Budulai

Budulay is a man of pre-retirement age, wandering the vast expanses of the Soviet Union in the post-war years. He is a front-line soldier and a man who has seen a lot in his lifetime.

Before the war, Budulay was married and worked as a blacksmith . After the death of his wife in 1942 under the tracks of a German tank, he, along with other volunteers from the Privalovsky farm, entered the military service in the cavalry of the Red Army and fought with the Germans until the Victory . He served in the ranks of the 5th Don Cavalry Corps ^{[Note. 1]} , with whom he went from the Terek to the Austrian Alps , riding in the Cossack saddle along the Astrakhan , Tersk , Kuban , Don , Azov , Ukrainian , Moldavian , Romanian and Hungarian lands, from Volodin Kurgan near Astrakhan , through Kizlyar , Aga Batyr, reeds Kugeisky estuary near Azov , Korsun-Shevchenkovsky cauldron , Carpathians , Bucharest, Oytoz gorge , troubled waters of the Danube . He took part in the liberation of Rostov and the capture of Budapest . Budulai has counted many days and nights spent in reconnaissance, and completed complex military missions.

Retired Colonel, Honorary State Security Officer , Veteran of External Counterintelligence of the KGB of the USSR Stanislav Lekarev in his article notes that Mihai Volontir in the role of Budulay created a very vivid image of a gypsy battalion reconnaissance. “Budulai,” writes Lekarev, “became the most vivid embodiment of such qualities of a scout as courage, devotion, battle ingenuity, the ability to navigate in difficult situations and instantly make independent and solely correct decisions. He easily coped with his specific and sometimes delicate duties, and the viewer never had any doubt that he was an ace in reconnaissance of his battalion ” ^[2] .

As a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, Budulay was awarded orders and medals:

At the end of the war, Budulay returns to the Don land . After the wanderings bring him to the Verbny Don farm, he is imbued with paternal feelings for the local boy, Van, who, as it turns out later, really turns out to be his son. In his spare time, Budulai plays the Russian seven-string guitar and has a special love for horses - when he was a scout, during the liberation of Romania, he was rumored to have taken his horse from the stables of the Romanian king Mihai I , for which his immediate commander was forced to blush on the carpet of the marshal Fedor Tolbukhin . However, Budulai himself always denied any involvement in this half-joking story, and on the whole he reacted negatively to this kind of fame, believing that it only reinforces the established stereotype that every gypsy is a horse thief and a loafer.

Memories of Anatoly Kalinin show that the book and films had a factual basis. The military past of the protagonist is one of two key lines in the plot of the novel “Gypsy”. And in this vein, it is very important that the author indicated the real name ^[3] :

The name and patronymic of this front-line soldier has not yet been restored ^{[Note. 2]} . After a careful study of the novel, the historian and gypsy scholar Nikolai Bessonov concludes that, most likely, the literary Budulay belonged to the Serv ethnic group ^[4] , although, judging by his name and description of the camp, the hero of the story was a loser . However, as Bessonov is sure, Anatoly Kalinin did not understand such subtleties. And if the Russian part of the book is written with great knowledge of real life, then the gypsy is extremely superficial.

“Of course,” writes Bessonov, “the book is uneven, and everything that has been written about the inner life of the Gypsies - in particular, about the true Gypsy customs, language , and psychology of the camp - these are clichés of Russian perception,” however, the theme “Gypsies and the war” , according to Bessonov, the writer revealed, and bright and talented. According to him, one can relate with full confidence to all the scenes that talk about the military past of Budulai. The writer, who himself is a front-line soldier, honestly reflected the military merits of gypsy men. Literary Budulay, as follows from the novel, served in intelligence and rose to the rank of lieutenant . In the course of work on the documentary book, Bessonov found information about dozens of gypsy intelligence officers, including officers. In the post-war period, no one doubted the patriotism of the gypsy population. Many front-line soldiers had gypsy colleagues. “This is rather a tendency of the present,” Bessonov notes with regret, “that modern journalists often write a dirty phrase for gypsy veterans:“ They only fought Budulai - and even then in the cinema. ” And immediately after the victory, ordinary people did not perceive nomadic gypsies in gymnasts as deceivers. The memories of the military brotherhood were too fresh ” ^[5] .

Kalinin told in an interview that the character’s name was borrowed from a young gypsy whom Kalinin saw after his war riding in his farmhouse in a red shirt on his bicycle. “But the resemblance to the prototype of the book hero is limited to the name. Appearance, actions, fate of Budulaya from the novel “Gypsies” are completely different. This is a collective image, ”writes a columnist for the Trud newspaper Lyudmila Karamysheva ^[6] .

“The story says in passing that the camp, from which Budulay left, decided to settle on the Don land. We not only do not know the life of this camp, we did not see any of the camp gypsies in the eyes. We can get an approximate idea of ​​the life of this community of people only from the fragmentary memories of Budulai, who told Vanya how long he had to persuade his fellow tribesmen to abandon their nomadic lifestyle, ”said literary critic Nikolai Dalada ^[7] .

Permanent author of the New World magazine Vladislav Survillo writes in his review of the then-novel "Gypsy" that its main character is Gypsy Budulay, a demobilized lieutenant of the Soviet Army - a sincere and noble man who is not constrained by either national or social prejudices - begins the struggle with wild tabor practices, with begging , theft , ignorance and seeking a turning point - the gypsies go to the collective farm authorities with a request to take them to the collective farm ^[8] .

As Vyacheslav Gorbachev, deputy chief editor of the Young Guard magazine, notes, the novel "Gypsy" was written by Anatoly Kalinin for an unusually long time. At first he was conceived as a story , and what later became the first part of the novel was published in the magazine “ Twinkle ” back in 1961. The editorial office of the magazine received numerous letters from labor collectives and readers with insistent requests and even demands for the return of Budulay ^[9] . As a result, after seven years, the second and third parts of the novel were written, and after a while the fourth. The last, ninth part of the novel was published in the Moscow publishing house Veche in 2011 after the death of the writer ^[10] . The novel gained a compositional end, and together with the new material received an acute social orientation. Anatoly Kalinin presented in the novel not the fate of one person, but the fate of the people at the turning point of their history. “And Budulai does not seek his happiness alone, but in proximity with his gypsy people,” continues Gorbachev, “the conclusion that Budulai makes when summing up his many years of mistakes, insights and discoveries leaves no doubt about the correctness of the chosen path:“ If such gypsies like you, Budulai, he tells himself, they themselves will not worry about the fate of their children and no one else - neither Russians nor any other people will do it for them “” ^[11] .

Roman Anatoly Kalinin was destined to be very popular, especially after a series of adaptations. Soviet spectators, and especially spectators, fell in love with the courageous noble Budulai ^[5] . The first film adaptation of the novel "Gypsy" was the film of the Soviet film director Evgeny Matveev . As the researcher of the national cinema history Fyodor Razzakov notes, Matveev began to shoot a picture based on the novel in 1966, and worked on it not only as a director, but also as an actor. He took the main role - Budulaya, and invited Lyudmila Khityaeva to the main female role of Claudia. The film premiered on July 13, 1967 in Moscow with a huge audience. According to a survey conducted by the magazine " Soviet Screen ", the acting works of Matveev and Khityaeva were named among the best for 1967. However, this film also had detractors. According to Razzakov himself, as an artist , Matveev miraculously restored the provincial melodrama of ancient times on the screen ^[12] .

The second film version was released in 1979 . By the way, the shooting of this picture was postponed for a long time due to the fact that its creators could not choose a suitable actor for the role of Budulay. Tried Nikolai Slichenko and Armen Dzhigarkhanyan , but even they did not match the director's vision of the image. And then the female lead, actress Klara Luchko , whose candidacy was insisted personally by Anatoly Kalinin ^{[Note. 3]} , showed the director Alexander Blanc a photo of Mihai Volontira, with whom she previously worked together. The performed roles of the main character and the main character, Luchko recalls, have grown not just into friendship, which can be between a man and a woman, but almost into family relationships. These relationships continued until the death of Clara Luchko in 2005 ^[13] .

In the film, Budulai spends a lot of time in a rural forge. In an interview with the correspondent of Theater magazine, Mihai Volontir said that although he had grown up in the village, he had not happened to stand by the forge before working on this film. And the scene in the forge was very important for revealing the character of Budulai. On the Don, in the village of Pukhlyakovskaya, where the film was filmed, Volontira was introduced to a blacksmith - Uncle Kostya. It was he who Volunteer had to learn blacksmithing in a very short time. Mihai Ermolaevich got on a motorcycle at four in the morning and rushed to his mentor. This very uncle Kostya, according to Volontir, helped him to reveal new facets of the character of his hero. To thank this man, he forged a small horseshoe with his cinema autograph - “Budulai” ^[14] .

The second film adaptation surpassed the first one in its success. To track “what’s happening at Klavka’s Budulay today”, almost the entire village where the film was shot was going every day ^[15] . The performer of the role of Budulai, actor Mihai Volontir, was called "the main gypsy of Russia." Letters addressed to Mihai Volontir were marked with the phrase: “Cinema. I’m going to walk. ” ^[16] According to the observer of the magazine " Spark " Valery Chumakov, the role of the free gypsy Budulaya became the pinnacle of the acting career of Mihai Volontir ^[17] .

Initially, according to the script, Budulai died at the end of the film, but Mihai Volontir foresaw the future success of the film, and therefore asked the director “not to kill” his hero. The author of the novel, Anatoly Kalinin, unexpectedly agreed with him. Through the efforts of Mihai Ermolaevich, the script was amended accordingly and the finale became open: the wounded Budulai was taken away and the viewer did not know whether he survived or not ^[16] . Thanks to this, in 1985 it became possible to release the continuation of “ Return of Budulai ” with the same actors, which did not gain much popularity.

In the mid-1990s, the four-episode film “ Budulai, which is not expected ” was released with Otar Megvinuetuhutsesi in the title role, who presented the characteristic “black-eyed” version of Budulai’s biography that was typical for that time. The director turned the front-line hero into a prisoner who returned after 10 years in prison.

Rostov composer Leonid Klinichev, based on the novel by Anatoly Kalinin, wrote the eponymous romantic opera in two acts and four scenes. The opera’s action was postponed to the present day, which the creator of the novel resisted for a long time. Budulai appears as an Afghan veteran . The image of Budulaya in the opera is the image of a lone wanderer, a wanderer, who, as the candidate of art history , associate professor of the Rostov State Conservatory (Academy) notes . S. V. Rachmaninov Natalia Meshcheryakova, as if separates him from other characters, and the halo of a truth-seeker, a seeker of truth, “lifts” him above his surroundings. He is something akin to an oratorio hero, and at the same time, there are echoes of a typical romantic image of Old Gypsy from the opera Sergei Rachmaninov " Aleko " - he is free from the tragic collision " One against all ", characteristic of other romantic characters. Instead, he is a national hero who becomes the embodiment of romantic duty, and his ethos rises to the level of ancient tragedies . Klinichev took a long time to create this opera, work on which began for him back in 1974, and lasted more than thirty years ^[19] . The composer Leonid Klinichev met Anatoly Kalinin in the mid-80s. Then Klinichev, who had just finished the ballet The Quiet Don, brought his passages to Kalinin, who liked what he heard and agreed to create a piece of music based on his novel. This is not to say that their partnership on this field was smooth. Klinichev had three versions of the opera “Gypsy”: chamber, large and final, finalized already in 2002. While writing the opera, the composer often traveled to Kalinin. “There were times when Kalinin wanted to correct the literary text, but the opera has its own laws. I had to change the word to the detriment of literature, ”Klinichev admitted later. Некоторые сцены приходилось переписывать по двадцать раз, а потом и вовсе отказываться от них ^[20] . Премьера оперы состоялась весной 2005 года. Писатель Анатолий Калинин так охарактеризовал оперу: «Опера „Цыган“ уже не мой роман. Это музыкальный роман Клиничева». По мотивам «Цыгана» Клиничевым была также написана большая оркестровая сюита для итальянского оркестра ^[21] .

В более раннем театральном спектакле «Цыган», ставившемся на ростовской театральной сцене, роль Будулая исполняли Народный артист России , лауреат Государственной премии РСФСР им. Станиславского Николай Провоторов ^[22] и народный артист СССР Михаил Бушнов .