Anna Karamazoff (1991) Timeline Explained – Every Event in Order

Anna targets the officer because she remembers he had once written a denunciation against her, leading to her imprisonment in the labor camps. When she meets the impoverished young man Viktor Sibilev, they scheme together to kill the wealthy officer as an act of revenge for her past betrayal and as a means to obtain money for their survival in postwar Leningrad.

• anna
• viktor sibilev
• poison
• revenge
• officer
• denunciation
• labor camp

The black dog Kaplan (named Greta) serves as a symbolic guide in Anna's quest to find her mother's grave. The girl Mari tells Anna that 'the Big Black Dog, Kaplan, she will show you the way,' and at the cemetery, the dog appears and leads Anna toward her mother's burial site. The film notes indicate Greta functions as a double for Anna herself, representing her search for memory and the past.

• kaplan
• greta
• black dog
• mother's grave
• symbolism
• guide

Inside the cinema, Anna watches a fragmented film where two sisters learn a legend about a magical carpet that can revive belief if innocent blood is spilled on it. They travel to the front line to test this legend, but the experiment fails when Prokudin-Gorsky spills his own blood and dies. This meta-narrative mirrors Anna's own journey, attempts to revive faith or meaning through sacrifice and violence ultimately fail, reflecting the film's themes of disillusionment.

• carpet
• film within film
• prokudin-gorsky
• belief
• sacrifice
• disillusionment

After the murder and robbery, Anna leaves the stolen purse in a theater box, and it mysteriously begins to swell with some unseen force. This surreal moment symbolizes the weight of Anna's guilt and stolen identity, she is literally burdened by her crimes. The swelling purse marks a turning point where she begins to shed this identity.

• purse
• theater
• swelling
• guilt
• identity
• surreal

When Anna goes to the communal apartment where her documents were once hidden, a child speaks to her from behind a door, claiming to be alone. After Anna tries to leave, she is recognized and admitted inside. Two men and a woman (who had been pretending to be the child) are waiting. This recognition suggests someone from Anna's past still remembers her, though the specific identity of who recognized her remains ambiguous in the dreamlike narrative.

• communal apartment
• recognition
• documents
• child
• hidden

At the young man's house, a passing train causes a portrait of young Vladimir Lenin to fall from the wall and crack. This occurs alongside the mysterious chant 'Sesame, open up!', referencing the Ali Baba fairy tale. The scene suggests the collapse of Soviet ideological certainties and the opening of hidden thresholds in Anna's life. It reinforces the film's permeable boundary between reality and illusion.

• lenin portrait
• train
• sesame open up
• collapse
• ideology
• illusion

After murdering the officer and stealing his possessions, Anna descends into a flooded toilet at the theater and passes the stolen clothes to an elderly cleaning lady. This surreal act symbolizes her deliberate shedding of the criminal identity she briefly assumed for the robbery. She emerges purified of that role, though the murder itself remains on her conscience.

• stolen clothes
• theater
• flooded toilet
• purging
• identity
• escape

Anna goes to a communal apartment searching for a hidden chest containing her important documents. When she finally enters, she discovers the chest has already been burned. The documents, likely proof of her identity or property rights, are gone, leaving her in a state of bureaucratic nonexistence in postwar Leningrad.

• documents
• chest
• burned
• communal apartment
• identity
• leningrad

On the train to Leningrad, a young man covered in liquid clay and wearing a women's purse on his belt fires an imaginary bow at Anna. This surreal encounter foreshadows the film's dreamlike logic and establishes the danger lurking in Anna's postwar world. The young man (Victor Sibilyov) later becomes her accomplice in the murder scheme, making this first meeting a ominous prefiguration of their criminal partnership.

• victor sibilyov
• imaginary bow
• train
• liquid clay
• surreal
• danger

When the Lenin portrait falls and cracks, a voice cries out 'Sesame, open up!', the magic phrase from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves that opens hidden caves. This references the fairy tale's theme of hidden treasure and forbidden chambers. In context, it suggests that the collapse of Soviet iconography is opening mysterious new possibilities for Anna, though whether this leads to freedom or deeper entrapment remains ambiguous.

• sesame open up
• ali baba
• lenin portrait
• ending
• freedom
• hidden

The film features multiple unsettling tooth-pulling moments: first when Tatyana Drubich's character tries to pull a milk tooth from a child in Anna's apartment, then later when Anna helps pull a tooth from the boy Alexander at the grandmother's house. These painful rituals in cramped, tense settings symbolize the extraction of memory, the loss of childhood innocence, and the brutal nature of survival in postwar Soviet society.

• tooth pulling
• ritual
• memory
• innocence
• brutality
• survival

In 1949, Anna Aleksakhina returns from Soviet labor camps to Leningrad, her hometown. She carries a diary on the train, contemplating an uncertain future. She returns to find her apartment occupied, her documents destroyed, and a society that no longer recognizes her. This homecoming represents her attempt to reclaim her life and identity, but she discovers that the city, and her place in it, has fundamentally changed.

• labor camp
• leningrad
• return
• 1949
• identity
• homecoming