Shukshin’s wife, Lidiya Fedoseeva, played the role of Yegor Prokudin’s mistress. Photo: Frame from the film.
The film became the leader of film distribution in the USSR in 1974 (62.5 million viewers) and received the main prize at the All-Union Film Festival in Baku. Soviet Screen magazine recognized it as the best film of the year and Shukshin as the best actor.
But it is possible that neither “Kalina Krasny” nor “Stove-Benches” will appear in the country.
Because?
Movie audiences didn’t like the guy in the boots.
Shukshin’s lifelong dream was to make the film “Stepan Razin” based on his novel “I Came to Give You Freedom.” About the peasant uprising of the 17th century. He reserved the lead role. The script was ready in 1968. But the film’s management did not approve it. The director then secured a meeting with a member of the Politburo, the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, Gennady Voronov. And the script was accepted by the State Film Committee of the USSR.
In 1970, preparations for filming began at the Gorky Studio. Shukshin and cameraman Anatoly Zabolotsky traveled to the places of Razin’s campaigns and collected material. Saratov, Ulyanovsk, Kazan, Astrakhan… Returning to Moscow, Vasily Makarovich felt open sabotage. Filming was postponed and postponed for various reasons.
And then he was invited to the artistic council. Tatyana Lioznova said that because of the three episodes about Razin, most of the studio’s directors will be left without work. All the money, they say, will go to Shukshin. At the same time, she doubted the concept of the film and the main character. She was supported by Rostotsky, Donskoy, Gerasimov, Kulidzhanov, other venerable directors and the head of the film studio Britikov. The Arts Council unanimously decided to close Razin until better times.
Lioznova herself at that time received financing for twelve episodes about Stirlitz. Yes, Goskino did not plan a lot of money for Razin. The thing is that the capital’s moviegoers didn’t like the Siberian guy in boots and put a spoke in his wheels. Voronov had already lost his senior position at that time. There was no one to support the director.
As a consolation, Goskino allowed Shukshin to film “Stoves and Benches”, the script for which was rejected several years ago. As they say, there would be no happiness, but misfortune helped. Thus a wonderful comedy was born.
After “Stoves and Benches,” the director returned to Goskino to film “Razin.” Useless. They hinted to him: “above” is against it. Later it turned out that “colleagues” filmmakers wrote closed and devastating criticism to the Central Committee of the future film about a popular revolt. Due to his scheming, Vasily Makarovich again found himself disconnected from the main business of his life. But the public received another masterpiece from Shukshin!
The mother of the main character was played by an ordinary village woman – Efimiya Bystrova. Photo: Frame from the film.
“Personnel scum”
The general director of Mosfilm, Nikolai Sizov, also a writer, read Shukshin’s new story “Kalina Krasnaya” in the magazine “Our Contemporary” and proposed to film it. In the best studio association, headed by the creator of “The Ballad of the Soldier” Grigory Chukhrai. Shukshin got excited and wrote the script in two weeks. But Chukhrai demanded that Yegor Prokudin’s biography be changed. A criminal, they say, cannot be a positive hero. This broke the concept of the film. Chukhrai also had other objections. Long disputes began. In the end, Vasily Makarovich realized that they were just playing with him, buying time. And he handed over the script to another Mosfilf partnership, Sergei Bondarchuk. And because of his nervousness he ended up in the hospital with a stomach ulcer.
Bondarchuk immediately gave the order to launch a “lyrical-dramatic comedy.” The director himself came up with this formulation in order not to attract the attention of influential detractors to his “Kalina”.
“Not having fully recovered, Shukshin, straight from the hospital, without any preparation period, with a monstrous film crew, where Mosfilm generously threw all its staff scum, rushes to the Vologda region to catch up with the deceased nature of “Kalina Krasnaya,” wrote film critic Valery Fomin.
The director and cameraman observed the surroundings of the ancient city of Belozersk when casting the character of Razin.
First day of filming of the expedition. The willow blooms, Yegor Prokudin plows the land with a tractor. He stops at a grove and begins a conversation with the birch trees. Behind Zabolotsky’s back, Mosfilm assistants joke: “Fellini is filming Amarcord and Rome, and Shukshin caresses the birches.”
They robbed an old woman
Principal filming of the Baikalovs’ courtyard, the bathhouse and Prokudin’s mother’s house took place in the semi-abandoned village of Merinovo-Sadovaya in Vologda. Vera Maretskaya was chosen for the role of Kudelikha (Egor’s mother). They were preparing to film the People’s Artist of the USSR in the hut of her lonely grandmother Efimiya Bystrova.
– No pavilion decorator will repeat it! Where can you get those icons: the Savior, Saint Nicholas and Saint George the Victorious? Here the grandmother’s soul is unique in everything, even in the light bulb covered with flies next to the silver frame of the central icon – the film’s production designer admired the interior with antique icons.
At the last moment, Maretskaya refused to play the defective old woman, citing health problems: “I myself am the same today. Can’t. I don’t want to!”
Shukshin was tanning. Where can you find a good free interpreter at the beginning of summer? Time was running out. We decided to take a chance and get the owner out of the cabin. He was 81 years old. Answering Lyuba’s questions prepared by the director, the grandmother told her true fate. Bystrova’s three children died during the Great Patriotic War, and the fourth disappeared 20 years ago. And how difficult it is for her to live alone with a pension of 17 rubles.
This episode became one of the most touching in “Kalina Krasny”. This is what the truth of life means.
Before leaving the expedition, Zabolotsky went to see Efimiya Efimyevna to say goodbye. There are no icons in the cabin! The only thing left was a small paper image taped to the board and Ilyich’s light bulb hanging naked from the ceiling. “Well, they took yours, they say they will film them again,” the old woman explained with a smile. “Then they left the money.”
Of course, they left pennies. The Mosfilm people stole my grandmother. And not only her. The bus with the film crew was packed with samovars and copper utensils. In the studio, upon returning from the expedition, a rumor began to circulate: Shukshin had taken all the icons and samovars from Belozerye.
Two years later, Zabolotsky returned to Merinovo-Sadovaya. He was received by his grandfather, in whose bathhouse Yegor scalded Lyuba’s brother with boiling water:
– Efimya, who was Shukshin’s mother, froze to death in the stove last winter. She died. They were looking for money in the cabin; Shukshin seemed to have left him a lot of money. So they overloaded everything, tore up all the wallpaper!
Zabolotsky walked around the abandoned hut. Between the window panes, a sun-bleached portrait of Shukshin from the cover of Soviet Screen lay on its side.
Leonid Ilyich often watched new films at his dacha. And he more than once defended them from jealous censors. Photo: Vladimir MUSAELYAN/TASS
changed the ending
In the finale, the collective farm driver Pyotr Baikalov, Lyuba’s brother, will drown the gang that killed Yegor Prokudin. Peter was played by Honored Artist of Russia Alexey Vanin, a friend and compatriot of Shukshin with specific tattoos on his powerful arms. In the film he helped the “prisoner” Shukshin. In life, on the contrary, Vanin sat down.
To get to the front, the boy from Altai gave himself a year. He was wounded three times. After the war, he became interested in wrestling and became a five-time medalist of the USSR. He traveled a lot around the world with the national team. In 1954, a textured wrestler with a fist the size of a child’s head received the lead role in the popular film “World Champion.”
After leaving the big sport, Vanin trained wrestlers in Hungary. On my next business trip I took two dozen chronometers with me to Budapest. For “smuggling” they were sentenced to three years. He served half of the sentence. Released for good behavior.
The phrase “My legs, my legs!” He suggested it to Vasili Makarovich. For example, when you run from the zone, only your legs will help you. If you don’t run away, they won’t take you back to the area, but rather drag you by your feet.
“Vasya did not allow me to drown the gang at the crossing for a long time,” Vanin later recalled. “I tell him: “I am a master of sports of the USSR, I am insured, what are you afraid of?” – “Lekha, that’s it! Everything!”
A professional specialist, specially called from Moscow, twice hit the Volga with bandit dummies with a dump truck. But weakly. Apparently he was a coward. The next day, a taxi driver from Cherepovets, an amateur racer, on the contrary, accelerated very much. He crashed into a concrete fence, broke his legs and drowned the dump truck. But the Volga remained intact. Complete failure!
– Then only Shukshin finally allowed me to get behind the wheel. He removed the left door and the windshield was exposed. I accelerate, really hit the Volga and then fly into the water in a dump truck. He swam and sat in the cockpit. All wet. People shout, “Hey, what have you done!” And I waved my hand. All. The end of the movie. But Shukshin was not allowed to come to such a powerful end. For example, you are promoting lynchings. I had to change the ending of “Kalina Krasnaya”: the stove is on, Fedoseeva is adding firewood… And the words behind the scenes.
“And I started crying too!”
The film was shot and edited in an extremely short period of time: less than a year had passed. During a screening at Mosfilm, Sergei Bondarchuk suddenly said:
– There is the truth of life and the truth of art. The truth of life has been captured in the material, but whether there is art remains to be discovered.
Directors Ozerov and Saltykov spoke out harshly against the film at the studio. Goskino’s editorial team even proposed modifications that, according to cameraman Zabolotsky, could only be made by reshooting the film.
The general director of Mosfilm, Nikolai Sizov, again came to Shukshin’s aid. He maintained good relations with the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Alexei Kosygin. I agreed with him that the film would be shown in the Kremlin dachas. Brezhnev watched “Kalina Krasnaya” and shed tears… This decided the fate of the film.
The premiere was a great success.
“The picture was received with great enthusiasm,” Vasily Makarovich wrote to his mother. – Not a single photograph was accepted in this way. And people cry and I started to cry myself. I really want you to see it as soon as possible.”
BY THE WAY
Novodevichye prophesied
Shukshin’s younger sister Natalya, who lived in Srostki in Altai, recalled:
“Once Vasya asks me: why doesn’t Lyuba Baikalova, our dear sister, get married, because it seems like it’s time?” I say: she corresponds with the prisoner, he writes her good letters and promises to come to Srostki after her release. Vasya then did not approve of this correspondence. But I remembered the story. In “Kalina Krasnaya” Yegor Prokudin, having freed himself, goes to the correspondence student Lyubov Fedorovna Baikalova. She even kept our relative’s middle name.
A “correspondence student” is a woman who begins a relationship with a prisoner through correspondence. She goes on dates and meets in person. Sometimes these relationships end in marriage.
And this is what Vasily Makarovich himself said about the main character:
– My Egor, when he left the town, lost everything. He was carried through life like a branch broken by the wind. Having fallen from his native nest, unscrupulous people seized him. They caressed you and gave you affection in a difficult moment: evil, always more cunning, fights more actively for the human soul. And Yegor became a thief. In this bitter story I am interested in the peasant. He lost his connection with the land, with difficulty, with the roots that hold life together. How is it possible that a man whose veins run peasant blood, the blood of workers, a man with a healthy moral biology instilled by the peasant environment, has suddenly become dislocated, ruined?
Shukshin composed the story of love between a prisoner and an absent student in the hospital, where he was again treated for an ulcer. The name didn’t occur to me myself. My wife Lydia Fedoseeva, after reading it, suggested calling it “Kalina Krasnaya”. In honor of the song she sang to her future husband on the first day they met in 1964 on the set of the movie “What’s the Sea Like?” Vasily Makarovich agreed. And he even decided to perform a popular hit together with his wife in the new movie of the same name. Logical.
But Mosfilm’s music editor stunned the director. It turns out that “The viburnum is red, the viburnum is ripe” is not a folk song at all. Property of composer Jan Frenkel. In 1963 he composed music based on the words of Yevgeny Sinitsyn. And you have to pay big royalties. And the film’s budget is small. Shukshin had to abandon the song. He still sang a few words only about viburnum. Apparently he to at least somehow explain the title of the picture.
MYSTICAL
After Kalina Krasny’s deafening triumph, Vasily Makarovich returned to work for Razin. And he was appointed … for Bondarchuk’s film “They Fought for the Fatherland”, based on the novel by Mikhail Sholokhov. For the role of soldier Lopakhin. “If you play, you will get Razin,” said Goskino president Philip Ermash. Shukshin agreed.
Ermash kept his word. In September, six months after the release of Kalina, the management of Mosfilm decided to release the film.
“One sunny September morning in 1974 we were going by taxi along the Berezhkovskaya embankment to Mosfilm,” said Anatoly Zabolotsky. – The newly gilded domes of the Novodevichy Convent delighted the eye. It was also fun in the background: “Razin” was put into operation. Shukshin reasons: “Prizes and orders no longer matter, but if we eliminate Razin, we will probably win the Novodevichy cemetery” … And he rubbed his palms. And on October 2 he died suddenly on the Don, at the end of filming with Bondarchuk. Vasily Makarovich was buried in Novodevichy.
The country never saw “Stepan Razin.”
