Arkady Raikin - Soviet pop star
30 years ago - 17 December 1987 was departed from life by the famous Soviet theater, stage and film actor, theater director and humorist Arkady Isaakovich Raikin. Arkady Raikin was a respected artist and master of instant reincarnation on stage. A performer of monologues, satires and sktets, an amazing entertainer - he forever entered the history Soviet pop and humor. His miniatures and performances were permeated with satire and differed sharpness in comparison with other artists of the time, while remaining always intelligent and correct.
Arkady Isaakovich Raikin was born on October 24 (November 11 in a new style) 1911 in the city of Riga, Livonia Province (today the capital of Latvia). The father of the future satirist, Isaac Davidovich Raikin, worked at the port of Riga and was the brawler of the construction forest, his wife Leia (Elizaveta Borisovna) was a midwife. Arkady was the eldest child in the family, his parents formalized the marriage a year before his birth. After him, two sisters Bella and Sophia were born, and in 1927, brother Maxim, who later became an actor Maxim Maximov.
At the age of five, parents took Arkady from Riga, as it turned into a front-line city. At the same time, he retained in his memory the atmosphere of the house №16 on Melnichnaya Street (today - Dzirnavu). The Raikin family moved to the city of Rybinsk, where the father’s new place of work was located. It was in Rybinsk that Arkady Raikin's childhood passed; it was here that at the age of nine he first entered the amateur scene. Arkady's hobbies were not supported at home, his father opposed the artist's career. However, having come to terms with what his son was doing, it was decided that for a Jewish boy to play music more nobly, therefore, they bought a violin for the child. At the same time, he never became a violinist and musician.
From Rybinsk, the Raikin family moved to Petrograd, this happened in 1922. In the northern capital, Arkady was very fond of visiting the Academic Drama Theater. In order to buy theater tickets, he secretly sold his textbooks and exercise books, for which he often received bashing from his father. Raikin studied in one of the oldest and best schools in the city - today it is school number XXUMX. Already in the school revealed his creative character. In addition to the scene of the boy attracted painting. During the lessons of fine art, he impressed teachers not only with his technique, but also with the depth of thought that was in his works. Therefore, for a long time he could not decide on which profession to choose: an actor or a painter.
It should be noted that in childhood the future satirist became very seriously ill. At 13, he caught a cold on a skating rink so badly that he made a terrible sore throat, which gave heart complications. Doctors believed that the boy would not survive, but he defeated the disease, although rheumatism and rheumatic heart disease had long chained him to bed. The illness left its mark on his entire life. He has changed a lot, read a lot and learned to think with concentration. In the future, he even worked motionless, when only the brain was able to work, who invented whole performances, monologues, dialogues, when thought completely replaced all movements. And then at 13, he had to learn to walk again.
By spring, when the pain in the joints had gone, Raikin got out of bed and found himself a head taller than his mother. With this he could not walk. His father planted him on his shoulders, like a little one, and took him down to the courtyard down from the sixth floor. In the courtyard, children ran to him, looked at him growing up, and he tried to walk on his unusually long, awkward, as if new legs. The disease, which he defeated, then took away from him almost a year of life, leaving behind not only unpleasant memories, but also heart defects.
In 1929, in the 18 age, Arkady got a job as a laboratory assistant at the Okhta Chemical Plant, and the following year he entered the directing and acting faculty at the Leningrad Technical School of Performing Arts, choosing an actor's path for himself. At the same time, he submitted documents to the technical school against the wishes of his parents. Because of this, a real scandal broke out in the family, and Arkady had to break up with his family, he even left home. He combined his studies in the technical school of scenic arts with work, in addition he took private lessons from the artist Mikhail Savoyarov, who highly appreciated Raikin's talent. After graduating from college in 1935, Arkady Raikin was assigned by distribution to the Theater of Working Youth (TRAM), which quickly became the Theater of Leninist Komsomol.
In the same year, 1935, Arkady Raikin married. His chosen one was actress Ruth Markovna Ioffe, whom he affectionately called Roma. Soon, their family will have a daughter, Ekaterina, who in the future will be the wife of three famous actors - Mikhail Derzhavin, Yuri Yakovlev and Vladimir Koval, and the son of this couple Konstantin Raikin will follow in his father's footsteps and become a legendary artist himself. He currently runs the Moscow Satyricon Theater, which was created by his father.
In the summer of 1937, Arkady Raikin again caught up with the disease - the second severe attack of rheumatism with heart complications. In the hospital where he was placed, the doctors again predicted the worst outcome for him, they did not believe that he would survive. However, Raikin defeated the disease and this time, though he was discharged from the hospital as a completely gray-haired person and this is in 26 years. After a while, Arkady met Sergey Vladimirovich Obraztsov on Nevsky Prospect, who was very surprised to see his completely gray head, and advised Raikin to paint himself so as not to look like an old man in 26 years. The artist listened to his advice and in some ways even ruined his life, becoming the “slave” of hairdressers for many years. With numerous tours, he had to paint his head in various cities of the USSR. Since there were simply no good dyes in the country, in random hands of a hairdresser, Raikin's hair, like a real clown, often acquired a strange tint, turning red, green or even purple. But at the same time, according to eyewitness accounts, the disease and the state of health of Raikin were never an obstacle to his acting.
In 1938, Raikin made his film debut, starring in two films at once: “Fiery Years” and “Dr. Kalyuzhny”, but his roles in these films went almost unnoticed. The beginning of Arkady Raikin’s cinematic career was difficult to call successful, so he returned to work in the theater. Raikin performed on stage as a student, mainly at concerts for children. In November, 1939, a real recognition came to the artist, Arkady Raikin became the winner of the 1-th All-Union Variety Artists Competition, performing with his numbers Chaplin and Mishka. Two of his dance and mimic numbers conquered not only the audience, but also the members of the jury of the competition. After the success of the competition, he is recruited by the troupe of the Leningrad Variety Theater and miniatures, in which Raikin will make a successful career in three years, having gone from a crowd actor to an artistic director Tetra.
The artist met the war in Dnepropetrovsk, where he arrived on tour with the theater several hours before it began. Tours have not begun. Foreseeing the danger for the artists, the First Secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk City Party Committee, Brezhnev personally obtained the selection of a separate railway carriage for the artists; they managed to leave for Leningrad literally an hour before the first bombardment of Dnepropetrovsk. During the air raid, the station building and its surroundings were seriously damaged. During the war years, as part of the front-line teams of artists, Raikin traveled all over the country, speaking both at the front and rear of the wounded. He later recalled that in the 4 of the year he traveled many thousands of kilometers from the Baltic to Kushka, from Novorossiysk to the Pacific Ocean.
During the war years, director Slutsky invited Raikin to play in a concert film titled “Concert to the Front,” filming took place in November 1942 of the year in Moscow. In this work, Arkady played the role of projectionist, who arrived at the front in one of the operating units, where he had to try on the duties of entertainer. This picture was, in fact, the on-screen embodiment of pop numbers, which were performed on the front during the war. In addition to Raikin, Claudia Shulzhenko, Leonid Utesov and Lydia Ruslanova repeated their front-line speeches in it.
After the end of World War II, Arkady Raikin continued his work at the Theater of Miniatures, and also had time to play in several motion pictures. In 1948, the Leningrad Theater of Miniatures, which was directed by Raikin, officially separated from the Leningrad Theater of Variety and Miniatures. His attempts to “make friends” with the cinema were getting better. The pictures “We met somewhere” (1954 year), “When the song does not end” (1964 year) and the television series “People and dummies” (1974 year), created by Raikin in collaboration with director Viktor Khramov, were the pinnacle of his film careers, which nevertheless were not as successful as stage and theater. In addition to Raikin, actors of his theater Victoria Gorshenina, Vladimir Lyakhovitsky, Natalya Solovyova, Olga Malozemova, Lyudmila Gvozdikova and Maxim Maximov (younger brother Arkady Raikin) starred in “People and Mannequins”. In this television series, most of the playful and lyrical images of Raikin, who in different post-war years appeared on the stage of his Theater of miniatures, were screened.
Arkady Raikin’s post-war theatrical activity was very successful. Together with the satirist writer V.S. Polyakov, excellent theatrical programs “For a cup of tea”, “Do not pass by”, “Frankly speaking” were created. Raikin's speeches on radio and television, audio recordings of his miniatures were very popular with the Soviet public. Especially were known for his stage performances, in which the actor quickly changed his appearance. Arkady Raikin created a whole constellation of completely different, but at the same time very vivid images, having been known as an unsurpassed master of stage reincarnation.
Arkady Raikin cooperated a lot with his colleagues in the creative workshop. For example, while on tour in Odessa, he met with young comedians Mikhail Zhvanetsky, Roman Kartsev, Lyudmila Gvozdikova, Viktor Ilychenko. Together they created a number of very memorable variety scenes, of which the most famous was the concert program called “Traffic Light”.
As later contemporaries of Arkady Raikin were repeatedly recalled, the satirist was almost the only one who, at that difficult time, dared to openly demonstrate on the theatrical stage how a person permits permissiveness and power. Relations with the Soviet authorities in Raikin have always been quite peculiar. He was greatly loved by the big bosses, but he was hated by the middle ages with whom he often clashed. Almost all of his miniatures differed sharpness, which was especially noticeable in comparison with other Soviet artists of the same time period. However, as Soviet critics noted, Raikin’s miniatures were always correct and intelligent. Any appearance of Raikin on the stage and the screen during the time of the USSR was a holiday. Probably for this reason, for many citizens of the Soviet Union, Arkady Raikin is a part of their soul, a part of an era, which, unfortunately, has left forever.
Arkady Raikin never specifically sought awards or titles that came to him mostly at the end of his life. So the title of People's Artist of the USSR Raikin received in 58 years, when, in fact, has long been a real people's artist. At the Lenin Prize artist nominated twice. For the first time in the middle of the 1960-ies for his play "Wizards live nearby." However, the nomination of Raikin, despite the letters of numerous viewers of his performances, was not supported by the relevant "instances". Only in the last years of his life, he received the Lenin Prize (1980 year), and in 1981 year and the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.
Throughout his life, Arkady Raikin shook around the country and the world; in 1965, he even performed in London. For many years he lived between the two main cities of the country - Moscow and Leningrad. At that moment, when the artist’s relationship with the party leadership of the city on the Neva was finally upset, he asked Leonid Brezhnev for permission to move with the theater to the capital. After receiving permission, Arkady Raikin moved to Moscow with the theater in 1981 year. Less than a year after that, a new performance appears, now in Moscow by Arkady Raikin’s The Faces (1982 year), in 1984, the performance “Peace to Your House” was released. In April 1987, the State Theater of Miniatures, headed by Raikin, received a new name "Satyricon", by which it is known today.
Going to the scene in the last years of his life, Raikin literally committed the feat. It was difficult for him to start talking - all his muscles were constrained, so he came to the theater in advance and began to knead them. The face is always lively and distinguished by bright mimicry turned into a mask, the eyes stopped, it was noticed even by viewers who wrote letters that they loved him and believed that they shouldn’t go on stage anymore, paying attention to their health concerns. But relatives hid these letters from him. As his daughter recalled, if the letters showed her father, he probably would have died tomorrow, and he always revived on the stage.
Arkady Raikin died late in the evening 17 in December 1987, at the age of 76, he died from the effects of rheumatic heart disease. He was buried on December 20 in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery. After his death, his son Konstantin Arkadyevich Raikin took over the management of the Satirikon Theater. Soon after the death of Arkady Raikin, the theater was named after its brilliant, long-term leader.
Based on materials from open sources
Arkady Isaakovich Raikin was born on October 24 (November 11 in a new style) 1911 in the city of Riga, Livonia Province (today the capital of Latvia). The father of the future satirist, Isaac Davidovich Raikin, worked at the port of Riga and was the brawler of the construction forest, his wife Leia (Elizaveta Borisovna) was a midwife. Arkady was the eldest child in the family, his parents formalized the marriage a year before his birth. After him, two sisters Bella and Sophia were born, and in 1927, brother Maxim, who later became an actor Maxim Maximov.
At the age of five, parents took Arkady from Riga, as it turned into a front-line city. At the same time, he retained in his memory the atmosphere of the house №16 on Melnichnaya Street (today - Dzirnavu). The Raikin family moved to the city of Rybinsk, where the father’s new place of work was located. It was in Rybinsk that Arkady Raikin's childhood passed; it was here that at the age of nine he first entered the amateur scene. Arkady's hobbies were not supported at home, his father opposed the artist's career. However, having come to terms with what his son was doing, it was decided that for a Jewish boy to play music more nobly, therefore, they bought a violin for the child. At the same time, he never became a violinist and musician.
From Rybinsk, the Raikin family moved to Petrograd, this happened in 1922. In the northern capital, Arkady was very fond of visiting the Academic Drama Theater. In order to buy theater tickets, he secretly sold his textbooks and exercise books, for which he often received bashing from his father. Raikin studied in one of the oldest and best schools in the city - today it is school number XXUMX. Already in the school revealed his creative character. In addition to the scene of the boy attracted painting. During the lessons of fine art, he impressed teachers not only with his technique, but also with the depth of thought that was in his works. Therefore, for a long time he could not decide on which profession to choose: an actor or a painter.
It should be noted that in childhood the future satirist became very seriously ill. At 13, he caught a cold on a skating rink so badly that he made a terrible sore throat, which gave heart complications. Doctors believed that the boy would not survive, but he defeated the disease, although rheumatism and rheumatic heart disease had long chained him to bed. The illness left its mark on his entire life. He has changed a lot, read a lot and learned to think with concentration. In the future, he even worked motionless, when only the brain was able to work, who invented whole performances, monologues, dialogues, when thought completely replaced all movements. And then at 13, he had to learn to walk again.
By spring, when the pain in the joints had gone, Raikin got out of bed and found himself a head taller than his mother. With this he could not walk. His father planted him on his shoulders, like a little one, and took him down to the courtyard down from the sixth floor. In the courtyard, children ran to him, looked at him growing up, and he tried to walk on his unusually long, awkward, as if new legs. The disease, which he defeated, then took away from him almost a year of life, leaving behind not only unpleasant memories, but also heart defects.
In 1929, in the 18 age, Arkady got a job as a laboratory assistant at the Okhta Chemical Plant, and the following year he entered the directing and acting faculty at the Leningrad Technical School of Performing Arts, choosing an actor's path for himself. At the same time, he submitted documents to the technical school against the wishes of his parents. Because of this, a real scandal broke out in the family, and Arkady had to break up with his family, he even left home. He combined his studies in the technical school of scenic arts with work, in addition he took private lessons from the artist Mikhail Savoyarov, who highly appreciated Raikin's talent. After graduating from college in 1935, Arkady Raikin was assigned by distribution to the Theater of Working Youth (TRAM), which quickly became the Theater of Leninist Komsomol.
In the same year, 1935, Arkady Raikin married. His chosen one was actress Ruth Markovna Ioffe, whom he affectionately called Roma. Soon, their family will have a daughter, Ekaterina, who in the future will be the wife of three famous actors - Mikhail Derzhavin, Yuri Yakovlev and Vladimir Koval, and the son of this couple Konstantin Raikin will follow in his father's footsteps and become a legendary artist himself. He currently runs the Moscow Satyricon Theater, which was created by his father.
In the summer of 1937, Arkady Raikin again caught up with the disease - the second severe attack of rheumatism with heart complications. In the hospital where he was placed, the doctors again predicted the worst outcome for him, they did not believe that he would survive. However, Raikin defeated the disease and this time, though he was discharged from the hospital as a completely gray-haired person and this is in 26 years. After a while, Arkady met Sergey Vladimirovich Obraztsov on Nevsky Prospect, who was very surprised to see his completely gray head, and advised Raikin to paint himself so as not to look like an old man in 26 years. The artist listened to his advice and in some ways even ruined his life, becoming the “slave” of hairdressers for many years. With numerous tours, he had to paint his head in various cities of the USSR. Since there were simply no good dyes in the country, in random hands of a hairdresser, Raikin's hair, like a real clown, often acquired a strange tint, turning red, green or even purple. But at the same time, according to eyewitness accounts, the disease and the state of health of Raikin were never an obstacle to his acting.
In 1938, Raikin made his film debut, starring in two films at once: “Fiery Years” and “Dr. Kalyuzhny”, but his roles in these films went almost unnoticed. The beginning of Arkady Raikin’s cinematic career was difficult to call successful, so he returned to work in the theater. Raikin performed on stage as a student, mainly at concerts for children. In November, 1939, a real recognition came to the artist, Arkady Raikin became the winner of the 1-th All-Union Variety Artists Competition, performing with his numbers Chaplin and Mishka. Two of his dance and mimic numbers conquered not only the audience, but also the members of the jury of the competition. After the success of the competition, he is recruited by the troupe of the Leningrad Variety Theater and miniatures, in which Raikin will make a successful career in three years, having gone from a crowd actor to an artistic director Tetra.
The artist met the war in Dnepropetrovsk, where he arrived on tour with the theater several hours before it began. Tours have not begun. Foreseeing the danger for the artists, the First Secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk City Party Committee, Brezhnev personally obtained the selection of a separate railway carriage for the artists; they managed to leave for Leningrad literally an hour before the first bombardment of Dnepropetrovsk. During the air raid, the station building and its surroundings were seriously damaged. During the war years, as part of the front-line teams of artists, Raikin traveled all over the country, speaking both at the front and rear of the wounded. He later recalled that in the 4 of the year he traveled many thousands of kilometers from the Baltic to Kushka, from Novorossiysk to the Pacific Ocean.
During the war years, director Slutsky invited Raikin to play in a concert film titled “Concert to the Front,” filming took place in November 1942 of the year in Moscow. In this work, Arkady played the role of projectionist, who arrived at the front in one of the operating units, where he had to try on the duties of entertainer. This picture was, in fact, the on-screen embodiment of pop numbers, which were performed on the front during the war. In addition to Raikin, Claudia Shulzhenko, Leonid Utesov and Lydia Ruslanova repeated their front-line speeches in it.
After the end of World War II, Arkady Raikin continued his work at the Theater of Miniatures, and also had time to play in several motion pictures. In 1948, the Leningrad Theater of Miniatures, which was directed by Raikin, officially separated from the Leningrad Theater of Variety and Miniatures. His attempts to “make friends” with the cinema were getting better. The pictures “We met somewhere” (1954 year), “When the song does not end” (1964 year) and the television series “People and dummies” (1974 year), created by Raikin in collaboration with director Viktor Khramov, were the pinnacle of his film careers, which nevertheless were not as successful as stage and theater. In addition to Raikin, actors of his theater Victoria Gorshenina, Vladimir Lyakhovitsky, Natalya Solovyova, Olga Malozemova, Lyudmila Gvozdikova and Maxim Maximov (younger brother Arkady Raikin) starred in “People and Mannequins”. In this television series, most of the playful and lyrical images of Raikin, who in different post-war years appeared on the stage of his Theater of miniatures, were screened.
Arkady Raikin’s post-war theatrical activity was very successful. Together with the satirist writer V.S. Polyakov, excellent theatrical programs “For a cup of tea”, “Do not pass by”, “Frankly speaking” were created. Raikin's speeches on radio and television, audio recordings of his miniatures were very popular with the Soviet public. Especially were known for his stage performances, in which the actor quickly changed his appearance. Arkady Raikin created a whole constellation of completely different, but at the same time very vivid images, having been known as an unsurpassed master of stage reincarnation.
Arkady Raikin cooperated a lot with his colleagues in the creative workshop. For example, while on tour in Odessa, he met with young comedians Mikhail Zhvanetsky, Roman Kartsev, Lyudmila Gvozdikova, Viktor Ilychenko. Together they created a number of very memorable variety scenes, of which the most famous was the concert program called “Traffic Light”.
As later contemporaries of Arkady Raikin were repeatedly recalled, the satirist was almost the only one who, at that difficult time, dared to openly demonstrate on the theatrical stage how a person permits permissiveness and power. Relations with the Soviet authorities in Raikin have always been quite peculiar. He was greatly loved by the big bosses, but he was hated by the middle ages with whom he often clashed. Almost all of his miniatures differed sharpness, which was especially noticeable in comparison with other Soviet artists of the same time period. However, as Soviet critics noted, Raikin’s miniatures were always correct and intelligent. Any appearance of Raikin on the stage and the screen during the time of the USSR was a holiday. Probably for this reason, for many citizens of the Soviet Union, Arkady Raikin is a part of their soul, a part of an era, which, unfortunately, has left forever.
Arkady Raikin never specifically sought awards or titles that came to him mostly at the end of his life. So the title of People's Artist of the USSR Raikin received in 58 years, when, in fact, has long been a real people's artist. At the Lenin Prize artist nominated twice. For the first time in the middle of the 1960-ies for his play "Wizards live nearby." However, the nomination of Raikin, despite the letters of numerous viewers of his performances, was not supported by the relevant "instances". Only in the last years of his life, he received the Lenin Prize (1980 year), and in 1981 year and the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.
Throughout his life, Arkady Raikin shook around the country and the world; in 1965, he even performed in London. For many years he lived between the two main cities of the country - Moscow and Leningrad. At that moment, when the artist’s relationship with the party leadership of the city on the Neva was finally upset, he asked Leonid Brezhnev for permission to move with the theater to the capital. After receiving permission, Arkady Raikin moved to Moscow with the theater in 1981 year. Less than a year after that, a new performance appears, now in Moscow by Arkady Raikin’s The Faces (1982 year), in 1984, the performance “Peace to Your House” was released. In April 1987, the State Theater of Miniatures, headed by Raikin, received a new name "Satyricon", by which it is known today.
Going to the scene in the last years of his life, Raikin literally committed the feat. It was difficult for him to start talking - all his muscles were constrained, so he came to the theater in advance and began to knead them. The face is always lively and distinguished by bright mimicry turned into a mask, the eyes stopped, it was noticed even by viewers who wrote letters that they loved him and believed that they shouldn’t go on stage anymore, paying attention to their health concerns. But relatives hid these letters from him. As his daughter recalled, if the letters showed her father, he probably would have died tomorrow, and he always revived on the stage.
Arkady Raikin died late in the evening 17 in December 1987, at the age of 76, he died from the effects of rheumatic heart disease. He was buried on December 20 in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery. After his death, his son Konstantin Arkadyevich Raikin took over the management of the Satirikon Theater. Soon after the death of Arkady Raikin, the theater was named after its brilliant, long-term leader.
Based on materials from open sources
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