Eldar Ryazanov

• 1. Introduction

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  Eldar Ryazanov was born on the 18th of November 1927, in Samara, to a diplomat father and a Jewish mother, in a country that would spend the next several decades reshaping itself by force. His father, Aleksandr Semyonovich Ryazanov, was arrested by the Stalinist government in 1937 and served 18 years in the correctional labour camps. The boy who grew up without his father would go on to make comedies that millions of Soviet citizens treasured, and one of them still airs on television every New Year's Eve across most of the former Soviet Union. What drew a man who wanted to make "serious films" to comedy? And how did laughter become a way of looking honestly at a society where honesty was often dangerous?

• 2. A Father's Absence

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  Ryazanov's childhood was marked by displacement and rupture. The family moved from Samara to Moscow in 1930, and his parents divorced shortly after. He was raised by his mother, Sofya Mikhailovna, and her new husband, Lev Mikhailovich Kopp. Then, in 1937, his father was arrested. Aleksandr Semyonovich Ryazanov spent 18 years in the correctional labour camps. That number - 18 years - spans nearly a childhood and a young adulthood. Ryazanov began his career making documentaries in the early 1950s. The country his father had been locked away from was the same country Ryazanov would spend his life depicting in film.

• 3. The Comedy He Never Wanted

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  Ivan Pyryev, a major force in the Soviet film industry, approached Ryazanov in 1955 with a proposal: direct Carnival Night. Ryazanov refused at first. He wanted to make serious films, and a comedy felt like a lesser ambition. Pyryev pushed back with an argument that turned out to be prophetic. He told Ryazanov that anybody could shoot a melodrama, but only a few could create good comedy. Ryazanov relented, and Carnival Night became an instant success. The lesson stuck. From that point forward, Ryazanov committed himself to a genre that required more precision, not less, than the serious films he had imagined making.

• 4. The Films That Defined an Era

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  Ryazanov's main genre was tragicomedy, and across roughly three decades he produced a catalogue that worked its way into the fabric of Soviet daily life. Hussar Ballad came in 1962. Beware of the Car followed in 1966. The Irony of Fate arrived in 1975, a film so woven into the culture that it became a New Year's Eve ritual broadcast. Office Romance in 1977 won the Vasilyev Brothers State Prize of the RSFSR. The Garage came in 1979. Station for Two followed in 1982, and A Cruel Romance appeared in 1984. Through all of these, Ryazanov took on a habit of appearing in his own films in small roles: a bus passenger in Office Romance, a sleeping man in The Garage, a railroad supervisor in Station for Two.

• 5. Honours and the State

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  The Soviet state gave Ryazanov its highest cultural distinctions, even as his films satirized the system those institutions represented. He received the USSR State Prize in 1977, specifically for The Irony of Fate. He was named People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1974, and People's Artist of the USSR in 1984. He also received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour twice, in 1969 and 1977. France awarded him the rank of Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters. Georgia named him a Commander of the Order of Honour in 2008. Russia gave him the Order for Merit to the Fatherland, 3rd class in 1996 and 2nd class on the 3rd of July 2008. The asteroid 4258 Ryazanov was named in his honour.

• 6. Criticism and Contradiction

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  Not everyone read Ryazanov's work as innocent laughter. Sergey Kara-Murza, in his book Nepoladki v russkom dome, argued that Ryazanov and the artists close to him, consumed by anti-Soviet feeling, lovingly reflected and in many ways created a certain social and spiritual world. Kara-Murza's sharper point was that this world, whatever its appeal, turned out to be possible only when it was surrounded and protected by the crude structures of the Soviet way of life. The critique is a paradox: the films that seemed to mock the Soviet system may have also depended on it for their meaning. Ryazanov went on to win the Nika Award for Best Director in 1991, the same year the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.

• 7. Last Years and Legacy

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  Ryazanov suffered an acute ischemic stroke in November 2014. On the 21st of November 2015, he was admitted to a Moscow hospital with shortness of breath. He died around midnight on the 30th of November 2015, of heart and lung failure, at 88 years old. Two years after his death, in 2017, a street in Moscow was named after him. A museum and memorial dedicated to his memory was opened on the site of his childhood home in Samara, the city where his story began. The Irony of Fate still airs every December 31st across most post-Soviet countries, though Ukraine suspended the tradition following the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.