Notes of an Actor

The notes of a great artist, a well-known writer, People’s Artist of the USSR Evgeny Yakovlevich Vesnik.
The correct stress in my surname should be on the second syllable—Vesnik! My father was Belarusian, and my mother was a Czech woman who had become Russified. And “vesnik” in Belarusian means “smorchok” or “strochok” (in the area of Pinsk).
In school, the girls teased me—“Zhenya—smorchok”…

In 1937, when I was fourteen, my parents were arrested, and I was left completely alone. How could my father, an army commissioner of the First Rank—almost a marshal at only twenty-six—an honest and decent man, a fanatic of the “building of socialism,” be repressed?! And what about my mother, who had retrained from an opera singer to a zookeeper—so that together with my father, the head of “Krivorozhstroi,” they could build the “Krivorozhstal” plant! What astonishing people they were! When our whole family went into the theater (my father had two Orders of the Red Banner and an Order of Lenin; my mother had the Order of the Labor Red Banner), the auditorium rose to its feet! I was almost dying of pride that I had such parents. But they were arrested, and I became the son of “enemies of the people.”

In 48 I graduated from the Shchepkin School, and as a straight-A student, a front-line veteran, I wasn’t accepted into the Maly Theater on an application form. Only after the exposure of the cult of personality and the rehabilitation of my parents did Tsarev call me: “Come back!”
How stunned I was when I learned that after the revolution we had not had a single leader with higher education! Most of them didn’t know proper Russian. But sociologists have proven: a person who speaks incorrectly in their native language cannot think logically. It’s the same as trying to create a brilliant musical piece without hearing, without knowing notes…