OTHER RANEVSKAYA

OUR DATES

“I was born in the family of a poor oilman,” wrote F.G. in autobiography. And she got away with it! Faina is eight years old. He enters his mother's room, and she, usually quiet, restrained, cries loudly. She dropped her head on the pillow and cries in ...

“I was born in the family of a poor oilman,” wrote F.G. in autobiography. And she got away with it!

Faina is eight years old. He enters his mother's room, and she, usually quiet, restrained, cries loudly. She dropped her head on the pillow and cries in genuine grief. The girl is frightened and also cries. On his mother's lap is a newspaper: “... A.P. died yesterday in Badenweiler. Chekhov. In the newspaper there is a photograph of a man with a kind face. Faina runs to look for Chekhov's book. The first one comes across "A Boring Story".

And that was the end of her childhood.

Faina is twenty years old. 1916 Goes to Moscow "to act as an artist." Without parental permission.

At the acting labor exchange, they are taken to the extras for the summer season in the Country Theater. And in the autumn of the same year - Kerch.

In Kerch, her mother (secretly from her father) sends money. Somehow, Faina enters the bank for a transfer, and the wind rips banknotes out of her hands. She looks after the banknotes flying away and says: “How sad when they fly away!”. (According to another version, F.G. said: “How beautifully they fly!”.) Her companion, a local tragedian, exclaims: “Yes, you are Ranevskaya from The Cherry Orchard! Only she could say that!

When it was time for the daughter of a poor Taganrog oilman, Faina Feldman, to choose a pseudonym, she decided to take the name of the Chekhov heroine.

So Ranevskaya was born.

We worked with Yuri Valeryevich Danilin at Komsomolskaya Pravda. He was the first deputy chief editor. I know that Danilin was friends with Ranevskaya. And one of these days we meet with Yu.V., we drink coffee, and I turn on the recorder.

“I am in the ninth grade, I live in the Omsk region and come to Leningrad to shoot the film “Beware, Grandma!”, Where F.G. No, just imagine: I’m from where the hell, it’s not known who ... I stuck my nose out the door, and she, without finding out who and why, strictly said: “Close and don’t interfere!”. Not daring to disobey, he nevertheless managed to murmur: "The theater perishes without psychologism ...". The door swung open immediately. "Who are you?" asks F.G. I tell her that we are “carrying out a reform” in our school theater: a subtle psychological drawing and no wringing of hands ... ”. - "Interrupted?" Yu.V. laughs: “No, but she repeated all the time: “What a horror.” True, not abusively, but with sympathy.

Two years later, Danilin came to enter MGIMO. Lived at Kazansky railway station. Ranevskoy said that relatives. Did not enter. Before leaving, he came to “cry”.

Ranevskaya is horrified. Boy! One! Traveled three thousand kilometers! From the village of Moskalenki, Omsk region! And didn't go to college? He says: “This should not be. Did you pass the exam?" - "I gave it up." “Did you get a grade?” - "Put". - "What?" - "Good." "What's the matter?" asks F.G. And then: "Give me some phone!". Calls: "This is Ranevskaya." At the other end of the wire, a person begins to list to her which of the celebrities he knows and to whom he provided services. He listens, is silent, his face turns to stone. Finally, he speaks into the phone: “Forgive me, forgive me, stupid, I didn’t know that licking ass is a profession, I thought: masochism.” (Documents at MGIMO the next day, no, they didn’t return them to Danilin - they threw them away. Helped!)

Yu.V .: “So, Ranevskaya. Great person. What do you think she's saying to me? “Well, how is it? How are you going home alone? I told her: "Well, I came here!". She: “No! Let's go together!". I took her by the hand and took her to the station. She took me by the hand to the carriage. I personally went around all the compartments. And everywhere she made a speech: “The boy is traveling alone. May get lost. Get off the train." The whole car solemnly assured her that nothing would happen to me. The conductor said: “And if it happens, I will find and kill!”. And she said it in the voice of her stepmother from Cinderella.

Before the war, Marina Tsvetaeva returned to Moscow, and Ranevskaya, having received five thousand (then salary), went to her. He says: I have money, I want to share it. A bundle of money in a bag, in a bank package. He tries to quietly tear it apart in order to divide it in half. Tsvetaeva did not understand and took the whole pack: “Faina, thank you, I knew you were kind!”

Many years later, telling this story to Marina Neelova, she adds: “What a blessing that I didn’t have time to divide it in half, that I gave everything! After her death, there is a feeling of terrible guilt in my soul for what happened in Yelabuga!

In 1953, she wrote: "It has always been incomprehensible to me: people are ashamed of poverty and not ashamed of wealth."

Meanwhile, she often has no money than she has. And money always gets in her way. (“I know the most important thing, I know that it is better to give than to take.”)

Movies only episodes. (Except for "Dream".) She loved her short roles, especially the speculator in "Storm" and the taper in the film "Alexander Parkhomenko". But there were so few roles that she felt like "a pianist whose hands were cut off." I once calculated: in fifty years - eighteen roles in the theater and twenty in the cinema.

Yes, I suffered that there were few roles. But she suffered more from empty roles.

Interfered with their own intelligibility, decency, innate squeamishness? Don't know. Perhaps they helped?

Eighteen roles in the theater, twenty in the cinema. Numbers are few. And by what she did, a lot. Russian “mother”, Ukrainian kulak, American millionaire, fascist Frau Wurs, shtetl hoarder… Are there many things of this level in Soviet art?

When the actors Vadim Beroev and Osip Abdulov passed away, she abandoned her favorite ones! - roles in "Strange Mrs. Savage" and Chekhov's "Drama". Partners for her are “co-creative relatives”. (Anatoly Adoskin once remarked: “Ranevskaya’s stage life was not illusory, but her own, and if a friend, partner left her, then she herself irrevocably and forever left him.”)

Didn't recognize the word "play". She said: “Let the children play. Let the musicians play. The actor on the stage must live.

... And do not talk about her - as a lonely, unhappy old woman.

If Ranevskaya were unhappy in life, where would the saving come from - precisely with her happiness! — the power of her art?

Unhappiness - in its natural form - is unproductive, fruitless.

PS Read the full story in the September issue of the color monthly issue of Novaya.