March 28, 2015

Smoktunovsky: Portrait of an Actor


Smoktunovsky: Portrait of an Actor

March 27, 2015, would have been the ninetieth birthday of beloved actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky. Renowned for his film roles, such as Hamlet in Hamlet and Yuri Detochkin in Beware of the Car, Smoktunovsky also had a highly successful career as a stage actor. In this excerpt from an interview with a Hungarian reporter, he recounts his experiences during World War II on the basis of old photographs.

[…] In this one my face is more serious. It’s another photograph from my youth. See how much red hair I had? As many red hairs as freckles on my face. But where is that hair now? Where did that incredible, enormous power go? It’s gone. Understand?

And now we’re up to the war, that is, its end – 1945. Rather often I get this request: “Bring out your military photos.” They don’t realize that if someone has military photos, it means he was near the front lines, near the battles, but wasn’t fighting – no, he was posing in his free time. Whereas I was in really, really awful binds and wrote a book about it, soon to be two. […] Just now I wrote a book titled To Be. In it I describe how out of 125 or 130 of us, only four survived. All the rest fell like grass cut in a meadow. Just like my other three comrades, I would take their bullets, their grenades, to somehow extend my life and somehow protect the road we were supposed to be guarding, to not let through the Nazi division that had broken out of Toruń (this was in Poland).

And now I’m often asked: “Show us your photos from the front!” I only have the one photograph, but it’s not from the front, it’s from after the war – 1945. I’m a staff sergeant. My mustache and beard haven’t even grown in yet, but I’ve already gone through such awful trials that I wouldn’t wish even on my enemies. Because, as I’ve already said, I was taken prisoner, then escaped from the prisoner-of-war camp, because I was torn apart by disease – dysentery, dystrophy… and complete psychological shock. I couldn’t accept the fact that any prison guard could shoot me, just like that. So I escaped. Because if I hadn’t escaped, all the same, two, or three, or five days later I would have just collapsed from exhaustion.

Later, when I was picked up by friendly Ukrainians in the Kamenets-Podolsk Oblast (now Khmelnitsky Oblast) and was left to rest in their house, there was a mirror on the wall in front of me. And because my mind wasn’t quite working yet, I thought that someone was looking at me through a window, some man with a big nose and sunken eyes. I would ask him, “What are you looking at? What do you want?” And the man “in the window” would whisper something at the same time. Then I realized that it was me. After all, a whole year I hadn’t seen myself in the mirror, being on the front lines, fighting the Nazis with my division. How could I possibly have photographs from the front, if I was busy protecting my human dignity and perhaps even my own life, as well as the life of my country?!

 

Translation: Eugenia Sokolskaya [source]

Image credit: http://agritura.livejournal.com/159547.html

 

Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of Our Books

Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided. 
Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

This is the work that made Chekhov, launching his career as a writer and playwright of national and international renown. Retranslated and updated, this new bilingual edition is a super way to improve your Russian.
Turgenev Bilingual

Turgenev Bilingual

A sampling of Ivan Turgenev's masterful short stories, plays, novellas and novels. Bilingual, with English and accented Russian texts running side by side on adjoining pages.
The Little Humpbacked Horse (bilingual)

The Little Humpbacked Horse (bilingual)

A beloved Russian classic about a resourceful Russian peasant, Vanya, and his miracle-working horse, who together undergo various trials, exploits and adventures at the whim of a laughable tsar, told in rich, narrative poetry.
Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

A book that dares to explore the humanity of priests and pilgrims, saints and sinners, Faith & Humor has been both a runaway bestseller in Russia and the focus of heated controversy – as often happens when a thoughtful writer takes on sacred cows. The stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, dialogues and adventures in this volume comprise an encyclopedia of modern Russian Orthodoxy, and thereby of Russian life.
The Little Golden Calf

The Little Golden Calf

Our edition of The Little Golden Calf, one of the greatest Russian satires ever, is the first new translation of this classic novel in nearly fifty years. It is also the first unabridged, uncensored English translation ever, and is 100% true to the original 1931 serial publication in the Russian journal 30 Dnei. Anne O. Fisher’s translation is copiously annotated, and includes an introduction by Alexandra Ilf, the daughter of one of the book’s two co-authors.
At the Circus (bilingual)

At the Circus (bilingual)

This wonderful novella by Alexander Kuprin tells the story of the wrestler Arbuzov and his battle against a renowned American wrestler. Rich in detail and characterization, At the Circus brims with excitement and life. You can smell the sawdust in the big top, see the vivid and colorful characters, sense the tension build as Arbuzov readies to face off against the American.
Bears in the Caviar

Bears in the Caviar

Bears in the Caviar is a hilarious and insightful memoir by a diplomat who was “present at the creation” of US-Soviet relations. Charles Thayer headed off to Russia in 1933, calculating that if he could just learn Russian and be on the spot when the US and USSR established relations, he could make himself indispensable and start a career in the foreign service. Remarkably, he pulled it of.
Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

In this comprehensive, quixotic and addictive book, Edwin Trommelen explores all facets of the Russian obsession with vodka. Peering chiefly through the lenses of history and literature, Trommelen offers up an appropriately complex, rich and bittersweet portrait, based on great respect for Russian culture.
Russian Rules

Russian Rules

From the shores of the White Sea to Moscow and the Northern Caucasus, Russian Rules is a high-speed thriller based on actual events, terrifying possibilities, and some really stupid decisions.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
The Moscow Eccentric

The Moscow Eccentric

Advance reviewers are calling this new translation "a coup" and "a remarkable achievement." This rediscovered gem of a novel by one of Russia's finest writers explores some of the thorniest issues of the early twentieth century.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955