Even Trees' list of Russian masters bears this out. What survives in other countries is what translates best, so Dostoevsky is still around (and was much more fashionable in America than Russia for a long time), while Russia's national poet, Pushkin, is fairly unknown, despite the attempts of a few luminaries to fix this, because he translates poorly. Trees' list is anglocentric (except for the shout-out to Gogol over the more well known Turgenev).MichaelB wrote:A case in point being František Vláčil, revered in his native Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic since the 1960s, but whose work was pretty much off limits to non-Czech speakers until less than a decade ago.
Critical fashions come and go; it's still too soon to say how Tarkovsky will fare in 100 years. I'm rooting for him, too, but these kinds of predictions are so pointless. But even if it happens, he may have to pass through through an age skeptical of or even hostile to stylists. Indeed, stylists in general may fare poorly in the future, and Tarkovsky and a lot of other worthies will be forgotten as mannered artists exemplifying the tastes of an age. Or not, and the beauty of the emotion he evokes will see him through. There's no way to know.