They rarely write about Leonid Gaidai, the creator of the most beloved comedies in our country. The undoubted general availability of his paintings in the eyes of many experts turns into seeming simplicity: they say, Gaidai is so elementary that there is nothing to tell about him. Film critic and postmodernist writer Evgeny Novitsky categorically disagrees with such statements. In the biography he wrote, Leonid Gaidai appears not just as an outstanding Soviet comedian, but as a true genius of world cinema, not inferior to such figures as Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick. The book argues with the established opinion in Russian film studies that the “late Gaidai” consists entirely of creative failures. In the author’s opinion, Leonid Iovich did not have a single failed film, and all together they form a surprisingly harmonious, intelligible, consistent “collection of film works”, the sophistication of which could be envied by the most prominent masters of classical auteur cinema.

[ Adapted for AlReader]