Issue 87 (2025) |
Adilkhan Yerzhanov: Steppenwolf (Dala qasqyry, Kazakhstan 2023) reviewed by Andrei Rogatchevski © 2025 |
Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927) is a cult novel whose impact on the discerning readers across the globe has lasted for nearly a century. Strongly influenced in form and content by Mikhail Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time and Fedor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, it describes—predominantly in Ich-Erzählung—a dissociative identity disorder compounded by a midlife crisis, hinting at a possibility of embracing the former and overcoming the latter.
The book’s protagonist Harry Haller, a sophisticated loner of independent means, is torn between his strong affinity with the bourgeois world (which typically strives “for a balanced middle ground between the countless extremes […] of human behavior”, Hesse 2012, 56) and his equally strong anti-bourgeois sentiments, exemplified by the Steppenwolf, which represents a contrarian and combative trait in Harry’s personality. Harry’s preferred way out of such a binary is to commit suicide. Yet he cannot muster enough resolve to go through with it, thereby suffering from an “intolerable tension between my inability to go on living and my inability to die” (Hesse 2012, 113).
A chance encounter with a bisexual courtesan called Hermione changes his attitude towards things that he previously neglected, opens his mind beyond his routine, and thus makes him appreciative of life a great deal more. Following Hermione’s initiative and insistence, Harry learns how to dance foxtrot (a modernized version of the traditional waltz), enjoy jazz (in addition to his fondness for classical music, especially Mozart), take drugs (to supplement his regular hefty alcohol intake) and have casual sex (with another courtesan, Maria, as opposed to his long-distance girlfriend).
A string of interactive performances at a magic theater that Harry visits teach him not to take his multiple personality condition too seriously, by comparing it with a game which rearranges the same set pieces in an infinite number of ways. When Harry kills Hermione out of jealousy, her murder is treated as a figment of his imagination: she is in fact little else but Harry’s mirror image, as well as a yin to his yang. As a punishment for his crime, Harry is laughed out of the theater. According to Hesse, “only humor (possibly the most original and brilliant of humankind’s achievements) can accomplish the otherwise impossible feat of uniting all spheres of human life by bathing them in the iridescent light of its prisms” (Hesse 2012, 59).
Until now, only one attempt has been made to adapt Hesse’s novel for the big screen, in 1974, by Fred Haines, a UC Berkeley graduate known for co-scripting the 1967 film version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The leading roles in Steppenwolf, shot in Hamburg and Basel (where sections of the novel got written),went to the well-cast Max von Sydow and Dominique Sanda, while the tract ‘On Steppenwolf’ and the magic theater episodes were ingeniously animated by the Czech-British visual artist Jaroslav Bradáč (see illustration above).
The critic Jacoba Atlas remarked that Bradáč’s was “one of the finest ‘dream’ sequences ever put on film. It is perhaps the ultimate ‘acid’ trip, one of those free-form fantasies using every cinematic technique from step-printing to chromatic negatives” (Atlas 1975). Atlas’s ultimate conclusion is also hard to disagree with: “The overall effect is somewhat limited. It does not do justice to Hesse and it does not really stand on its own” (Atlas 1975). Haines’s Steppenwolf experienced problems with the distribution and for years would be “shown only rarely in revival theatres” (Lewis 1985).
The film’s executive producer, the entrepreneur Peter J. Sprague, has been portrayed in Eduard Limonov’s roman-à-clef His Butler’s Story (1987) as Steven Grey, in whose real-life New York residence at no. 6, Sutton Square, Limonov worked as a housekeeper in the late 1970s. Without being named, Haines’s Steppenwolf is mentioned here obliquely as a “film with excellent European actors, a very high-class film – ‘a piece of real art’. Real art doesn't earn any money, of course, and as a consequence Steven Grey had lost ‘one point eight’ million on that venture” (Limonov 1987, 9).
It is too early to say whether the latest Steppenwolf film, by the Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov, will yield any profit. However, it already looks as if its financial prospects might be brighter than those of its fifty-year old namesake, if only because its budget must have been considerably smaller (and should, in theory, be easier to recoup) than the 1974 Steppenwolf’s reported loss of 11.5m USD (in today’s money), while its genre, at least potentially, has a wider appeal.
Unlike Haines’s Steppenwolf, which tried to be faithful to its literary source, Yerzhanov’s film at first glance has little to do with Hesse’s novel, except for the film’s epigraph linking personal shortcomings to societal flaws: “How could I fail to be a lone wolf and an uncouth hermit, as I didn’t share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures?” The 2024 Steppenwolf is an apocalyptic thriller (with a nod to the violent Kazakh unrest of January 2022), in which there is neither time nor place for intellectual self-analysis, and suicidal intentions give way to survival instincts.
In the atmosphere of bloody mayhem that engulfs Kazakhstan provinces, the ex-policeman, now an escaped convict, Brayuk (Berik Aytzhanov), is looking for a local gangster to punish him for burning Brayuk’s family alive. Brayuk is, thus, almost literally, a lone wolf of the steppes who takes the law into his own claws. His quest is assisted by violent actions that would make Tarantino blush. As the gangster acquires children for organ harvesting, a woman called Tamara (Anna Starchenko) tags along with Brayuk, hoping that he would help her to find and save her son Timka, abducted by his estranged father (Azamat Nigmanov) and given to the gangster to settle a debt.
Yerzhanov successfully adopts and naturalizes the principal conventions of classical Western in their two varieties: looking for missing family members (e.g. The Searchers by John Ford, 1956) and exacting revenge (e.g. High Plains Drifter by Clint Eastwood, 1973). By some critics (see Kereibayev 2024), Yerzhanov is even credited with co-establishing a subgenre of beshbarmak Western (so called by analogy with spaghetti Westerns from Italy and goulash Westerns from Hungary). In my view, though, Yerzhanov simply continues to develop the tradition of Easterns (aka Red Westerns, see Lavrent’ev 2009), in existence since the 1920s. In his online interview (Yerzhanov 2024), Yerzhanov also claims that the plot of his Steppenwolf has been influenced by the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale.
Homage to Hesse’s book is traceable nonetheless—for instance, in fanciful scenes, such as escaping a wall of bullets unscathed and procuring a horse and a grenade launcher out of nowhere, likely inspired by the magic theatre sections. There is also a gender twist: it is the man who demonstrates dance moves to the woman, and the woman who kills the man, not the other way round. It appears that Yerzhanov is playing with the topos of (re-)emancipation of the downtrodden woman of the East. Initially almost incoherent and utterly helpless, Tamara gradually learns from Brayuk how to make herself understood, torture a suspect, handle a gun, and even bare her teeth in a wolf-like manner. Once she is capable of defending herself and freeing the kidnapped children from captivity (her son included), she does not need Brayuk anymore and disposes of him in cold blood. To paraphrase Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, the she-wolf has rejoined her cub and all is right in the steppes.
Andrei Rogatchevski
UiT The Arctic University of Norway
| Comment on this article on Facebook |
Works Cited
Atlas, Jacoba. 1975. “Steppenwolf (United States/Switzerland)”, Los Angeles Free Press 11 (56), issue 546, 3 January, p. 18.
Hesse, Hermann. 2012. Steppenwolf, translated by David Horrocks. London: Penguin.
Kereibayev, Oraz. 2024. “Stepnoi volk: Beshbarmak-vestern o besprosvetnom zle”, 98mag.kz, 16 August.
Lavrent’ev, Sergei. 2009. Krasnyi vestern. Moscow: Algoritm.
Lewis, Randy. 1985. “Steppenwolf Screening Will Have Analytic Focus”, Los Angeles Times, 7 March.
Limonov, Eduard. 1987. His Butler’s Story, translated from Russian by Judson Rosengrant, New York: Grove Press.
Yerzhanov, Adilkhan. 2024. “SHEBERXANA talk”, 14 September.
Steppenwolf, Kazakhstan, 2023
Color, 102 minutes
Director and scriptwriter: Adilkhan Yerzhanov
Cinematography: Erkinbek Ptyraliev
Design: Yermek Utegenov
Editors: Arif Tleuzhanov, Adilkhan Yerzhanov
Music: Galymzhan Moldanazar
Cast: Berik Aytzhanov, Anna Starchenko, Azamat Nigmanov
Producers: Olga Khlasheva, Aliya Mendygozhina, Alexander Rodnyansky et al
Production: Golden Man Media, State Center for the Support of National Cinema, Blue Finch Film Releasing
Release date: 15 August 2024
Adilkhan Yerzhanov: Steppenwolf (Dala qasqyry, Kazakhstan 2023) reviewed by Andrei Rogatchevski © 2025 |