“I am a slave driver, like all those who do their (great) work in the shadows,” the writer Marina Tarkovskaya used to say with a laugh, since as the sister of the famous filmmaker Andrei Tarkovski (1932-1986) and daughter of the poet Arseniy Tarkovski ( 1907-1989), has dedicated most of his life to protecting and continuing the legacy of these two geniuses. The Russian author, who died last Tuesday, wrote a dozen books largely related to the cinema and life of Andréi Tarkovsky, and she was distinguished by her poetic and philosophical writing, which always transcended the autobiographical. This is clear from the titles of her books: Mirror Fragments, Arseni Tarkovsky: my destiny burned between the lines, We now have another postal address, to name a few. He wrote an original text, Autobiographical motifs in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, for the collective book Andrei Tarkovsky and universal culture published only in Spain (Shangrila, 2020).
Tarkovskaya was a biographer and historian, essayist and literary critic, philologist and member of the Russian Film Academy and its guild of film critics (Gilda). She supported the creation of the Andrei Tarkovsky Film Festival in 2007, which has since been celebrated every June in the Ivanovo region. The precedent for the aforementioned event was the purchase of a part of Tarkovsky’s archive at an auction at the London gallery Sotheby’s for just over one million euros. This fact shows the appreciation for culture in the giant Slavic country, but also the intention of the political power to continue propaganda through artistic creativity, to which a lot of budget continues to be allocated. On the other hand, Andrei and Marina Tarkovsky lived in the Ivanovo region with their mother and grandmother during World War II, a sufficient reason for Tarkovsky museums, archives and cultural events to be found in various towns in the area.
Marina Tarkovskaya dedicated the last years of her life more to literature than to cinema: she undertook the edition of the complete works of her father, Arseniy Aleksándrovich Tarkovski, a poet silenced in Soviet times. “There is a lot of Dad’s work that has not yet seen the light and if I don’t do it, no one will,” was the argument that gave him the strength to endure work days of more than ten hours a day, writing on a computer, between documents and books, when she was already over eighty-five years old. “My mind is about forty-five years old, but my body doesn’t forgive,” she said lately.
In his books he talked about family life, artistic creativity and nature. To these three components of her own life and the work of her brother, her filmmaker, and her father, her writer, Marina, she added other profound themes that also determined her existence: absence, war, love, death. With a vital smile that she somehow used to protect everyone around her, Marina Tarkovskaya always spoke to convey some message for life to her interlocutors. In an interview, she confessed: “Many times I have wished that my brother and my father were not Andrei and Arseny Tarkovsky, but ordinary men. Because they loved their artistic creativity so much that they had no emotional strength left, not even for those closest to them.” It is a painful mission to be related to two geniuses.
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