The young actor went to the front as a volunteer, despite a white ticket, in the first military summer, like his hero Boris Borozdin. He always remembered his first and last battle, near Vyazma: “Almost our entire battery died. Only two people survived: the nurse and me. The rest died. I crawled into a ditch through which blood flowed.”
Then the hospital. There he joked incessantly, encouraging the desperate. He probably considered it an actor’s duty. Although he understood that the injury would prevent him from returning not only to the front, but also to the stage. Rozov entered the Literary Institute, began to write his first work – “Forever Alive”. About those who did not return from the war. A work of an untimely tonality, since it was not written then, and more so in later times. The human dimension for him was closer to the social, state. Such is the rosy vision of people: sympathetic, sentimental. Although sometimes, with a flagellation demonstrative of evil. He studied and at the same time traveled with a small concert crew to all-Union hospitals.
At the Literary Institute, the playwright wrote another of his best works, although not entirely rosy. This is a dramatization of Ivan Goncharov’s novel “An Ordinary Story”. It would seem that for the post-war Soviet period, not the most relevant story, although … To trample on the ideals of youth for the sake of a high position, many and even many were ready even then. Compose a play according to Goncharov – on the one hand, a good thing. There is no other master of Russian prose dialogues – all of Goncharov’s novels are a draft of conversations through which the action is built. Many years later this play will be staged in Sovremennik, and years later it will become a play for television. In many ways, this is the merit of Rozov, who brought Goncharov to his theater. In The Ordinary Story there is a premonition of characters and conflicts that will become central to the playwright.
Well, and then … “I brought a rather anemic play” His friends “to the Central Children’s Theater, got into an interesting theater group: with Sperantova, Chernysheva, Perov and others, I got to Olga Ivanovna Pyzhova and Boris Vladimirovich Bibikov. I worked with them together on each rehearsal for almost a year and brought the play to the point where it could be called a play. It was high school for me,” Rozov recalled. At Central Children’s (unfortunately, it was renamed Youth) he met Maria Knebel and Anatoly Efros, who organized Good Hour, a play that glorified both Rozov and the director himself.
“Good Hour” and “In Search of Joy” – these two performances in the 1950s determined the style of the time. After military severity, after the triumphalism of plaster statues of the first post-war years (all these are quite reasonable phenomena), the hour of Soviet sentimentality has come. Like at the end of the 18th century. It is attention to common people and common feelings. Internal struggles of a person, not directly related to the achievements of the state. The boy did not go to university and is going to leave his parents’ house. Alone and everything. He seems to be behaving like a tripped up spoiled teenager. It would not be difficult to unmask him, in extreme cases scold him. But Rozov sympathizes with him. Like fifteen-year-old Oleg from the play “In Search of Joy” (the film based on this comedy of manners was called “Noisy Day”). It was he who, with his grandfather’s Red Army saber, cut up furniture and other things in which they saw acquisition sedition. philistinism, which at that time seemed to be the main enemy of socialism.
However, there were no political terms in the work: Rozov did not allow direct writing. And so the public – for the most part – was ready to join in the boy’s last words: “Be strong, feet, to the world of undeserved victories!”
So, for some reason, many believed that young people would always be cleaner, more perfect than their parents and uncles. Why he believed – more or less clear. The belief in a just society and a happy future was built on the idea of progress from generation to generation. This turned out to be perhaps the most bitter illusion of the 20th century. This does not deny the nobility of Rozov’s ideas, their beauty and theatrical correctness. After all, the destruction of polished furniture with an old saber is spectacular, it is a wonderful culmination, after which everything in the play calms down in a Chekhovian manner.
And then it was the turn of “Forever Alive”. You cannot imagine such a story, you need to see it with your own eyes. It is very important that Rozov refrained from condemning his Veronica (and this did not please, for example, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, as well as many conservatives). How we like to make malicious judgments. Today, maybe even more than 70 years ago. He was above it. I think if Rozov had given Mark a chance for the truth from him, the job would have come out even stronger. A rare case: this story became the basis of a play, the performance of which was staged in Sovremennik for decades and became a key in the history of this theater, and a film, one of the best of the 20th century. Rozov subtly understood the nature of theater and cinema, their differences. And in the script “The Cranes Fly” he reworked a lot, not sparing his own literary finds, too heavy for the screen.
The author and his like-minded people wanted their favorite characters to stay that way forever, not to break. In the slightly later and somewhat more complicated work “The Traditional Gathering” we see such a conflict. And the hero, not having achieved resounding success, did not give up, he remained true to himself. This is much more important for Rozov’s high position and well-being. He rarely favored the victorious and dignitaries. For a long time his heroes were not accepted by the cautious and faithful. They were afraid of too loud success, which they had with a young audience. “If something doesn’t work out” – a riot, a rebellion, or simply doubts about the general line. In a word, Rozov was deservedly considered a troublemaker.
At the end of the “Traditional Gathering”, after a painful dig into the heroes’ past, a clash of principles and explosive conflicts, there is a note like this:
“The girl begins to water the flowers on the window sills, the boy moves the desks and, wrapping a rag around the brush, cleans the floor.
GIRL. Lesha! Lesha! Look, the crocuses have bloomed!
BOY. Good!
He addresses the girl and they both look at the flower that opens.
This is also sentimentality. By the way, Rozov, blaming philistinism, loved indoor fish and flowers, even the notorious ficus. In this, too, there is feeling, humanity, a departure from pompous marble and solemn hymns.
He knew the people he was writing for well. He knew what emotions and reasoning they craved, because he was not much different from them. Rozov from the first works of him was intensely human, he always wrote in a topical way and it was not by chance that he became the voice of a generation. The concept of “pink boys” is also not a myth. He was interested in the rebellious youth of the first post-war generation. Much has been said about them. Maximalists, they saw in many high-level opportunists, capitulators. They defended their truth. At Rozov’s, they spoke differently from others – the elderly. He found or somewhere heard the intonation of freethinkers from him, sometimes naive, sometimes worthless … He admired the homeless, free and in search, some of them somehow resembled heroes from Gorky. Petrels! Such is the conceited nihilist Vladimir from the play “On the Road”, such is Sergei from “The Entertainer”.
Oleg Efremov, who owes his first successes to Rozov, both acting and directing, recalled him: “Perhaps there is no writer in our drama that is more traditional, calm, balanced, if you will, militantly old-fashioned. And indeed, he spent all his life in wearing the same jacket, speaking the same words all his life. Meanwhile, it is quite clear that we are dealing not only with a famous playwright, but also with a writer who has always been at the forefront. This is the internal innovation of Rozov with absolute external “conservatism” Perhaps the main feature of his writer’s appearance.In fact, were not Rozov’s plays, in particular, the renovation of our theater in the mid-50s, in the character of the modern man?
Here, perhaps, only one thing is inaccurate. She was in fashion for at least 10 years, before becoming a legend and a teacher. Even because he wanted this, as a person who believed that theater is a department, who needs to ask questions that will become a discovery for people. He knew how to say what -for various reasons, far from being just censorship-, others were silent. How many theatrical legends arose around Rozov and his works. Efros, Efremov, even the immense Tovstonogov without Rozov’s “unequal battles” would have lost a lot.
Full version on the Year of Literature.RF portal.
