The funeral of the "chance encounter" in Moscow | Cao Jingxing

Mark Zakharov died in Moscow, and his Chinese student, Director Cha Mingzhe, learned about it several days later. There was no report in the Chinese media, or the friend who was investigating saw someone posting a message on a bulletin board at the Central Academy of Drama and taking pictures to pass it on to him. We had the opportunity to interview Zakharov's burial, which happened to be met on the afternoon of October 1 at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

In the morning, I ended the discussion with the scholars of the Russian Academy of Social Sciences and rushed to the next site, the New Virgin Cemetery, where it rained a lot of cars and arrived at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. The entrance seemed a little unusual, with police cars and policemen, TV reporters with tripods and cameras, and people waiting for something with flowers. There must be something important in it, something important. Looking inside, there were many people gathered at the intersection of the main passage, and there was a black dress under the red canopy, where the funeral should be held.

A few steps inside, we were stopped by a female guard who asked us to take a detour. Not far to the left is the tricolor flag cemetery of The first Russian President, Boris Yeltsin. We circled from the wall to the other side of the funeral, where there was also a row of black luxury cars and a group of security guards. Seeing a lady walk out, Liu Fangzhou, a Russian-speaking professional, went up to inquire and knew that it was russian director Zakharov who was buried today. She said, "I came because I loved him!" ”

Moscow's 4G signal is good, China Mobile Global Communication networking capabilities are strong enough, even in the open cemetery, we still quickly found a lot of Russian and Chinese information with mobile phones. Mark Zakharov, one of the five most famous directors in the Moscow theater scene, died on September 28 at the age of 86. In the morning, the body of Lenin, who had been in charge and care of the Theater of lenin's Communist Youth League for more than forty years, was bid farewell to the body, and in the afternoon it was moved to the New Virgin Cemetery for burial.

For our interview course, it is a rare opportunity to encounter such an opportunity. Although it is a bit sudden, how to quickly prepare to enter the state, how to try to obtain the necessary and sufficient information materials in a strange environment with limited time, and come up with qualified news reports is a good on-site combat exercise. In the blink of an eye, Russian-speaking students began interviewing admirers who had come to the funeral, and students with video cameras circled to the front of the crowd to record the burial ceremony in the rhythm of the chant.

Our "Shanghai Overseas Chinese University Global Major Events Multilingual All-Media Coverage Tour" course began in 2008 and is the ninth time this year, with 20 students selected by the whole university and four teachers. With the Russian language major as the core and the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Russia as the theme, two weeks of planes and trains passed through five major cities in Russia from east to west. On October 1 in the capital, Moscow, our group chose to interview the world-famous New Virgin Cemetery.

A local cemetery is a record of history, a collective memory, and in the past few courses I have traveled with students to the Père Lachaise cemetery and montparnasse cemetery in Paris, and to the Recoleta National Cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Evita "Madame Perón" is buried. No matter how tight the time is, we should not miss the New Virgin Cemetery, and fortunately we also "happened" to Zakharov's funeral.

Speaking of Zakharov, Shao Ning, a veteran Shanghai media personality who studied theater in Moscow at the same time as the director more than twenty years ago, used the term "like thunder", believing that he and his Lenin Communist Youth League Theater were second to none in Moscow and Russia, and their status was high. Not many people in China know him, and we all hear his name for the first time; he has only been to Beijing once, and in 1987 he rehearsed the Soviet play "Red And Blue Horse" for the Chinese Youth Art Theater. But he had a special influence on the later development of Chinese theater.

The following year, as his assistant director, Cha Mingzhe published a paper entitled "The Mystery of Zakharov" in the Journal of the Central Academy of Drama: "We suddenly discovered an omission in our work: we had not studied and introduced Zakharov, one of the most influential directors in the Soviet Union in recent years. He's a mystery to us..."

Zakharov brought with it an impact of ideas. Zhang Qiuge, who played Lenin in "Red And Blue Horse", was only twenty-three years old at the time, nearly one meter and eight meters tall, and did not look like Lenin at all. But Zakharov is opposed to the actor's pursuit of similarity to the character from the appearance, demanding "non-portraitization". In the words of Lenin's wife Krupskaya, "Lenin's ideas are images." At the beginning of the performance, Zhang Qiuge jumped from the audience in a jacket and jeans, entered the role in the third person, and at first felt abrupt to the audience, and it did not take long to accept that he was Lenin.

Cha Mingzhe, who was Zakharov's deputy, observed from the sidelines and found that he "worked like a fire, and life was like an unguessable mystery." The stage secret he taught was to keep the audience interested in appreciating or even satisfying their appetites, but never let them guess what you were showing him and what scenes were happening below. Cha Mingzhe found that the key to directing art is to grasp the rhythm of the play, create a dramatic atmosphere, design contradictions and conflicts, and present vivid details...

In 1991, Cha Mingzhe went to the Soviet Union to pursue a doctorate, and was left in Moscow by Zakharov as an introductory disciple. Those four years were the turbulent period of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the people generally endured the hardships and pressures brought about by the changes in the system, but they did not give up their love, respect and pursuit of art and culture. Before returning home, he went to the theater to say goodbye to his mentor, and when he was about to break up, he asked a question that he had been thinking about for a long time: "What does theater really mean to Russians?" ”

This story has been told many times since then, and has been widely circulated in the Chinese theater industry. On the evening of October 19, in the powder room backstage of the Shanghai Oriental Art Center, he recalled the scene to us again. Zakharov said, "You asked very well," but did not answer immediately. The two men walked out of the theater, and Zakharov stopped on the steps, looking thoughtfully at the setting sun, and the bells rang from the church next to it. At this time, he muttered that "the theater is the church", answering the student's last question, as if to give himself an answer.

Drama and theater brought spiritual sublimation to Russian audiences, and for Zakharov, it was his paradise. But on the first day of October he left the theater and came to the cemetery, his other paradise. The new cemetery is in the middle of the New Virgin Cemetery, covered with flowers, and his large black-framed photograph rests in front of a brownish-yellow Orthodox cross, temporarily replacing a future statue. A few dozen meters to the left is the graveyard of The Great Russian Literary and Dramatic Master Chekhov, and opposite is Gogol, another Great Russian Literary Hero. What do they talk about in the dead of night?

The funeral was over, the participants dispersed one after another, and there were many wreaths left in the drizzle to sort out the surroundings, and the most solemn and eye-catching ribbon was written with the words of the Government of the Russian Federation. Moscow is beautiful in late autumn, especially in the New Virgin Cemetery. Half of the golden yellow leaves are spread on the ground, and the other half is still hanging from the trees, and from time to time it will fall on more than 20,000 cemeteries. From October onwards, the cemetery closed early until five o'clock, and the management urged us to leave, and the time was too short to hope that we would have the opportunity to come back next time.

The next day I turned to the Russian newspaper, where there was a half-page report on Zakharov's funeral, saying that his favorite Lenin Komsomol Theater would henceforth bear his name. Russians have great respect for artists and cultural people, for the theater director, both before and after his death.

Author: Cao JingxingEditor: Xie Juan