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People and events:
ranked
among elite moviemakers. Muratova's career was a thorny one. Two of her
early films, "Short Meetings" and "Long Goodbyes",
both made in the 1960s, had a fairly short screen life because they displeased
the former Soviet cultural authorities. Shown on television two decades
later, they revealed Muratova as a subtle lyricist and psychologist. "Long
Goodbyes" is about tense relations between a woman who was unlucky
in love and her grown-up son. The film earned its author an honorary prize
at a festival in Locarno in 1994. Muratova's esthetics becomes tougher
in her later years. In "Asthenic Syndrome" the main character,
a young woman, kills her lover in a bout of jealousy. The film won a high
assessment at a festival in Berlin in 1990. Muratova was awarded a prestigious
"for freedom and dignity" prize instituted by Polish director
Andrzej Wajda. "What she does amazes me to the bottom of my heart…,
the famous master said. "Her films remind me of Dostoyevsky. She knows
the Russian soul inside out…" "I want to please everyone"
is the phrase Muratova likes to repeat in her rare interviews. As time
flows by, her creative vision of the world become more and more complicated.
Muratov's films do not allow viewers to relax, one can even say they require
certain courage of viewers, and her view of human relationship is devoid
of illusions. In "Three Stories" telling about three murders,
the author balances between the horrible and the ridiculous. She investigates
the idea of murder with her unbiased philosophy. If people kill each other,
it means there is room for murder in the divine architecture of the Universe.
Is murder a grimace of fate or a weapon of the Providence? She doesn't
give an answer, though, letting viewers to search for their own answers.
In one of her latest works, "Chekhovian Motives", Muratova remains
faithful to herself, concerned, as she always was, with a moral and philosophic
background of human existence. She transfers a Chekhov-style plot to contradictory
modern Russia, making a subtle comedy in black and white about petty home
life with sparks of genuine tenderness amid an ocean of acid irony. Emotionally
rich, Muratova's films are both simple and elite. They evoke strong criticism
with some people and are admired by others who call Muratova the last of
20th-century classics. 
composer.
Pakhmutova's song mark a whole epoch in the Russian musical culture. She
began playing the piano at the age of 3. Later she studied at a musical
school for gifted children, and then at the Moscow Conservatory where she
took a post-graduate course under the well-known composer Vissarion Shebalin
and even wrote a thesis about Mikhail Glinka. Nature endowed Pakhmutova
with a phenomenal gift for melody: none of her 400 songs repeats itself,
let alone the fact that she repeated no one. A woman of fairly short height,
which makes her look like a teen-ager, especially when she smiles, Pakhmutova
managed to express the feelings and aspirations of millions. All of her
songs were in tune with the times, some devoted to the construction of
new cities or other historic events. A friend of the world's first cosmonaut
Yury Gagarin, she wrote a touching song, "You Know What a Guy He Was",
soon after his death. Pakhmutova's songs were in the repertory of best
performers, among them Muslim Magomayev Iosif Kobzon, Lyudmila Zykina,
Edita Pyekha, Tamara Gverdtsiteli, Pesnyary group and a host of others.
Pakhmutova's husband, poet Nikolai Dobronravov, is the author of lyrics
to most of her songs. In the United States they compared her with George
Gershwin, in Britain they called her a "small diamond", but more
often she is dubbed a "hit maker", which absolutely true. In
Russia Pakhmutova was literally heaped with titles and awards. She is a
People's Artist of the USSR and the winner of several State Prizes. One
of her best later music pieces is "Dedication" written for Alexander
Pushkin bicentenary celebrated in 1999.
