Yerevan

He was great, but somehow foolishly unserious. Sergei Parajanov’s ex-wife once said of him: “He is charming, but untolerable.” The artist liked this definition very much and often took pleasure in repeating it.

In 1973, Parajanov was imprisoned. The bouquet of indictments was very colorful – from homosexuality to parasitism. He was beaten in prison before they understood the reason for his conviction – “He has raped a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).” The prisoners apologized to Parajanov and their “leader” told him: “We hate communists, but have always raped them with words. You have done it in practice.” Parajanov became inspired and thought about a follow up: to be honest he had raped ten, no twenty, no a hundred, no in fact three hundred members of CPSU. The respect for him grew in prison in proportion to the number of “raped” communist.

In 1968 Parajanov shot one of his most profound and paradoxical films, The Color of Pomegranates. It is really a surprise that the film ever got distributed. However, the final version was not Parajanov’s. The director Sergei Yutkevich was assigned to complete the film, removing the erotic paradoxes and the text of Hrant Matevosyan. State officials told Parajanov sadly: “It’s a pity that we can’t remove Sofico Chiaureli, a famous Georgian actress who plays the young Sayat Nova, from the film. How come a woman acts the role of a man in your film?”

How could he explain that the spirit is genderless, that all the differences between people are simply superficial and have nothing in common with objective reality?

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