“She saved her humility”: biographer Vasily Shukshin called the main merit of Lydia Fedoseyeva-Shukshina

According to Gundarin, Vasily Makarovich, from whose era we are moving away every day, she saved her humility, which in theory should not have been peculiar to her as a star of the Soviet screen.

Starting with the writer Yevgeny Popov to create a fundamental life of Shukshin, the co-authors decided not to appeal to the family, which at that time was experiencing “another mode of confrontation, some sort of showdown.” It was clear that what was said by one side would be denied or hurt the other (the heirs of the classic, as is known, are divided into two camps, in the first there was a daughter from a civil marriage with Victoria Safronova Ekaterina Shukshina and a younger daughter from marriage with Lidia Fedoseyeva Shushkina Olga, and in the second – Lydia Nikolaevna herself and their middle daughter Maria Shukshina).

Most of what Lydia Nikolaevna could have told us directly, she had already told us. We relied on her existing interviews, of which there were quite a few, and other sources. We have a complete picture, another thing is that we could not write about a number of things, for example, did not disclose some personal stories, Gundarin explained. At the same time, he noted that Lydia Fedoseyeva-Shukshina played an invaluable role in the life of her second husband:

His biography can be revealed through relationships with women. Evil tongues claim that he used his companions, “used” his wives when he started a relationship with one woman and moved on to the next stage. But this continued only until the meeting with Lydia Shukshina, after which his life stabilized. And let's be honest, all of his major accomplishments have come in the last ten years that they've been together. He gave up drinking, seriously engaged in creativity, and Lydia Nikolaevna supported Vasily Makarovich, was even ready to quit her film career and be with him all the time. This did not happen, but Shukshina, who held rather conservative views, was satisfied with this position.

Also, Mikhail Gundarin stressed that Lydia Nikolaevna Shukshina “was the only one received by the mother of Vasily Makarovich, whom he took to show all his chosen ones.” “He and Safronova did not work out, because her mother did not like her,” the critic said.

Answering a question about a certain prototypical echo of Lydia Shukshina in the work of Vasily Shukshin, Gundarin noted: she fell into those images that already existed in Shukshin’s works, he did not use her when creating new heroines, because she became an ideal for him:

He pushed her to become one of his types, and, admittedly, before meeting him, she played other roles (and many years after his death, she embodied the images of Empresses on the screen, and so on). But Shukshin’s magic was so powerful that for a long time it was perceived as a “village simpleton”, which, of course, it never was.

Especially without hiding anything, Lydia Nikolaevna told about their early conflicts: in a drunken state Shukshin even tried to resort to physical violence, she had to literally pull him out of drunken companies. A well-known story is how he left his daughter in a stroller by the store. It is believed that Shukshin quit after this “emergency”, which is not quite so: he quit drinking by 1970, when he realized that drinking was preventing him from working. And female wisdom Shukshina manifested itself in the fact that she somehow influencing her husband, global showdowns he still did not suit. She showed a humility seemingly uncharacteristic of her as a screen star. It was a miracle, summed up our interlocutor.