Mikhail Ulyanov and Leonella Pyrieva in The Brothers Karamazov
Photo: frame of the film.
Two weighty directors fought over the right to film Dostoevsky’s latest novel. Sergei Bondarchuk almost secured this production. At the beginning of 1965, his request was included in the long-term plan of the Mosfilm film studio. But despite this, the project was “stolen” from him by another cinema classic – Ivan Pyryev. Bondarchuk filmed his epic film War and Peace. We had to wait for him to finish filming. And Pyryev was already at the start. He told Goskino’s president, Alexei Romanov, that he had his own script ready for The Brothers Karamazov. No one dared to refuse the all-powerful director, the former head of Mosfilm, the creator of the Union of Cinematographers. Pyryev had enormous power. Hung with Stalin and Lenin awards, he filmed what he wanted.
He was the author of the literary and directing script for Future Picture. I must say that Dostoevsky’s complex, multifaceted philosophical novel, the director of rural musical comedies (“The Pig and the Shepherd”, “The Kuban Cossacks” …) carefully dissected. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Pyrieva himself to some extent felt like a Dostoevsky character. Dostoevsky’s world, full of violent passions and mental storms, was close to him. Passions boiled within him. That’s why he staged White Nights, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot so well. Authoritative film critic Maya Turovskaya once advised Pyriev to play Fyodor Karamazov himself, believing that there was something hellish in the director, just as in the character. In his youth, Pyryev worked for Meyerhold as an actor. He mastered the art of transformation.
But for Fyodor Karamazov, he invited the People’s Artist of the USSR Mark Prudkin, who had previously played this role at the Moscow Art Theater. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, the director had no doubts about Kirill Lavrov, to whom he entrusted the role of Ivan Karamazov. The younger brother, Alyosha Karamazov, was played by the artist Andrei Myagkov, who was just starting at that time. By the way, Myagkov always considered the best role of him not Zhenya Lukashin from The Irony of Fate, but Alyosha Karamazov. Ivan Alexandrovich took his wife, actress Lionella Pyrieva, to Grushenka, who was almost 40 years his junior. When the artistic council came to see her samples, Pyryev looked at the audience with a stern look and said: “There will be no discussion!”.
According to the memoirs of Mikhail Ulyanov, he himself asked for the role of Dmitry Karamazov. “Perhaps, this was the first time that I made such a request to the director, and he gave it to me not without effort. And the request came out hesitant and hopeless, expressed only so as not to reproach himself later for lack of courage. Apparently, Ivan Alexandrovich felt this and with a shudder, smiling wryly, said that, perhaps, except for Dmitry Karamazov, he does not see a character for whom he could try himself, ”Ulyanov recalled in his book Reality and Dream.
Pyryev began shooting the film at the beginning of 1967. And in a year he planned to finish work on a three-part film in record time. But at the beginning of October ’67, he landed in the hospital, the shooting was stopped. They resumed a month later, due to Pyriev’s poor health, the shooting continued without the previous intensity.
On February 7, 1968, Ivan Alexandrovich died suddenly in his sleep, returning from the shooting of The Brothers Karamazov. A medical examination established six heart attacks suffered “in the legs” during work.
The movie was not finished. Of the three episodes, the director managed to shoot two and a half. A third of the material from the last series was already ready. The rest had to be shot according to Pyriev’s blanks. Artists Mikhail Ulyanov and Kirill Lavrov were instructed to complete work on the film. They finished filming in the summer of 1968, exactly 55 years ago. Within two months the footage was assembled (the film was delivered on September 2, 1968). After that, a scandal broke out.
The director’s widow, Lionella Pyrieva, was prejudiced against Mikhail Ulyanov from the very beginning. She believed that the artist asked for it in the picture, “finished” her husband. She persuaded Pyryev to find another actor. Just like Ulyanov is not suitable for Dmitry – too simple, far from Dostoevsky’s complexity, too “collective farm chairman”, like his hero of the film “Chairman”. On the screen, she and Ulyanov represented passion, but in life they could not see each other.
When the film was completed, Lionella Pyrieva accused Ulyanov and Kirill Lavrov of being “dirty”: they decided to appropriate her husband’s directing laurels and took advantage of his work. In fact, the third series of “The Brothers Karamazov” is preceded by the credits, informing that the film was being completed by Mikhail Ulyanov and Kirill Lavrov, although they finished the film according to the director’s script Pyriev, they did not bring anything fundamentally new. they did not bring their own to the picture.
The restless Lionella wrote letters to the Central Committee of the party, filed lawsuits… From all sides they looked at her as if she were crazy. She couldn’t prove anything.
Meanwhile, when The Brothers Karamazov was released in 1969, the film was named the best film by readers of Soviet Screen magazine. Ivan Pyryev was posthumously awarded the prize “For his outstanding contribution to Soviet cinema.” Mikhail Ulyanov – the title of People’s Artist of the USSR.
Mosfilm recently performed a frame-by-frame restoration of the image and sound of The Brothers Karamazov. Specialists found serious flaws caused by deep damage to the Kodak film on which the movie was shot. One of the most difficult defects was the spots on the film. They were different in color and shape. There were also subtle dark spots, for example, on the faces – pink and blue. I had to gasp at the extensive damage to the image, its warping and flickering. The soundtrack was also of poor quality. All these defects have been fixed. Now the image looks completely different. As if it was filmed yesterday, and not 55 years ago.
