Anna Timireva. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Not everyone knows that the beloved woman of Admiral Kolchak, Anna Timireva, starred in the cult film by Leonid Gaidai. And before that – in the epic film by Sergei Bondarchuk “War and Peace”. The roles were episodic, not noticeable. In both cases, “noble old women”.
July 18 – 130 years since the birth of Anna Timireva. The fate of this woman is incredible.
He had a happy childhood in Kislovodsk in his parents’ large house on Krestovaya Gora. A loving family, a famous and successful father – Vasily Ilyich Safonov, a talented pianist, conductor, rector of the Moscow Conservatory, conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, known in the musical community around the world.
Sofya Kolchak was 42 years old when she and her son had to leave Russia for France. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
So there was a carefree youth. Charming eighteen-year-old Anechka Safonova accepted a marriage proposal from her second cousin, a naval officer (he rose to the rank of rear admiral) Sergei Timirev. He was 18 years older than her. He is not old yet: 36 years old. Later, in her memoirs, he wrote: “He was much older than I, handsome, the hero of Port Arthur. It seemed to me that I love, what do we know about love at eighteen! Three years later, her son Vladimir was born. And a year later, in 1915, she met a polar explorer, Admiral Alexander Kolchak, with whom her husband served. Kolchak became the main love of her life. A long and very hard life awaited her, sanctified by this love.
Everything prevented their union: Anna Timireva is married, Kolchak is married, both families had children. Yet she plunged into her love like a pond with her head. She divorced her husband, left him a son and went to her beloved. She lived with Kolchak for just over two years, until the arrest of Russia’s Supreme Ruler in 2020. After Kolchak’s execution, she, too, waited for the Bolsheviks to execute her. But she was unexpectedly released from prison, Gorky’s first wife, Ekaterina Peshkova, stood up for Anna Timireva. Anna was free. But not by much. She was soon arrested again… In all, she spent more than 37 years in prisons, camps and exile, sometimes she was released between arrests. She worked as a librarian, an archivist, a preschool teacher, a draftsman, a retoucher, a cartographer, an embroiderer, a toy painting instructor, a house painter, a prop teacher, and an artist in the theater… And there was not a day that she did not remember Kolchak. tenderly. :
But if I’m still alive
against fate
just like your love
And the memory of you
These are poems by Anna Timireva. In the 60s, she was completely rehabilitated. In memory of her father, an outstanding musician, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich assured her a personal pension – forty-six rubles and a room in a communal apartment in Moscow on Plyushchikha. With this money, she survived, sometimes working as a second part like filming a movie, playing noble old women in Mosfilm extras. Anna Vasilievna worked as an etiquette consultant for Sergei Bondarchuk during the filming of War and Peace, where she played an elderly princess with a lorgnette at Natasha Rostova’s first ball. In Leonid Gaidai’s “Diamond Hand”, one of the cruise passengers. For the shooting day I received 3 rubles. This money was enough to buy a ticket to the Taganka Theater or the conservatory…
