On December 2, 1931, a unique woman was born – Zinaida Chirkova – a Russian by origin and civil status, a Moldavian by last place of residence, whose work underwent an amazing metamorphosis during her life: she gave 15 years to journalism, 15 years to documentary filmmaking and devoted another 15 years to novelistics.
Childhood and youth
It is known that our model of worldview is “molded” by early childhood. And it turned out to be a happy one for Zinaida Chirkova. She was born in the Ural village of Temlyakovo near Kurgan. In her soul, the joys of the free life of a village child like fresh milk, the white boiling of cherry thickets and the talkative Borovlyanka river flowing in the forest near the village were forever imprinted. The clear water was inhabited by a lot of all kinds of living creatures, which could be observed sitting on the shore. And if you raise your head, there were no less wonderful objects of observation in the green tangle of crowns, in the blue sky. On summer days, he and his brother and sister ran along the picturesque sandy shore, where orchids – Venus’s slipper – met, and saw beavers blocking the river with a dam.
In the seventh year of her life, her family moved to Kurgan. And three years later, the Great Patriotic War broke out. Zina’s older brother Konstantin, a lieutenant, her father Kirill Malofeevich and five of Dad’s brothers went to the front and laid down their heads on the battlefields. Sister Anya, then a 14-year-old teenager, entered the defense plant, stood at the lathe.
The beginning of the professional path
Zina decided as a schoolgirl that she would become a journalist. She was very interested in people. And there is no better reason for confidential communication with a person than a request for an interview for a newspaper. She had a need to fill her inner bins with the “grain” of human destinies. When she graduated from school in Kurgan, her road was laid out first to Sverdlovsk, to the university there, and then to Leningrad. She transferred to the Faculty of Journalism at LSU and graduated in 1955. By that time, the mother had already moved to the Far North, to Murmansk, and the daughter, as a young specialist, went there as well. As a result, she worked for 15 years in various newspapers of the Arctic – in Murmansk, on the Kola Peninsula. She participated in the creation of the youth newspaper Komsomolets Zapolyarye and became its editor-in-chief.
Prone to extreme sports, she, with a notebook and a watering can in her hands, then on dog or deer sleds, then on skis, went to the most inaccessible places of the tundra, went into the plague, climbed icebreakers, watched the northern lights, got lost in thick fog, drank icy water from the ski track… And she found wonderful heroes everywhere for her talented reports and essays. Her style, according to people who knew her, could be called “humane journalism”.
She also wrote for the central press. In the 60s, the name of a new correspondent Zinaida Chirkova, the editor-in-chief of Komsomolets Zapolyarye, flashed in the newspaper Pravda. Her essays “Sea Salt”, “Plots behind the scenes” and others attracted the attention of readers with the novelty of the themes, the depth of the disclosure of characters, the freshness and imagery of the Russian language.
Changing interests
Meanwhile, the piggy bank of life stories, images and characters of our heroine was steadily filling up. Digested in the inner cauldron, they demanded to be released in a new capacity – in the form of literary characters. So Zinaida Chirkova began her literary activity. Her first story was called signally “This is happiness”, the second – “Mistake”. Then others followed. Her first novel “Men” appeared in the Moscow magazine “October”, which was highly appreciated by the editor-in-chief of this publication Vsevolod Kochetov. In the story, a boy from an orphanage goes in search of his mother and found her… in the same orphanage in the person of the teacher.
The journalist raised the then forbidden problem of abandoned children. Then this topic was picked up and promoted by others. Alas, but a denunciation was already flying to the KGB – in this story someone found trends hostile to the system. The result is a scattered set of the second story “Your Road to the north”. The door to literature for Zinaida was shut for a long time. But she did not despair, but decided to master the profession of a cinematographer. Moreover, by that time she had already managed to get a diploma of a screenwriter, having studied for four years at VGIK (workshop of I. Vasilkov and A. Nikiforov) and successfully completed it.
Well, the story “Men” was published in a separate edition already in Chisinau, where she, along with her husband Nikolai Gibu, a classmate at VGIK, came to work permanently and became a member of the script and editorial board of the Moldova-Film studio and the author of more than 30 scripts, according to which documentaries were shot, as well as several scripts for feature films directed by Nikolai Gibu.
From a journalist to a documentary filmmaker
According to Chirkova, she and her husband decided to create a whole gallery of images of our contemporaries-workers of the 80s of the last century, from a simple rebar worker of the ZhBI-4 plant Vera Bugi to major Moldovan scientists Moskalenko brothers. “We told about the efficient chairman of the Ryshkan district executive Committee D.Gutu, about the humane chairman of the agro-cooperative V.Kozhokaru from the Brichansky district, about the talented participant of artistic activity from the village of Tsaul of the Oknitsky district Maria Raku, a doctor by profession, who played on the stage of the local House of Culture Vasilutsu from the play I. Drutse “Casa mare” and Virineu from the distant years of the civil War. In our four paintings “Greetings from 1937, 1949 and other years”, as well as “Prisoner R-886″, we tried to restore the good memory of those who innocently suffered during the years of mass repression.”
New Biography Page – Movie Editor
How did she remember 15 years of editorship? In an interview, she answers this question: “All our films at that time were released on the Union screen, so they were made in Russian. Then they were translated into Moldovan. The quality of the texts and dialogues in the picture largely depended on the editor. Those mistakes that the actors voluntarily or unwittingly made during filming, we had to correct already in the final recording when tinting the film. In addition, our knowledge of the people with whom we studied at the Institute helped us to attract professional playwrights and actors to work in Moldovan cinema, for whom we were a kind of quality guarantor. So we attracted the playwrights E. Volodarsky, A. Inin, B. Shustrov, A. Usoltsev (“Accused of Murder” (USSR State Prize), “Summer of Private Dedov”, “Fortress”, “Tony Wendis’s Mistake”, in which I was an editor) and artists of the first magnitude Klara Luchko, Boris Plotnikov, Tamara Semina, Andrei Myagkov, Larisa Luzhina, Svetlana Kryuchkova, Grigore Grigoriu for filming in Gibu’s films, according to my scripts, “Reserve Officer”, “Am I to Blame”, “Find a Horseshoe for Luck”, “The Game of Death, or an Outsider”.
“Summer of Private Dedov”
The book from the “uncomfortable life”
At the time of the nationalist frenzy, when venerable specialists were dismissed from their jobs just because they were Russian-speaking, the same fate awaited Zinaida Chirkova. She again did not get discouraged, but sat down and, according to her, “from the lack of life.”.. wrote a novel. How did this happen?
That ‘s what our heroine confessed herself: “There came a time when the situation of nationalist psychosis of a part of the population deprived us of hope for a creative perspective. An article by one of the adherents of nationalism N.Dabizhi in the newspaper “Literature of Shi Art” under the heading “Rusoachele” (Rusachki) spoke about the “negative” influence of Russian wives on cultural figures of Moldova. And I am a “rusoayka”, because my husband is a native Moldovan. Fortunately, I remembered that I can not only edit other people’s scripts as an editor. And I started writing novels. The editor-in-chief of the October magazine Kochetkov told me before: “Zina, you’re a talent! Give up this cinematography and engage in real literary creativity. You’re really good at it.” Then I didn’t listen to him, got carried away with movies and did a lot in this field. But in the new conditions, I remembered that order. She began to write novels on historical topics. There is such a series of novels “Companions and favorites”.
This is not an easy matter. It was necessary to shovel “mountains of verbal ore” (in the words of Mayakovsky), mountains of archival documents, and it took time. I wrote my first novel, The Stolen Throne, for 8 years. I was lucky with him. He was taken from me from the first presentation. But it wasn’t always like that. Sometimes, it was necessary to go around up to fifteen Moscow publishing houses to find a buyer for their products. And they didn’t pay much for such work – about a thousand dollars for a book. And it takes up to two years to write it. But a new case has covered my head. I’m surprised at myself. I just got into some kind of excitement. I wanted to prove that rusoaichele would give a head start to any Moldovan writer in a creative competition. The process of writing a novel is very similar to investigative journalism. With the difference that the events took place a long time ago. But what is curious is that when the author is in the “topic”, it’s as if someone is leading him on the trail and throws up the necessary information.”
As a result, over the last 15 years of her life, Zinaida Kirillovna wrote 10 novels. She saw them published and repeatedly reprinted in large editions in Moscow. Among them are “The Stolen Throne” (about the beginning of the reign of Catherine II and St. Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg), “The Child of Sin” (about the papess Agnes Langlois), “Count Nikita Panin”, “The Star of sad Happiness” (about Natalia Fonvizina, the wife of the Decembrist, who followed him to Siberia, the patroness of Dostoevsky, who knew the secret of the elder Fyodor Kuzmich (Alexander II), “Cabinet-Minister Artemiy Volynsky”, “Konstantin Pavlovich. Crown for love” (about the fate of the second son of Paul I and Margarita Tuchkova, abbess of the Spaso-Brodinsky Monastery), “Elizabeth Alekseevna. The Silent Empress”, “The Vizier’s Curse. Maria Cantemir”, “Around the Throne of Catherine the Great”, “Sofia the Greek and Elena Voloshanka. Mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.”
Let us give as an illustration a novel about Catherine II. Armed with extracts from archival documents, the gift of artistic analysis, imagination and intuition, she created not relishingly erotic (and there was where to roam!) and not pompously monumental, but warmed by human sympathy, a lively and voluminous image of a very peculiar, major historical figure and a great sovereign.
The mosaic novel, consisting of nine stories, tells about the most famous favorites of Catherine. According to the writer, “the glory of Russia, obtained by them, brought glory to her personally. She tried to put the country in the first place. Without a single shot, thanks to Potemkin, she “swallowed” the Crimea and the Kuban steppes – no one in Europe or Turkey dared to utter a peep, because she was strong. Such was the essence of Catherine – she could not separate love from politics. Each new lover, younger and more energetic than the previous one, plunged into the abyss of state problems. Seeing the talent and the state vein in the next chosen one, she sincerely fell in love with him and acted with maximum benefit for the Fatherland in each new hobby.
As for the fact that, having accepted Orthodoxy, she had to remember about the sin of adultery, then it cannot be said about Catherine that she was pious. Her teacher was Voltaire, so disliked by the churchmen. Each new love gave her a huge burst of vitality. In her youth, she was humiliated by the aging Elizabeth when she married her son at the age of 15. Tears were her constant refuge. She remained a virgin for 9 years, since her husband, for physiological reasons, could not carry out marital duty until, at the suggestion of Catherine, he was operated on. And immediately got himself a mistress, not hiding that it was her he wanted to see with him on the throne. Living as if in prison, Catherine knew that she would either be executed, or a monastery, or, in the case of a successful conspiracy, the throne. And she climbed on the shoulders of her beloved Orlov’s brothers.”
The landmark of the Holy Blessed
The reference point to the Blessed Saint Zinaida Chirkova has always been ebulliently cheerful. In her youth, she was engaged in volleyball, was a member of the team. She loved chess and taught this intellectual game to all her relatives. She loved to drive a car and often “reckless”, for which traffic cops fined her more than once. I stopped turning the steering wheel only after I got into a road accident. In addition, she loved gardening very much, adored digging in the suburban area, planting flower beds. Their dacha with Nikolai Gibu was a real discussion club for like-minded people. God gave Chirkova and Gibu two loving sons, of whom one – Igor Chirkov-Gibu – became a film director. Grandson Egor is studying at VGIK.
In one of her last interviews with the newspaper “AIF-Moldova” Zinaida Kirillovna said: “I gave 15 years to journalism, which taught me to look into the material and acquire ideas that roam in society. She devoted the next 15th anniversary to film activities and dramatic comprehension of this material. Then it all resulted in 15 years of novelistics as a logical continuation of the first two stages. Deftly, smoothly, someone let me down. Well, for 15 years I was a “blonde at the wheel”, I was reckless, until I got into an accident. Writing began with a script about blessed Xenia Petersburgsoy, whose role Klara Luchko wanted to play. Patriarch Alexy blessed us. But since there was no money, I made a novel. As the antipode of the main character, she brought out the Empress Catherine II – she was at the top of power and changed dresses a hundred times a day, and the other 45 years in winter and summer walked in broken shoes and torn clothes. One worked for her age and for herself, the other for heaven and people.”
Author of the article: Varvara Kartushina
