Maybe I won't live to see it...

The name of Gennady Shpalikov, a poet and screenwriter, is inextricably linked with the "thaw," that brief but remarkably fresh breath of freedom that resonated in various ways in the art of the generation of the sixties. He wrote poetry... all his life; it was included in his scripts and became songs. The song "The little white steamboat" and the songs from the film "I Walk Around Moscow" were sung by the entire country. In 1966, Shpalikov directed the film "A Long Happy Life" based on his own script, which won the Grand Prix at the International Festival of Author's Cinema in Bergamo but remained unnoticed in the USSR, just like many of his cinematic works. Gennady Shpalikov did not have a long or happy life, but the rays of "gentle hopelessness" and that amazing feeling of happiness from simple things still shine for us in the texts he created.