Karen Shakhnazarov is making a film about Gilyarovsky’s Moscow

Karen Shakhnazarov is finishing work on the most interesting film Khitrovka. The Sign of the Four”, where one of the heroes is the slum of historical Moscow with its taverns, bunkhouses and dungeons.

The film, the script of which was written by screenwriters Elena Podrez, Ekaterina Kochetkova and Karen Shakhnazarov, is based on a real historical event. In 1902, the young Moscow Art Theater undertook the production of Maxim Gorky’s play “At the Bottom”. Directors Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky asked the famous writer and public figure Vladimir Gilyarovsky, who knew the lush Moscow slums of Khitrovka like the back of his hand, to take the Moscow Art Theater troupe on an excursion to the rooming house.

The filmmakers, led by cameraman Oleg Lukichev, carefully studied Moscow life at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries and created a vivid artistic image of both slum Moscow, where the most terrible crimes were committed and remained hidden, and secular Moscow, whose inhabitants let their lives down the drain in expensive clubs, theaters and restaurants and preferred to ignore the existence of the slums.

In the film, Gilyarovsky, after a tour of the slums, leads Stanislavsky to a mysterious Indian, his friends find him killed. Stanislavsky and Gilyarovsky begin an independent investigation of this mysterious crime.

In practice, Shakhnazarov’s film is the story of Russian Holmes and Watson. And not fictitious characters, but real historical figures who are drawn into the maelstrom of a dangerous investigation by a series of circumstances.

The film’s team has constructed an original detective adventure inspired by the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, based on the works of Vladimir Gilyarovsky.

“We must remember that this is a feature film,” says Konstantin Kryukov, who plays the role of Stanislavsky, “and we are not chasing a documentary illustration of history. This is not a biopic, this is not a biography of Stanislavsky, this is not a verbatim transmission of some real facts, because much of what will be in our cinema is just a fictional story! Although, of course, I take into account some points from the biography of my character.

At one time, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov wrote: “I have known him (V. Gilyarovsky) for almost 20 years, we started our career together in Moscow, and I looked at him quite enough … There is something Nozdrevskoe, restless, noisy, but the person is simple-hearted, pure in heart, and there is absolutely no element of betrayal in him, which is so inherent in gentlemen newspapermen. He tells jokes incessantly, wears a watch with an obscene panorama and, when he is in a good mood, performs card tricks.

The role of Gilyarovsky in the film is played by Mikhail Porechenkov. Other roles were played by Anfisa Chernykh, Evgeny Stychkin, Alexei Vertkov, Alexander Oleshko, Boris Kamorzin, Ivan Kolesnikov, Stanislav Eventov, Georgy Topolaga, Yuri Mirontsev, Sergei Shkoda, Sergei Barkovsky.

Elena Bulova.

Frames from the film provided by the film crew