Sergei Yursky

During a recent film festival in Anapa, a Black Sea resort town, Sergei Yursky would come to the beach early in the morning to do some gymnastics before the long working day. One day, when he had just begun his simple workout, Yursky noticed a photographer taking pictures of him. A couple of days later, the pictures of the exercising actor appeared in a local rag (with the circulation of 250,000). The article claimed that Sergei Yursky was actually a Chinese spy, who had secretly come to Russia 40 years ago with a reconnaissance mission and that he knew the unique art of hand-to-hand combat. The article insisted that Yursky’s work as an actor was only a cover-up. It all seemed amusing to Yursky at the time, but the story refused to die. It was reprinted not only in other towns, but other countries. Some time later, Yursky was astonished when, both in Nizhny Novgorod and Ottawa, he was asked by producers and spectators to demonstrate his combat technique.

Today, Sergei Yursky is a famous actor of stage and screen, a writer, playwright, poet, film and theatre director. Strangely enough, when he was young, his parents were against his entering the Theatrical Institute. After finishing school and receiving the Gold Medal, he therefore entered the university’s law faculty. Three years later, in 1955, he failed his third year exams and decided to enter the Leningrad Theatrical Institute, despite his parents’ opposition.

By 1957, Yursky was acting at Leningrad’s famous BDT (Great Dramatic Theatre). Two years later, he successfully graduated from the Institute. Remembering his early years, Yursky said that, in his youth, there came a point when he felt he had to decide whether to relax, live it up and enjoy life, or devote himself entirely to the Theater. He chose the latter, working exceptionally hard. In BDT plays staged by Georgy Tovstonogov, Yursky brilliantly portrayed Chatsky in Woe from Wit, Henry IV in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, and Victor Frank in Arthur Miller’s The Price. Yursky also directed and starred in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Moliere.

Yursky, unlike many people in the public eye, does not discuss his private life with journalists. He said he finds such “soul striptease” senseless and shameful. But what we do know is that his wife, Natalya Tenyakova, and daughter, Darya Yurskaya, are both theater actors as well.

Yursky said he did not try to talk his daughter out of becoming an actor; in fact, she may have had little choice in the matter  – when she was a baby, Yursky would recite Pasternak to her instead of singing her lullabies; when Darya was a schoolgirl, she did her homework in the wings of BDT. Even her first disappointment in love was connected with acting. When she was seven, a classmate confided that he was in love with her. However, when Darya asked the boy flirtingly what was so remarkable about her, he told her the truth: he was in love with her because she was the daughter of Sergei Yursky.

Despite Yursky’s extensive theatrical work, most Russians know him through his films. One of his first major roles was in Eldar Ryazanov’s eccentric comedy, A Man from Nowhere (1961). And one of his best and most famous was as Ostap Bender in The Golden Calf. In 1979, he starred in two very different films, both of which became hugely popular: Little Tragedies, based on Pushkin’s plays and The Meeting Place Can Not be Changed, a Soviet detective story.

There was “a black period” in Yursky’s life, a time when his name disappeared from playbills and newspapers. He had been summoned to the KGB and told that the actor Sergei Yursky did not exist any more, because he had discredited “the honored title of Soviet Man.” The reason for this sudden turn of events? Yursky had denounced the suppression of “the Prague Spring” and had met openly with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was in disfavor.

Yursky had to leave BDT and was forced to move from Leningrad to Moscow. Doors  were shut, opportunities closed off to this, one of the great actors of his generation: LenFilm, radio, TV, MKhAT, Lenkom – none wanted anything to do with him. Finally, with great difficulty, in 1979, eleven years after Prague, he managed to become an actor at Mossovet.

Yursky the writer is independent of Yursky the actor. He started writing 30 years ago and his first book was Those Who Know How to Hold a Pause, published in 1979, and only because the printing-house’s director so admired Yursky. It was a very brave thing to do, since Yursky was still persona non grata – his name taboo even in reviews. (Usually the critics just wrote: “The part of such and such character is far from being a success.” Even to criticize him openly would have been to confirm his existence.) And yet, all 100,000 copies of his book quickly sold out, and soon thereafter, it was adopted as a theatrical acting textbook. Yursky has written 11 books since, but still insists that acting is his “true love.”

Yursky who has always played on “great stages” for “great audiences” and liked it, said that times have changed: today, people’s tastes lean more toward “mass culture,” something he has no interest in pursuing. He said that sometimes he feels that the time has come for him to bid farewell to theater, even though he loves his work and even though acting in Russia over the past decade has become such a warped profession.

Interestingly, Yursky says that he feels an era in literature and theater that dates back to Pushkin – where certain principles determined the values and set a line dividing what could and could not be laughed at – has come to an end.

In his world tour concert program “Pushkin and the Others,” Yursky demonstrates how, in spirit, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor Sologub, Daniil Kharms, Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel and Josef Brodsky all belonged to the Pushkin era, despite the fact that they all come from different “literary generations.” Today, he says, the new cultural epoch is defined by writers like Pelevin and Sorokin, whose surrealist, post-modernist prose he does not like.