"Shelved for almost ten years, A Lonely Man's Voice was the debut feature of Aleksandr Sokurov, who has been called the "heir apparent" of Andrei Tarkovsky within the Soviet cinema. Based on two short stories by Andrei Platonov, the action is set in a small Ukrainian town immediately following the post-revolutionary Russian Civil War. A former Red Army soldier, Nikita, returns home to his girlfriend Lyuda, but the fighting has extracted too high a price; both are haunted by wartime memories, and the pervasive fear that they will be unable to adapt to the new society. One of the few Soviet films to deal, sympathetically, with the problem of psychological maladjustment, A Man's Lonely Voice freely combines live action, newsreels, and highly processed footage to create a palpable sense of its protagonists' inner worlds. According to director Sokurov, 'A Man's Lonely Voice actually tries to follow in a grand tradition of Russian literature that concentrates on inner anguish rather than outward action. The retreat into eroticism demonstrates the death of the Spirit when faced with the cruel fact of the World.' " -Richard Peña