Fascinated, it seems, by the aesthetics of the post-revolutionary Soviet theater of the 20s – the time, it seems, is the expanse for stage experiments – the director, bent over the stick, with the maximum permissible in the 60s (the years of the famous “thaw”) degree of pampering with a white guard color did not guess. Maybe it would have rolled, but the text issued as a Bolshevik song about wooden costumes – with beaches – vernissages – rauts – voyages – sounded deliberately not our way, the crime of the plan was too obvious, and the first critics of the film, authorized and not blatantly sewn, ideological diversion thwarted on takeoff: with the audience he was able to meet only 20 years later, already under Gorbachev. . .
A film from a number of products of the Soviet cinema of the 60s, radically different from what happened before or what happened after, looks like a vivid evidence that then the country definitely had a chance to become more normal, turning to optionality only an emphasised and respectful interpretation of the existing Soviet dogmatics. But the energy of the “thaw” was not enough for this, and the unseen civilizational project, which had begun cheerfully, skipped its Renaissance, then rolled, deflating, on the former, now gradually overgrown with indifferent grass, to its inglorious end.