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“GOGOL. THE NEAREST” – TO THE 200th ANNIVERSARY OF THE WRITER

This spring there has been 200-year anniversary of the great writer Nikolay Gogol. In Russia and in the Ukraine this date has been celebrated with different expositions, evenings, reeditions of the writer’s books, as well as with the release of the film “Taras Boulba” made by Vladimir Bortko. The film director Nataliya Bondarchuk will soon submit to the audience’s approval her new movie “Gogol. The nearest” dedicated to the destiny of the writer himself. Now the movie is being edited at Mosfilm studio.

As Nataliya Bondarchuk says, “Gogol was not only a great writer but also a great eccentric”. For example, once he amused her friend Alexandra Ossipovna Smirnova-Rosset’s daughter by putting on a bread-crumb nose, disguising himself to a dwarf and thus treating the guests with food.

There are no stories like that about Gogol’s life in school text-books. Pupils are educated with respect to the classic. Nataliya Bondarchuk also respects Nikolay Vassilievitch, nevertheless from the beginning she has made it her mission to show the audience not official but “alive” Gogol. The Gogol we don’t know at all…

The name of the movie “Gogol. The nearest” has been inspired by the famous painting “The Christophany” by Ivanov, where the writer was painted close to Jesus Christ. Thus Nataliya Bondartchuk defines the main subject of the film: spiritual and metaphysical pursuit of Gogol, his desire to live a Christian life…

Anyway, there will also be the prose of existence in the film. Nataliya Bondarchuk will also speak about the writer’s private life, his friends and his relations with the colleagues. For example, the movie will show the episode of Gogol’s failure in his suit (the only one) to Anna Viyelgorskaya, there will also be the writer’s meetings with the aforesaid Alexandra Ossipovna Smirnova-Rosset who called Gogol “a remarkable small khokhol” and had been his good friend for years.

The role of Gogol in the film is played by a RAMT(Russian Academic Youth Theatre) actor Yevgeny Redko. Nataliya Bondarchuk chose him for the hero after she had seen him playing Belinsky in a 10-hour play “A coast of Utopia”. She says she needed a universal actor who could laugh and suffer, and so Yevgeny Redko cumulated all these necessary qualities. Besides, he really looks like Gogol when in his make-up…

After the shooting of the film Nataliya Bondarchuk again and again complained to journalists that she had to “shoot a film with maybe the lowest budget in the history of Russia”. Gogol was known to travel a lot, so according to the first idea some shooting was to be made in the places he had visited – in Italy, Germany, Israel. However, the financing of expensive expeditions was not enough, so the idea was abandoned and the shooting took place in Russia and the Ukraine, and as well, at his “small motherland” – in the villages Gogolevo and Bolshie Sorochintsy of Poltava Region. Let’s hope that the quality of the acting wasn’t spoiled by low budget, and the film will worthily reflect the life and destiny of Nikolay Gogol and will be equal to his talent…