Upon returning to a war-torn Leningrad, Nadezhda Kosheverova filmed a fairytale. With Zolushka she turned her back on reality and took a resolutely aesthetic perspective. Faithful to individuals and ideas, she surrounded herself with close collaborators and longtime friends. Theatre director and production designer Nikolay Akimov (1901- 1968) had been her first husband (in 1953 she would film his production of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Teni/ Shadows). He had been collaborating for 20 years with the playwright and satirist Evgeny Schwartz (1896-1958), who wrote the screenplay. Schwartz wrote plays that incorporated fairytale elements with contemporary allusions (here, to name one example, about the importance of being well-connected) – and his vitriolic humour earned him numerous bans. He wasn’t taking that risk with Zolushka but, instead of making a fairytale that conformed to the dominant ideology, as Aleksandr Ptushko was doing in his films, he wrote lines that would delight Soviet audiences for a long time afterwards.
Unlike Ptushko’s Kamennyy tsvetok (The Stone Flower) made in Moscow and filmed in Sovcolor the previous year, Zolushka had to be shot in black and white. However, Nikolay Akimov’s colour sketches have been preserved (many of those sketches have been published in colour in Peter Bagrov’s book, Zolushka, zhiteli skazochnogo korolevstva, ZAO, Moscow 2011) and they give an idea of the intense desire to create a synthetic world, evoking miniature art, book illustrators or theater decorators at the end of the 19th century.
Kosheverova’s co-director was Mikhail Shapiro (1908-1971), also from Leningrad, for the second of their three collaborations. Above all, she fought to give the main role to Yanina Zheymo (1909- 1987), one of FEKS’s greatest talents (in two short films by Antonina Kudriavtseva, Schwartz had created for Zheymo the comic character of Lenochka), despite her age. “We don’t need”, said Kosheverova, “a budding sexuality to make the role a success, but a kindness, spontaneity and child-like innocence. And no one can play that better than Yanina Zheymo. Even at the age of 37”. She was supported by enthusiastic actors Erast Garin and Faina Ranevskaya. This creative reunion made the film an immediate and lasting success, achieving the dubious triumph of being colourised in 2009.

Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz