Valentin Gaft

Valentin Gaft: Moscow's Sharpest Tongue

Russian actors feared him for a reason unrelated to any role he ever played on stage: Valentin Gaft wrote epigrams. Short, cutting, often devastatingly funny verses aimed at colleagues, rivals and the absurdities of Soviet and post-Soviet theatrical life, they circulated through Moscow's greenrooms the way gossip usually does, except that Gaft's version rhymed and drew blood. That he was also, simultaneously, one of the Sovremennik Theatre's defining actors for half a century tells you something about how much talent the man carried in reserve.

A Lawyer's Son Finds the Stage

Valentin Iosifovich Gaft was born September 2, 1935, in Moscow, to a Jewish family that had relocated from Ukraine. His father, Iosif Ruvimovich Gaft, worked as a military lawyer and served as a major in the Red Army during the Second World War; his mother ran the household. Neither parent had any connection to the arts, yet — as one Russian profile later put it — "it was in the house that Gaft first felt a craving for the word and the stage." He trained at the School-Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre from 1953 to 1957, under the noted teacher Vasily Toporkov, alongside classmates who would themselves become towering figures of Soviet theater, including Oleg Tabakov and Oleg Efremov.

Five Decades at the Sovremennik

Gaft's stage career began in 1957 at the Mossovet Theatre, and over the following years he moved through some of Moscow's most prestigious houses — the Lenkom Theatre under director Anatoly Efros, the Theatre of Satire, the Mayakovsky Theatre. But it was his move to the Sovremennik Theatre in 1969 that defined his career: he remained a company member there for fifty years, until 2019, an extraordinary span of loyalty to a single institution even by the standards of Russian repertory theater, which prizes long ensemble tenures more than most national traditions. In 2001 he expanded into directing at the Sovremennik itself, staging adaptations including *Balalaikin and Co.*

A Face for Both Comedy and Menace

Gaft made his screen debut in 1956 in *Murder on Dante Street*, but it was a run of films from the late 1970s through the 1990s that made him a fixture of Soviet popular culture. In Eldar Ryazanov's *The Garage* (1980), he played the cooperative chairman Sidorkin in an ensemble satire of Soviet institutional pettiness that remains one of the defining comedies of its era. He appeared in *Hello, I'm Your Aunt!*, *Say a Word for the Poor Hussar* (1981), *The Wizards*, *Forgotten Melody for a Flute* (1987), and the beloved television film *Pokrovsky Gate* — a filmography that, as one obituary noted, showed him looking "equally organic in both satirical and dramatic images," a rare range in an industry that tends to typecast. Later he took on Woland, the devil of Mikhail Bulgakov's *The Master and Margarita*, in a 1994 adaptation not released until 2011 — a piece of casting that fit an actor whose off-stage reputation already carried a certain diabolical wit.

The Epigram as a Second Career

What set Gaft apart from his theatrical peers was a parallel career as a writer of ironic, often merciless epigrams — short verses "in which he humorously responded to events in society and the lives of colleagues," as one Russian biography summarized it. These were not private jokes; they circulated publicly, were collected in books, and became genuinely feared within Moscow's tightly wound theatrical community, where reputations could be made or dented by a well-turned four-line poem. He performed his own verse on screen as late as the 2013 film *Yolki 3*, evidence that the epigrammatist's instinct never left him even in his final decade of work.

Recognition and a Late Marriage

Gaft was named Honored Artist of the RSFSR in 1978 and People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1984, the Soviet system's clearest official acknowledgment of an actor's stature, and later received Russia's Order "For Merit to the Fatherland" in multiple classes, the Order of Friendship, and the Golden Eagle and Golden Mask awards in the 2000s and 2010s. His personal life ran in parallel to his professional one through several marriages — to Elena Izergina, to ballerina Inna Eliseeva (with whom he had a daughter, Olga, who predeceased him in 2009), and to artist Elena Nikitina, with whom he had a son, Vadim — before he married actress Olga Ostroumova in 1996, converting to Orthodox Christianity around the time of their relationship. In his later years he was an outspoken supporter of Vladimir Putin, a stance that led Ukraine to formally bar him from entry in 2016.

Why Valentin Is Called a Genius

The case for calling Gaft a genius does not rest on any single towering performance but on the unusual doubling of his talent: he was a first-rank stage and screen actor by the testimony of directors like Eldar Ryazanov who cast him repeatedly, and simultaneously a genuinely skilled satirical poet whose epigrams demanded a completely different kind of verbal precision — compression, rhyme, timing, and the nerve to aim them at people he worked alongside. Few actors anywhere sustain a serious literary sideline that colleagues actually feared; Gaft's epigrams were not vanity verse but a recognized cultural form in their own right, discussed and anthologized. The honest counter-case is that neither talent, taken alone, would likely earn the word: his screen roles, however versatile, were mostly supporting and character parts rather than the kind of career-defining leads that generate international acclaim, and his epigrams belong to a minor, culturally specific genre with little audience outside Russian-speaking theater circles. What makes Gaft distinctive is the combination — an actor's ear for how people actually sound, turned into a satirist's weapon — rather than either skill in isolation reaching the first rank on its own.

Legacy

Gaft's health declined through his final years; he suffered from Parkinson's disease and a stroke in August 2019, and died on December 12, 2020, at 86, in Zhavoronki outside Moscow, and was buried at Troekurovsky Cemetery. He left behind a fifty-year record at one of Russia's most respected theaters and a body of satirical verse still quoted in Moscow theatrical circles — a legacy split evenly between the stage he stood on and the sharp private commentary he wrote about everyone standing beside him.

Achievements

• Order of Friendship — 1995
• Worked as actor, poet and theatre director