30 years ago - on December 17, 1987, the famous Soviet theater, stage and film actor, theater director and comedian Arkady Isaakovich Raikin passed away. Arkady Raikin was a respected artist and master of instant reincarnation on stage. A performer of monologues, feuilletons and sketches, an amazing entertainer - he forever entered the history of Soviet pop music and humor. His miniatures and performances were imbued with satire and distinguished by their sharpness in comparison with other pop artists of that 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 Isaak Davidovich Raikin worked in the port of Riga and was a scaffolder, his wife Leia (Elizaveta Borisovna) was a midwife. Arkady was the eldest child in the family, his parents got married 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, his parents took Arkady away from Riga, as it turned into a front-line city. At the same time, he retained in his memory the atmosphere of house No. 16 on Melnichnaya Street (today - Dzirnavu). The Raikins' family moved to the city of Rybinsk, where their father's new place of work was located. It was in Rybinsk that Arkady Raikin spent his childhood, it was here that at the age of nine he first appeared on the amateur stage. At home, Arkady's hobbies were not supported, his father opposed the artist's career. However, resigned to what his son was doing, it was decided that it was nobler for a Jewish boy to play music, so 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 attending the Academic Drama Theater. In order to buy theater tickets, he secretly sold his textbooks and notebooks, for which he often received a beating from his father. Raikin studied at one of the oldest and best schools in the city - today it is school # 206. Already at school, his creative character was revealed. In addition to the scene, the boy was attracted by painting. In fine arts lessons, he amazed 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 which profession to choose: an actor or a painter.
It is worth noting that as a child, the future satirist became very seriously ill. At the age of 13, he caught a cold so badly at the rink that he developed a terrible sore throat, which gave complications to his heart. Doctors believed that the boy would not survive, but he defeated the disease, although rheumatism and rheumatic heart disease were bedridden for a long time. The disease left an imprint on his entire life. He changed a lot, read a lot and learned to think with concentration. In the future, he even worked motionless, when only his brain was able to work, which invented whole performances, monologues, dialogues, when thought completely replaced all movements. And then, at the age of 13, he had to learn to walk again.
By the spring, when the pain in the joints was gone, Raikin got out of bed and was a head taller than his mother. However, he could not walk. His father sat him on his shoulders as if he were little and carried him down into the courtyard from the sixth floor. In the courtyard, children ran to him, looked at him as he grew up, and he tried to walk on his unusually long, awkward, like new legs. The disease, which he defeated, then took away almost a year of his life, leaving behind not only unpleasant memories, but also heart defects.
In 1929, at the age of 18, Arkady got a job as a laboratory assistant at the Okhta Chemical Plant, and the next year he entered the directing and acting department at the Leningrad College of Performing Arts, choosing an acting 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 at the College of Performing Arts with work, in addition he took private lessons from the artist Mikhail Savoyarov, who highly appreciated Raikin's talent. After graduating from technical school in 1935, Arkady Raikin was assigned to the Theater of Working Youth (TRAM), which quickly became the Theater of the Lenin Komsomol.
In the same 1935, Arkady Raikin got married. His chosen one was the actress Ruth Markovna Ioffe, whom he affectionately called Roma. Soon, a daughter, Ekaterina, will appear in their family, who in the future will be the wife of three famous actors - Mikhail Derzhavin, Yuri Yakovlev and Vladimir Koval, and the son of this married couple, Konstantin Raikin, will follow in his father's footsteps and become a legendary artist himself. He is currently the director of the Moscow theater "Satyricon", which was created by his father.
In the summer of 1937, Arkady Raikin again overtook the disease - the second severe attack of rheumatism with complications on the heart. In the hospital where he was admitted, the doctors again predicted the most difficult outcome for him, they did not believe that he would survive. However, Raikin defeated the disease this time, although he was discharged from the hospital already as a completely gray-haired man, and this is at the age of 26. After some time, Arkady met Sergei Vladimirovich Obraztsov on Nevsky Prospekt, he was very surprised to see his completely gray head, and advised Raikin to paint himself so as not to look like an old man at the age of 26. The artist listened to his advice and in some way even ruined his life, for many years becoming a "slave" of hairdressers. In the conditions of 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 the random hands of a hairdresser, Raikin's hair, like a real clown, often acquired a strange shade, becoming either red, sometimes green or completely purple. But at the same time, according to eyewitnesses, Raikin's illness and state of health have never been an obstacle to his acting activities.
In 1938, Raikin made his film debut, starring in two films at once: "The Years of Fire" and "Doctor Kalyuzhny", but his roles in these films went almost unnoticed. The beginning of the cinematic career of Arkady Raikin could hardly be called successful, so he returned to work in the theater. On the stage, Raikin performed during his student years, mainly at concerts for children. In November 1939, the artist received real recognition, Arkady Raikin became a laureate of the 1st All-Union Contest of Variety Artists, performing with his numbers "Chaplin" and "Bear". His two dance-mimic numbers won over not only the audience, but also the members of the jury of the competition. After success in the competition, he was hired to work in the troupe of the Leningrad Variety and Miniature Theater, in which Raikin would make a successful career in three years, going from an actor extras to the artistic director of the theater.
The artist met the war in Dnepropetrovsk, where he arrived with the theater on tour a few hours before it began. The tour never started. Foreseeing the danger for the artists, the First Secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk City Party Committee, Brezhnev, personally achieved the allocation of a separate railway carriage to the artists, they managed to leave back to Leningrad literally an hour before the first bombing of Dnepropetrovsk. During the air raid, the station building and the surrounding area were seriously damaged. During the war years, as part of the front-line brigades of artists, Raikin traveled almost the entire country, speaking both on the front line and in the rear in front of the wounded. Later he recalled that in 4 years he traveled many thousands of kilometers from the Baltic to Kushka, from Novorossiysk to the Pacific Ocean.
During the war, director Slutsky invited Raikin to star in a concert film entitled "Concert to the Front", filming took place in November 1942 in Moscow. In this work, Arkady played the role of a projectionist, who arrived at the front in one of the active units, where he was to try on the duties of an entertainer. This picture was, in fact, a screen embodiment of pop numbers that were performed at the front during the war. In addition to Raikin, Klavdia Shulzhenko, Leonid Utesov and Lidia Ruslanova repeated their front-line performances in it.
After the end of World War II, Arkady Raikin continued his work at the Theater of Miniatures, and also managed to star in several films. In 1948, the Leningrad Theater of Miniatures, headed by Raikin, officially separated from the Leningrad Variety and Miniature Theater. His attempts to "make friends" with the cinema were also getting better. The pictures “We met somewhere” (1954), “When the song doesn’t end” (1964) and the serial TV series “People and Mannequins” (1974), created by Raikin in collaboration with director Viktor Khramov, were the pinnacle of his a career in cinema, which, after all, was not as successful as the stage and theatrical. In addition to Raikin, the actors of his theater, Victoria Gorshenina, Vladimir Lyakhovitsky, Natalia Solovieva, Olga Malozemova, Lyudmila Gvozdikova and Maxim Maksimov (younger brother - Arkady Raikin), starred in "People and Mannequins". In this television series, it was possible to film most of Raikin's witty and lyrical images, which in different post-war years appeared on the stage of his Theater of Miniatures.
The post-war theatrical activities of Arkady Raikin were also very successful. Together with the satirical writer V. S. Polyakov, excellent theatrical programs "For a cup of tea", "Don't 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. His stage numbers were especially famous, 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 the reputation of an unsurpassed master of stage transformation.
Arkady Raikin collaborated a lot and successfully with his colleagues in the creative department. For example, while on tour in Odessa, he met there with young comedians Mikhail Zhvanetsky, Roman Kartsev, Lyudmila Gvozdikova, Viktor Ilyichenko. Together they created a number of very memorable stage scenes, of which the most famous was a concert program called "Traffic Light".
As the contemporaries of Arkady Raikin later recalled more than once, the satirist was almost the only one who, at that difficult time, dared to openly demonstrate on the theater stage how permissiveness and power spoil a person. Raikin's relationship with the Soviet regime has always been rather peculiar. He was very fond of the big bosses, but they hated the middle ones, with whom he often clashed. Almost all of his miniatures were distinguished by their sharpness, which was especially noticeable in comparison with other Soviet pop artists of the same time period. However, as Soviet critics noted, Raikin's miniatures were always correct and intelligent. Any appearance of Raikin on stage and screen during the existence 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 that, unfortunately, has gone forever.
Arkady Raikin never specifically sought awards or titles, which came to him mainly at the end of his life. So Raikin received the title of People's Artist of the USSR at the age of 58, when, in fact, he had long been a real People's Artist. The artist was nominated for the Lenin Prize twice. For the first time back in the mid-1960s for his play "The Magicians Live Nearby". However, Raikin's nomination, despite the letters of numerous spectators of his performances, was not supported by the relevant "authorities". Only in the last years of his life did he receive the Lenin Prize (1980), and in 1981, the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.
All his life, Arkady Raikin has been on tour around the country and around 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. Having received permission, Arkady Raikin moved to Moscow with the theater in 1981. Less than a year later, a new performance appeared, now by the Moscow theater of Arkady Raikin “Faces” (1982), in 1984 the performance “Peace to thy house” was released. In April 1987, the State Theater of Miniatures, headed by Raikin, received a new name "Satyricon", under which it is known today.
Stepping on the stage in the last years of his life, Raikin literally performed a feat. It was difficult for him to start talking - all the muscles were constrained, so he came to the theater in advance and began to stretch them. The face is always alive and distinguished by bright facial expressions turned into a mask, the eyes stopped, this was noticed even by the viewers who wrote letters that they loved him and believed that they should no longer go on stage, paying attention to their health concerns. But his relatives hid these letters from him. As his daughter recalled, if the letters were shown to her father, he probably would have died tomorrow, but on the stage he was always reborn.
Arkady Raikin died late in the evening on December 17, 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, the management of the theater "Satyricon" was taken over by his son Konstantin Arkadyevich Raikin. Soon after the death of Arkady Raikin, the theater was named after his brilliant long-term leader.
