Translator’s note: We’ve tried to retain the author’s style. We’ve also kept in his factual mistakes (Oleg Menshikov was 39, not 42 years old at the time the programme was aired.)

(…The beginning of the programme is missed)

He’s a very reserved person. I sometimes think Oleg is an extremely lonely man, but his loneliness is of a special kind. It’s his own kind of loneliness. There seems to be a lot more to him than just being smart (and to my mind coming across really smart people in Russia these days is an even more difficult task than spotting really talented ones). Oleg is not a merely smart and witty person – he is also extremely clever. And the reason he is lonely is that he seems to percieve some things in life which he cannot express as an actor. And it is the pain lurching behind that seemingly light facade of his that keeps gnawing at him and tearing him from inside. It can easily be seen in his Chatsky – the only play staged by him so far, which we will discuss later in the programme.
The spirit of things now is calling for changes on stage, and these chages have already taken place – both in real life and in the theatre. But what kind of changes are these? What kind of people have appeared? Who are these actors? What are they trying to convey and what do they keep silent about? What are the things they cannot convey – not because they do not know how to do it, but because dealing with the things that are happening to us now (especially doing it in the all-out tradition of the Russian drama theatre) is unpleasant, to say the least.
I can’t tell for sure how long I’ve been acquainted with Oleg Menshikov. We used to serve in the same regiment; that is, in the regiment made up of actors-servicemen from the Soviet Army Theatre.
It was a unique group of people (in fact, “unique” and “elitist” doesn’t even begin to cover it) which had the Defence Minister’s permission to serve in the army and at the same time … not to serve in the army. There were only 20 of us there.
We were alowed to wear casual clothes instead of the military uniform and we all worked in the Soviet Army Theatre – that was considered to be our military service.
The director of the literarure department had just resigned then, and I was an asistant to the stop-gap director Olga Yarmolskaya. As for the rest of the guys, almost all of them were actors. Oleg Menshikov was our sergeant, Anton Tabakov was a lance-corporal, Garik (Igor) Volkov – who later played Mihialo Lomonosov in Sasha Proshkin’s fabuluos film – was a private. (I never managed to get a higher rank than a private either.)
I once asked our warrant officer, the legendary Anatoly Dvoinikov, who had held this position with this “elitist” group for all of the 40 years since it had been established:
“Anatoly Andreevich, how come Menshikov is our sergeant?”
“That’s because he is smart, Karaulov”, was his reply.
Those were very happy years – the early 80s. We were young and carefree. Oleg, though, was the saddest of all of us even back then.
He used to get momentarily inspired – it would only take a tiny thing like a casual word for this almost surreal lightness of his to spring to the surface. But you could always feel the loneliness behind all of it. It was this shattering, gnawing kind of loneliness I have spoken about earlier.

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A picture of laughing Oleg Menshikov from the “Premier” Magazine ¹10, 1998.
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I often think about the generation of actors we have today. Why do they all seem to be broken, regardless of the obvious success they have attained or the highly professional drama skills they undoubtedly possess? What’s more – why do they all seem to have been broken in their youth?
I don’t know the answer to it.
Ivan Ohlobystin – all the heroes he plays are deeply unhappy people.
Kseniya Kachalina – all her heroines are the women of misery too.
It is strange, it really is. When I look at Oleg Menshikov’s heroes (be it Kostik from “The Pokrovskie Gate” or Tolstoy from his latest film “The Barber of Siberia” by Nikita Mihkalkov), I can’t but feel that these are the people who wouldn’t be among the living long…
So, we were soldiers and we had a great time. Yet I couldn’t help noticing that Oleg Menshikov was kind of …on his own. He was there at our parties or at the rehearsals all right, but he was still by himself, as if he were standing a bit to a side from it all.
He did have a secret of his own – a personal one, – and he still has it. I have no intention of speaking about this secret, and I certainly do not have the right to. But there’s much more to it than his secrets.
It’s not about his secrets even – it’s about the way he sees life. He understands a lot more in this life than we do…
“The Pokrovskie Gate” – the script is an old play by Leonid Zorin, the film director is Mikhail Kosakov, and Oleg Menshikov plays Kostik. The whole film is set in the 50s, and the atmosphere of that time was brilliantly (and I mean – brilliantly!) re-created by the crew.
The spirit of the time comes through with Bronevoy, and with all the other actors. It is the 50s we see on the screen, the real thing – not the imitation.
And it is only Oleg Menshikov (and perhaps Valya Voilkova – also an actress of the Soviet Army Theatre in those days – Kostik’s beloved) who certainly does not belong to the 50s.
They both do not belong to any time. Menshikov’s Kostik is all of us – our generation, and may be the generation of the 50s as well.
Oleg played the Youth itself; his Kostik was sparkling, effervescent, he was fooling around brilliantly. Kostik was a Khlestakov to some extent. He loved life as fully as it is humanly possible.
I was looking at Menshikov’s Kostik in “The Pokrovskie Gate”, and I felt happy for both him and Oleg. I also kept thinking about the words once said by Mandelshtam to his wife, Nadezda Yakovlevna. They were having an argument and in the middle of it Mandelshtam said: “Nadya, that’s right – I have upset you, but has anybody ever told you that you must be happy?”
Menshikov played Kostik’s happiness, but there was something not quite so real in it, and Oleg let it be known. He didn’t quite believe in what he was saying as he kept a tiny distance between the character and himself. He stepped back from Kostik, looked into his eyes and taunted: “Right – have some fun, dance, swing, fall in love – your life will be hard anyway.”
Whoever Oleg played, he always let the audience feel that there was a possible tragedy looming behind it all. Somehow it seemed that he didn’t have enough warmth and care in his life…may be not enough love…or may be not enough happiness.
When he started to play contemporary characters – the guys of the 90s with their drugs, crimes, the incomprehensible wish to die, and the morbid interest in death, (while this urge to simply touch the death itself, to open the door and peer at what is behind it, to touch another life behind the proverbial line is totally alien to the Russian mentality), – all of it was present in him. Moreover, he had this premonition of his own death. In his late films.
I kept wondering – what has brought it all about? And then I realised that it has nothing to do with him being an educated man (he’s read piles of books) or with him being a smart man ( a gift from God). No, it’s all about a completely different thing…
Whenever we were on tour, he would go looking for a records shop in every town. He would buy loads of LPs, and he didn’t just collect the anthology of symphonic music, or Russian music, or the 19th or the 20th century music. He was virtually saturated with Beethoven’s and Chopin’s music, and with Mozart’s as well, though to a lesser extent. “They’ll play me Brams – I’ll tremble all over”, – he once quoted these famous lines (“tremble” being the key word.)
It’s strange…This desire to escape from life – if Oleg indeed has this desire, that is; though we may call it just a desire to be left on his own – inevitably resulted in him putting on a record. He used to listen to music, it seems, as if it were a substitute for everything – friends, vodka (he hardly ever drank back than, and I think he doesn’t drink these days either), love or happiness.

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A picture of Oleg Menshikov from a magazine.
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He should have played Aldemaro in Vladimir Kantsel’s fabulous production “Dance Teacher”. He was born for this part. Aldemaro, played first by Vladimir Zeldin and later by Fedor Chehkonkov, was the legend of the Soviet Army Theatre. It was a great performance which probably marked the end of the romantic theatre epoch in Russia. Oleg had longed to play Aldemaro and he prepared the part. I remember seeing a notice which said that Fedor Chehkonkov gave over the part to Oleg Menshikov... I remember rehearsals. Oleg refused to play. It was his decision. It could have been that both – he and the director of the Soviet Army Theatre Yury Eremin – wanted it that way.
Aldemaro is a great lover who cannot live without women. Aldemaro is a love genius. Strange as it may seem, but Oleg Menshikov has never known how to play “love”. I think this is exactly what happened in the only love scene in “The Barber of Siberia” where his character is enamoured with a young and incredibly beautiful woman (played by Julia Ormond) .
Something (I wonder what exactly) has stood in Menshikov’s way (and in the way of his characters) to love. They (his characters) thought that love was denied to them, possibly because they were not worthy of it.
His Chatsky doesn’t love Sofia. Neither does he love himself, or his life. His Chatsky was born to die.
I asked Oleg as I ran into him one of these days: “What do you play in Chatsky?” “I play everything”, his answer was. His Chatsky, as a romantic hero, lives waiting for his death. Moreover, having spent three years travelling, he comes back to Moscow…to die. Why? What for? He’s a handsome man, if not exactly young. His Chatsky is 40 years old. Oleg doesn’t hide his age. He is 42 now – he’s one year my senior, that makes it 42…Not a young Chatsky, he is.
The snow is falling merrily, there’s some wonderful music playing…all the prerequisites for a happy holiday or for a love. But the happy holiday never happens! There’s some lightness and some childish pranks, some fooling around, – there is even some love for life. But there is no happiness. What (Chatsky) does have is his loneliness amidst everybody else, even when he’s next to Sofia. Strange as it seems, but in Menshikov’s play his Chatsky is more willing to fall in love with Lisa than with Sofia. Though he does want to fall in love with Sofia…it’s only that he can’t.
He’s just like Chaikovsky’s characters. Chaikovsky never allowed German to be with Lisa, or Onegin – with Tatiana. Why? What was in the way? There was something… And this something, this barrier, this immovable obstacle is the key to Chatsky’s tragedy. It may as well be the innner tragedy of Oleg Menshikov, the actor.
It’s strange, really… Whenever he launched into character types, whenever he was looking for them (as in Nikita Mihkalkov’s “Burnt by the Sun”), it always came out wrong. It was always somewhat unnatural, somewhat artificial and far-fetched. Like in that opening scene of the movie when his character – this NKVD offcer – makes the first appearance: he is hobbling unnaturally, it’s make-believe hobbling. And it’s not the character, who is playing this make-believe – it’s Menshikov himself, one can easily see through it.
Oleg’s “theatre-making” instinct is incredibly strong and well-developed, sometimes even more than is necessary. You can see a piece (episode) being done, you can see it being played, but you don’t see the actor “living” in it and through it. It’s just a show, just a man playing this make-believe…or merely fooling around, whichever you prefer.
Strangely enough, when Oleg plays crooks or butchers, some “bad” people, as we used to say before, (it actually took us some time to realize that no character is one hundred per cent “good” or “bad”; there’s much more to people’s nature than this simple dichotomy) – these unpleasant characters never come out quite as unpleasant as they were meant to be.

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A picture of laughing Oleg Menshikov.
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I happened to be at one of his London performances – he played Esenin together with a wonderful actress Vanessa Redgrave. To my mind, she played her part (Icedora Duncan) badly, really badly. But then there was Menshikov, who wasn’t playing Esenin (or even his perception of Esenin) – no, what he was playing was a Russian man. A certain kind of Russian man, that is: a man acutely vulnerable, desperately lonely and outstandingly talented – all in one person. None of these qualities dominated the others, as they were all mixed in equal proportions.
But there was one trait of character in his Esenin – a trait unbelievable for any Russian person, especially for a poet. He was a man who had a strong moral conscience. This man, unlike his real-life prototype, couldn’t bear not seeing his own children. I also think that this man couldn’t have said what the creator of the Russian language and a great humanitarian Alexander Pushkin had once written in a private letter: “I don’t have any children; all I have are bastards.”
His Esenin was born for everybody. He was born to love people. The thing is, people didn’t need him. Even his woman didn’t understand him or needed him.
It’s interesting, really, that Menshikov’s Esenin didn’t love or understand Icedora either. He stayed with her simply because God (or his fate) wanted it this way. He stayed with her because she intrigued him as an Artist – not as a woman. It’s a totally different motivation, and therefore he was feeling unbearably lonely. And this distance between the two of them – Menshikov’s Esenin and Redgrave’s Icedora Duncan – was enormous. Nothing could bring the two of them closer – not even her tears and hysterics, not even his drinking binges. Even when he was drunk off his feet, that distance still remained. It was a tragedy (yet again), it was the premonition of death and awaiting it all over again.
The same can be said of the Roman history characters Menshikov played in Mossovet theatre – they just could not be happy, or understood by others. They could not even feel at home in their time – or any other time, for that matter. They lost themselves irrevocably, which led to wearing masks, to burlesque, to dancing, to those never-ending smiles and all.
Menshikov’s performance in Nikita Mikhalkov’s film is superb. (The film itself is a bit of a touchy subject, as, in my opinion, the director shot it to be seen (and appreciated) in Hollywood, in America or at the Cannes Film Festival.) But the last episode in the picture (the one set in a nameless Siberian village), where Menshikov is not actually saying anything, is a piece of brilliant work.
It’s all in his face – the face of a maturing boy, and the face of an old man at the same time. It’s all in his mad look (though mad he is not; on the contrary, he’s perfectly calm). It’s all in the look he gives the chariot in which the one he once loved beyond all reason is riding away.
You just can not play it like THAT, you can not be looking at her SO, if you haven’t led a difficult life yourself, and haven’t suffered some pretty serious disappointment on the way.
Episodes like this and looks like this can not be played. They can only be taken out of the innermost corners of your soul.
We’ve run into each other in the street recently, not having met for several years. “What’s happening next, Oleg?” I asked him. “Huh, I wish I knew”, he replied. And it seemed to me that he sounded wistful.

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Pictures of Oleg Menshikov.