Filmmakers from Irkutsk put forward their version of the death of Alexander Vampilov

Film director from Irkutsk Anastasia Zverkova made a short documentary-animated film “Sanya, the Playwright” based on her own script and based on an unpublished interview with the now famous Soviet playwright Alexander Vampilov, which he gave to Leningrad journalist Lev Sidorovsky. The film’s running time is just over twenty minutes, but filming, studying archives, and creating hand-drawn animation took two years.

Anastasia Zverkova has already made a documentary film “Countryman” about a native of Mali who learned Russian, moved to Russia, drives a tram in Irkutsk and at the same time reports the weather forecast on local television. Her “Shenekhen Queen” is about the Buryat singer Badma-Khanda Ayusheeva, and “Freedom Squared” is about a person’s life in isolation.

In her feature short film “Without Sky” about a former pilot, she directed Dmitry Pevtsov, which people in Irkutsk are very proud of, since metropolitan artists are still rarely featured in regional cinema.

Now Anastasia and her team have reconstructed Vampilov’s lost interview from 1970, and for this they found 90-year-old Lev Sidorovsky and asked him to remember their old conversation, studied Vampilov’s diaries and notebooks. An a priori interesting experience that Irkutsk producer and director Yuri Yashnikov helped Anastasia Zverkova implement. He is an enthusiast of his work, who has done a lot to perpetuate the memory of Leonid Gaidai in Irkutsk.

Production designer Timofey Makhnev reproduced the interiors of the 1960s and 70s. Props were found in Irkutsk museums and private collections – a guitar, a typewriter, and objects touched by Vampilov.

On the screen there is an empty room, but it feels like people have just left it. Two glasses of hot tea are on the table, steam billowing above them. Those who could have been will soon appear in the form of graphic portraits on paper. One is 32-year-old Irkutsk playwright Alexander Vampilov, whose play “The Eldest Son” was recently staged at the local Drama Theater named after. Okhlopkova. Now a monument to the playwright is erected in front of its building. By the time of the lost interview, Vampilov had already written “Duck Hunt”.

The second interlocutor is a 36-year-old Leningrad journalist of the Smena newspaper and Aurora magazine, a native of Irkutsk, Lev Sidorovsky, sent to Irkutsk. He watched “The Eldest Son” and was impressed by the talent of the unknown author. And he came to his homeland to write an article about Siberian youth, and ended up taking the first and only big interview with Vampilov. The characters of the film become visible thanks to the animation artist, representative of Irkutsk street art Ekaterina Lazareva.

Vampilov tells the interviewer that his father named him Alexander in honor of Pushkin, about his Buryat roots and Cheremkhovo, where he was born. His father was a school director, the grandson of a lama – a Buddhist priest. And my mother worked as a mathematics teacher at the same school as my father. She was the daughter of an Orthodox priest who served in the Irkutsk Cathedral, and after the death of her husband she raised four children alone.

Alexander Vampilov was also a journalist, he worked for the Irkutsk newspaper “Soviet Youth”. The footage that was once taken there has survived. Vampilov recalls his trips to Siberia, how he wrote essays and feuilletons. He visited Moscow, where life seemed interesting and the people thoughtful.

To confirm his words, newsreels of the capital’s streets are shown on the screen. A woman among a noisy crowd is thinking about something of her own, as if she is not here. Vampilov is close to O’Henry and likes Federico Fellini. As soon as he starts talking about it, they immediately show a chronicle of his stay in the USSR, and we will see the Soviet beauty Zinaida Kiriyenko next to the Italian master. The heroes of Vampilov’s essays also materialize in the form of animated characters. They are static and lack the energy that experienced animators can bring.

On the screen are Khrushchev, Brezhnev, footage from Marlen Khutsiev’s film “Ilyich’s Outpost”, which is perceived by many as a documentary, as a chronicle of a poetic evening at the Polytechnic Museum with the participation of the Siberian Yevtushenko, which is especially emphasized. But these scenes are staged, everything was organized by Khutsiev for the sake of filming a feature film.

The inexperienced Vampilov expresses doubts about whether his interview will be published. Sidorovsky assures that everything will work out. He will take a few photos when he arrives in Leningrad, hand in the text, but it won’t come out. And not because he embarrassed anyone with Vampilov’s judgments. There was simply a lot of other material, and they were preferred to a conversation with a little-known Siberian playwright.

But the questions voiced from the screen do not seem to be the most interesting. This is not a text for which one could fight. The photos disappeared somewhere along with the unpublished interview. There were no voice recorders then, and the journalist wrote everything down in a notebook. The draft has not been preserved.

Two years after the interview, Vampilov died on Lake Baikal. He was in a boat that capsized, managed to swim to shore, but fell. His heart stopped. For many, this version of the development of tragic events will be a revelation, since it is believed that Vampilov drowned in the cold Baikal as a result of hypothermia and was unable to swim. This happened two days before his 35th birthday.