Actor Vakhtang Kikabidze.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
– Kikabidze is dead! – the sad news from Georgia fell as it should. Unexpected and random. And the reaction, unfortunately, is familiar. A dull ache and the realization that another part of childhood was slipping away, another familiar face gone. Breathe and move on.
But at once several acquaintances spoke violently:
– Have you read his interviews? Do you know what she said about Russia? Have you seen him with the Ukrainian flag?
I did not read, I did not know, I did not see. No, of course he knew that Vakhtang Kikabidze was saying something nasty about us. But it was painful for me to learn the details, and I tried not to think about it, not to be disappointed, to remember him in a huge cap and scarf, wandering the streets of Moscow with a wheel in his hand in the film “Mimino”. Without Kikabidze’s interviews and opinions, I can easily live, but without “Mimino” and the song “On the airfield …” no.
Is this position correct? I have no idea. Everyone deals with their past as best they can.
So what do we have? Great Soviet actor, his films are part of our genetic code, his songs are a concentrate of nostalgia. In his old age, a man decided that he was rotten in the USSR, that Russia was going the wrong way and that he should tell the world about it. Did he have the right to do it? May be. Did the audience in Russia have the right to stop loving him for this? Of course. Or you could just ignore his comments. After all, old age is not always wisdom, unfortunately.
But the question is not idle. Time again dispersed everything that was before on different sides of the borders and barricades. And for every idol from the past, who did not have time to leave for a better world on time, there will be quarrels and insults. This one had to do this, and this one that. And we evaluate and put on the shelves: these are correct, these are not very good.
But after all, if you wish, you can find unpleasant things about everyone. Defoe was a secret agent, Turgenev led a complex personal life, Dostoyevsky acted like a madman, Maugham served in counterintelligence, Orwell was considered a spy, Wodehouse was accused of collaborationism… Soviet writers are to blame for serving Stalin, the emigrants who left to leave Russia. At the same time, everything that they wrote, that they created, is forever with us. These are great works, world heritage.
No, of course, we all live here and now. And this is the time when there seems to be no room for sentimentality. There is no place, but the feelings remain. So what to do with those who were once your idols, and now say what you don’t want to hear.
You can burn everything that was in your heart, delete songs from playlists and forget your favorite movies forever. You can be more rational. Keep both songs and movies with you and try to forget about people. You can rise above the fight and try to understand everyone, but this is almost always beyond human power.
Time is one thing, it will put everything in its place. And it’s not worth getting poorer. The old is easy to erase, but the new may not be found… Vakhtang Kikabidze himself is part of our common past, and we will remember him.
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