Especially for “Antenna”, the actress took out of the bins a collection of pigs, which she had been collecting since 1975.
December 30 2018
– The first piglet was presented to me by the artist with whom we worked on the painting “The Elder Son”, Oksana Kokovkina, her memory is blessed, – tells “Antenna” Svetlana Kryuchkova… – She sewed it by hand and elegantly decorated it with beads. And it all started with her: someone saw a toy from me and gave me another. All my colleagues from their foreign tours brought a copy.
And I didn’t mind. I treat pigs as animals well, and I treat people who were born in the year of the Pig even better. They are very good friends. They are clean both physically and spiritually – these are the most decent people.
The collection of pigs was kept in my attic. Two or three years ago I shook it up – and I gave it entirely to my close friend, Honored Artist of Russia Elena Ternova. Because for her it has a special meaning: Elena Evgenievna plays at the Zazerkalye Theater in St. Petersburg, where we both live, the role of pig Khavronya Ivanovna in the play Kashtanka by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. She plays so well that she even won one of the most prestigious theatrical awards for this work – the Golden Mask in the Best Female Role in Operetta / Musical nomination in 1999, that year we met her. I gave it entirely. I do not mind.
I live by the principle: what you left is lost, what you gave is yours. The person looks at the gift and remembers you. Who’s going to look at this in your house? My sons live far away (the eldest, 37-year-old Dmitry, is in France, from him the actress has two grandchildren – Anton and Polina; the youngest, 28-year-old Alexander, studies in Belgium at the conservatory, comes to concerts with his mother as a guitarist. Note “Antennas”). And there is no place to store all this stuff. Recently she presented 20 boxes of books to our Leningrad library – let the younger generation read.
“Those born in the year of the Pig are the most decent people”
– 20 years ago I saw Svetochka on TV on the Blue Pages. Night conversation with Alexei Lushnikov “, – shares with” Antenna ” Elena Ternovaya… – By that time, I knew how an excellent artist, respected and loved, but I was not personally acquainted with her. I phoned the editorial office on the phone and invited me to my performance. She said right during the broadcast that she would come. And she came! It was destiny. She liked the production and went backstage to get to know each other. And since then we have been friends for 20 years. We are soul mates, sisters. We support each other in both joy and sorrow. We help. We have more family relations than friendships.
The collection that Svetochka donated is kept in a suitcase on the balcony of my apartment. There are many piggy banks, and at the same time very, very old. Svetochka threw Soviet coins into them. Now you can’t get them out of there: now they make piggy banks such that they took out the cork and took out all the contents. And before, it was necessary to break it. And how to break such antiquity and beauty? No, sorry. But you can still extract coins from some of the piggy banks without damaging them. Thanks to this, I unwittingly became a numismatist. Such is the treasure to add to the collection. Those coins went out of circulation a long time ago, so the treasure may be stupid, or, on the contrary, priceless. Now we phoned Svetochka – we agreed that we will honestly divide everything that I am skillful with her in half.