Vyacheslav Tikhonov, a Soviet film star best known for his role in the film 17 Moments of Spring died in December. He was 81.
vyacheslav tikhonov was not a member of a drama club, did not perform on stage, and was extremely shy as a child. He grew up in a simple working class family in Pavlov Posad, a factory town in the Moscow region that was as full of criminals as any other Moscow suburb in those years.
He had neither prestigious education nor the privileged upbringing of a member of the intelligentsia. But as he was crying in the corner after being rejected entry to the State Cinematography Institute, a teacher who was filling out a beginners’ class for actors walked by. History has preserved his name: Bibikov. He was enraptured.
So were many in the years that followed. Including Soviet Culture Minister Yekaterina Furtseva, who “strongly advised” that director Sergei Bondarchuk cast Tikhonov in the role of Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace.
A working man, an intelligent of the people, Tikhonov donned an expensive, white aristocratic coat.
It was a monstrous, ineffable success. Lines at the Rossiya movie theater (now renamed Pushkinsky) bordered on mass unrest and they brought out the horse guards.
His accomplishment in his greatest role — as the Soviet spy Stirlitz, in 17 Moments of Spring — was that he offered a brilliant personification of the central Russian drama of the 20th century: the constant need to adapt to one’s environment, to pretend, to play games, to always think about saving face, to keep one’s identity in any and all impossible circumstances… the need for internal loneliness.
We were all Stirlitzes. At party meetings, conferences and congresses, at lectures on Marxism-Leninism, at briefings and planning meetings, boards and panels, at meetings with readers, spectators and voters. But where was I?
Watching Stirlitz, the way he walked down the hall, the way he burned a coded message in an ashtray or baked potatoes in his fireplace, I have always seen not just a spy, but someone of the Soviet intelligentsia, forever wound up and internally tense. And, because of this trait, the mystery of it all soars to inestimable heights.
An expanded version of this text was originally published on Russian Journal (russ.ru).
Vyacheslav Tikhonov acted
in over 70 films, including
Delo bylo v Penkove (It Happened in Penkovo), 1958
Dve zhizni (Two Lives), 1961
Voyna i Mir (War and Peace), 1967
Dozhivem do ponedelnika (We’ll Live Until Monday), 1968
17 mgnoveniy vesny (17 Moments of Spring), 1973
Oni srazhalis za rodinu (They Fought for Their Country), 1975
Bely Bim chernoye uho (White Bim with the Black Ear), 1977
TASS upolnomochen zayavit (TASS is Authorized to Declare), 1984
Ubit drakona (To Kill a Dragon), 1988
Utomlennye solncem (Burnt by the Sun), 1994
Andersen. Zhizn bez lubvi (Andersen. Life Without Love), 2006
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