LEONID PAVLUCHIK
Son for father
This year Nikolai Eremenko Jr. would have turned 75 years old. I can’t imagine him gray-haired, with wrinkles on his face. We knew Erema (as he called himself in a good mood) for a quarter of a century. More precisely, from the late 70s, when I worked in Minsk at the newspaper “Banner of Youth”, and he came from Moscow to his parents’ home, the leading actors of the Kupala Theater – People’s Artist of Belarus Galina Orlova and People’s Artist of the USSR Nikolai Eremenko Sr.
In those days, Kolya – young, talented, handsome, with a strong chin and shoulder-length wavy curls – was experiencing the peak of his unimaginable, transcendental popularity. He made his debut with a small but expressive role with his teacher Sergei Gerasimov in the film “By the Lake”. And after the roles of Lieutenant Drozdovsky in “Hot Snow”, Julien Sorel in “Red and Black”, and a dashing old mechanic in “Pirates of the 20th Century”, he was literally not allowed to pass on the streets.
Kolya told me with humor that young fans spent the night at the entrance of his house, sent parcels with their curls, letters with a promise to commit suicide if he did not reciprocate. Or they even showed up on the doorstep with suitcases: they say, I will be your faithful wife. What to hide, Kolya enjoyed success with women and throughout his hectic life he reciprocated generously. When, I remember, I called him to congratulate him on his 50th birthday, he cheerfully replied: “You know, it’s fifty dollars, and I still haven’t gotten enough of it.”
Despite universal and universal adoration, he had enough intelligence and sober self-esteem not to go crazy, not to get star fever. As always, his work saved him: he filmed a lot even during the post-perestroika years of crisis for our cinema. Moreover, he tried with all his might to diversify his acting repertoire. After the high classics, he gladly starred in genre films, after historical characters – Menshikov in the dilogy about Peter or Count Orlov in The Tsar’s Hunt – he willingly switched to “our contemporaries”.
A student of the great teachers Sergei Gerasimov and Tamara Makarova, who played age-appropriate, sharp-character roles at the institute, including, imagine, Plyushkin, Eremenko was afraid of falling into the clutches of one role. All the time he was delirious with the idea of starring in a funny sitcom, but he was increasingly cast in the roles of supermen, fortunately the texture allowed. And even in adulthood, he performed all the stunts in the action films “Sniper” and “Crusader” mostly himself. Having crossed the threshold of his 50th birthday, Kolya, not without pride, told me that he could repeat much of what he did on the set of the film “Pirates of the 20th Century,” in which he (for the first time in Soviet cinema!) acted without an understudy.
And off the set, he was not Superman, he was not a “cool kid,” despite the fact that many perceived him as such. He regarded this misconception with a condescending smile. “I can’t say for myself that I’m as thick-skinned as my other characters,” he told me. – Actors in general are reverent, sensual natures, this is inherent in our nature. Maybe I transformed myself into supermen so as not to play myself on screen. For me, a role is still about creating a certain, most often fictional, image, and not about revealing one’s own essence on the screen.”
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By the age of 50, Eremenko, it seemed to me, had outgrown the scope of the acting profession. At one time he was sick to death of his own appearance. He either let his hair grow, or cut his hair short, and then for the film “Maroseyka, 12” he willingly shaved his head. Everyone wanted to leave, to escape from his flashy appearance, which dictated the monotonous nature of his roles. It was then that the opportunity arose to change his fate and, as a director, make a movie himself at Belarusfilm. It was the film “Son for Father” (produced by Nikolai Eremenko and Margarita Kasymova) based on the script by Valentin Chernykh, in which Kolya played for the first time together with Nikolai Eremenko Sr. It’s a pity that this successful directorial experience, crowned with the main prize at the National Film Festival in Brest, turned out to be his only one. I know that Kolya had serious plans for this: he had three ready-made scripts on his table. But, as usual, there was no money to implement these plans during the difficult years for our film industry.
“Actually, I didn’t intend to direct the film “Son for Father,” Kolya explained to me after the film’s premiere. “I just wanted to please my old man, give him a role for his 70th birthday, otherwise he began to get depressed, lose his taste for life, but then he cheered up.” And I myself was interested in acting with my father, since we had never been on camera together before. I was well aware that directing was a different profession. It’s not for nothing that an actor is called a performer: he fulfills someone else’s will. And here you have to impose your will on others. I don’t really like it. But at some point I was faced with a choice: either I will make the film myself, or it will not be made at all. And I went on this, as it seemed to me, adventure. And then, imagine, I liked it. It’s so good to stand behind the camera, lead, and everyone obeys you – even my father, whom I ordered around throughout my subordinate childhood.”
With his father, a strong, strong-willed man who went through captivity and a fascist concentration camp, who essentially played a version of his own fate in Sergei Gerasimov’s film “People and Beasts,” Kolya developed different relationships at different periods of his life. In childhood and adolescence, he grew up as an active, lively, even hooligan child, and Eremenko Sr., intoned Kolya, was not a fan of Dr. Spock and Makarenko: “He endured, endured, and then gave normal male slaps.” But over the years, Kolya, having himself become the head of the family and the father of two daughters, stopped being offended by the severity of his parent.
In his mature years, he and his father established an extremely trusting, warm, truly masculine relationship. They could talk all night about art, since they worshiped the same gods here, and they could argue seriously on political topics (my father, who joined the party during the war, was at one time one of the leaders of the Belarusian communists, and Kolya was sympathetic to the perestroika processes). Eremenko Jr. did not have the social temperament of his father, but at one time he willingly accepted the duties of cultural adviser to the Embassy of the Republic of Belarus in Moscow, trying to promote the cultural and spiritual rapprochement of our countries and peoples. He equally loved both his native Belarus and his native Russia. On this issue, he and his father were completely unanimous.
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Full version – in “NE” No. 4, 2024
