Writer and playwright Yuri Arabov, who worked with Sokurov, Dostal, Khrzhanovsky and Proshkin, has died

On December 27, at the age of 70, the writer, poet, film playwright, a man of great talent and inner strength, Yuri Arabov, died. He had been seriously ill for a long time and preferred to become a hermit, while remaining very friendly and open. He fought bravely against garbage in the streets and in people’s minds and often lost this battle. And it was captured on film.

On the death of a comrade with whom “The Lonely Voice of a Man”, “Sorrowful Insensibility”, “Days of Eclipse”, “Save and Preserve”, “Silent Pages”, “Mother and Son”, the trilogy “Taurus” – “Moloch” – “ were made The Sun”, “Faust”, 12 films in total, film director Alexander Sokurov said: “Yuri Nikolaevich is part of my life. Special, almost root. He taught me a lot, he was always patient and noble. I think that everything he wrote about in his film scripts, he lived within himself, moved through times, cultures, knew a lot, learned everything. He is in the souls of many people: students, directors who worked with the Master for a long time. A real Muscovite. Lived in Moscow, loved Moscow. He loved Russia and believed in the Russian God. Good bye, my friend. We’ll meet Again”.

Yuri Arabov was born on October 25, 1954, graduated from VGIK, and made his film debut as a screenwriter with the unsurpassed “The Lonely Voice of a Man.” In 1999, the jury of the Cannes Film Festival awarded him the Silver Palm for the script of Sokurov’s Moloch, which tells about Hitler and his lover Eva Braun. Many films in which Arabov was involved received worldwide recognition, but he himself seemed to have nothing to do with the success. He just continued to live.

In almost all of his paintings there is something phantasmagoric and miraculous, related to holiness, whether he was exploring the nature of power or the soul of the common man. In “The Miracle” by Alexander Proshkin, a girl was petrified, and believers began to pray for her, and the special services hid an inexplicable fact. The heroine of “Security” Alexander Proshkin had an immaculate conception. In “The Horde” by Andrei Proshkin, Saint Alexy goes to the capital of the Golden Horde to heal the mother of the mighty khan from blindness. In Pavel Lungin’s “The Case of Dead Souls,” there are actually two Chichikovs. He and his shadow, “a demon hunter,” as Lungin himself says.

Nikolai Dostal told MK how, having conceived “The Monk and the Demon,” he set the screenwriter the task of writing a story reminiscent of “Faust” and at the same time Saint Ivan of Novgorod, “riding” the demon. “I need Gogol’s devilry. Who else but you can do this? Let’s! Yura wrote and said: “Your project. Do what you want”. I have already finalized it myself with the consent of Arabov. He, however, said: “I don’t believe that you will make this movie.” The dialogue with the characters did not end even after the film was released. Arabov continued to search for answers to the questions: “Can the devil become a man? And the devil knows! I have come to a heresy rooted in folklore.”

He wrote scripts for the films “Mister Decorator” by Oleg Teptsov, “The Mental Wolf” by Valeria Gai Germanika, “Apocrypha: Music for Peter and Paul” by Adel Al-Hadad about Tchaikovsky, “A Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland” by Andrei Khrzhanovsky about Brodsky . The heroes of dreams in the animated documentary film “The Nose, or the Conspiracy of the “Not Like That” by Andrei Khrzhanovsky were not only Major Kovalev, who lost his nose, and the nose itself, walking around in a uniform, but also Gogol, Shostakovich, Stalin, Meyerhold, Tuminas.

In 2014, in St. Petersburg, debutante Ella Arkhangelskaya filmed “The Cage” based on Dostoevsky’s “A Meek One.” It was adapted for film by Yuri Arabov, who wrote the script about love given from above and became the artistic director of the project. Dmitry Nagiyev played the moneylender Moser, who buys human souls, to whom Dostoevsky was given several lines, but had a whole role in the script. In an interview with MK, he said: “Yuri Arabov has every chance of being called a living classic. “Cage” is like a breath of air for me.” Arabov also came up with a new character – a young priest who has learned the rules of life, but is not yet ready to save a person begging for help.

Arabov worked a lot for television, and these were non-trivial projects “Testament of Lenin” by Nikolai Dostal, “Doctor Zhivago” by Alexander Proshkin, “The Case of “Dead Souls” by Pavel Lungin… He did not interfere in the work of the director, he understood who was boss. In this sense, he was a 100% professional. But sometimes he suffered, declaring that he would no longer have anything to do with cinema, since there was no opportunity to do what he cared about. Why else? He had his own opinion on everything. For example, he did not like the films “The Pianist” and “The White Ribbon” by Michael Haneke, because “the director speculates on violence.” “I wouldn’t risk killing a crow on camera, because it has a soul. Cats and dogs have it too. You cannot film the suffering of a being with a soul,” Arabov said. He considered Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” a masterpiece and watched it twenty times, and then told VGIK students about it. But, looking at Margarita Terekhova, every time I thought about whether she would kill the rooster in the frame or not. I recalled how Sokurov, filming a 15-year-old actress in Faust, also invited a model, since an intimate scene was being filmed. “We must remain within the bounds of morality. Money these days flies away like birds, but do we really live for it? We are alive by something else. The soul resides within us. My profession includes the desire to do good,” Arabov said then.

In 2020, his directorial debut, Yuri Arabov, directed the film “Gjirokastra”. But even after a couple of years, he asked the film critics awarding the White Elephant Award not to review his film, citing the fact that it was not completed. The script was written jointly with the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, who was born in the city of Gjirokastra in southern Albania, where the action takes place. Early 1960s. Albanians are being dealt with in the country on fabricated cases. Those with Russian wives are at risk. Arabov invited Dmitry Krymov’s student Polina Grishina-Liske to play one of the main roles. She later said: “We talked with Yuri Nikolaevich, there weren’t even any auditions. He looked at 600 actresses and said to the producer, who was offering another famous actress: “I will shoot Paula. I don’t need any stars.” He saw me in the film “Salvation” and said: “You are Lars von Trier’s actress. This is how you exist.”