Pyr’ev is not exactly the director people associate with the Thaw, no matter that he was one of its head architects. During his all too brief stint as director of Mosfil’m (1954-57), he backed, among others, Grigorij Cˇuchraj (Sorok pervyj, 1956) and El’dar Rjazanov (Karnaval’naja nocˇ’, 1957) when nobody else believed in their talents and projects, and was proven right by audiences and critics alike. He didn’t do so, it is said, because he liked the films, but because he understood that Soviet cinema desperately needed their kinds of images and stories. But that’s only one dimension of the Pyr’ev-and-Thaw-complex. Quite another is his work from Ispytanie vernosti (Devotion, 1954) to Svet dalëkoj zvezdy (1965), his last film (Pyr’ev died during the making of his most ambitious project, the 1969 The Brothers Karamazov, which was finished by its stars Kirill Lavrov & Michail Ul’janov). It’s not too much to suggest that the whole period is one epic exploration of Fëdor Michalovicˇ’s mindscape, with Idiot as its compass. Pyr’ev didn’t try to create cinematographic equivalents of Dostoevsky’s prose; instead, he made melodramas driven by the writer’s moods and notions – a people’s Dostoevsky, if you will, which worked splendidly here (and fell flat in Belye nocˇi, 1960). Idiot  shows Pyr’ev as an artist falling apart, and very aware of it. He took darkness’ hand and never let go.