Faina Ranevskaya. Life as Told by Herself

“My father was a poor oilman…” – it was believed that only this anecdotal phrase survived from Faina Ranevskaya's memoirs: she burned all the other writings, returning the advance to the publishing house, and her legendary witticisms and aphorisms are mainly known through retellings.
But Bulgakov's Woland was right: manuscripts don’t burn, and this book is a unique opportunity to hear the living voice of the great actress, who could only drop her usual mask and speak candidly, not for the public, “in the first person”… Do you know that Faina Georgievna hated this “winged phrase” “Mula, don’t annoy me!”, which made her famous, and spoke disparagingly of her film roles: “another clowness, not Vassa Zheleznova!”, fearing to be remembered by audiences merely as a source of verbal “gems” and anecdotes? Do you know that, in addition to the title of People’s Artist of the USSR, the Orders of Lenin and the Red Banner of Labor, she also received three Stalin Prizes, although she referred to awards as “funeral accessories”? Do you know that beneath the guise of “Mula,” the eternal mocker and swearer, lay the creative tragedy of a genius actress who never learned to appreciate her comedic gift?..
This book is not a memoir, not a collection of well-known jokes and “gags”; from these pages, the voice of a completely different, true, tragic Ranevskaya resonates, whose cutting remarks were always LAUGHTER THROUGH TEARS.