Who replaced Levitan?
The man who could imitate any artist! Gennady Dudnik! A popular pop artist of the post-war period, who became famous not only for his parodies and recordings on Melodiya records. Dudnik stood in for Yuri Levitan himself when he suffered a heart attack! The legendary announcer himself recalls:
"Six in the morning. Moscow's call sign. Naturally, I'm awake. My heart sank... Something's about to happen. And suddenly... I hear my own voice reading the new Central Committee Resolution. There's no doubt about it—it's me. Everything is mine. The timbre, the intonation, the pauses, even my breath. I thought I was going crazy. Or had already gone mad. At worst, auditory hallucinations.
What happened? That night, the radio announced an all-hands-on-deck. The question was—what to do?
And then someone remembered that at an acting gathering, a skinny actor, a recent GITIS graduate, had been doing parodies of Boris Andreyev, Pyotr Aleinikov, Vasily Merkuriev, and others, including me. They were spot-on. But no one knew his name or where he lived. There was only a description. They immediately woke up the director of GITIS. So, around four o'clock, two security officers showed up at the young actor's house, woke him up—the guy was terrified, of course—and rushed him into the car and onto the radio. They gave him his lines and locked him in the announcer's room so he could learn them. About forty minutes later, he asked to listen to them. They took him to the studio, and he read the entire Decree through a microphone.
The audience was silent for a minute, then applauded. The women burst into tears. He saved everyone.
This was later the famous pop artist and unrivaled master of parody, Gennady Dudnik. My understudy and I later met, and I gave him a gold signet ring with the inscription: "For saving the announcer."
#artofspeech #humorclassics #dudnik