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‘Do you have an extra ticket?’
In the mid-1980s, various local comedy festivals were very popular in Minsk. Particularly popular was the April Humorina festival, which featured a festival of ‘theater skit shows’ from the capital's theaters. Tickets for these ‘theater skit shows’ were, as they say, hard to come by. And our hero, Nikolay Studnev, was the chief director of all these super-popular comedy shows. He was even nicknamed ‘the minister of laughter.’
That spring, the Taganka Theatre came to Minsk. The theater's audience, naturally, was eager to see the capital's renowned touring performers. But it would have been a sin to miss the Humorina and, most importantly, the skits!
Lily's colleagues from the theater went off to see Moscow stars, and Grigaliunas asked her to go get invitation tickets to Humorina.
Having received tickets from Nikolay, she lingered in the auditorium, unable to tear herself away from the rehearsal. Nikolay noticed a girl sitting in the empty auditorium. She was laughing, quietly applauding, her eyes sparkling… It was as if he were seeing her for the first time. And for the first time, he clearly understood that he didn't want her to leave.
Quickly going down to the hall, he approached her and asked: ‘Please stay...’ Liliya smiled... and stayed.
Her gentle smile could be interpreted in any number of ways. But she was smiling because she had recently turned 21...
‘This is my girlfriend!’
Love is truly a mysterious thing! People destined for each other may walk different paths, see each other only occasionally or briefly, meet and talk about the most trivial things… What does it take for the miracle of recognition to happen? What ‘formula of love’ must be uttered for the pendulum of fate to swing in the right direction?
Everything is prosaic only at first glance—behind great Love there is always high Poetry...
While running errands through the city's Youth Center, Nikolay encountered an acquaintance. The acquaintance glanced at a slender girl retreating down the hallway: ‘Look, how beautiful...’ Nikolay was in a great mood that day and immediately seized the initiative. ‘That's my girlfriend!’ And within seconds, he had caught up with her. When she turned around, Nikolay saw familiar dark eyes and a familiar sweet smile.
They started seeing each other. So often that they realized: it’s better never to part.
‘As a sign of love and fidelity...’
Nikolay had no idea he was simply keeping his word, given in a cherished dream to eight-year-old Liliya. She was twenty-two when they married.
<…> Instead of rings, the newlyweds exchanged zodiac signs. <…>
It happened, ‘as predicted,’ in 1987, on July 18. <…>
Do they have weekdays? [Information as of 2000.]
Of course! Nikolay Studnev is the principal director of the Palace of the Republic, and he doesn't consider film directing a ‘closed subject’ either (remember his outrageously mischievous film Mona Lisa, with its songs and poems, pranks and parodies, which defies any genre definition?). He writes screenplays and is preparing a book for publication, which, even in its manuscript form, promises to be a sensation...
Liliya Studneva is a singer and actress. Her creative output includes the CD Persianochka [1997, reissued in 2006] featuring songs based on Marina Tsvetaeva's poems and the concert program ‘Other People's Songs.’ Bulat Okudzhava, upon hearing Liliya sing his Trubach, said he couldn't do it at that way, but God had commanded her... Her latest project, in which she collaborated with renowned performer Aleksey Shedko, is the musical and choreographic cycle Wings by composer Sergey Beltyukov. Many years later, Liliya returned to Rozhdestvensky's poetry: it was his poems that once prophesied her happiness." — author of the text Yulia Leshko, 2000.
The text insertion is finished. Now a few words from me.
When I met this married couple at the end of 1991 and then I communicated with them until the end of 1993—about 2 years with fairly frequent meetings, there were months when we practically did not see each other, but if there was some work to organize another fest or an artist’s concert, then we saw each other daily for 1–2 weeks.
I always thought Liliya was about 38 in 1993. I was 20 then, and I was sure she was 18 years older than me. She didn't look like a young woman of 28. Consequently, I treated her more like a mother than a slightly older woman. Her behavior was also deliberately energetic. Yes, she was shining with energy, but she did it the way women in their 40s do when they want to appear little girls—pretty artificially. In real life, I never saw in her the naturalness that young people possess.
Another interesting fact: the Internet indicates that she graduated from the Belarusian State University (BSU) in 1985, in the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science (they teach programmers there).
Her husband was quite the playboy, he was liked by all the women around him without exception and he knew it.
However, this married couple was attractive to me, and I was, of course, enchanted by both of them. This is an endearing quality of creative people. You fall in love with artists because they represent something different from the average person. And this quality is more evident on stage than in real life.
On May 29, 2026 at 8:51 pm I accidentally stumbled upon this VK post from July 30, 2025 at 7:55 pm by Lera (Valeria) Studneva. I was surprised, then started thinking, then went to bed, slept for 20 minutes. I woke up, and suddenly it dawned on me:
I took Liliya's year of birth—1965—and added eight years to it ("Liliya was eight years old when she had a strange, mysterious dream.") —and got that her future husband appeared to her in 1973! That is, Fate intervened in her life and began to lead her down a certain path starting in 1973, the year I was born.
Here are two more links about Liliya:
The most unconventional singer: Liliya Studneva (April 18, 2006, link in Russian)
https://nestor.minsk.by/mg/news/2006/04/1810.html
My audience is the intelligentsia! (July 12, 2008, link in Russian)
https://www.sb.by/articles/moya-auditoriya-intelligentsiya.html
On May 30, 2026 at 5:35 pm I was surprised to find this:
Liliya Studneva (Zakharkina) (this is the first post from July 27, 2025, the next post from July 31, 2025 contains an article from the magazine "On Screens," which I previously found on her daughter's VK, link in Russian)
https://vk.com/id1061753101
"So, I'm online. No, not on social media. Although I'm on that too. A retrograde, a hardened conservative, a human who has spent twenty years hiding from civilization and progress on the small island of my family and my beloved work. For a while now, I've enjoyed being ‘behind the scenes.’ And everything would still be the same, if not for certain events.
The first is that I turned 60. It's an important milestone, and the time has come to think about my memoirs. Don't let my many, or not so many, detractors from the past flinch: this isn't about them. There are more important things. I want to talk about my Love Story and the fruits of that love and creativity.
About other events that prompted me to register on VKontakte—later.
I am Liliya Studneva. The daughter of teachers. A loving and beloved daughter, sister, wife, and mother. A dreamer and romantic, a singer and actress, the founder, director, and artistic director of the Liliya Studneva Song Theater. Almost twenty years ago, I ‘left the stage,’ as they say. But my creative children, born of love, remain with me and in my heart. They are beautiful.
That's what I want to talk about. One article at the time had the headline, ‘Liliya Studneva has reached the masses.’ I sang at a time when the Internet didn't exist. Let Nikolay Ivanovich and I have our beloved creative children who are ‘coming out to the masses.’"
An actor's life
Liliya Studneva sent me to be tutored by a friend of hers who ran a literary reading group. I and a few other enthusiasts would meet twice a week at the Minsk Railway Workers Culture Palace (7 Chkalava Street) in a small room furnished only with chairs and a piano, and we'd read the same thing to each other endlessly. I was, of course, unsuccessful, and they probably work with me because I was the only boy in the group.
I spent several months dabbling in this nonsense, with predictably zero results, until I accidentally stumbled upon a rehearsal at one of the most famous folk theaters in Minsk at the time (now located in this building (or nearby) on Moskovskaya Street— the "Variety Theater"). I was incredibly drawn to the theater's warm, creative atmosphere, and I began attending all the rehearsals, first as a spectator, and then I was given the opportunity to participate in the crowd scene.
It was a unique folk theater, led by a true professional theater director, a student of Anatoly Efros. Unfortunately, I don't remember the director's name. He was staging, or rather restoring, his own production of Alexander Volodin's play "Two Arrows."
We, the actors of the folk theater, worked like horses for hours every day, and almost no one had any role! All the leading roles went to just a few actors; the remaining 10–12 people in the troupe dreamed of only bit parts. Those who didn't get anything were, like me, extras in the crowd.
Over the two years I spent with this company, I grew from a nobody to a weak actor who might well be entrusted with a bit part in the future. It's the kind of role where you appear on stage a couple of times per performance and maybe even say a few words. I was incredibly proud of my progress, and I really enjoyed everything there. In fact, I did make progress, because to play even a small role on stage, you need to be an actor.
Who are actors and how are they different from ordinary people? And this is no joke: actors are very different from common people.
First, their psyches must be as flexible as plasticine; they must be able to instantly ‘adapt’ to their partner. We had numerous exercises where it was essential to hit the same emotional note with the partner, to reflect and complement their emotions. This is very difficult and, in fact, is the foundation of the acting profession, because even if you're a star and perform brilliantly solo, you need the support of the other actors onstage and backstage. When one part of the troupe performed onstage during rehearsal, the other part, sitting in the audience, provided emotional support to those onstage.
Second, actors tend to have a childlike, unmediated way of thinking. When they regularly ‘get into character,’ the part of their personality responsible for everyday life becomes dormant and doesn't develop.
It's typical for their souls to admire and rejoice wildly over the simplest things. This also happens because an artist's soul must be simple and uncomplicated, so they can more easily ‘take on the role.’ My soul, however, was overly complex, and this became my main problem on stage; as a result, almost nothing worked.
Third, it's the artist's openness by the soul, as an actor performs not only with their body but also with their soul, and their soul must be large and beautiful. If an actor is regularly on stage, his soul blossoms. The stage is a magical place; anyone who has been on stage even once, and has a tendency for this profession, will never forget it and will be drawn back in the future.
The nature of an actor is multifaceted, and in addition to the obvious skills of transformation (which is characteristic of a very small number of actors) and the brightness of talent (which is achieved through cultural education and the natural beauty of the Soul), a good memory and masterful control of one's body and voice, there are also little-known aspects of this profession.
The most important, little-known aspect is the ability to perform the same play over and over again, each time anew and differently. Even the extras in our troupe, sitting in the audience, tried to internally re-enact the action onstage. On the one hand, they thus emotionally supported the actors on stage, and on the other, they developed the necessary skill of experiencing the same event anew each time. In reality, this is extremely difficult and requires special psychological preparation.
Intention in Stanislavski’s System
Despite the fact that, in essence, we were an ordinary folk theatre, we seriously studied the "Stanislavski’s System" ("Stanislavsky method").
This system is fully described in K.S. Stanislavski's book "The Actor's Work on Himself," which was published in 1938 (it was developed earlier, between 1900 and 1910). Here's one modern interpretation:
(link unavailable)
"The Stanislavski’s System is a theory of stage acting developed by the famous Russian actor and director K.S. Stanislavski and designed to impart realism and psychological authenticity to dramatic performance. Researchers of the Stanislavski’s System believe that it provides actors not with rules, but with tools for behavior and communication. There are numerous working versions of the System, as well as borrowings of Stanislavsky's basic principles by other sciences and professional fields. Therefore, the concept of Stanislavski’s System, originally developed for theater professionals, is perceived as a metaphorical term denoting the foundations of the art of transformation, acting, manipulation, ‘reading’ and understanding people. <…>
Back in the 1930s, he taught that soul and body form a unity. <…>
Stanislavski advised investing one's energy in those aspects of behavior that can be controlled. These are primarily attention, purpose and action. Stanislavski advised actors to think about actions and goals. Emotions (feelings) will come naturally. When organizing an activity, the appropriate tools are important: attention, goal-setting (intention), and action. And the desired feeling (emotion) will emerge as a consequence.
Stanislavski's discoveries reveal what we can control (action, intention, attention) and what we cannot (feeling, emotion). As Stanislavski understood, our moment-to-moment choices of attention, intention, and action shape our lives. He understood this to be a law of nature, one that must be followed to achieve success and competence in one's chosen professional field. Stanislavski's goal was to create a method by which one can think, feel and act as the character would feel, think and act—and yet behave as naturally onstage as in real life."
Intention, or action in the broad sense, implying not only external action but also internal action, is a natural mechanism that a person can control, and a feeling that is essentially uncontrollable will obediently follow the intention, if, of course, a person has a special talent for ‘naturalness’—to be an ordinary person on stage.
And the cornerstone of his System is that embodiment is a consequence of intention, which, incidentally, was the opposite of Vsevolod Meyerhold's theory. And embodiment is what we see, feel, and even think.
Phenomenon
“In everything, I want to reach
For the very essence.
In work, in searching for the path,
In the heart's turmoil.
For the essence of days gone by,
For their causes,
For foundations, for roots,
For the core…"
— Boris Pasternak, 1956.
I reflected on the quality of my Soul, which allowed me to watch the same film dozens of times, listen to the same music, endlessly observe the play of sunlight and shadow on any object, or even on no object at all, simply observing the space. Without experiencing any discomfort and even making it with some interest. I would rather watch an old film again than discover a new one.
I'll note that I didn't see any additional illusory images at all. Seeing images are difficult, as I have a rigid, insensitive soul, completely uninclined to fantasies and with little imagination.
The phenomenon is that every time I watch a different movie or listening to different music. This may seem completely inexplicable, but it's true. I don't make any effort, I don't deliberately ‘look at it from a different angle,’ and I see a new film every time. And the film will be equally interesting in every part. It's a curious fact: I find all the episodes equally interesting, including the credits.
It sounds like I'm impressed by this piece of art, but I'm not.
For me, it's simply a way of exploring the world. I explore it on what I believe is a deeper level. Of course, I experience some emotional involvement. But it only adds a pleasant flavor to the process, not something that's important to me. And I try my best to mitigate it, as it interferes with the process of exploration.
But I also can't say that I study it with a ‘cool mind.’ Of course, I use my mind as much as possible, but that, too, is just a pleasant side pastime.
Most likely, I'm simply trying to understand, to obtain information directly, without limiting myself to feelings or reason. And this almost never succeeds, but I have this desire, and I consider it natural.
And importantly, during this process, I didn't experience that meditative state where one simply looks at anything, and their gaze directed ‘inward.’ No, my behavior was the most ordinary, trivial, watching a movie or listening to music, and I wasn't ‘immersed in myself’ and didn't change in any way internally.
When I started acting, this quality of perception really took off! It was incredibly exciting and captivating for me.
A group of us, students in the acting and directing program at a fee-paying University, spent hours looking at paintings in a museum, trying to decipher the artist's intentions. While the other students took this class with little enthusiasm, I thoroughly enjoyed it, as it was something I could express myself in and something I was good at.
I spent many days in the Hermitage and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, looking at paintings and trying to sense the ‘fabric of the narrative.’
Of course, all this was superimposed on my childhood detachment, but the result was absolutely stunning, this property led me to the main natural function of my Soul [see in the "Achievements" chapter].
This phenomenon, incidentally, can help identify potential poets, as well as a host of shamans and mediums, among a crowd of children. If your child can spend hours performing the same repetitive action with interest, or looking at the same object over and over again, or watching the same movie dozens of times without looking away from the TV or computer screen, and, crucially, capturing every frame as if seeing it for the first time, then they fall into a kind of ‘risk group.’
When I listen to a song, I simultaneously know what the next line will be, and yet it's completely new to me. It's a superficial perception where I'm not touched by the world and it doesn't stick with me, and as a result, the world is always new to me.
This property has a funny peculiarity: when I see a person for the first time, he does not remain in my memory, and if he immediately goes out the door and a second later comes back in, I will be absolutely sure that I see a new person, unfamiliar to me.
Why do I get stuck on something as pointless as watching the same movie over and over again?
This action can be considered a peculiar form of ritual. According to the works of Carlos Castaneda, it is one of the exercises for working with the Spirit; this is how they summon it. Castaneda's followers call this process "non-doing," that is, a repetitive action devoid of meaning in everyday life. They alternate it with moments of "inner silence" for their minds. This quality was natural for me, but thanks to my acting work, I developed it significantly more.
This phenomenon is time-bound. The period when I find it incredibly interesting to view a work of art dozens of times, when I see and hear the tiniest halftones, ends after a certain period of time (it could be a few days or months), and I become completely indifferent to the work; and most importantly, I stop seeing and hearing any halftones in it.
The subjective time of perceiving a work of art also flows differently. When I'm interested, it ‘slows down,’ and when I'm no longer interested, it ‘jumps by like an express train.’ Meanwhile, real objective time behaves in the opposite way—when subjective time flows slowly, objective time often flows very quickly, and vice versa. Apparently, this is related to where my attention is located—that time will flow slowly (as if my attention is slowing it down).
It's also like eating candy: I discover an interesting kind of candy and gorge myself on it. And I don't know if I'll ever be interested in that kind of candy again. For this reason, I always try to finish my tasks here and now, because I don't know if I'll be able to return to them later.
Should I become a director?
I was 20-old, but already too old to study acting. Usually, those who enroll in Theater School at such a late age for actors are already considering a career as a director, which is quite ironic, as these are completely different professions, often requiring opposing skills and talents. Of course, I didn't stand out from the crowd and also considered becoming a director...
The ‘actor factories’ focus on ‘young human raw material’ is explained by the fact that they require a flexible body and a youthful, unburdened soul, into which the director leading the course would infuse their understanding of the world. And, of course, each director recruited only those people who were a personal fit. In this regard, it was curious to observe how the stream of sufferers eager to enter the institute moved from one educational institution to another in an attempt to find their master.
I spent my first year studying acting and directing at a fee-paying educational institution in St. Petersburg, and then I even ‘almost got into’ the free program at LGITMiK (Leningrad State Institute of Theatre, Music, and Cinema). Admittedly, I was applying for the puppet theater acting program. Of course, I applied for the regular acting program, but they told me they'd only accept me for the puppetry program. Perhaps because of my tall stature, strong build (some puppets are quite heavy), and interesting voice. I declined, and later regretted my decision.
In an acting career, the major you study isn't so important; it's more important to demonstrate talent and hard work, and perhaps you could transfer to another acting or directing program later. But I didn't feel I had any significant talent, so I didn't choose that path.
It's curious that, over the course of a couple of months, while sitting in the Theatre Library, I half-copied a two-volume work on the history of world cinema by a French author into a notebook. Such an act is completely impossible for a modern person, but for a future director, it's quite common. When a person writes by hand, they develop their mind.
Over the course of several years, I have watched many films by classic world film directors from Italy, France, the USA and the USSR, such as Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky.
[The description of the film "Fanny and Alexander" was added in December 2025 in preparation for the 2nd edition of the book.]
I was most impressed by the work of Ingmar Bergman. I have seen almost all of his films. My acquaintance with him began with his first color film, Fanny and Alexander (F&A, 1982, running time: 3 hours 8 minutes). I went to see this film at least five times over the course of two weeks, which is quite an achievement. I saw F&A sometime between 1989 and 1990. Most likely, it was November 1989 (I was 16 years old), based on:
List of foreign films released in the USSR from 1955 to 1991 (link in Russian)
https://svae.by/showthread.php?t=16053