A sad memory.

Mashchenko didn’t come, he already didn’t feel very well then (in May, 2013 flew to Lesya and the friends of Leonid Bykov, Kostya Stepankov, Ivan Mykolaychuk …). The cameraman Alexander Itigilov left from life in 1990.
Ivan Fedorovich Drach came. Those were difficult years for him. His son Maxim died, although it seems that simply killed (now he and his father lie next to each other in Telizhentsi, in the Kyiv region, in the poet’s native village). It seemed heart, got other sores and troubles. However, often, going to the Blue or Red Hall of the House of Cinema before At the beginning of a movie screening, I met Drach’s gaze, his gentle, ironic smile.
It’s simple: he loved movies. That’s why he once went to Moscow, to the Higher Scriptwriting Courses. Diploma the project was the script “Well for the thirsty”, which was directed by Yuri Ilyenko. And then high officials put the picture on a long shelf, where it was removed only in 1987 ….
Ivan Fedorovich told how once in Moscow a short slender boy came to him, called Vdikiv student Leonia Osyka. He said: here I read an essay by Andrei Platonov about Vasily Stefanyk, and then Stefanyk himself (at school, of course, we all read Stefanyk’s short stories, but usually in such fresh interpretation …). It’s brilliant, – exclaimed Osyka. And he added: You must write for me scenario!


As a result, the ingenious film “Fireplace Cross” was released. Now on the graves of both, Aspen and Drach appeared like this crosses … Drach told how he went to shoot the film. Aspen reminded him of Napoleon: small, and everyone obeys, look from the bottom up: because it’s the same vertical! They lived in the same house, knocking on the window at night. The peasants came: “Sir Leonid, the cow is calving and there is no vet – help. “
Aspen rolled up his sleeves, washed his hands and went to take the child to the cows. He grew up in Kyiv, but in Solomyanka, where then, in the first postwar years, cows also happened. In any case, he could not leave because he would break the magic of his name, his image of a man who can do everything in the world.
And then they really could do anything. That is why the authorities of the Shcherbyts pygmies did not like them so much.
Then there were “I’m going to you”, even further – “Lost diploma”, staged by Boris Ivchenko with Mykolaychuk in the main role. Few people know: in 1970, Drach wrote the screenplay “Bread and bread, or Vasilina-mother” (it can be read, printed). Wanted to direct himself, it was to be his directorial debut.
It was then, in the early 1970s, that the ghosts of the “Ukrainian bourgeoisie” wandered the country. nationalism “. Cinematographers, and with them Ivan Drach, were counted among those ghosts … So. Ivan Drach didn’t bake his director’s bread, he didn’t bake. Like many other things that were dreamed of but not happened. But so much happened! With a film about Lesya Ukrainka, “I’m coming to you”, inclusive. Ivan Drach has “Kinobalada”. It starts like this:
“I probably would have died if it weren’t for the movies,”
I told myself once and shuddered terribly … “.
And next to another ballad – “Charlie and Chaplin”. As little Ivanko rode across the steppe, in a cart, and the horses were called so: one Charlie, the second – Chaplin.
“My heavy boundless steppe for the first time took me, a dazed child, in its gray palms:” But, Charlie, Chaplin, but! … “- and for the first time he looked into my eyes like that …”.
The movie continues to look us in the eye. And often the eyes of Ivan Drach.

Sergey Trimbach