АктёрAktyor

Early in 1958 Tarkovsky went to Ashgabat on a writers’ assignment and met a woman about whom, as his daughter Marina Tarkovskaya writes in Sudba moya sgorela mezhdu strok (“My fate burned down between the lines”), “we know almost nothing”: she gave him a few months of real happiness. “Poet friends” carried the news to Moscow, his wife’s telegrams about a sudden illness and an urgent operation called him home, and in June, November and December 1958 he wrote poems about that “stolen love.” He never gathered them into a cycle himself; Marina Tarkovskaya prints “The Actor” among them, and in the 2017 collection she compiled, “The Actor” opens the cycle “What happiness was stolen from me…”

This was probably the most painstaking selection of “candidates” for a song: the shortlist held 14 versions, which I broke down by their stats, like a character in some RPG. Four made it to the final; I showed them to my sister Sasha, and it was her love for this one that tipped the scales. The three finalists left over are still sitting in my notes, waiting their turn to become another song.

Paradoxically, I did not like the version I chose more than the others, but it was, without a doubt, the most distinctive and unexpected — a criterion I later raised to one of the most important. What I didn’t like was mostly the chorus: I wanted something more varied and harmonious there, and the Suno of the day wouldn’t let you try it “another way.” And now I listen and think: of course — what else could possibly have been there?