Arkady Raikin died a whole epoch ago, back in 1987, but people still remember him and enjoy his gags. Raikin’s humor was democratic – he was equally admired by academics and housewives, engineers and flushers. He burlesqued the Soviet reality, bygone Soviet types and complexes, but for some reason his gags still sound fresh and funny. Mr Raikin probably cracked the nature of the hilarious – the secret known only to great humorists.
A great stand-up comedian of the 20th century, Arkady Raikin was a sheer national phenomenon. Traveling all over the world and eliciting stormy applause everywhere, he nevertheless was hardly understood and duly appreciated anywhere else beyond his homeland which then covered one sixth of the planet’s land.
Too much in his art derived from our common Soviet mentality.
His noble appearance and his amazing gift of impersonation and dramatic identification, which did not even require wearing special masks, were the tests of a great actor prized by any theatre-goer on the planet. But only his fellow countrymen could truly understand and appreciate his “Greek hall adventure”, his bent-back demonstration of the cheese “freshness,” his parody of Soviet bureaucrats who give some important men a tinkle or a sleepy boss with disheveled hair running to his office in his wife’s shoes – the entire wide array of personified “individual shortcomings.” People of Russia were screaming with laughter and swarming into concert halls to enjoy his performance.
From our present-day angle Raikin’s skits (written by best national authors) seem just amiable pranks. In the suffocating atmosphere of Soviet censorship it was the bearers of individual shortcomings who became Raikin’s heroes. The actor repeatedly followed up his artistically powerful gags and skits with high-flown inspiration and verve. Yet it is the former, rather than the latter, that immortalized the name of Arkady Raikin. With years it becomes ever more apparent that his skits are simply unmatched and unsurpassed.
While transforming into louts and thieves, souses and boneheads, bureaucrats and red-tapists on the stage, Raikin had always been a true gentleman. People saw an intellectual and smart cookie on the stage who knew a lot more than he expressed verbally. But this was an actor of genius with a fantastic drive and an incredible technique of momentary dramatic identification. Each of his gags immediately turned into a double festival. The contact of Arkady Raikin with his audience was fundamentally different than the contact of contemporary stand-up comedians with the modern show-goers. He deliberately made his texts universally understandable, since high-browed humor would never win such a mass audience. Yet the actor proceeded a priori from respect for each spectator, recognition of his or her wit, taste and sense of humor. Raikin never stood above the crowd and never curried favor with the crowd. Many of his gags were permeated with outright sadness and many – with high seasoned scoffs – but he never smacked down.
Arkady Raikin occasionally performed melodic and subtle songs. “And we felt the smell of sauerkraut from the neighboring courtyard,” sang the actor like a hidalgo under the balcony. “The kind spectator in the ninth row” was Raikin’s hit that expressed the very principle of his relationship with the audience.
The great comedian reigned supreme in the revue theatre he himself founded. All other actors, even the most talented ones, either left for other theatres (that was the choice of Roman Kartsev) or agreed to the “side-order” role. It was pointless to challenge that disposition, for this was a theatre of Arkady Raikin, the theatre of his numerous personages whom nobody else could represent better than him. On the other hand, many now famous actors do not hide that they are direct heirs of Raikin: Sergey Yursky, Gennady Khazanov, Alexander Kalyagin and others.
Arkady Raikin himself was repeatedly compared with Charlie Chaplin – not only because both were great comedians, but also because the art of those actors always appealed to common man, took human imperfections close to heart, was relentless towards vices, but charitable towards human weaknesses. Arkady Raikin created a grand-scale human comedy of national living on the stage all by himself.
Natalia Kaminskaya
