TARKOVSKY'S SOT ARTS thousand years of European cultural activity. All this, especially in the light of internal, State repression, made the Russian intellectual aspirations look quite dramatic. The debate/struggle, thus begun, converged towards a different indentity once it had historically accomplished its prologic function in the first quarter of the 20th century. Official science policy, official aesthetics etc. were the significant differences within the continuum of identities that evolved in the post-revolution context. And yet, Tarkovsky's oevre does not avince any of this drama. There is at best an unintended parody of the classical (Socratean) agons but no direct reference to this continuing debate of which artists like Tarkovsky are, nevertheless, a significant part. Perhaps, the only direct hint of his inscription in the debate is his rather unambitious sense of humour—parody again—which, as he would have it, is rarely ever recognized for what it is. In an immediate, internal context, however, one finds the filmmak-er Tarkovsky faced with different, though related, sets of pressures. There is, for instance^ the question of the artist working within the period and space where 'official5 aesthetics (proletkult or socialist realism) continues to survive in one form or the other. The arrogance with which Tarkovsky's work is classified is an indication of his alienation from the unwritten official aesthetic within which the fact of his work as production is nevertheless firmly grounded. The mildest of the charges brought up against him (by people who may be symptomatic officials of the above aesthetic) are those of elitism, historical imprecission and mystic tendencies. (The American and West European press never tires of over-publicising these details. What it never bothers to ask is how and why an artist like Tarkovsky and his cinema is possible only in countries like the Soviet Union and not in the U.S. or, for that matter, West Europe) Another rather sympathetic charge levelled by his Western admirers is that Tarkovsky does not adequately stress, for (what they term) "obvious reasons" the relation between art and power. What the official aesthetic does not find correctly represented in his work, his Western admirers do not find adequately stressed. However, the point most frequently missed in both the views is that the individual, the 'presence' through whom the moral/epistemological conflict is expressed, represents only a manifest unity of a sign whose overtone or connatative absence is the State; that a sign over and above its specific signification is a sensuousness, a fiction, a possibility. Unlike Eisenstein, Tarkovsky never makes use of conventions that foreclose possibilities of discourse other than the one intended. Instead of creating a sign in lieu of another (sign) from material foregroundings to conceptual abstractions, as in Eisentein's earlier cinema, or to rhetorical expressivity as in Ivan the Terrible, Tarkovsky quietly moves on to 70 October-December 1983