100th anniversary of the "King of the Soviet film comedy"

On January 30, 1923, in the city of Svobodny, Amur Region, Russia, in the family of Iov Gaidai and his wife Maria Lyubimova, the third son was born, who was named Leonid. Leonid's father came from a family of serfs in the Poltava province, Ukraine. In 1906, at the age of 20, Iov Gaidai was sentenced to several years of hard labor for revolutionary activities and sent to the Far East. Leonid's mother was born in the Ryazan region of Russia. She met her future husband through her brother Yegor, who was serving hard labor with Iov Gaidai. After the birth of Leonid, the Gaidai's family moved first to Chita, and then to Irkutsk, where Leonid went to school.

Leonid Gaidai graduated from high school on June 20, 1941, two days before the start of Great Patriotic War. In the autumn of 1941, Leonid was drafted into the army. Initially, he took sergeant courses in Mongolia. In December 1941, as commander of a foot reconnaissance unit, he was sent to the Kalinin Front and literally shortly after arriving in the combat zone in the Pskov region, he accomplished a feat, for which on December 20 he was awarded the medal "For Military Merit". In March 1943 he was seriously wounded, after which he spent 9 months in hospitals.

Being declared unfit for further military service, he first got a job as an illuminator, and then as an actor in the Irkutsk Regional Drama Theater. There he entered the theater studio, which he graduated in 1947. Two years later he entered the directing department of VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinema), in the workshop of Grigory Alexandrov. In the last year of VGIK, in 1955, he participated in the filming of the film "Lyana" as an assistant director, who was the famous Boris Barnet.

In 1956, together with another director of Mosfilm, Valentin Nevzorov, who also began his creative career as an actor in the Irkutsk Theater, he made the film "A Weary Road". The film was staged based on the stories of the famous writer, publicist and human rights activist Vladimir Korolenko, whose life, like the life of Leonid Gaidai's father, was connected with Ukraine and Siberia. Korolenko's works were dramatic, sometimes tragic. The first film by Leonid Gaidai, filmed in collaboration, turned out the same way. Nevertheless, the famous master of Soviet film directing Mikhail Romm ("Nine Days of One Year") saw in this work of Gaidai the makings of a comedian and advised him to shoot comedies in the future.

Following the recommendation of the super-authoritative Mikhail Romm, in 1957 Leonid Gaidai made a comedy, originally called "The Dead Affair". The famous Soviet film director Savva Kulish, who was present at the first screening of the picture, recalled:

“the picture made a killer impression on me, and on everyone who saw it. It was a very funny, very tough and desperately bold picture, completely uncharacteristic of the then movie. On the screen you could feel the horror of a man who can not prove to anyone that he is alive. His own existence is not taken into account. It was a truly absurd picture ..."

Another participant in the screening, the then Minister of Culture of the USSR N.A. Mikhailov, gave the opposite assessment to Gaidai's film. He called it "a mockery of Soviet reality." Naturally, even despite the so-called "Khrushchev's thaw", Soviet censorship could not allow the broad masses of the people to view a sharply satirical work. The picture was severely castrated: out of 90 minutes of screen time, 43 minutes were cut, almost half. In 1958, it appeared on the screens in a truncated form and under a different name - "A Groom from the Other World."

After the obstruction that officials from the Soviet culture arranged for Leonid Gaidai and his first independent offspring, he vowed in his work to touch on political topics, and indeed sharp social satire. According to the above-mentioned Savva Kulish,

"it seems to me ... that after "A Groom from the Other World" Leonid Iovich closed like a shell closes to protect himself, to protect the tender and beautiful that is inside. He created a kind of shell that protects from an unfavorable and aggressive environment."

During his not very long life, and he died in 1993 at the age of 70, Leonid Iovich Gaidai made 15 films on his own. Three more films were shot by him in collaboration with other directors. Of these 15 films, 7 films were included in the Golden Thousand, including "Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future", "Operation 'Y' & Other Shurik's Adventures", "The Diamond Arm", "Kidnapping Caucassian Style, or Shurik's New Adventures", "The Twelve Chairs", "It can't be!", "Business people". Based on this indicator, Leonid Gaidai is included in the list of the 100 greatest directors of world cinema compiled by FilmGourmand. At the same time, almost all of Gaidai's films were bypassed by prestigious film festivals, both foreign and domestic.

Six films by Leonid Gaidai became the leaders of the Soviet film distribution of the corresponding years, gathering 60-70 million moviegoers in cinemas. And, thus, providing a huge income for the state budget. But despite the millions earned by the films of Leonid Iovich Gaidai for the state budget, financial success practically did not touch him. All his life he lived in the same cooperative apartment and had the same Zhiguli car, which his wife, actress Nina Grebeshkova, drove for many years. And he had one wife - from 1953 until the death of the Master. She was the fortress of his success, a quiet assistant who never asked for more than they had.