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The Only Meeting

It is difficult to imagine, but on July 25, 2019, Vasily Makarovich Shukshin, an actor, film director and writer, would be 90. We can only follow Sholokhov in lamentation with the great pity: “He would be able to do a lot more…”, if he lived these years. Though who can say, how the Altai natural talent could manage those “underlived” 45 years. Sometimes age and efficiency come into severe conflict with each other. But anyway, it would be enough for completing conceived by him and long-time exciting project – filming his novel “I’ve Come to Give You Freedom…” It was to be enough. For the cherished dream was most probably powerful. But…everything goes exactly according to Hemingway: “The world kills the best…”

The life of Vasily Shukshin, a village boy from the remote Altai, was not easy. During the difficult war years the young man trained to be a driver, then having left his native village Srostki he worked as locksmith, served in the navy, for some time he was even a director of evening school. But his attraction was cinematograph, and later his restless heart brought him to Moscow, to the Institute of Cinematography. Soon Shukshin acted in a few films including an episode in the “Quiet Don” by the film director Gerasimov. Along with it, Vasily wrote short stories and film scripts. The young cinematographer was overwhelmed with his work.

The first real success of his was brought by the film “There Lives Such a Boy” based on his stories. The image of Pashka Kolokolnikov pictures a Shukshin hero, a boy, one of ordinary folks, with a notable “simpleness”. The title of this film, like some others, was used by V.Vysotsky in his poem dedicated to the death of Shukshin:

Death marks the best
And pulls them out one by one.
Such a person our brother has gone into the dark!
Neither bothering nor missing.
But it could be “Razin” that year.
Where is the nature – the Onega, the Naroch?
That’s the end, “pechki-lavochki”, Makarych!
Such a boy of yours can’t live.

In the mid-60s, Shukshin made an attempt to make a film about the rebellion of Stepan Razin, but the film script was disapproved by the Goskino…

Vasily Makarovich continued acting in the films and writing a lot. In 1973, and 1974, his two most famous films “Pechki-Lavochki” and “Red Guelder Rose”, where he was a script writer and film director, were released. The filming process was difficult; and at night he returned to his writing work again. He worked at the limit of his spiritual and physical potential… But he couldn’t leave his heroes – ordinary people, patriots of their country, their village, who took closely to heart the lives and troubles of their families and relatives.

Here the words come at once: “The life takes a wrong way…”

Well, Shukshin had only one personal meeting with Sholokhov, on June 10, 1974, in Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya, during a short break within the filming “They Fought for Their Country”. Following that meeting Vasily Makarovich greatly amended his attitude to the author of the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”. “…My acquaintance with mediocre writers made up my simplified idea of Sholokhov”.  Yet, he put it mildly, though he had long had his claims to Moscow “literary Bohemia”, to the intellectualizing “elite”: “Intellectual person. This is a responsible word. It is so deep and serious, that one should think more often namely of responsibility for this word. To begin with, the phenomenon of an intellectual person is a rare thing. It involves a restless conscience, intelligence, a complete absence of voice, when it is necessary – for accord – “to sing” to a powerful bass of the strong man of this world, a bitter discord with himself because  of the damned question “what is truth?”, pride… and compassion on the destiny of the people. Inevitable, excruciating. If all this is found in one person, he is an intellectual, a cultured man. But this is not enough either. A cultured person knows that intellectuality is not an end in itself”.

Such reflections of V.M.Shukshin can be found in his work “Morality is the Truth”. We wish there had been many other meetings of Shukshin and Sholokhov, there would have been found lots of common positions.

The literary heritage of the writer and cinematographer is well-known and loved even in the remote countries of Russia including Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya.

Alexey Kochetov
Marina Debur