Egorooshka's Travels

The Steppe, when Anton Chekhov wrote about it in a tale as monotonous and mesmeric as the steppe itself, was in Russia. But times have changed. In this movie directed by Alberto Lattuada (Tempest), the steppe is in Yugoslavia and all its inhabitants speak Italian. Khrushchev & Co. may consider this a steppe in the wrong direction. But the literary crowd will applaud Lattuada's loyalty to Chekhov's plot; children who are old enough to read the subtitles will take the hero to their hearts; and Walt Disney will no doubt hate himself for not making the picture first.

The hero is a nine-year-old boy (Daniel Spallone) named Egorooshka who leaves home in the country and goes to school in the city. To get there, he makes a journey across the steppe and on the way accomplishes a lively passage from innocence to experience. First day out, the boy gapes in innocent wonder at every passing beetle, but life soon confronts him with a pack of savage dogs, with a peasant whose face is rotting away, with a wild young man who grabs him and hurls him into a deep river just for the hell of it.

Forced every day to face some kind of danger, the child swiftly loses his fear of it. One night, when two peasants put their quarrel to the knife, he rushes boldly between them and breaks up the fight. A day or two later, delirious with chills and fever, he stands up like a man to the terrors of the mind. Next morning he is well. Life, he discovers, is like the steppe. Every day is a journey, and the end of one journey is the beginning of the next. The big thing is to keep going.

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