The study was conducted at author's own expense. No competing interests have been declared. Publisher: Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences & The Slavic Foundation. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 PL License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/pl/), which permits redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, provided that the article is properly cited. © The Author(s) 2016. Agnieszka Magdalena Korycka An attempt to approach the sacred through the flm on the example of the analysis and interpretation of the journey of a yurodivy in the flm The Lonely Voice of Man by Alexander Sokurov T he debut flm of Alexander Sokurov The Lonely Voice of Man, prepared as a gradu- ation flm in the Moscow VGIK1, was created in the place where no one expected a prophetic word. In 1978 the flm was not well received by the university authorities because of ideological vagueness. The only person that defended it was Andrei Tarkovsky. Many years later Sokurov recalled that the flm tape of The Lonely Voice of Man would not have survived without that proof of faith given by Sokurov's master (EM, 1989, p. 14). Only in 1987 the flm was shown to a wider public. The work of Alexander Sokurov is based on several texts written by Andrei Platonov2. In fact it is, however, a collage of meanings reaching much deeper. On the horizontal plane (at the level of the storyline) the ordinary story of two young people is presented, they try to be happy in the world recovering after the civil war (Vogel, 1989, p. 64). 1 The Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (direct translation from Russian: All-Russian State University of Cinematography named after S. A. Gerasimov). 2 The references to two Platonov's texts are the clearest: The River Potudan (Река Потудань) and The Origin of a Master (Происхождение мастера). Agnieszka Magdalena Korycka – a translator, a flm director, she graduated from the Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in the Humani- ties, a PhD student in the Section for Film and Visual Culture at University of Warsaw. Her felds of interest are artistic translation and Russian cinematography. She carries out research on auteur cinema and the philosophy of Alexander Sokurov's work. e-mail: agnieszka.korycka.uw@gmail.com DOI: 10.11649/a.2016.003 nr 7/2016 r.