The manuscript of the script “Peter the Great” by Alexei Tolstoy was handed over to the Russian Museum

The problem is not how to acquire unique documents, but to whom to transfer them later

At the Film Library. Eisenstein, dating back to 1934, the manuscript of the script “Peter the Great” by Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy was handed over to the Museum of Cinema. The rarity was brought from the UK by Andrey Konkov – just a few pages. How and when they got there is unknown. The main dream of the donor is that the manuscript should not gather dust in the archive, but be available to visitors and researchers.

The Museum of Cinema has over 100,000 items in its collection. Among them are pre-revolutionary publications, rarities that exist in a single copy, editing sheets and film postcards. In the film library, which emerged on the basis of the House of Cinema, there is a tradition of donation. On the Day of Russian Cinema, actress and film critic Marianna Kushnerova presented a rare, albeit modern, edition of The Stationmaster about the film by her ex-husband, film director Sergei Solovyov, where she played Dunya. Marianna Kushnerova is a graduate of the film studies department of VGIK, a museum worker and knows the price of such specimens well. On the same day, Andrey Konkov, a lawyer and connoisseur of painting, presented the museum with a manuscript of the script written for the film “Peter the Great”, filmed by director Vladimir Petrov in 1937-1938. We talked about this with Andrey Konkov.

– Did the manuscript come to you through a family line or was it an acquisition?

– Not by family line, fortunately or unfortunately. I bought it at Christie’s auction house. I am fond of painting, I buy paintings and I see that sometimes documents related to the life and work of writers and artists are exhibited. Alexei Tolstoy personally wrote the script. There were several options. He worked for a long time, but he corrected himself little, judging by the manuscript. We took it home with great difficulty. It took a year to obtain all the necessary permits.

– What is your interest?

– Such things should not be in the West. They should decorate our museums and archives. I myself am a lawyer and I know what is the value of the document and its history. We have already donated more than 30 letters to the Turgenev Museum. A few more “hung” in connection with the current situation. We bought something and are waiting for circumstances to allow us to bring it all and donate it to the museum in Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. There is the legacy of Zinaida Gippius, but there is neither her museum nor the Merezhkovsky museum in the Russian Federation. To whom to give? We also managed to acquire an interesting handwritten biography of the writer Alexander Belyaev. There are many such things. In the West they have been gathering for centuries. Why am I doing this? There is no commercial purpose. There is a purpose of exposure. The main thing is that all these riches should not be left lying around in the West, as is often the case. There, Repin’s paintings are in storerooms, since for the most part they are of no interest to anyone. We have a lot of documents. We call museums, talk to their leaders. The idea is not to get them from the West into our archives, but to be exhibited and studied. Of the 33 letters of Turgenev, as experts told us, at least 8 have not been studied at all. They didn’t even know about their existence. They were not in the catalogs.