“Antenna” visited the director’s house, which he invented himself. “It may even be too big, but in fact it’s not – there’s not enough space,” notes Yegor. Here are family heirlooms, handmade furniture.
July 17 2020
My favorite home as a child was a dacha on Nikolina Gora. Now my dad Andrey Sergeevich Konchalovsky and my uncle Nikita Sergeevich Mikhalkov live on this site. The happiest time I have is associated with this place, the river, with my grandmother Natalya Petrovna Konchalovskaya. Therefore, I have always dreamed of living outside the city and now settled in the suburbs.
This does not mean that I don’t visit Moscow – I have an apartment there, but I haven’t spent the night in the capital for 8-10 years. I have always dreamed of building a house, and fortunately, this village turned up, and mostly cinematic, since most of the inhabitants are from the world of cinema. I am honored to be the chairman of this cooperative. There were amazing people selling plots here – actors Oleg Yankovsky, Valery Priemykhov and director Eldor Urazbayev, from whom I bought three small plots. All of them are already in another world, but the earth remained, and I live on it.
I built a house of my own design. Of course, there were mistakes: I didn’t do something, I didn’t finish something, but basically everything worked out. The main principle of my home: for good relationships in both large and small families, it is important to be able not to see each other. It’s nice to hear how my mother Natalya Utelevna Arinbasarova cooks soup in the kitchen, how my son Timur runs under the window (in April he turned 3 years old. – Approx. “Antenna”), someone is vacuuming. That is, life goes on, but no one touches you and does not even see you. And you don’t see them. I wanted – I saw. I think that after the forced self-isolation, people will understand me very much.
Mom has absolutely her own zone: no one goes there when she is not there, because she does not like it. Children’s territory – separately. The biggest, of course, was mine: I was building a house at 40, and my selfish feelings were higher than they are now, so I allocated more space for myself.
The house is built in English style. Over the past 20 years, I have fallen out of love with England, although I used to respect it very much, and studied and lived there for a long time, even thought in English. But I still like their style. Some memories from my Cambridge and Oxford past – in the appearance of buildings.
There are no purchased furniture here at all. Almost all are handmade. I have been inventing interiors myself for a long time. It’s easier to find a picture and show it to the master, so that he does exactly that, than to look at a thousand cabinets. So I created 5 or 6 interiors in my apartments – and I got a little tired. Now I would rather buy ready-made furniture. But in this house there are very few bought, almost everything is done, redone and restored. Or there is some kind of antique furniture, which I was fond of at one time. However, this hobby is expensive, so I have not collected a huge collection of antiques, and the items are not particularly valuable. There are several things that are symbolically related to what I do.
I am friends with the adopted son of the brilliant director Sergei Parajanov. And in my bedroom there is a wardrobe that perished in the boiler room of Mosfilm, and he offered me to save it and take it for myself. The cabinetmaker Anvar, famous for making the cabinets for the general secretaries in the Kremlin by hand, restored this cabinet. We store clothes in it.
Or here is the table at which, working in his father’s apartment, Andrei Tarkovsky was sitting and writing the script for the film “Ivan’s Childhood”. He often stayed with his father because they worked late.
And the third item that is very dear to me is an armchair from the house of the great writer Yuri Nagibin. We were in close contact with him in London, where he and my father wrote the script for the film about Rachmaninov, which has not yet been filmed. And I just moved to the UK to study. Nagibin made a huge impression on me. Once I said to him: “How quickly the week has flown by,” and he replied that the whole life will fly by so quickly. It was 35 years ago, but it was like yesterday. And somehow his furniture was being sold, and I allowed myself to buy that very chair.
I studied a lot in various educational institutions and, being a poor student, lived in small spaces. It was my job to be in control of my things. You couldn’t buy an extra CD, book, or shirt. I bought a new one – I need to give the old one, because there is nowhere to hang it. On the one hand, it’s good – you don’t get lost. But on the other hand, it’s tiresome. Therefore, I wanted my own house to be large. It may even be too big, but in fact it is not – there is already not enough space.
On the site I plant trees that I bring from the shooting. I have a larch growing from the top of a volcano on Iturup Island, which I myself dug up and brought back. There is larch from Magnitogorsk, birch from Khabarovsk, two oaks from Minsk. Unfortunately, the larch from Karelia, where we filmed the film “On the Moon” last year, has dried up.
Maybe it’s age-related, but it began to give me great pleasure to watch the life of plants. They are animate and they have an informational essence that they get from the water.
I am against landscaping. I planted a tree – and let it grow as it should. If they start to conflict with each other, then we cut it off somewhere. But I am not a gardener or a gardener. The absolute achievement of my and my mother’s efforts was a tiny carrot – just a nanomarrot. We have a difficult land – loam, little grows. But there was once an ornithological reserve here, and until now, songbirds and other birds have remained.
Pictures … You cannot imagine how strong the Soviet painting school was. When you are in Tashkent, Bishkek, Alma-Ata, you can buy high-quality paintings of classical socialist realist painting there for a thousand rubles. Wherever I go, everywhere I try to get one or two paintings, prints, art photographs, sculpture.
Dad really liked the house for two reasons: firstly, there are many aesthetic solutions – design and technical, taken from him. It was he who long ago decided how to arrange everything here, for example, a small tea and coffee corner on the third floor. Secondly, he is to some extent an Anglomaniac, at one time he lived in London and, I think, would like to have such a house, although he has his own wonderful wooden structure, completely different.
My territory is an archive, everything is put together for work. This book is a family heirloom, it came from my father. In it, up to a certain year, the birth and death of our ancestors were recorded. For example, Voldemar: was born on July 3, 1817 at 6:50 am. And then Voldemar died in 1905. I don’t know how it was recorded. He might be some kind of great-nephew. And so on by years: 1820, 1847, 1865 … And all this in French. Natasha was born on May 20, 1822. Of course, I wanted to record here both Timur and Masha (the director’s 19-year-old daughter. – Approx. “Antenna”). I myself am not recorded there. The recording ended at some point and did not resume again.
Engravings from my English college, which I graduated from Cambridge University in 1994 (in the photo above – approx. ed.). This is the XNUMXth century, when sheep roamed there. And here I lived. By the way, this college graduated from Harvard, who then went to America and founded his own college in Cambridge.
And our family coat of arms (in the photo above – approx. ed.). Some fool, maybe I, used to hammer carnations with them as a child. And we all, the Mikhalkovs, wear this coat of arms on our little finger.
Approx. Antennas: the coat of arms of the Mikhalkov family was included in the general coat of arms of the noble families of the Russian Empire. The shield on it is divided perpendicularly into two parts, of which in the first, in a red field, half can be seen flying out a white eagle with an outstretched wing, holding a silver sword entwined with laurels in its paw, and a silver hexagonal star above the eagle. In the left part, divided diagonally to the lower right corner into two fields: blue and red, there is a hexagonal golden star. The shield is crowned with a noble helmet and crown. Crest: three ostrich feathers. Basting blue on the shield, enclosed in gold.