Colleagues and fans said goodbye to Alexander Shirvindt at the Satire Theater

On Monday, a farewell ceremony took place at the Satire Theater for actor and director Alexander Shirvindt. His fans laid flowers at the coffin for several hours, and his colleagues and friends asked “not to be so serious,” because “Shura and non-existence are incompatible.” The farewell ovation for the great actor drowned out the noise of the Garden Ring.

Triumphal Square said goodbye to Alexander Shirvindt from the very morning. The queue to the Satire Theater started from the exit from the Mayakovskaya metro station, and 20 minutes before the start of the ceremony it turned onto Tverskaya. The police had to install metal barriers to divide the crowd stretching along the Garden Ring into several sectors.

In line, they remembered the jokes of Alexander Shirvindt and discussed film and theater gossip – it seems, even regretting that there wasn’t so much of it around the artist. “It turns out that now Zhenya Lukashin has no friends left,” sighed the woman, clutching a voluminous bouquet of red roses. “Actually, there is no Zhenya Lukashin left,” her companion didactically corrected her with the same armful of carnations (actor Andrei Myagkov, who played the role of Yevgeny Lukashin in the main Soviet New Year’s comedy, died in 2021).

Large photographs of the actor were displayed in the windows of the Satire Theater. Below them lay a sea of ​​flowers, which loyal spectators began bringing since Friday.

Journalists were allowed into the theater only after strict verification of accreditation lists. The staff explained that the “high-ranking guests part of the ceremony,” for security reasons, would only begin when the entire line had laid flowers: “We expect that to be in about 40 minutes.” But the calculation turned out to be wrong. They began to let people in to see the actor’s coffin, which stood on stage among a mountain of flowers and wreaths, at one o’clock in the afternoon, and the line began to thin out only at half past three. At first, the bouquets were placed to the right of the stage, but this place filled up in ten minutes, after which the theater staff continuously removed flowers, freeing up space for new ones. To the accompaniment of quiet, piercing music, the actors replaced each other “on the clock” at the coffin.

Suddenly the music stopped, and the voice of Alexander Shirvindt himself was heard in the hall: “Do you really think that you can listen to comic couplets with such a sad, lenient face?”

It was on the screen above the stage that they played an excerpt from the film “Three in a Boat, Not Counting the Dog.” The people in line smiled in surprise.

Colleagues, students and friends of Alexander Shirvindt approached the coffin, and then talked for a long time with the actor’s family. So, singer Philip Kirkorov, actors Leonid Yarmolnik, Yulia Menshova, Alexandra Zakharova, deputy Vladislav Tretyak and general director of Channel One Konstantin Ernst appeared on stage.

The official ceremony began as promised when the line from the street finally dried up. The hosts, actors Maxim Averin and Yuri Vasiliev, recalled that Mr. Shirvindt loved fishing most of all. “On the planet that he has now become – the Shirvindt planet somewhere in the neighborhood of the Ranevskaya planet – there should be at least one lake where he can fish,” said Mr. Vasiliev. “The creek, the flask, the Druzhba cheese and his guys – Zakharov, Derzhavin, Mironov. We finally met there. And I’m sure they’re having a great time,” echoed Maxim Averin. The presenters asked those gathered not to be so gloomy: “You feel some kind of hopelessness, but he was all hope,” said Yuri Vasiliev.

Of the “huge stack of telegrams that everyone sends and sends,” only one was quietly read out – from Vladimir Putin.

The current artistic director of the Satire Theater, Sergei Gazarov, thanked Alexander Shirvindt for his trust. “Now we all remember and tell his jokes, because we are trying to have time to say about our love for him,” said Mr. Gazarov. “But with all this greatness, he was an extremely modest, but sparkling person. I even saw him angry once – and that was even funnier.” A group of Alexander Shirvindt’s students recalled that he told “life stories” in class. “Our favorite is about how he proposed to his wife in winter with a bouquet of lilacs,” the young people said. And then they laid an armful of lilac branches at the coffin – and this was in the month of March.

The artist Ivan Urgant noted that his relationship with Mr. Shirvindt “began with a kiss”: “I kissed a living monument, and he offered his old cheek.” “It didn’t matter what Alexander Anatolyevich said, how he joked, he could do nothing, just be there – and I laughed. He will always be there,” Mr. Urgant promised. Photographer Yuri Rost recalled that Alexander Shirvindt “even managed to swear funny”: “He didn’t offend anyone, but built an ornate pattern of irony out of words.”

The speakers quite quickly stopped calling Mr. Shirvindt by his first name and patronymic: all of them, regardless of age, switched to the simple “Shura.”

The rector of the Moscow Art Theater School, Igor Zolotovitsky, told how everyone was preparing to celebrate the “Shura anniversary” this summer: they were preparing speeches and collections of memoirs for this, which Mr. Shirvindt himself called an “obituary.” “That’s what happened in the end. But we don’t need to translate verbs into the past tense – he is always with us,” Mr. Zolotovitsky assured.

The special representative of the Russian President for international cultural cooperation, Mikhail Shvydkoy (introduced at the ceremony simply as a friend of the deceased), reflected that “Shura and non-existence are incompatible.” This idea was supported by many speakers. Actor Alexander Oleshko told how in one performance they “died together on stage so many times, and then went out to bow.” “Now it’s like it’s also a performance, and after that he’ll come out to bow. I can’t believe that this won’t happen,” said Mr. Oleshko. “Without Shura,” there will be no one to pass on “the fire, not the ashes of tradition to the younger generation,” he worried.

Artist Gennady Khazanov shared: “Now it’s as if I hear from behind the scenes: “Gen, make it shorter and less pretentious.” And in general, it seemed to Mr. Khazanov that this whole ceremony was organized by Alexander Shirvindt himself: “He listens somewhere, and then he tells his wife: “This one lied, this one invented everything, and Khazanov has generally gone crazy.” The artist added that it is not difficult to imagine such a thing, because “Shura loved practical jokes” and considered April 1 to be the main holiday. “But still, with his enormous amount of comedy and irony at the end, he made us all cry,” concluded Mr. Khazanov.

Friends, students, children of friends, colleagues, officials – everyone tried to speak briefly, but by the end of the ceremony not everyone had time to speak. The guests were asked to leave the hall so that the family could say goodbye to Mr. Shirvindt, but there were so many people that the hall was empty only after 15 minutes.

“There were elections all weekend, but we were still left without a president,” someone from the theater in the lobby said quietly.

Hundreds of fans of Alexander Shirvindt stood near the theater. Many had to climb onto steps and benches. They waited almost an hour and a half for the coffin with the actor’s body to be taken out of the theater. An elderly woman complained to her neighbor that “all her legs were frostbitten,” but she could not help but “shout out the last ‘bravo’.” And when the funeral procession left the theater, these “bravos” and stormy applause filled the entire street, drowning out the noise of the Garden Ring. The ovation lasted for more than ten minutes; Passers-by, struggling to make their way through the crowd, asked in surprise what was happening, and then often joined in the applause. When the funeral cortege set off, Sadovoe began to make noise again: drivers passing by began honking at the procession. The ovation was lost in their horns. Only after this, at half past four, did the people who had gathered near the theater at noon begin to disperse.

At the request of Alexander Shirvindt himself, the actor’s body was cremated. The ashes will be buried at the Novodevichy cemetery – the actor’s family will announce the date of the funeral later.

Polina Yachmennikova