Actress Svetlana Kryuchkova: "The role of Anna Akhmatova cost me health"

Due to the pandemic, Svetlana Kryuchkova’s tour in Moscow and her creative evening were postponed. I was lucky to talk with Svetlana Nikolayevna about Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva in her legendary apartment on the Fontanka, that visited the best people of Russian culture. It was possible to create another room on the roof, so that there appeared a "poetic attic". Here Svetlana Nikolayevna and me drank tea and talked about Anna Andreyevna until three AM.

- In film of Dmitry Tomashpolsky "The Moon at the Zenith" you are strikingly similar to Anna Andreyevna, although you are a blonde, but she was a brunette.

- Director Tomashpolsky, who is also the author of the script and of the idea of this film, from the very beginning was convinced that only I should play Anna Andreyevna on the “take-off” of life. There were no film tests. I note that my heroine is not young Akhmatova, but a mature person. Dmitry Lvovich right away explained that it was important for him to convey the character, soul movement of the poet Akhmatova. I admit that I did not agree at once. What “bird” words did he convince me to take on the role of Anna Andreevna - I do not know. Curious when I was working on this role, she was silent, although by nature she did not belong to the category of non-talkative women. Moreover, she was silent not only on the set, but also in life. The most amazing thing is that in the process of working on the picture, some mysterious things happened, up to mysticism. When we shot the film in Komarovo, where Akhmatova lived in the country, and where her museum is currently located, his employee saw me in make-up (although there was no make-up as such: only my hairstyle changed) almost fainted: it seemed to her that Anna Andreyevna herself was coming.

- Is it difficult to play Akhmatova for a graduate of the Moscow Art Theater School? Certainly you know that Anna Andreyevna had a frienship with the actors of the Moscow Art Theater, in particular, one of her friends was the actress Nina Olshevskaya, although the theater as such Akhmatova did not like.

- The role of Akhmatova cost me health. I deepened into her image so much that I became disconnected from the outside world, and in many ways I even ceased to be myself. In general, I am a fatalist, convinced that nothing is happening in our life just like that, for so, which means that I really had to play Akhmatova.

- Svetlana Nikolayevna, what can Anna Akhmatova be compared with?

- Akhmatova is the ocean, and the ocean is in a different state, from complete rest to a storm. Try to dive into this ocean, and what will happen to you? I used to love Akhmatova’s love lyrics, and then I discovered her “The Wind of War”, “Northern Elegy”, “Requiem”, “Poem Without a Hero”.

- Perhaps you tried to find an explanation for this - why the only marriage union of two great poets broke up in the entire history of Russian literature?

- I can find a thousand everyday reasons for their break, but it is not important at all. Gumilyov was a very complicated person, with his own notion about the relationship between a man and a woman. But the ties that Akhmatova and Gumilyov had were never broken. He came to her in dreams. By the way, when I read the script for the future film "The Moon at its Zenith", I had a dream about my late husband - cameraman Jura Veksler. I AM I ask: "Yurochka, what are you doing here? You are died" And he says to me: “Well, what are you saying, Svetochka, I’m alive” And he continued: “What a good husband you have, and a good son. Feed me, I'm very hungry". It turned out, as Dmitry Tomashpolsky told me about this, Akhmatova had the same dream about Gumilyov immediately after his execution. I love to read Gumilyov’s dying poem, “In the evening, at the sunset”.