On Monday, January 20, NTV will show the first and second episodes of the multi-part spy detective “Legend of Ferrari”. The series is based on real events - the activities of the Russian intelligence agent Olga Golubovskaya, better known under the pseudonym Elena Ferrari.
The action takes place in the post-revolutionary years in the Crimea. During this period, the peninsula remained the scene of the struggle of various political forces, the site of military intervention by foreign troops and the change of civilian power. Among other things, Crimea was one of the strongholds of anti-Bolshevik resistance.
According to the plot, in the fall of 1920 in Sevastopol during a church holiday one of the leaders of the White Movement, Baron Peter Wrangel (Alexander Bukharov), is attempted. The military leader remains alive and even publicly pardons the criminal, who, as a result, is secretly executed by the head of counterintelligence (Nikolai Dobrynin).
In Moscow, after this incident, the head of the Red Army intelligence department Semyon Uritsky draws up a new plan to eliminate Wrangel. It is assumed that the protagonist of the operation will be a poet of Italian descent and reconnaissance El Ferrari.
According to the plan of Uritsky, who had assigned agent Yashu Popov (Konstantin Kryukov) to Ferrari to work on her image as a poetess, the scout should get closer to the Wrangel family and eliminate the baron. Ferrari has a lot of trump cards in her hands, but the local journalist and British intelligence agent Maximilian Ermler (Pavel Delong) inserts sticks into the wheels.
- Frame from the series "Legend of Ferrari"
- © NTV Press Service
For the Legend of Ferrari, two screenwriters were responsible - Pyotr Gladilin (Aurora) and Konstantin Maximov (Margarita Nazarova). Maximov also acted as the director of the series. The complex and controversial image of the scout and poetess on the screen was embodied by Olga Pogodina (“The Man in My Head”).
“This is a bright woman, strong, who makes all decisions herself and often even changes her tasks. She is supposed to do one thing, but she doesn’t. She is a thinking person who is able to draw her own conclusions from any situation and act in her own way. For the benefit of this matter, but in its own way, - said the actress in an interview with RT. - In the series there is a good phrase that you can kill only in a very extreme case - senseless killing is unacceptable. “My heroine very often chose between life and death the life of another person, which is very attractive to the hero.”
According to the artist, the attractiveness of the character of El Ferrari also lies in her significant and very cinematic profession. At the same time, the actress notes, the image of the scout herself is less popular in the cinema in comparison with the image of the male scout, despite the fact that women did no less for the residency.
“There are a lot of women in this profession. But, as a rule, patriarchy operates in many countries, ours is not an exception, therefore we always have heroes of men. And fame is coming about Mate Hari, indeed, not as a scout, but more as a woman of easy virtue, which is completely unacceptable, ”Pogodina added.
Ferrari had a wonderful legend: a staff member of the Red Army Reconnaissance represented herself as a poetess of Italian origin. According to information from the real biography of the scout, she really wrote poetry: such prominent literary figures as Maxim Gorky and Viktor Shklovsky even helped her (one of the collections of Golubovskaya’s poems was published not without their efforts).
However, the creators of the series decided to limit the use of Ferrari’s creativity in the film, and from time to time they gave out works written by him personally, but stylized as poetry poetry. According to Pogodina, who was involved in the development of the project and as a producer, the duet of screenwriters (Gladilin and Maximov) and journalist Natalya Piskaryova-Grigoryeva composed poetry especially for The Legend of Ferrari. It was they who entered the fictional collections of El Ferrari, which in the story helps her to be the hero of Konstantin Kryukov.
The story of a mysterious shipwreck
The name of Elena Ferrari is associated with a loud story about the shipwreck of the yacht of Baron Wrangel "Lucullus" in Constantinople in 1921. The ship served as the floating headquarters of the military leader, where the archives of the Russian Volunteer Army, documents and monetary assets of Wrangel were stored.
- Frame from the series "Legend of Ferrari"
- © NTV Press Service
In October 1921, the Italian liner Adria, which was leaving Batumi, rammed Lukull, after which the yacht instantly sank. Wrangel with his family and adjutant was not on board, most of the crew also managed to escape. The strange circumstances of the incident led to the suspicion that the accident was helped by the intelligence agent Elena Ferrari. This page of history is reflected in the series.
This and other episodes were filmed using a chromakey in a special pavilion.
“The 1920s is practically impossible to recreate, and even with the chases on retro cars. We have completely restored this shipwreck, so Adria, the Italian liner, will directly crush the yacht, ”Pogodina said in an interview with RT, noting that this is the first project in her producer portfolio that used so many computer graphics.
And yet, it is not worthwhile to perceive the “Legend of Ferrari” as a textured project: it contains a lot of artistic fiction, including related to the life of the poetess.
“We specifically changed the name of my heroine from Elena to El, because, firstly, there is fiction and it is inevitable, and secondly, we wanted to keep a certain distance between the historical character and the movie hero. For three years we worked on this image, ”said Pogodina.