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• 1 2018-10-08T23:56:22-07:00 Gaidai Memorial 31 plain 2018-12-15T21:24:00-08:00 At the center of Irkutsk, between Kirov Square and Karl Marx Street stands Labor Square, a major pedestrian walkway on the route to the city’s central market. On the square is an unusual looking monument to Soviet film director Leonid Gaidai. Not many people are familiar with his works in the United States, but Gaidai’s films are very popular in Russia.
  The monument depicts four individuals and a dog during a shoot for the film “Caucasus Captive”, one of Gaidai’s many famous comedy films. On one side there is the sitting director and his dog behind a camera, and on the other are characters from the film, Trus, Balbes, and Bivali. Just like in the famous scene from the film, they are holding hands and blocking a road in order to prevent the film’s female lead from escaping.
  
  The monument was erected in 2012. Many distinguished guests attended the opening ceremony, such as Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi and actors Valeri Zolotukhin and Svetlana Svetlichnaya, the latter of whom played a role in a later Gaidai comedy, “The Diamond Arm”(Iloshvai: 2012).
  
  Gaidai’s life and upbringing are very much tied to Irkutsk. His family moved to Irkutsk when he was very young because his father worked on the railroad network in Siberia and in the Far East. His first theater-related job came when he worked at the regional drama theater on Karl Marx Street. Like many at this time, Gaidai’s aspirations were put on hold when war broke out and he left for the front in 1941. His time there was short, for the following year he was wounded and allowed to return home. After the war he resumed his work at the theater until 1949, when he left for Moscow in order to study at the prestigious Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. Gaidai’s early films were not very successful, but in 1965 he released “Operation Y and other Adventures of Shurik” to much fanfare. Sequels such as “Caucasus Captive” and “Ivan Vasilyevich Changes Profession” were subsequently released (Petrov: 2010). “Gaidai's best films are usually quasi-silent and relegate narrative to a secondary position in order to foreground the visual. Their focus is on visual aggression directed at the viewer through slapstick gags, surprise tricks, or dizzying chase,” (Prokhorov, 458:2003). Gaidai’s films are loved by all Russians and his memory lives on in memorials such as the one in Irkutsk.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Iloshvai, Artem. “Pamjatnik Gajdaju i gerojam ego fil'mov otkryli v Irkutske.” GazetaIrkutsk, 10 Oct. 2012. http://www.gazetairkutsk.ru/2012/10/10/id62815/.
  
  Petrov, Alexander. Leonid Gajdaj — genij komedii. 2010. http://leonid-gaidai.ru/index.php. Accessed 12 July 2018.
  
  Prokhorov, Aleksandr. “Cinema of Attractions versus Narrative Cinema: Leonid Gaidai's Comedies and El'dar Riazanov's Satires of the 1960s.” Slavic Review, Vol. 62, No. 3, 2003, pp. 457-458.
  
  Photo: Caucasus Captive. Directed by Leonid Gaidai, performances by Aleksandr Demyanenko, Natalya Varley, Yuri Nikulin, Georgi Vitsin, and Yevgeni Morgunov, Mosfilm, 1967.