Crossroads of Galina Shcherbakova: Why the daughter accused the author of the story "You never dreamed of" of immorality

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

Galina Shcherbakova was a popular Soviet writer and screenwriter, author of over 20 books. Her trademark was the story, which was used to make the cult film of the youth of the 1980s. "You never dreamed of." Shcherbakova wrote about the difficult relationship between parents and adolescent children, but she herself was never able to establish contact with her loved ones. A real family drama took place 30 years after the adaptation of the story, when her own daughter accused the writer of immorality and lack of maternal instinct …

Galina Shcherbakova (nee - Rudenko) was born in 1932 in Dzerzhinsk (now - Toretsk), Donetsk region. After leaving school, she entered the philological faculty of the university in Rostov, and after moving with her husband to Chelyabinsk, she continued her studies at the local pedagogical institute. For some time she worked as a teacher of the Russian language and literature, then as a journalist and editor of a regional youth newspaper in Volgograd, but after a few years she left this job in order to devote all her time to literary creativity.

For a long time, her writing talent did not find recognition - her novels were not published anywhere. When Shcherbakova began work on a novel about contemporary Romeo and Juliet, which she called "Roman and Yulka", she did not even expect that an easy love story would arouse such a lively interest both among readers and filmmakers.

The theme of the story was suggested to her by her own life: once her tenth-grader son climbed the drainpipe to the 6th floor to the girl with whom he was in love, and fell down. Fortunately, everything went without serious injuries, but this story gave the writer a reason to think about the sometimes tragic consequences of first love, and how often adolescents cannot find understanding and support from their loved ones.

After the work on the story was completed, Shcherbakova took it to the editorial office of the Yunost magazine, but did not receive an answer for a long time. Then she sent her to the Film Studio. Gorky in the name of the famous director Sergei Gerasimov. To her surprise, a few days later the director's wife, actress Tamara Makarova, called her, saying that she really liked the story and that she would do her best to make it into a film.

Meanwhile, Shcherbakova went to the editor of Yunost, Boris Polevoy, and inquired about the fate of her work. He replied that he could not publish a story with such a gloomy ending - at the end, a young man, whose family was categorically against his relationship with a classmate, was thrown out of the window and crashed. Polevoy was afraid that after that "". And the writer had to change the ending: Roma jumped, but survived. And in the film, he accidentally stumbled, trying to attract the attention of the heroine, who was standing below the windows. Due to too obvious allusions with Romeo and Juliet, the title Roman and Julia also had to be corrected - the story was published under the editorial title You Never Dreamed of.

The Goskino did not appreciate the parallels with Shakespeare either. When the director Ilya Fraz began work on the adaptation of the story, the management indignantly declared: “” And Yulka had to be renamed Katya. However, the claims against the author did not end there. The story, published in 1979 in Yunost, caused an unprecedented excitement among readers - this issue of the magazine was impossible to get, the multimillion circulation was sold out in a few days! The teenagers recognized themselves in the heroes and sent letters of gratitude to the writer, but the teachers outraged the work: they say, at this age, teenagers should think about studying, and not about love experiences. Shcherbakova was even accused of immorality and propaganda of debauchery!

But the professionals appreciated the work of Shcherbakova at its true worth. Writer and journalist Dmitry Bykov said: "".

In the 1980s. based on the works of Galina Shcherbakova, several more films were filmed: "Quarantine", "The Personal File of Judge Ivanova", "Two and One", "May I Die, Lord …" a game without rules. " However, the novel “You never dreamed of” remained the visiting card of the writer, which was the most popular among the readers. Shcherbakov was depressed by this. She said: "".

However, the real drama was played out not in her works, but in real life. The writer, who was called a subtle psychologist and a real expert in family relations, could not find a common language with her own daughter. In early 2010, a few months before Shcherbakova's death, a scandal erupted: her daughter, 45-year-old Ekaterina Shpiller, wrote an autobiographical book "Mom, Don't Read!" misunderstanding, dislike, lack of maternal instinct and drunkenness. In the annotation, she stated: "".

First, the book was published on the Internet, and it was published after the death of Shcherbakova. In the preface, Catherine wrote: "".

This book caused an ambiguous reaction in society: someone sympathized with Catherine, and someone doubted her words and suspected her of jealousy of maternal fame and success. Even her brother Alexander, Shcherbakova's son from his first marriage, greeted this work with indignation. In response, he wrote an article where he argued the opposite: the writer was a good mother, and her daughter was a spoiled girl who demanded increased attention to herself: "".

According to the son, the daughter's book accelerated the departure of Shcherbakova - in recent years she was seriously ill, and Catherine's accusations finally knocked her down. Probably, it is better to look for the truth about Shcherbakova in her works, on which more than one generation of readers grew up, and which still do not lose their relevance and popularity. Unfortunately, the path of Nikita Mikhailovsky, who embodied the image of Romka on the screens, was even more difficult than the life of the writer: The tragic fate of the actor of the film "You Never Dreamed of".