From what Faina Ranevskaya fainted and other little-known facts about the queen of sarcasm

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

Even today she remains the standard of the actress in the broadest sense of the word. Faina Georgievna's character was complex, and to many she seemed rather capricious and spoiled. In fact, the actress was smart. She knew how to treat life's difficulties with a fair amount of irony and sarcasm, but at the same time she could well faint from a strong mental shock. In 1972, Faina Ranevskaya entered into an agreement with the publishing house to publish her memoirs and overnight destroyed her three-year work.

Destroyed manuscript

In the early 1970s, Faina Georgievna sat down to write a book of memoirs. The WTO publishing house promised her a very decent fee and even paid an advance in the amount, as the actress wrote, of two thousand rubles she spent on the purchase of a warm coat.

Faina Georgievna worked for three years, collecting her memories bit by bit, stringing them, like beads on a string, in chronological order. She had already reached the home stretch and there was very little left before the end, when the actress destroyed all her work in one night. She suddenly felt a sense of shame that her whole life was in the manuscript, and she herself appeared before the readers as if naked. The actress even compared her memoirs to the situation when she washes in the bathhouse, and they come to watch numerous excursions at her, not too well-built.

In the following months, she had to collect money to return the advance she received for the memoirs to the publishing house. Faina Ranevskaya later doubted the correctness of her then decision to destroy the almost finished book. But Margarita Aliger, with whom the actress was friends, sincerely lamented. And she took the floor from Faina Georgievna to restore the manuscript.

And Ranevskaya honestly tried to keep her word, again writing down memories, only this time not in chronological order, but as recalled. She wrote down the brightest episodes on different scraps of paper, sometimes even on napkins. Subsequently, the records of the actress ended up in the State Archives of Literature and Art, where you can get acquainted with priceless materials today.

Fainting

The actress remembered herself as a very little baby, when she was only a few years old, and she was already constantly acting, portraying either a local janitor, or a customer from a bakery, or an ice cream maker inviting customers.

Once in childhood, impressed by the scene from Romeo and Juliet, she first cried with admiration, and then ran home and smashed her savings box in the yard, allowing the neighbour's children to collect all the money. She wanted to do something unusual and great.

But the most vivid memory of Faina Ranevskaya was not associated with childhood. As the actress herself said, at the end of the 19th century, when she was born, it was fashionable to faint. If she fainted, she tried to fall beautifully and gracefully, but naturally. From an excess of feelings, Faina Ranevskaya collapsed only once, was badly hurt, but at the same time she was incredibly happy.

On that day, she was just walking down the street and looking at the windows, when next to her she heard the voice of the person with whom she was in love. The future actress collected photographs of her idol and even wrote letters to him, however, the addressee did not read them, because they always remained in Faina Ranevskaya's desk drawer.

The girl fainted from the sound of her voice and was carried to the nearest pastry shop. And it had to happen that the object of adoration of young Faina turned out to be not only talented, but also sensitive person. As soon as the girl came to her senses, she again heard his voice, inquiring about her health. And Faina lost consciousness again.

A few years later, she, an aspiring provincial actress, came to Moscow to get into the Art Theater as a spectator. The queues for tickets then stood day and night. And then she decided to write a letter to her idol again and even found the strength to send it. She talked about how passionately she wants to get to the play with his participation and recalled how she once lost her senses in Stoleshnikov Lane when she heard his voice.

The answer came quickly enough, and Vasily Ivanovich Kachalov (and he was the addressee) informed Faina Ranevskaya about the two tickets left for her by the administrator. From that moment until the last day of the actor's life, his friendship with Faina Ranevskaya lasted. She studied with him, often visited him and was always surprised at how talented and at the same time very modest the actor was.

Unfinished diary

Faina Ranevskaya, fulfilling her promise to Margarita Aliger, tried to put her memories together again. But she did not like to write, and therefore her scattered notes sometimes look like a cry from the soul of an endlessly lonely person. She will write that she is tired of everything, complains about the pointlessness of New Year's greetings, expresses regret that she did not keep a diary and complains about poverty.

And then she admits: her talent did not bring her anything, her personal life did not work out, and she did not have so many friends. And she did not create anything at all, so … squeaked … But it was not for nothing that Yesenin wrote that "you cannot see a face face to face." After all, the power of talent and the magnitude of such a phenomenon as Faina Ranevskaya can only be appreciated by those who still admire all her works, wondering, laughing and crying along with the Great Actress.

The fact that a wonderful Soviet actress, in addition to her talent, had an incredibly sharp tongue, today, unfortunately, is known to the younger generation much better than the roles in which she shone. Faina Georgievna really was an inexhaustible storehouse of humor, and her figurative, juicy phrases were immediately taken away by rumor, turning them into anecdotes. But later this led to a strange, reverse copyright infringement: Ranevskaya today is credited with such a number of witticisms that she simply would not have had time to say in her entire life.