Леонид Гайдай

Leonid Gaidai, the creator of the most beloved comedies in our country, is rarely written about. The undoubted general availability of his paintings in the eyes of many experts turns into seeming simplicity: they say, Gaidai is so elementary that there is nothing to talk about him. Film critic and postmodernist writer Yevgeny Novitsky categorically disagrees with such statements. In his biography, Leonid Gaidai appears not just as an outstanding Soviet comedian, but as a true genius of world cinema, not inferior to such figures as Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick. The book polemicizes with the well-established opinion in Russian film criticism that the "late Gaidai" consists entirely of creative failures. In the author's opinion, Leonid Iovich did not have a single failed film, and all together they add up to a surprisingly harmonious, intelligible, consistent "collection of film works", the refinement of which the most prominent masters of classical auteur cinema could envy.