How are Soviet actors different from modern ones? Life experience

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The simpler the question, the more difficult it is to answer it. Why, for example, are the majority of modern actors acting so badly?

To answer this question, you can write ten large articles and three thick monographs, or you can simply tell the biography of one of their predecessors.

As you know, the main "aristocrats and intellectuals" of Soviet cinema were usually of the most common folk origin.

Vyacheslav Tikhonov, for example, was born into the family of a factory mechanic and a kindergarten teacher in the proletarian Pavlovsky Posad. Innokenty Smoktunovsky is from a family of Siberian peasants, the second child of six children of Belarusian Mikhail Petrovich Smoktunovich and Russian Anna Akimovna Makhneva.

Father and grandfather were dispossessed, father received a year of imprisonment and three years of exile. In 1929, the family fled from hunger from the village to the city, first to Tomsk, then to Krasnoyarsk. In order to somehow help his relatives, Kesha and his brother Volodya are taken to her by a childless aunt, father's sister Nadezhda Petrovna.

Volodya, however, she did not "pull out" - he died out of hunger, but the elder Kesha survived.

With the beginning of the war, my father was called up, and he, like millions of men in our country, did not return from the war - he lay down in the ground in August 1942. Innokenty, who remained the eldest man in the family after his father left for the front, leaves school after the 8th grade - it is necessary to feed the younger ones. Finishes courses of projectionists and works in a military unit and a hospital attached to it.

In 1943, he was also called up. Eight classes at that time were considered an enviable education, so the Krasnoyarsk conscript was sent to Achinsk, to the officer's school. But he was not destined to wear shoulder straps with asterisks - because of hunger he was quietly digging potatoes on a collective farm field, he was expelled from the school and sent to the front as a private.

He got into the very heat - on the Kursk Bulge. Luckily, he survived, but then their 75th Guards Division was transferred to the crossing of the Dnieper. From the fire to the fire, yes. Guard private Smoktunovich for the Dnieper was given a medal "For Courage". Here's a view:

But this medal will find him only 49 years later, in February 1992.

Because soon after the performance, in December 1943, during the German counteroffensive near Zhitomir, part of Smoktunovsky was surrounded, where he lay down almost completely. Innokenty Mikhailovich was considered dead, but in fact he was captured. Wanderings began in the prisoner of war camps in Zhitomir, Shepetovka, Berdichev. The hunger was terrible, everyone died like flies.

It was possible, of course, to be saved - by enrolling in the Vlasov ROA.

As the actor himself recalled, the agitators constantly walked around the barracks, “they were treated to chocolate. After each visit, at least a platoon left with them. People 20-30.

But the son and grandson of the dispossessed for some reason chose a different path, and a month later fled. Barely alive, weightless from hunger, he was picked up by the Shevchuk family. For the fugitive they found, the Germans shot the whole family, but these "natural traitors Ukrainians", as some now certify them, were not afraid either for themselves or for their children. The Red Army soldier came out, put him on his feet, and then transported him to the partisan detachment. You will never pay for this, and Smoktunovsky maintained close relations with members of this family until the end of his days.

Well, the actor was excluded from the list of irrecoverable losses only many years after the war.

He fought in the partisans, and in May 1944 the partisan detachment united with the 318th Guards Rifle Regiment of the 102nd Guards Rifle Division. The future People's Artist received sergeant stripes and a division of a company of submachine gunners under his command.

In Poland he was given a second medal "For Courage". "The commander of the company squad, submachine gunner, junior sergeant Smoktunovich Innokentiy Mikhailovich" was awarded for the fact that "in the battles during the breakthrough of the enemy's defense on 01/14/45 in the area of d. Lorzen's squad was one of the first to break into the enemy's trenches, destroying about 20 Germans."

The rest was afterwards.

Then there were medals for Berlin and Warsaw, then there was the end of the war, which he met in Grevesmühlen, then there was demobilization in October 1945.

Then there was a manic, in spite of everything, desire to become an actor. Then - a five-year work on the stage of the 2nd Zapolyarny Drama Theater in Norilsk, where he was almost the only "freebie" among the unconvoyed convoys of Norillag. Then - scurvy earned in Norilsk, then - many years of wandering around provincial theaters: Grozny, Makhachkala, Stalingrad …

Then - breaking through an invisible wall with his head in Moscow and St. Petersburg, extras in the cinema, freelance work (with payment for exit) in random theaters. The passing years, the reputation of a failed loser, the age in his mid-twenties …

And - unintentional, accidental - the starring role of Prince Myshkin in "The Idiot" at Tovstonogov's 33rd year of life.

The role after which he woke up famous.

And now we are surprised - how is that? Where does such an acting range come from? How could he play Hamlet, Detochkin, a scientist-physicist, a villain, and a hero with the same reliability?

It's very simple.

This generation of actors saw something in this life, and they knew life.

From the inside, not from the spa window.

They knew their country and the people living in this not very good state.

They sculpted their roles from countless encounters on the roads of life. Of those with whom they drank and sang, waited for death and won, laughed and cried, talked all night long and were silent in silence.

They had plenty to create images from.

There would be no these years, lived with their people - there would be no actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky. And another great actor, Alexei Batalov, said very correctly: