Faina Ranevskaya: Life Passes and Doesn't Bow

4 hrs. 31 min.

Language Russian

Author Sofia Benois

Narrator Natalya Kaznacheeva

Description

What a paradox: her theatrical and screen work can be counted on one’s fingers, yet, according to the British encyclopedia “Who’s Who” (“Кто есть кто”), she is among the ten most outstanding actresses of the twentieth century! So what makes Faina Georgievna Ranevskaya unique—the plain-looking girl from a “poor oil industrialist” family who became a charismatic actress (“Cinderella,” “The Foundling,” “Bombo,” “Easy Life,” and others)? The author insists that Ranevskaya remains compelling thanks to her one-of-a-kind ironic view of life: the actress was never shy about her choice of words, and if she joked, she would make people laugh until tears.

Yet it was not sarcasm that helped her—an Honored Artist of the USSR, as she put it, to receive her “funeral trappings”: the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, and also three Stalin Prizes! And it wasn’t her witticisms and uncensored expressions that strengthened her friendship with the most famous people of that era: Anna Akhmatova, Lyubov Orlova, Rostislav Plyatt, Olga Aroseva, and many others. It seems that among all Soviet celebrities, only she could afford to be sincere.

At the moment when children surrounded her with happy shouts of “Mulia! Mulia!,” she answered dismissively: “Pioneers, go to hell.”

And it’s hard to imagine that inside this extraordinary person there lived a terrifyingly lonely, delicate, and vulnerable soul… Despite dozens of books written about Ranevskaya, her phenomenon still has not been fully revealed… and only now the reader gets the chance to look at the contradictory fate of this original actress in a new way.