The soloists of “Mirage” spoke about the series “Words of a Boy”: “There is only truth in it”

“Our acquaintances were exactly the guys about whom the series was filmed”

The cultural community has been discussing the release of the acclaimed series “The Boy’s Word” for several days now. It resonated with the themes the film deals with. Many turned out to be opponents of such romanticization of gangster groups. Perhaps not everyone is aware, but the series featured six songs from the repertoire of the Mirage group.

Of course, the group’s soloists Ekaterina Boldysheva and Alexey Gorbashov could not help but watch the film. They shared with MK their thoughts on what they saw and remembered their 1980s and 1990s.

Alexey Gorbashov: “I lived in Lyubertsy, near Moscow, and I saw much of what is shown in the film with my own eyes. Only this was not in the 1990s, but much earlier – in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of my friends from the yard and school were exactly the kind of guys about whom this series was filmed. My school friend, thanks to whom I first heard Vysotsky, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, and who showed me how to press “thieves” chords, spent almost 20 years in the camps. It was such a time…

Ekaterina Boldysheva: “We often visited Kazan and other cities of Tatarstan in the 1990s, and often the spectators at our concerts were the very people from whom the characters in this film were based. Who else could relax at that time in the nightclubs where our concerts often took place? One way or another, we had to come into contact with them and communicate. And, it should be noted, in communication these were nice people who always behaved correctly towards us. It was only later that we learned from the organizers that this or that person who looked into our dressing room or invited us to dinner after the concert turned out to be a well-known authority.”

– Do you think the creators of the series are dramatizing those years? Or is what is shown in the series true?

Ekaterina Boldysheva: “We had the opportunity to travel around our country in those years. And it seems to me that, no matter how much I would like to close my eyes to all this, what is shown in the film is very similar to the truth.”

– Many people are calling for the series “The Boy’s Word” to be banned so as not to romanticize gangster groups. How do you feel about such prohibitions?

Alexey Gorbashov: “The film left a painful impression on me. No matter how hard I tried, I didn’t catch any romance in him. In general, it has always been a good tradition in our country to prohibit anything. We had everything that was banned: religion, Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, rock music, jazz… And after some time it suddenly turned out that what was banned was good. And from a certain moment it was necessary to start loving Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, to believe in God, and jazz and rock suddenly began to be studied in music schools. I wonder if they will now remember the names of those who banned all this in those years? The most interesting thing: in the 1980s, they didn’t make films that would romanticize the criminal world and prison themes, but organized crime existed very well and flourished. Probably, questions should be asked not to the filmmakers, but to the government under which all this happened, and, perhaps, is happening somewhere now.”