Dmitry Yurov
Why has Ilya Ehrenburg — once read by the entire country — all but vanished from the reading experience of newer generations? And why do his books suddenly sound so contemporary again? The makers of the forthcoming film went looking for answers together with the writer and artist Pavel Pepperstein and with the art historian, art producer, collector and founder of the Vellum gallery Lyubov Agafonova.
One of the key shooting days of the documentary «Ilya Ehrenburg’s Victory Day» has wrapped at Nikolina Gora. The film is being made by director Artemy Belov and the Cinema Line studio (Mosfilm) with the support of the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives.
The protagonists of the new episode are Pavel Pepperstein and Lyubov Agafonova. The choice of interlocutors alone reveals the film’s intent: its authors are interested not only in Ehrenburg’s biography, but in his presence in today’s culture. Why, decades later, do people who largely shape the contemporary artistic and intellectual agenda turn to this writer again?
Ilya Ehrenburg remains one of the most complex and hardest-to-explain figures of the Russian twentieth century. A writer, journalist and war correspondent, a witness to revolutions and wars, a friend of Pablo Picasso and of Europe’s major artists, the author of the novel «The Thaw», whose title came to name an entire era — he belonged to several worlds at once: the Soviet and the European, the literary and the artistic.
Nikolina Gora was chosen as the location for a reason — the legendary old dacha settlement where, for decades, writers, artists, directors, scholars and musicians met one another. In such a setting, a conversation about Ehrenburg takes on a particular tone. It is no longer only the story of one man, but a conversation about cultural memory, which goes on living in old houses, family libraries and books passed from one generation to the next.
Pavel Pepperstein recalls several of Ehrenburg’s works at once — «Julio Jurenito», «The End of Europe», «Thirteen Pipes». Yet instead of the usual literary analysis he tries to define this author’s inner nature. The formula for Ehrenburg that Pepperstein arrives at is unexpected and precise:
«a sentimental attitude towards cynicism».
The novel «The End of Europe», he believes, reads as especially contemporary today. Almost a hundred years ago Ehrenburg drew in it a picture of a slowly disappearing European world — a space of wars, epidemics and civilisational catastrophes. Many of those images now read not as literary fantasy but as an anxious premonition of the future.
One of the film’s central episodes will be Pepperstein’s conversation with Lyubov Agafonova. It is she who formulates the question running through the whole picture: why has a writer once familiar to practically every reader in the country been almost forgotten by a new generation — and why is it so important to discover him anew right now?
Reflecting on this, Pepperstein recalls the particular phenomenon of the old dacha library. In summer, in a house where one family has lived for decades, the shelves turn out to hold random books that no one seems to have chosen on purpose. They smell of printing ink, old paper, rain, winter snow and of the dacha itself. And sometimes it is precisely such finds that shape a reader more powerfully than carefully selected literary novelties.
For Pepperstein himself, Ehrenburg turned out to be exactly such a book — found almost by chance, but staying with him for good.
«It is not for nothing that we are recording this conversation in the atmosphere of a classic dacha near Moscow», the writer remarks.
During the shoot the film acquired one more, entirely unexpected protagonist — a grey dacha cat named Dymok. Several times he strolled imperturbably in front of the camera, showing not the slightest wish to yield the ground to the crew. No one chased Dymok away. His small cameo may well survive into the final cut — one more living detail of that dacha world in which books, memories and the present quietly go on talking to one another.
