Don Quixote, The Decline of Socialism American poet and novelist Delmore Schwartz, looking at the clouds floating across the sky, said: 'Time is the school in which we learn; time is the flame in which we burn.' Nikolai Grigorievich Grinko, for whom the role of a former history teacher at the secondary boarding school of Gatchina Nikolai Mikhailovich Chmutin, was the last, according to the authors, gave 40 years to the great cause of the Enlightenment, gradually burning out from the inside, because, by the grains of giving your soul to children, you can get only the light of their love in return. But that light is immaterial. He can support only spiritually, but not physically. Very, very many late Soviet films bear the seal of joylessness. Directors, like no other, saw the changes in the country, and in their own way responded to them.
Someone plunged into ' black eroticism' someone, remembering the Great Cinematographic School of the USSR, tried to shoot a film justification, a film requiem. Victor Sokolov did just that. In his picture, all the attributes ' Neo capitalism' are present in full program. The daughter of Nikolai Mikhailovich Lyudmila (Irina Rozanova) - ' champion and deputy' and her husband, a graduate of the railway institute, and now a commission shop worker and antiques dealer Leonid Ivanovich (Emmanuel Vitorgan) represent those who very successfully fit into the new realities of life. Lyudmila and Leonid have not yet etched in the soul ' the quarrel of socialism' in the form of love for neighbor and compassion for those in need: Lyudmila takes her father from the boarding school, and Leonid is easily ready to lend a certain amount to his friend. Seeing the open loneliness of Nikolai Mikhailovich in his huge apartment, where all the time it is half-dark, ' so as not to burn out furniture', they, out of humanistic motives, decide to marry a pensioner.
This part of the movie looks funny, if not funny. The relationship between Nikolai Mikhailovich and the failed actress Rosa Aleksandrovna (Svetlana Nemolyaeva) give hope that a spark, if not love, then sympathy and understanding, will run between two elderly people. Because in the huge apartment of the daughter Nikolai Mikhailovich & #39; cold & #39; and Rosa Alexandrovna does not like loneliness because she is afraid to die in her sleep. It seems to be a feeling that unites both, but... In the new world, where the Golden Taurus is already ruling the ball, feelings are pushed to the farthest corner, and material gain comes to the fore. Nikolai Mikhailovich, who has lived a long honest life, realizes with bitterness - and he, by and large, is not needed by anyone! Daughter categorically ' asked to leave' his chosen one, and the chosen one whispered to his sister: ' What a husband he is! Just an old sick man. . . '
It is terrible to imagine yourself in the place of a hero. After all, in fact, a person was literally erased from life! The only place an old teacher could go was a boarding school. All his life raising children, Nikolai Mikhailovich struggled with windmills of callousness, heartlessness, callousness, immorality. But at the end of his life, he suddenly realized that the mills had defeated him. Going to his now former students, Nikolai Mikhailovich seemed to be returning 40 years ago. Where the world was different, the country was different and people were different. This is what the kids are singing on the bus a few minutes before the finale: 'Childhood, childhood, where did you go? Where's the cozy corner? I can't catch my childhood. All that remains is to remember. '
It remains only to remember that the real fate of Nikolai Grigorievich Grinko in the family plan was much happier than his on-screen character. People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR died on April 10, 1989 in a hospital in Kiev from leukemia. He died quietly, in his sleep, holding in his hand the hand of his wife Aisha, with whom he lived in love and harmony for 22 years. .