Eldar Ryazanov

Origins and early life

Eldar Ryazanov was born in Samara on 18 November 1927; his mother, Sofia Shusterman, was Jewish, the daughter of Moisei and Frida Shusterman, shopkeepers from Rezekne in Latvia, and his father, Alexander Ryazanov, a Russian trade official, was arrested in 1938 and spent seventeen years in the camps — a family history that the Russian-language sources document with the care of an archive, and which this fiche records as the basis of his place here.

He graduated in 1950 from the Moscow film school VGIK, in the class of Grigori Kozintsev, and spent five years making newsreels before Ivan Pyryev of Mosfilm handed him a musical comedy: Carnival Night, in 1956, made Lyudmila Gurchenko a star and Ryazanov the master of a genre the Soviet cinema barely had.

Work and career

For forty years he made the comedies by which the country recognized itself — Hussar Ballad, Beware of the Car, The Garage, Station for Two, A Cruel Romance — sad, humane comedies about ordinary people caught in the absurdities of everyday Soviet life. The Irony of Fate, first shown on television on 1 January 1976, became a ritual: broadcast every New Year's Eve for half a century, its story of a drunk Muscovite who wakes up in an identical flat in an identical street in Leningrad is known by heart by several generations, and Office Romance, in 1977, drew fifty-eight million spectators. People's Artist of the USSR in 1984, poet, television host, he died in Moscow on 30 November 2015, at eighty-eight.