May 31, 1933
Georgy Burkov, a film director, screenwriter, and theater and film actor, was born in Perm.
"How can you kick me out? I sold my country for a car!" (Garage)
He dreamed of the stage since childhood. But four attempts to enter drama school failed due to a speech impediment. He studied law, then attended an evening studio at the Drama Theater. In 1965, he became an actor at the Stanislavsky Theater. He worked at the Sovremennik Theater and the Moscow Art Theater. In 1988, he became artistic director of the Vasily Shukshin Cultural Center, a close friend of his. In 1990, Burkov was supposed to play the president in Ryazanov's film "Promised Heaven," but broke his leg. He died two days later. He had a blood clot.
Burkov's characters' lines from films (Garage, The Irony of Fate, and others) have become widely quoted. We'll cite excerpts from his book "Chronicle of the Heart"—a diary entry the actor kept from 1953 to 1990.
*** A few hours before his death, V. M. Shukshin said to me, with a mysterious, yet solemn tone: "I think I've found a hero of our time." "Who is he?" I asked. "A demagogue"—that's how Shukshin nailed it. *** I'm a man, and I can be killed with a word. And every living person can be *** Victory in the Great Patriotic War finally destroyed the Russians. And, naturally, it allowed the Bolsheviks to hold out to this day. After all, Victory gave the right to think that the path was the right one: camps, socialist realism, etc. <…> Here's another thing: war provides no reason for heroism on either side. War is filth and murder at the very depths of consciousness. Heroism is created by ideological scum. *** The ease with which we enter foreign countries (or introduce weapons there)—Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the GDR, Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, China, Vietnam—suggests that the West has armed itself for good reason. We are professional aggressors. And we still haven't abandoned the idea of world domination, modestly calling this idea "World Revolution." Underdeveloped and talentless people continue to terrorize and rob a vast country. *** Death is not an abyss ahead, it is an abyss nearby, to the side, we walk alongside it. And death is a step aside. We let those who come after us go first.