Lake and Island

When I think of Anton Vasilyev's creativity, I always recall the lines from Nekrasov that touched my soul during my school years from the classical poetic dialogue «The Poet and the Citizen»:
Counted are the pure-hearted,
To whom the homeland is sacred.
God... help them!..
I have known Anton Vasilyev for many years since I had the opportunity to publish his father, Sergey Vasilyev's poem, «The Dove of My Childhood», in the Urals in the 1970s. This poem was praised by A.M. Gorky at the time.
Anton Sergeyevich was a young screenwriter and documentary film director at that time. I don't know if he wrote poetry during those years. If he did, he showed it to no one.
You may not be a poet,
But you must be a citizen. (N.A. Nekrasov)
«To be or not to be?» everyone decides for themselves. But in Vasilyev's films, an active civic position is always discernible: concern for preserving our historical memory, pain for the destroyed Orthodox churches, for the dehydrated Russian lands and drying rivers. His films-conversations with the classics of Russian literature are also significant.