Well, it’s necessary: some ten years ago we were sitting under a lampshade at a round table in the editorial office, drinking tea with dryers, not in a hurry and quietly talking with the man who made two films that largely determined the fate of my generation, – “Ilyich’s Outpost” and “July Rain”.
Ekaterina Chesnokova / RIA Novosti
Marlen Hutsiev.
I was very worried and rather tongue-tied tried to say thank you to him, realizing that a second such opportunity might not arise (and so it turned out). Khutsiev brushed off my thanks until I asked him: why was “Ilyich’s Outpost” released under the title “I’m Twenty Years Old”? Then he looked at me carefully and said: “Well, what do you think – why?” Personally, this is what I thought about it.
There, in his film, there was such an episode. In a noisy group of young people drinking, the main character suddenly proposes a toast “to the potatoes!” The ironic intellectual public scoffs: why not “for the turnip”? “And because,” the hero replies, “the potatoes saved my mother and me during a hungry war time” (the action takes place in Moscow in the late fifties). “Are you serious?” – they tell him. “Seriously,” he replies. “If there is nothing in your life that you can take seriously, then why live?” “And what do you personally take seriously?” – they ask him. “To the revolution, to the song “Internationale”, to 1937, to the war, to the potatoes,” he answers after thinking.
The film was released in the early sixties, when the country was just beginning to understand with horror what Stalinism, unlimited and irresponsible totalitarian power was, when the youth of the sixties generation tried on personal responsibility for what was happening in the country. It was a time when we sincerely believed that we had lost our true values, but they remained – there, in the distant revolutionary years, where “commissars in dusty helmets”, where Pavka Korchagin, where Svetlovskaya “Grenada”, where “Lenin is so young” “… Because “Zastava Ilyich” is a line of defense, beyond which there is something that can be taken seriously. The credits of this film were played to the music of the Internationale, and the famous newsreel footage from the Polytechnic Museum preserved the young Okudzhava singing “I will still fall on that one, / on that one Civilian, / And the commissars in dusty helmets / Will bow silently over me.”
In the mid-sixties, Khutsiev’s film “July Rain” was released. There the heroes – a wonderful young intellectual, a scientist and a smart, charming girl Lena – are on the verge of a wedding. But there will be no wedding, because Lena gradually understands: her chosen one has nothing in his soul that can be taken seriously. It’s empty. Within a few years, among the young Soviet generation, the outpost of Ilyich, the outpost of the revolution, and the outpost of the party ceased to exist. They turned out to be outposts on the sand. As Vladimir Vysotsky’s hero sang in Poloka’s banned film “Intervention”: “I will not serve as a slave to illusory hopes, / No longer worship the idols of deception”… Lena, it seems, will remain with another hero, who has retained in her soul a serious attitude towards war, towards to the silent male brotherhood who defended the country. It’s interesting that the same thing happened in life: Evgenia Uralova, who played Lena, and Yuri Vizbor, who played the front-line soldier, became husband and wife after Khutsiev’s film. And the outpost of the Great Patriotic War, thank God, is still a real outpost, behind which there is something that can be taken seriously even today. But…
Marlen Khutsiev in our editorial office. Photo: Yuri Lepsky
But years have passed. And Khutsiev’s new film appeared – “Afterword”. Plyatt played the father-in-law, originally from the twenties, and Myagkov, the son-in-law, originally from the sixties. Son-in-law is a young scientist. In the eighties, he already understood a lot about the time in which he lives. For him, there are no longer any outposts, values, or, in general, anything that can be taken seriously in his contemporary society. That is why he looks with sincere amazement at his father-in-law, who comes from the twenties. My father-in-law is an amazing person who has retained his sincerity, honesty and nobility. In the end, the son-in-law understands that a normal person should have eternal, timeless outposts, not connected either with the principles of social order, or with wars, or with parties, or with liberal or conservative values, or with Ulyanov, or with Dzhugashvili, neither with Yeltsin nor with Gorbachev…
We are left with the Khutsiev Outpost, which remains in the “Afterword,” that is, after all the words. This is you, those you love, those who depend on you, those who are weaker than you, interesting work, friends, your teachers – full-time and part-time, to whom you are grateful, favorite places on this earth.
Our last outposts. Not so little, if you think about it.
We talked about this under a lampshade over tea and crackers with Marlen Martynovich Khutsiev.
Source: rodina-history.ru
