Translated material
Everything that can get smart
Celebrated her 20th birthday at the Yermolova House-Museum
This is not an article, not even a note: it is an attempt. Everything was good and correct. Music played, sometimes delightful, there was enough snacks for everyone, people who interrupted someone else's speech out of turn turned out to be graceful. The owner of the Yermolova House-Museum, Raisa Ostrovskaya, who organized this holiday-concert-banquet, had every reason to be happy: the evening was a success. Surely he would not succeed: good people came to a good place.I’ll spare myself from listing people: there were a lot of them. What is more important is what brought them together. The house-museum of Maria Ermolova on Tverskoy Boulevard is beautiful not for its architectural merits, but for the circumstances of life: since the end of the 18th century, nothing bad, obviously vile and stupid, has ever happened there. Neither before Maria Nikolaevna, nor after: this mansion preserves its own concepts of human honor.
The house itself is twenty years old; before that there was an “apartment-museum”, before that there was something else. It is necessary to understand that the words “honor” and “home” do not live without each other, the last memory, an elastic growth, but something else from the future; without it it's bad. Praise be to those who sprouted: they are already leaving, they are almost gone - museum workers, what can we take from them. Only one thing: without them it’s worse.
The generation of museum workers requires special praise: they have taken responsibility for the past. Unlike my beloved “Generation of Janitors and Watchmen,” which did not want to know either the past or the future.
In contrast to the newest generation, for whom even the personal present, in general terms, seems to be a transitional step from chimpanzee to gorilla.
At the celebration at the Ermolova House-Museum, it was easy and sweet to feel ashamed: after all, life can be so pure, so deep, but what about us?..
“Easy” - because it’s easy. “Sweet” - because it’s not always so easy.
In the Yermolova House, as long as I remember it, amazing, joyful things have always happened. Here Alexander Ponomarev’s theater “Even-Odd” tested its contours. Here, still very young, homeless “Fomenki” played “Wolves and Sheep”. Here I first saw “The Hopscotch Game”, better than which Vladimir Ageev has not yet directed anything. There was a concert here where Alexander Galich’s songs were performed in a conservatory, polished (who told you it was cold?) performance, once again striking everyone: what a living, what a necessary place to live.
The playwright Ostrovsky, as you know, did not have the honor of giving a speech at the opening of the monument to Pushkin. He spoke his words at a banquet, as a toast, and the best of them were: “The first merit of a great poet is that through him everything that can grow smarter becomes smarter.” Maly Theater actor Vasily Bochkarev, I think, had them in mind when he said at the current Yermolov festival: “Now we have all been given the right to be worse.” Link your thoughts together. The great actress is right between them.