Prague Spring May is a special month when there is a place of joy and sadness in our hearts. We celebrate spring and remember those for whom it will not come. And it does not matter whether we celebrate the round date of the end of the war or not: there are no anniversaries here, every new May brings us purification, bursts into the soul with a pure wind. And we remember, we remember, we remember.
Stanislav Rostotsky was drafted into the army in 1942, his rifle brigade was stationed in the Mari ASSR, but in 1943 he escaped to the front and went from Smolensk to Rivne. A year before the Victory, he was seriously wounded, and wanderings in hospitals began. His corps, meanwhile, participated in the liberation of Czechoslovakia and met him in Prague on May 9. I do not know what feelings Stanislav Rostotsky experienced, but for some reason it seems to me that he needed to redouble. And he did it in every movie. Today I want to talk about the picture of 1959 “May stars” – a lyrical and dramatic story of the first post-war spring in Prague.
4 stories are intertwined, each of them has its own artistic pathos. The general (Alexander Khanov), who remembers pre-war life, wakes up every night to the howling of a bomb that has destroyed his past. Young Lieutenant Andrei Rukavychkin (Vyacheslav Tikhonov), to whom this spring gives his first love, will wait a long time for news from Yana. Tanker Alesha (Leonid Bykov), who fell in a battle of “local significance”, saved several lives at the cost of his own. A sergeant (Nikolai Kryuchkov), who passed through Europe after seeing the first post-war tram on a Prague street, remembers what it was like to pick up something other than a weapon. All these stories are united by an amazing property, so delicately and unobtrusively seen by Rostotsky: in these characters there is no bitterness, hatred or indifference. This is what fills the film with inner light, and it, despite its seeming naivety, still looks in one breath after all these years. It helps us to feel the mood and atmosphere of those May days, when everyone knew that there was a personal merit in the common victory of mankind over inhumanity. Again, we can only admire the skill of artists of the Soviet school and Stanislav Rostotsky, who were able to show a lifetime in the images of their heroes. Even the actors involved in the episodes create a real palette: Yuri Belov, Mikhail Pugovkin, Ladislav Peshek, Milos Nedbal.
For me, this film was a personal experience, because in 1945, my grandfather fought in Czechoslovakia, who then met his twentieth spring in his life. Young, handsome, with very large kind and slightly sad eyes. Like Andrei Rukavichkin, he did not forget to love and fall in love, although he went to the front on the first day of the war. After the surrender of Germany, the fascist troops in Czechoslovakia fought for several more days, and when everyone was celebrating the Victory, we could still lose it as a tanker Alyosha.
Prague Spring! This combination is associated today with the political events of 1968 and causes negative emotions. But the real Prague Spring was in May, when people began to learn to look at the sky again without fear and the smell of lilac was forever mixed with the hope of a new life in which there would be no cruelty, child grief and plowed earth with shells.