Until next spring

For Vera, a student of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute, first love instead of joy and happiness brings disappointment - and it was enough to have one first deception, and before a self-confident girl changes, becomes suspicious and closed.

She no longer believes in anyone and runs away from people - having left the institute, Vera and her little daughter leave for a remote village where no one knows her.

And although primary school students were naughty at first: they planted a hedgehog and dragged a puppy to the lesson, but soon they fell in love with a new “teacher”.

Working at school was a great joy for Vera, only with children did she feel easy and confident. But outside of school, she remains silent and restrained. Soon, a friend appeared in her house - a teacher at a neighboring school, Alexei Nikolaevich, a thin and responsive person. But in conversations about life, about people, about work, they constantly argue, between them there is always some kind of shadow clouding friendship. Somehow, when Vera said in passing, the school cleaner about the teacher, “good he”, Vera protests: “The good are only children”, but in her heart she has long been drawn to this “big child”.

Soon, Vera comes to her father, who is surprised to find that he now has a granddaughter. He is going to take Vera with him to the Urals where he works on the railroad, but he sees how Vera is loved by adults and children, who have loved her in the village, who have come running to the pier to say goodbye. At the pier, Vera meets Alexei Nikolayevich who arrived and says goodbye that she understands why she is leaving ... And Vera remains, and the schoolchildren argue that it was not the "teacher" who returned, but their teacher Vera Nikolaevna.

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In the lesson, Vera Nikolaevna reads the story of Leo Tolstoy “ Phillipoc ” to children .

In the film, Aleksey Nikolayevich says: “ A man needs a lilac branch in space ”, clarifying that he read it “ in the Komsomolskaya Pravda ” - this is a phrase that was popular in those years, which gave rise to a dispute between “physicists” and “lyricists”, which Yuri put an end to Gagarin . ^{[K 1]}

Another scene where the kid asks him to read a book - the 1865 novel by Jules Verne “From the Cannon to the Moon” hints at the successes achieved in the space exploration sphere at that time. ^{[K 2]}

• Lyudmila Marchenko - Vera Nikolaevna, teacher
• Innokenty Smoktunovsky - Alexey Nikolaevich Ruchev, teacher
• Valentin Arkhipenko - Vera's father
• Maria Prizvan-Sokolova - Nastya, cleaning lady
• Galina Vasilyeva - Natasha
• Vladimir Andreev - Vasily
• Nikolay Novlyansky - Silantych
• Klarina Frolova-Vorontsova - chatty aunt
• Igor Bogdanov - Mitka
• Vova Boytsov - Vaska
• Lena Papp - Alyonka
• Olya Yudina - Nadyushka

Innokenty Smoktunovsky

Innocent Smoktunovsky on the role of a teacher in the film was recommended by director Rachel Milman to the director Sokolov, the art director of the film was G. M. Kozintsev , and this directly affected the choice of the performer of the role of Hamlet. ^{[5] [6]} Kozintsev later spoke of him like this: " He is attracted by the fact that some kind of inner light burns in him, I cannot call it otherwise ."

 

Few people know that thanks to this film I was invited to Hamlet. Grigory Kozintsev was at one of the rehearsals of this film. Someone came (I didn’t even know him by sight), and when I began to argue with the director and stage the scene as it seemed to me right, this person I didn’t know somehow sniffed. After the rehearsal, G. Kozintsev was excited and said that he had found what he was looking for. Suddenly he came up to me and said: “I want to offer you a role. Don’t be alarmed! I want to offer you Hamlet. "

- Innokenty Smoktunovsky ^{[7] [8]}

The film expert Rimma Karpina noted that the actress Lyudmila Marchenko was characterized by roles, where her characters are natural, ordinary, ordinary, do not seek solutions themselves, but call for the answer and help of others - and someone helps them, and in this film the viewer sees the heroine through the eyes of the teacher Alexei Nikolayevich - and fortunately Innokenty Smoktunovsky played this role:

A modest mathematics teacher Aleksey Nikolaevich, poetic and wise, from the first, casually cast glance, seems to have managed to feel both Vera's insecurity, her fearful credulity, and her naive-stubborn desire to bring the mistakes of her own youth into life's law. Later, when we went together with him, shy and intelligent, into Vera’s room, we would see on her table “The Legend of Van Kleiburn” ^{[K 3]} and a volume of “Japanese Poetry” ^{[K 4]} , laid down by the photograph of Ulanova .

And the whole city student life of Vera will appear before us. Her enthusiastic stunned by the wealth of impressions. And somewhere her unsuccessful, in some way invented, offended love will be seen. And her inability to understand what happened, and pain, and fear, and despair, and flight to a distant village will be explained. Her slightly painful, zealous love for the child, and fear for him, and proud rejection of outside help, and vulnerability, and the desire for independence, and timidity before loneliness, and his false desire, interrupted by the desire for kindness and participation, will become clear.

But all this will arise through the perception of the hero of Smoktunovsky who has not uttered a word. Like the hero Smoktunovsky, awakened to Vera is no longer the acute pity of compassion, but an active desire for her spiritual revival. A timid, slender teacher with frightened, resentful, dull eyes from talking to him will gradually warm, thaw, come to life.

Almost all Marchenko heroines love. But to follow the movement of their souls is difficult. Even the eyes hide it. The shift can be caught only through the perception of the hero Smoktunovsky, fixing everything instantly and accurately. And although his laconic hero does not yet require from Vera either spiritual revelations or cardinal decisions, they are predetermined.

- film critic Rimma Karpina, “Actors of Soviet Cinema”, No. 6, 1970 ^[9]

According to Vladimir Andreev for the film, the external image of Smoktunovsky was successfully chosen - for the role he was painted in blond: ^[10]

Actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky, who played a teacher, was very blonde. He was beaten up, and his head became not only helpless, but, in combination with his eyes and an amazing soft smile, the head of a man whom it was not very respectable to offend. And still life offends. The topic was read of a lonely man, a man to whom people are drawn and who they probably love. And at the same time, this is a man doomed to loneliness, despite his spiritual generosity. But one day he is destined to meet another lonely man: his hero, a rural teacher, meets with a rural teacher, a single mother, and sees how trustingly the child’s arms stretch towards him.

• 2820. Until next spring // Soviet feature films: 1958-1963 - All-Union State Film Fund, Moscow - Art, 1968 - p. 252
• Photo from the filming of the film "Until next spring" // Official site of the film studio "Lenfilm"
• " Until Next Spring ” on the Internet Movie Database