Master of sympathy

At the age of 77, director Nikolai Dostal, the author of the iconic perestroika film Cloud Paradise (1990) and the equally iconic TV series Penal Battalion (2004), the unforgettable Sasha Krieger from Mikhail Kalik’s Thaw masterpiece Goodbye, Boys, died in Moscow. » (1964). The love shown by Dostal in his best films for the provincial “freaks” gives the right to call the director Vasily Shukshin’s “direct heir”.

Nikolai Dostal was born into a family about which it is time to shoot a series: no one, perhaps, will believe in its plausibility, but in vain. Father Nikolai Vladimirovich Dostal, half Czech, spent three years in German captivity, filmed the first police detective in the USSR – the famous “Case of the Motley” (1958). And on the set of the film “It all starts with the road” (1959), he died terribly: he filmed the passage from the hood of a truck when it crashed into a pole.

Even earlier, at the age of 28, Nikolai’s mother died immediately after the birth of her son. Persian and cellist, adherent of the exotic religion of the Bahai Jahantab Sarafi Ali-kyzy. So the Jewish sadness in Sasha Krieger’s eyes was actually Persian sadness. The legendary Natalya Androsova raised her stepson. Great-great-granddaughter – really great-great-granddaughter – of Nicholas I and the USSR Master of Sports in motorcycle racing. From her races along the vertical wall in Gorky Park, the heart of more than one generation of Muscovites sank: who only from the sixties did not dedicate poems to her and did not declare his love.

After the death of Dostal’s father, cinema did not appeal: before entering the workshop of Georgy Danelia at the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors, he graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. But the claw got stuck – the whole bird is gone.

In the first Soviet retro “Goodbye, Boys” about boys from a southern seaside town who will go to the front “without finishing their last cigarette”, Dostal will make a brilliant trio with Yevgeny Steblov and Mikhail Kononov. Their friends will be played by Natalya Bogunova and Victoria Fedorova: the head is spinning from such a galaxy of future stars.

Dostal’s first films as a director, Man with an Accordion (1985) and Shura and Prosvirnyak (1987), outline his avid interest in the texture of the Stalin era and, at the same time, in the fate of small Soviet people.

It was just such a small, good-natured, worthless and tragic character that Kolya, the hero of Dostal’s most famous film Cloud Paradise, became. A film that reflected the muddy, indistinct languor of the perestroika years, the feeling of the soil leaving from under the feet along with the USSR.

Languishing from the idiocy of provincial life in an anonymous urban-type settlement and suffering from the fact that no one was interested in him, Kolya invented for himself, if not fate, then the prospect of breaking out into the big world. He lied that he was leaving to work in the Far East, and received unexpected “support” from his neighbors, literally pushing him out of his small homeland to nowhere and never: at least he would succeed.

Fifteen years later Dostal returned on the screen of a weirdo in the film “Kolya – Rolling Stone” (2005). Having succeeded, oddly enough, on the path of foreign navigation, Kolya returned home and was again forced to invent the circumstances of his biography. This time – so that the neighbors would not be offended by their fate, rolling along the well-worn rut – he composed a fatal illness for himself.

The theme of two lives – real and fictional – is the main theme in Dostal’s best films. In “Petya on the road to the Kingdom of Heaven” (2009), based on the story of the Leningrad prose writer Mikhail Kuraev, the city fool from Kandalaksha of the fateful year 1953 imagined himself as a traffic police inspector. And the whole city, including the formidable authorities of the camp region, played along with his harmless game. Harmless for the time being. Fitting into the pursuit of fugitive convicts, the innocent Petya, armed with a wooden pistol, died from an accidental bullet of an escort.

Dostal had a rare property among domestic directors: he treated his Kolkas and Petkas with sincere, albeit sometimes clumsy, tenderness, without metropolitan arrogance.

One can only regret that he did not film Kuraev’s best story “Captain Dikshtein” about a participant in the Kronstadt rebellion, who lived a fictional life that dragged on for many decades.

A kind of eccentric was also the clumsy, but tenacious provincial investigator Pavel Pafnutiev from the TV series “Citizen Chief” (2001) based on the novel by Viktor Pronin. The serial elements partly tightened the director. So, he took off the penal battalion, which deserved a bunch of fair reproaches regarding the historical authenticity. And “Lenin’s Testament” (2007) about the fate of Varlam Shalamov, and “Split” (2011), also not without sin in terms of reliability, but still head and shoulders above other historical teleopuses. The master of the old school remained a master, without betraying the hereditary profession.

Mikhail Trofimenkov