At the play “The Cranes Are Flying” at the Maly Theater, the hall sobbed

Premiere of Andrey Zhitinkin’s The Cranes Are Flying at the Maly Theatre. The film of the same name based on the scenario of Viktor Rozov at one time completely changed the perception of the Great Patriotic War – for the first time they showed the war not in the trenches, but in the rear, which, however, does not mean “unheroic”. In the theatrical version of “Forever Alive” Zhitinkin left the Soviet idealistic ideas about good and evil, honor and dishonor, sacrifice and sacrifice, but at the same time he introduced something new.

It is almost pointless to retell the plot of the performance, as well as the film, which was watched by 28 million people only in the USSR after its release on the screen. Comparing the version from the director Zhitinkin with the “primary sources” is also not entirely justified. Despite the length of the production – 3 hours and 15 minutes – many important storylines are turned into silent figures in it. So, we do not see and do not learn from the text the reason why Veronika-Belka (Varvara Shatalova) suddenly began to live with Mark, the moment of rape is left out of the brackets. We do not know that Belka saved the boy, whose name was the same as her lover – Boris, that she tried to commit suicide, and the death of her parents during the bombing is mentioned in passing.

But silence only enhances the dramatic effect, inflames the feeling of annoyance from the fact that such injustice is possible in the world. Mark (Alexander Vershinin) is well aware that he forced Veronica to marry himself, and at the same time reproaches for coldness, Boris’s sister Irina (Varvara Andreeva) knows why Belka is like that, and still dislikes and reproaches. And the father of the family, Fyodor Ivanovich Borozdin (Alexander Klyukvin), knows more than anyone – and who brought Belka into the house, and what his nephew did to her after that. And also – for the time being – is silent.

This confidence of the villains in their own triumph is the key semantic grain of the play, where there is not a lonely negative character who will inevitably be defeated. In life, everything is more complicated – here for every hero there is a villain, and there is no certainty who will win in the end. Soviet idealistic notions of good and evil most often did not allow semitones: “friend – enemy”, “drummer – parasite”, “worker – bourgeois”, “volunteer – deviationist”. But if Nyura (Ekaterina Bazarova), who steals bread from people, but promises to become honest after she collects 500 thousand (in the summer of 1943, the average monthly salary in the rear of the worker was 403 rubles), today it seems rubbish, then in the “gray zone” morality turns out to be Antonina Nikolaevna Monastyrskaya. If she is with evil, then not to the end.

Perhaps she left such an impression thanks to the first-class game of the people’s artist Svetlana Amanova (the same Tanya from Gaidai’s comedy “Sportloto-82”). A monastic, as they would now say, a secular lioness, arranging a feast in a country at war in the company of swindlers, selling stocks of expensive things on the market and at the same time blasphemously called the “victim of Leningrad”, from where she was evacuated, is still perceived as a glass ball thrown into fuel oil . Take away the fuel oil and the ball remains a ball. Because Monastyrskaya’s contempt for the thieving bread slicer is too great. The heroine of Amanova “lives beautifully” on inappropriate for the Second World War, but still legal grounds, she is the cream of society. Nyura, taking advantage of the situation and amassing “capital”, boorishly demands a place for herself in this society. And she gets it, since she has the same bread, the question is for how long.

But all these moments are secondary. Andrey Zhitinkin not only showed us a gallery of images of people and non-humans with a hint of modernity, where Nyura’s “followers” ​​sell body armor for NVO fighters on the Internet for 125 thousand rubles at a factory price of 25. To unravel Zhitinkin’s idea, you need to determine what or who is the semantic center of his statement. It could be assumed that this is a toy squirrel, left as a gift to Veronika by Boris, who is leaving for the front. But around this uncomplicated subject revolves the world of the play, and the film, and the play.

So, it’s not about things, but about people. It remains Boris (Andrey Chernyshev). The monument “height to the sky” promised by the father to him, as one of those who did not return from the war, we can only find in our reality. But in the performance there is a direct comparison of Boris, who laid down his soul for his friends, with Jesus Christ.

Perhaps it’s all about the geometry of the stage at the Maly Theatre. But the table covered with a white tablecloth in the center of the scene, turned to the viewer according to the laws of reverse perspective, indicates an artistic representation of how the Last Supper took place. On an Orthodox icon, in a painting by da Vinci or Salvador Dali, the last meal of Christ with the disciples takes place at the table, although in the text of the New Testament the Savior reclined with them in the Zion Room.

And Christ is in the center of the table, just in the place where Boris appears invisibly after his death, having come free from the body to his relatives, who returned to the old Moscow apartment.

“For your life” – that was exactly the working title of the film “The Cranes Are Flying” – is semantically close to the formula “For your friends”. But in the USSR, the New Testament was replaced by a scanty “Code of the Builder of Communism”, and who exactly for the Russian people has always been an example of sacrifice, even the sixties could not speak openly. Hence the scene where grandmother Varvara Kapitonovna says goodbye to Boris “in the old way” and baptizes him, just like the mechanic Makarych from the immortal film “Only “old men go into battle”.

The brilliant Lyudmila Polyakova, who played the grandmother, was the first to make the audience cry. In the final, every second cried, applauded standing – all. And it’s not just about newsreels of the war years or footage from the Immortal Regiment and Mark Bernes’ song about white cranes, which ended it all.

To paraphrase the words of a fighter from another war film – about the defenders of the “Brest Fortress”, the battle is successful if everyone is where they should be. Klyukvin, Polyakova, Chernyshov, Andreev, Amanova, Vershinin, Shatalova, Lyudmila Titova, Vladimir Alekseev, Vladimir Nosik ended up where they were supposed to be.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29048 dated June 14, 2023

Newspaper headline:
“The Cranes Are Flying” in Maly: Tears and Applause