A tube of vodka, a call of spirits and a glamorous fight: How our "Greats" played each other and those around them

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In some countries, on April Fool's Day, it is customary to arrange rallies in the first half of the day, and those who like to joke in the afternoon risk being branded as "April fools." This never bothered our famous compatriots - they managed to joke, albeit not always successfully, 365 days a year.

Together with MOSGORTUR and Moscow museums, we recall several funny stories.

Fake news and battle with Mayakovsky

In the Yesenin Museum on the eve of April 1, two episodes from the poet's life were recalled. One of them is described in the book “S. A. Yesenin in the memoirs of his contemporaries,”says the Georgian poet Georgy Leonidze, whom Sergei Yesenin almost dragged into his adventure.

One evening Leonidze came to the Oriant hotel in Tbilisi, where Yesenin lived. Seeing a colleague in the shop, the lyricist got up and shouted: “Gogla, I challenge you to a duel! Name the seconds! Tomorrow at six o'clock in the morning, on the Kojorskoe highway!"

Later, he explained his idea in the following way: “Don't worry, we will shoot blanks, and the next day the newspapers will print that Yesenin and Leonidze fought, do you understand? Doesn't that seduce you?"

Leonidze was not seduced by the idea, the friends changed the topic of the conversation and forgot about the staged duel. As it turned out later, Sergei Alexandrovich proposed this PR move to another poet, Sandro Shanshiashvili, and also unsuccessfully. But luck smiled at the poet in a verbal battle with Vladimir Mayakovsky - this case is described in the book by Alexander Mikhailov - "Mayakovsky"

Mayakovsky in his poem "Jubilee" called Yesenin "balalaika", and one evening, after playing billiards, Yesenin decided to answer him. “Forgive me, but I don’t take it upon myself … Although, at the same time, I don’t want to be offended. A matter of taste, "said the poet and read his new work" In the Caucasus ":

Mayakovsky did not sarcastically: "Quita", - he smiled. But Yesenin did not stop and, making a sad face, continued: “Yes … what can you do, I really only have the letter E. Fate! You can't get away from the alphabet!.. But you, Mayakovsky, are surprisingly lucky, only two letters separate from Pushkin. Only two letters! But what - BUT!"

The Futurist laughed and kissed the lyrics.

Poet vs crowd

Employees of the branch of the Museum of V. V. Mayakovsky - "Apartments on Bolshaya Presnya". This episode can be found in the same book by Mikhailov.

On October 19, 1913, a cabaret called "The Pink Lantern" was opened in the center of the capital. The audience was quite bourgeois - festive outfits, expensive jewelry. Mayakovsky did not like this "fat mass" and decided to report this on the evening of his poetic debut on the stage of the "Pink Lantern".

After midnight, when the guests had already ceased to pay attention to the festive program, Mayakovsky appeared on the stage - tall, serious, in a yellow blouse.

He looked at the audience for a long time, and when it calmed down, he began to read in a thick bass the now famous "Nate!" which the futurist points out. - Here you, woman, whitewash at you thickly, you look with an oyster from the shells of things - and the visitors are already covering up the jewels.

The last lines finally pissed off the audience:

Aggressive image and rudeness did their job - there were whistles and shouts of "Down with!"Mayakovsky urged: “More! Yet! Let the idiots enjoy!”, He was pleased - the opening of the cafe turned into a fight with beating bottles and decanters. The police had to calm down the guests - this is how the first and last evening at the "Pink Lantern" ended.

Foreigner, medium and financial inspector

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was a very witty and artistic person, they say in the writer's museum, he adored practical jokes.

For several years, his extraordinary abilities for reincarnation made the writer an actor - in the 1930s he played on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater, and they say he reincarnated so skillfully that even Stanislavsky did not recognize him in makeup.

In the first years of his life in Moscow, he played the family of his new acquaintances who lived in the neighborhood, so much so that they refused to continue their friendship with him - the writer persuaded them to arrange a seance, and his wife, Tatyana Nikolaevna, secretly persuaded to knock on the table at his signal … He described this story in the story "Seance".

Sometimes Bulgakov found accomplices. One day he went to celebrate the New Year with his friend - the secretary of the publishing house in which he published. On the way, the writer suggested: “You know, Pyotr Nikanorovich, this house, and nobody knows me there. Let's play them out. Introduce me as a foreigner …"

Bulgakov spent the whole evening in a black mask, pretending to be a wealthy traveling foreigner, accompanied by the translator Zaitsev. Only at midnight, the writer took off his mask and introduced himself to the stunned guests in the purest Russian language.

Bulgakov's second wife, Lyubov Evgenievna Belozerskaya, somehow helped him play a Leningrad friend of Elena Pavlovna Lansberg. Belozerskaya came to visit her, and later the writer rang the doorbell and pretended to be a financial inspector who was going to describe and take out all the antique furniture of the hostess. Elena Pavlovna's friend, who did not know Bulgakov, silently watched the process, and then Lansberg said in a whisper: “This is some kind of adventurer! And you didn't even ask him for a document!"

The writer played the role excellently, after which the woman was revealed the truth.

Grandiose spanish

Composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was also not averse to having fun, as the staff of the A. N. Scriabin. One of the episodes, preserved in the memoirs of Olga Sekerina (she was the sister of his first lover, Natalya Sekerina), is also associated with dressing up.

According to Sekerina, the winter of 1893 was rather boring for the musician and his friends. To have fun, “a whole company of young people, thirty-five people, had to dress up in order to go to two or three familiar houses. The mode of movement was the most diverse: there were troikas, cabbies, a shyperko (a truck for transporting furniture), into which benches were adapted for sitting. When we drove up to the collection point in this sobbing, two cheerful, cheerful masks jumped up to us. I dressed up as Santa Claus, and my partner turned out to be a grandiose Spanish woman, who played her role with extraordinary talent."

During a visit to one of the houses, the Spaniard settled down on the sofa next to the Sekerins' mother and fanned her throughout the evening. Only at the end of the party did the participants in the comic action realize that Scriabin was hiding behind the mask.

Bonus: About comic and cosmic

Astronauts like to joke no less poets and writers, they say in the Museum of Cosmonautics.

In 1975, the docking of two ships took place - the Soviet Soyuz and the American Apollo. Its participants were Alexey Leonov, Valery Kubasov, Thomas Stafford, Donald Slayton and Vance Brand.

The astronauts who came to the Soyuz were greeted hospitably - they offered them a drink to the meeting and handed them tubes with the inscription: "Vodka Extra". Despite the ban, the Americans decided to taste the contents, but were disappointed in the form of borscht.

The Soviet rally did not go unanswered: during radio communication with the Apollo after undocking on the Soyuz, they heard the sound of water and a woman's screeching - with this joke the astronauts were helped by Brand's daughter and her friends, who prepared this recording. Korolev made fun of the fate itself and the secret status - the world learned the name of the chief designer only after his death.

Once the Queen had to go to the hospital. The medical staff, of course, did not know that the patient was the main creator of the USSR's rocket and space technology. Suddenly, the cosmonauts came to visit Sergei Pavlovich. "Wow, the cosmonauts themselves came to visit him!" - the employees were surprised, but the scientist was left to accept the rays of someone else's glory with humor.

Widely known and jokes and practical jokes by Oleg Tabakov - how Kozakov was brought to hysteria, and Evstigneev - to insidious revenge.