also in short supply, so Govorukhin instructed his carpenters to construct a replica, atop a barge, replete with lacy white railings, two smoking black chimneys and an American flag flapping at the stern.

The film got rave reviews from its young Soviet audience. "I liked it a lot because it was realistic. It was authentic," said Misha, 15, a Moscow high school student. Foreign students were equally enthusiastic. "I couldn't believe it was made in Russia," said a 14-year-old American boy at the Anglo-American School in Moscow.

The film about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn is remarkably devoid of any anti-American sentiment. Ironically, its illusion of reality is broken only once, when the director chides a Soviet, not an American, weakness. Confronting the corpse of Dr. Robinson in the graveyard, the tramp is unable to remember having killed him and mumbles, "It must have been the vodka."

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