Anatoliy Solonitsyn

Twenty Six Days in the Life of Dostoevsky

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Anatoliy Solonitsyn as Dostoevsky

A bit too neat and tidy, maybe, but Twenty Six Days in the Life of Dostoevsky is serious and sincere and has two canny performances at its centre: Anatoliy Solonitsyn as the Russian writer and Evgeniya Simonova as the woman who saved him. The neatness and tidiness is exemplified by the opening scene, where two friends discuss Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky’s terrible financial position. He’s broke, it seems, and if he doesn’t deliver his latest novel to the publisher by the end of the month, he’ll lose the right to all the royalties on all his books for the next nine years. Maybe what Dostoevsky needs, one of the friends suggests to the other, … Read more

Andrei Rublev

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Anatoliy Sononitsyn as Andrei Rublev

A film about an icon maker called Andrei made by a film maker called Andrei. Any read across from 15th century painter Andrei Rublev to 20th century auteur Andrei Tarkovsky is entirely deliberate, though the surprise of watching what’s often described as Tarkovsky’s master work is how little Andrei Rublev actually features in it. He’s the bystander, the observer, in his own story, which is actually more the story of the times Rublev lived in, as recreated by Tarkovksy in, remarkably, only his second film. How at this stage in his career Tarkovsky got the funding from an avowedly anti-God communist regime to make a film about a man of God is one … Read more