Yury Nikulin. The words “great” and “legend” were imagined by mankind at one point to describe people like this. Nikulin, the great clown, the great actor, the great man. Funny as hell and as warm, human and as personable as they come. Without Nikulin you’d have to downgrade Soviet comic cinema by 50%. This guy was like Chaplin but not a copy in any way. His characters were clumsy, silly, sometimes stupid and almost always naive. They were so rich in heart, so lovable, so vulnerable, that you felt about them the way you felt about your fuzzy-blankey, your teddy-bear, your imaginary friend, whatever it was that meant warmth and love when you were a child.
I remember Nikulin for all that, for every film I have ever seen rerun on television over the last quarter century (I arrived here too late to see any of them in original release), but what I really remember him for was seeing him joke with the coat-check women at the coat rack at the Actors House on Arbat. He was bigger than life – a very big man, tall and broad. But he was Yury Nikulin, so when he would walk into the Actors House it was rather like the world drew back to let him pass. Smiles appeared on the faces of everyone present. People stopped what they were doing, even if it was just walking by. They watched him and smiled and it was as though you could feel them becoming better people for those brief moments. The rest of us had to turn our coats over to the coat-check woman for which we were given a little plastic tag to keep until we wanted our coat back. Nikulin just walked into the coat-check area and hung his own coat up in the back. No waiting in line for him, coming or going. And the whole while he cracked jokes, told anecdotes, teased the coat-check women and make them blush and laugh – not because they were uncomfortable, but because they were so flattered. This guy was History moving amongst us. He was Greatness and Humanity, all in one. He was one of those people who make you wonder if genuine Greatness requires this kind of warmth and humility. It probably doesn’t, but in my more sentimental moments I might be convinced to say I wish it did. The photos posted here were taken on a rainy day in front of the Circus on Tsvetnoi Boulevard, where Nikulin worked for, it seemed, an entire age. Wikipedia tells me his dates were 1921 to 1997, and my mind I can’t possibly believe it has been 17 years or more since I last saw Nikulin cutting up with the coat-check women at the Actors House.
Russian Culture in Landmarks 