Boyarsky’s hat: the artist called himself an “evil dwarf”

Boyarsky is already a stereotype, a meme. So I started with d’Artagnan. “Just a man in a hat,” as Garik Sukachev once sang for a completely different reason. You can also recall Chekhov’s “Man in a Case,” but why? All this has nothing to do with Boyarsky at all.

Yes, a hat is an attribute, a dress uniform. Once happily found, the illusion of eternal youth. Mikhail Sergeevich takes off his headdress only in the Kremlin, when the president awards the artist with another order.

And what’s under the hat is the main thing. If Boyarsky had not had it, we would have seen His Majesty’s aging musketeer, gray-haired and no longer very hairy. Do we need this?

The hat is a mask, a role, faith in the proposed circumstances. Put it on – and you’re in the house: “I need a horse, a horse, a thousand devils!”

But what really? How to break into this immortal soul, separate the wheat from the chaff, the hat from the head, from the heart.

In the bag? She’s wearing makeup, that’s all. The faithful have penetrated this man, and they are succeeding.

What is needed for that? Love for the interlocutor, interest, intelligence, knowledge of background, psychological complexity. That’s all.

Do you know what the charm of the mind is? Not necessarily higher intelligence, artificial intelligence, seven spans in the forehead. It’s just when you sit opposite a person and get a thrill from his every answer. You experience joy, gratitude, and your soul sings. That’s what communication is.

I once had such a catharsis with Mikhail Sergeevich during a conversation in a small hotel on the outskirts of Moscow, where he stayed for two days, came to rest for the recording of another musical program at Ostankino.

“Where have you seen smart artists?” – one very famous former TV presenter, my good neighbor, a wonderful person, told me. I saw it, and how. And this is not only Sergei Yursky and Alla Demidova. Their name is Legion. But, as the late General Lebed said: “Stupidity is such intelligence.” And I only saw one who wasn’t very smart, right, Cosmos? “After all, you are the most narrow-minded among us” (“The Irony of Fate”).

And here Boyarsky is special, at Vernikov I felt it again. His self-destructive self-irony (which is characteristic only of a very smart person) is not coquetry, not show-off. He really humiliates himself beyond belief. “What am I, who am I, Terekhova, Freundlich, Durov – yes, but I…”, “I’m an artist for the muscles, I can’t make the heart cry.” “You are for joy,” Igor Vernik disagrees. Boyarsky responded: “I don’t believe it,” just like Stanislavsky.

This foolishness is the greatness of Boyarsky. Because he is sober, practical and pragmatic (“I still don’t understand what romance is”), cruel to himself, his beloved. After all, if you remember how many real hours of happiness he brought (and not only to women) with his roles (“Eldest Son”, “Dog in the Manger”, “Straw Hat”, “Musketeers”, of course, “New Year’s Adventures of Masha and Vitya” ” – “I don’t like to pull the cat’s tail”). These are just my favorites.

Yes, he is closed and says about himself what he can and wants. But how! So much intelligence and talent slips into this crack, God willing. It’s as if he still imagines himself as a boy, a green youth, who was so lucky to find himself in the holy of holies, high art. He is still studying, he is searching, he is searching, although it would seem… He saw closely how Nikolai Simonov and Nikolai Cherkasov played at the theater, he has something to compare with, he knows the price of everything.

Boyarsky seems to know how to get out of his own image and look at himself, at all his art, at life from the outside. And then we all (and himself first of all) will not find it enough. “I am an evil dwarf,” he continues to sculpt himself into a hunchback (“And now Hunchback!”). Eh, we need more of these “evil dwarfs”, but where can we get them? Boyarsky is the only one, in the singular. There will be no other.

A BIG DIFFERENCE

On “Culture” they showed “Forgotten Cinema,” that’s what the section is called. First, “The Hound of the Baskervilles” from 1971, then “Colleagues” (1973). It’s like in “Winter Evening in Gagra” Shirvindt, remember: “We are starting our program “Forgotten Names.” Give me the film, please.”

“The Hound of the Baskervilles” features wonderful actors: Holmes – Nikolai Volkov, Watson – Lev Krugly, and also Anatoly Adoskin, Oleg Shklovsky, Alexander Kaidanovsky, Ekaterina Gradova, Grigory Lampe… Then the film was stopped showing because Krugly emigrated abroad. Well, that was it. Now they showed it again. It would be better not to show it. Because in 1981, Igor Maslennikov filmed that same “Dog” with Livanov, Solomin, Mikhalkov, Kryuchkova, Adabashyan, Rina Zelenaya, Demidova, Steblov, Yankovsky, Kupchenko, Brondukov, Martinson and the divine, awe-inspiring British music of Vladimir Dashkevich – and that’s all , you don’t have to watch the previous version, you can forget it like a bad dream.

And here is “Colleagues”. Did you understand what it was? The scriptwriters are Ryazanov and Braginsky. Well, did you get it?

That’s right, “Office Romance.” After 4 years, Eldar Aleksandrovich decided to direct the film himself, “do as I do,” and the result was a masterpiece. And the further you go, the tastier it becomes.

And what they showed us… It’s quiet horror. The characters utter absolutely the same sacramental phrases – about Bublikov, who died, and about “our world,” and “hello, Prokofya Lyudmilovna,” and about “light industry”… But when you turn it on, it doesn’t work. It’s boring, girls. It’s creepy.

This is what true direction is, brilliant artists, Andrei Petrov’s music, which transformed everything. And only then does a miracle come, and there are no more “Colleagues”, but there is a magnificent “Office Romance” and the unique Eldar Ryazanov of his best time, who breathed life into his own play with Braginsky, and the fairy tale immediately became reality. This is the transformation. Feel the difference.