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Hi! Welcome to a thread dedicated to various references and things in #WithinLapenko that may be incomprehensible for non-Russian fans!
(sorry for my English, there can be mistakes here and there)
(sorry for my English, there can be mistakes here and there)
Let's start from some info about the main creative force behind all this stuff. Anton Lapenko is a Russian actor born in Zelenograd, Moscow, on September 1st, 1986. He is the ninth out of sixteen (sic!) kids in the family. His parents raised their kids to be loving and caring, >
> probably that's why everything Anton creates has that certain degree of kindness and softness. He is a fan of Monty Python and that explains a lot. Once he got interested in documentaries about the USSR era and that interest eventually inspired him to create the characters.
The Engineer is the first Soviet-times character created by Anton. A stuttering, clumsy big-eyed lad who's keen on his work and tries to find the love of his life.
According to Anton himself he was inspired by The Stalker, the main character of Andrei Tarkovskiy's movie of the same name. Anton says that people in the past used to talk with a different accent compared with what we have now. He simply created the character starting from that>
> intonation, adding everything else later. Here's the very first IG sketch featuring him. The Engineer is being constantly asked to show the vaccine developed in his scientific research institute (shortened as НИИ in Russian) but behaves quite strange...
see ya all tomorrow, I'm going to bed =)
Our Engineer is a so-called "small person" which is a quite common character type in Russian (and not only Russian of course) culture (mainly literature). He is not a big boss, gets paid peanuts, and lives in misery.
To me, Engineer resembles Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a government clerk and the main character of Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Overcoat". They both are fond of their work, poor, and gain little recognition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat
Thank God Engie is full of optimism to become happy sometimes. The song "25 to 10" which is a recurrent theme of this character says:
"I'm an engineer for one hundred roubles
And I won't get paid any more.
I'm 25 and I still
Don't know what I want. >
"I'm an engineer for one hundred roubles
And I won't get paid any more.
I'm 25 and I still
Don't know what I want. >
> And I guess there are no reasons
To be proud of my destiny.
But if I could choose it
I would become myself again." (с) Boris Grebenshikov
This song is playing at the end of this sketch:
To be proud of my destiny.
But if I could choose it
I would become myself again." (с) Boris Grebenshikov
This song is playing at the end of this sketch:
Btw before we proceed let’s say a few words about the aesthetics of the original IG sketches. They look like footages from late Soviet/90s TV programmes or home video (VHS) tapes. Almost every sketch’s background music is usually taken from Soviet movies.
There are notable exceptions to this rule though. Note that every character has his own soundtrack that apparently helps outline his key features (e.g. the Engineer’s romantic side or Igor’s nuttiness).
The timeline is quite uncertain but it’s clear there are signs of both the late 80s (e.g. the Soviet-styled news about Igor’s arrest, the Engineer being a typical Soviet character) and the 90s (gangs, Latin American TV series, commercials, presidential elections, etc.)
Back to the sketch. The Engineer says he's been asked to play with an amateur group because he resembles Hamlet a lot. "What kind of Hamlet I am? "To be or not to be?" If I met him I'd say: "What nonsense are you talking now! Come on, TO BE!"
This sketch reminds me of Innokentiy Smoktunovsky, a great Soviet actor who played the part of Hamlet in theatre and did it excellently. One of Smoktunovsky's movie characters, Yuri Detochkin, also plays Hamlet in a movie Beware Of The Car, >
> and Detochkin is such a soft character that he looks like The Engineer in many ways! In other words, Engie is often compared to Yuri Detochkin and Smoktunovsky himself to the point that he's called Kesha by fans (a diminutive form of the name Innokentiy)
About the Engineer's clothes. On the left he wears a herringbone overcoat. Compare it to the jacket on the right picture worn by Zhenya Lukashin in the classic Soviet New Year movie entitled The Irony of Fate (1975). That's definitely the same cloth! https://twitter.com/BevvieBevvy/status/1268991732303237124?s=20
The same herringbone cloth is used as the series' title screen's background (see in the first tweet in this thread)
