Andrei Tarkovsky: A Life on the Cross

Lyudmila Boyadzhieva is a brilliant documentary writer whose attention to every detail of Andrei Tarkovsky’s life took a literary form in recreated dialogues, scenes, quotes from letters and interviews with the director, his family, friends and colleagues, accompanied with profound comments on history and cinema. The reader here is being offered an opportunity to experience, together with the novel’s characters, Tarkovsky’s path to creating his masterpieces – from finding resolutions to artistic dilemmas to overcoming obstacles put out by the Soviet regime. Lyudmila Boyadzhieva depicts Tarkovsky’s life with minute details and unknown facts, recollects his famous colleagues and contemporaries. The most distinctive feature of the book is that Andrei Tarkovsky is portrayed in neither sublime nor exalted light but as an immensely sensitive and susceptible man.