Andrey Plakhov remembers what the outstanding film playwright Yuri Arabov was like

At the age of 70, Yuri Arabov, an outstanding film playwright, poet, novelist and teacher, passed away.

Fate connected him with cinema from birth: his mother, a Crimean Greek, who worked as an assistant director at the Gorky film studio, met the father of the future screenwriter on the set of the film “Vassa Zheleznova” by Leonid Lukov.

At VGIK, where Arabov studied, the most important acquaintance of his life took place – a meeting with Alexander Sokurov.

Their joint feature debut was the film “The Lonely Voice of a Man,” which opened a new era in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema. An extremely important role in the appearance of this film adaptation of Andrei Platonov’s story was played by Livia Zvonnikova, who taught literature and was close friends with Arabov (she also died this year). His creative union with Sokurov lasted for many years. The fruits of this close cooperation were the films “Mournful Insensitivity”, “Days of Eclipse”, “Save and Preserve”, “The Second Circle”, “Stone”, “Mother and Son”. Then followed the “trilogy of tyrants” – “Moloch”, “Taurus”, “Sun” and the adjacent “Faust”. All these films received a wide international response; “Moloch” was awarded the Cannes Film Festival prize for best screenplay.

Despite his closeness to Sokurov’s world, Yuri Arabov also had other cinematic passions; he loved not only auteur cinema, but also genre cinema, and appreciated fantasy, mysticism, eccentricity and the grotesque. But the further he went, the more persistently he was drawn to spiritual and religious quests, to the eternal questions of existence.

His name as a screenwriter appears in the credits of 39 films and mini-series. He successfully worked with such different directors as Oleg Teptsov (“Mister Decorator”, “The Initiated”), Alexander Proshkin (“Nikolai Vavilov”, “Doctor Zhivago”, “Miracle”), Pavel Lungin (“The Case of “Dead Souls” “), Nikolai Dostal (“Lenin’s Testament”, “The Monk and the Demon”), Andrei Proshkin (“Horde”, “Orleans”), Kirill Serebrennikov (“St. George’s Day”), Andrei Khrzhanovsky (“A Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to homeland”, “The Nose, or the Conspiracy of “not like that””).

At the same time, Yuri Arabov lived an active literary life, not connected with cinema. In the 1980s, he was one of the leaders of the metarealism movement in Russian poetry and the organizers of the informal club “Poetry” in Moscow. He has published several poetry collections, including “The Hitchhiker”, “Unreal Saga”, “Simple Life”, “Air”. His novels “Big Beat” and “Flagellants” brought their original color to the literary landscape of the era. He was sensitive to modernity, his fresh voice sounded in verses imbued with irony:

I’ve never been to France

and even in Sweden (wherever!),

but I was in monstrous prostration,

when I remembered where I haven’t been…

Moreover, I have not been to Greece,

where my ancestors were eaten by a jackal…

He really was not an experienced traveler, as I learned when I once attended the Haifa Film Festival with him and made an unforgettable trip to Israel.

Yura was an incredibly interesting conversationalist – smart, deep, but without any arrogance or pathos, with a very original, sometimes dark sense of humor.

At this time, he already headed the department of film dramaturgy at VGIK and was one of the few remaining teachers of the highest standard at this university. Many students in his workshop turned out to be gifted film playwrights.

In recent years, Yuri Arabov struggled with a serious illness, but at the same time continued to work intensively in cinema and tried his hand at directing. But there was less and less strength left. Arabov’s departure is a huge loss. Modesty and human decency prompted him to keep a low profile, but now nothing prevents us from saying that he was one of the key figures in Russian culture in recent decades.

Andrey Plakhov