The Man I Met Too Early
In 1981, inside the Soviet Union, I met Sergei Parajanov. Only years later did I understand I had been sitting with a different kind of mind.
In 1981, I was twenty-four years old, newly married, and traveling through the Soviet Union, Moscow, Leningrad, and the Armenian SSR, with a side trip into Tbilisi, Georgian SSR.
I had seen the photographs. I had read the articles. I thought I knew something about the Soviet Union before I arrived.
I didn’t.
Moscow hit me first as a feeling. More than a city, it felt like entering a machine built to diminish human individuality and creativity. Everything seemed designed to make the individual feel small and temporary. The boulevards were impossibly wide, the kind of vast avenues where you could easily imagine endless columns of troops marching in lockstep, legs thrown straight out in that peculiar Russian parade step, tanks rolling behind them, missile carriers following, all of it staged to remind the world where power lived. This was the Kremlin’s center of command, not only for the Soviet republics under its rule, but for the satellite Communist states caught in its orbit, and for any enemy watching from afar.
The buildings carried the same message. Huge Stalinist and Stalinist Empire structures of stone and concrete stood in rigid formation, severe enough to feel almost brutalist in mood, as if architecture itself had been drafted into service. They were not built to welcome or delight. They were built to dominate. Even the apartment blocks and government buildings seemed to say the same thing: this system is permanent, and you are passing through it on its terms.
There were no commercial advertisements, no brands competing for attention, none of the visual noise I was used to in America. Instead, there were propaganda posters everywhere. Workers with rolled-up sleeves. Soldiers with determined jaws. Women smiling into the bright communist future. Red flags hung from buildings and stretched across streets. Lenin’s face and statue were everywhere, and in Leningrad, his presence felt especially inescapable. It was as if history had not passed but had been frozen, enlarged, and planted in every public square.
The posters themselves were strange to me. They were too bright, too cheerful, too full of smiling faces moving confidently toward some promised future. They felt like rehearsed happiness, as if the whole country had been instructed how to look. Meanwhile, the real city moved under a different weather. The buildings were drab, paint was peeling, surfaces were stained and worn, and the people I saw on the streets carried solemn faces, tired faces, faces that did not seem to have much reason to smile.
Even at the airport, before we had fully entered the country, the tone was set. Soldiers greeted us along the runway and inside the terminal. Heavy coats, machine guns, hard expressions. Nobody smiled. Nobody welcomed you. Passport control was slow and deliberate. Each stamp came down like a judgment. Each suspicious look seemed designed to do one thing well: make you feel watched, measured, and slightly afraid.
And it worked.
No one had to explain the rules. You felt them. You lowered your voice without realizing it. You chose your words more carefully. You became aware of yourself in a way that did not feel entirely your own.
Just two years earlier, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and President Jimmy Carter had responded with a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The ripple effects reached directly into my professional life. NBC’s Moscow coverage plans collapsed, the network took a major financial hit, and the advertising expectations built around those Games evaporated. I had spent a year working on branding and promotional campaigns tied to that effort, work I believed in, work I was proud of, and it disappeared almost overnight.
So I arrived carrying more than luggage. I brought my frustration with me, along with the confidence of a twenty-four-year-old who thinks he already understands how the world works.
I didn’t.
Each morning, I would leave the Hotel Ukraina and jog along the river toward Moscow State University and back, a run of several miles. It became my small attempt at independence inside a system that did not quite allow for it.
Before I even reached the elevator, I would notice the woman at the desk quietly pick up the phone.
By the time I stepped outside, they were already there.
A car. Two men inside.
They followed me the entire route. Every morning. Same distance. Same pace. Cigarettes in hand, windows slightly open, smoke trailing behind them. I never believed I was important enough to be interesting. If anything, I assumed they were watching to see who might approach me.
After a few days, it stopped feeling unusual.
That may have been the most unusual part.
Inside the room, even conversation had limits.
One night, frustrated, I began speaking openly about what I was seeing. Shortages, long lines, the strange contradictions of daily life. Shelves with little more than pickled goods and processed meat, what I had started calling mystery meat. No sugar, no matches, basic things missing. At the same time, there were stores that accepted only foreign currency, where Western goods were available, but only to those who were not part of the system.
It did not eliminate inequality. It simply reorganized it.
My wife didn’t argue. She pointed quietly to the lamp, then to her lips.
Be quiet.
The phone rang moments later.
A voice, calm and direct, told us political discussions were not allowed and asked if we would prefer to be escorted to the airport.
I adjusted quickly. I apologized. I shifted the conversation. In America, I said, we complain about our own government.
A few minutes later, there was a knock. A woman entered and filled our refrigerator with bottled water, chocolate, caviar, bread, butter, boiled eggs.
I understood the message.
We were being watched, but we were also being managed.
Somewhere inside that same system, I met Sergei Parajanov.
I knew immediately I was in front of someone different. Not because I understood his reputation then, but because of his presence. He had dark, focused eyes and an eccentricity that did not feel staged. Some people perform originality. With him, it felt native. He seemed to be operating from a place inside himself that had not been colonized by approval, convention, or fear.
By then, he had already lived several lives. He was born Sarkis Hovsepi Parajanyan in Tbilisi in 1924, to Armenian parents in that multicultural Caucasian city that shaped so much of his imagination. He studied in Moscow at VGIK, worked for years in Kyiv, made films in Ukraine and Armenia, and remained deeply tied to Tbilisi, where he lived and created much of his collage work. He died in Yerevan in 1990, but Tbilisi was one of the great homes of his spirit.
That matters, because Parajanov was never a neat national category. Armenians claim him, rightly. Ukrainians claim him, rightly. Georgia shaped him, also rightly. He belonged to a region, to a civilizational crossroads, and that richness is everywhere in his work. He absorbed Armenian miniatures, Orthodox imagery, folk ritual, music, textiles, gesture, and silence, and turned them into cinema.
The conversation moved through a translator, which created pauses. In those pauses, I watched him closely. His gestures were precise. His attention was exact. He was not filling the room with talk. He was inhabiting it.
“He makes collages, dolls, drawings… it is real art.” — Andrei Tarkovsky.
At one point, he gave me a photograph as a homage to Federico Fellini. He spoke of Fellini with respect and gratitude. That gratitude was not abstract. By the time I met Parajanov, Fellini was already among the major international artists who had spoken up for him. Parajanov had been arrested in Kyiv in late 1973 and sentenced in 1974 to five years of hard labor on shifting charges; he served about four years before his release amid international pressure.
That larger story, of course, was mostly lost on me in that moment. I had my sketchbook with me, collecting Soviet fragments, wrappers, little notes to myself, things to look up later. I began writing something down. He noticed immediately. Without hesitation, he went to a drawer, opened it, and pulled out a stack of sketches and photographs. He handed them to me as if this were the most natural gesture in the world.
“Add them to your scrapbook,” he said.
I carefully placed them in my sketchbook, closed it, and thanked him.
Then we left. Our driver was waiting for the long return trip to Yerevan.
That was the entire meeting.
At the time, I knew I had met someone important. I felt it in the room. But I did not understand it.
Years later, sitting in Marvin Minsky’s living room, I felt something similar again. Not intelligence in the ordinary sense. Something rarer. Original thought. A way of seeing that did not depend on the structures around it. Genius, for lack of a better word.
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Only then did I begin to understand what I had encountered in Parajanov.
He had not simply made unusual films. He had changed the grammar of cinema. In Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors he turned folklore, landscape, ritual, and movement into something alive and fiercely cinematic. In The Color of Pomegranates, released after censorship battles and stripped of its original title Sayat-Nova, he moved even further away from ordinary storytelling. The film is built out of tableaux, symbols, textures, objects, music, and visual rhyme. It works directly on the eye, the nerves, and the imagination.
That is why the work endures. It does not depend on trend, on explanation, or on ideology. It reaches deeper than that.
What I came to understand later is that he had something in common with what Gurdjieff called objective art, art that transmits something precise through impression itself. Gurdjieff’s distinction was between art that merely expresses passing moods and art consciously made to carry something exact. That idea helped me understand why Parajanov’s images stayed with me. They did not just express personality or style. They carried impressions arranged with unusual care.
That is exactly what Parajanov’s best work does.
“He opened a door into a timeless cinematic experience.” — Martin Scorsese, on The Color of Pomegranates.
The Soviet system could not make use of someone like that. His films were too symbolic, too culturally rooted, too spiritually charged, too free of official instruction. Socialist Realism wanted clarity, utility, ideological obedience. Parajanov gave them ambiguity, ritual, and beauty. The official charges against him shifted depending on the source and the moment, but the larger truth is not difficult to see: he could not be shaped into something acceptable.
He spent years in prison and labor camps. Later he faced further harassment and renewed arrest. Yet even when deprived of film, he continued to create from whatever was around him: scraps of paper, bottle caps, found objects, fabric, dolls, collages, assemblages. The medium changed. The imagination did not.
Today, those works can be seen in the Sergei Parajanov Museum in Yerevan, a place that matters far beyond tourism. The museum’s collection includes more than 1,700 objects, with hundreds on permanent display, along with recreated elements of his Tiflis house and Kyiv apartment. The museum itself is part of the answer to why he matters. The state tried to diminish him. History did the opposite.
“With the death of Parajanov, cinema lost one of its wizards.” — Federico Fellini.
And why should a reader today care?
Because Parajanov’s work asks something we are in danger of forgetting: how do you remain inwardly free in a world that constantly pressures you to become legible, useful, marketable, and simplified? His films slow perception down. They teach attention. They resist the flattening of experience into content.
That is also why major filmmakers and artists responded so strongly to him. Fellini recognized in him a fellow maker of cinematic worlds. Tarkovsky recognized a free artist working in images at a spiritual level. Later generations kept finding him for the same reason: because his images do not die. And yes, even popular culture found its way back to him. Lady Gaga’s “911” video openly drew on The Color of Pomegranates, borrowing its visual language and symbolism.
Looking back, I do not feel regret so much as timing.
I met him too early. Not too early in life, but too early in myself.
I did not yet have the questions. I did not know to ask about perception, about inner freedom, about what it takes to remain yourself inside a system that asks for alignment. I did not know enough to ask what prison changes in an artist, or what kind of inner law allows someone to keep creating when the outer law has turned against him.
Those questions came later.
My nephew Berj understood something about Parajanov early on. At the time, I noticed it, but I did not fully recognize what I was seeing. Now I do. It was not fascination. It was recognition.
In one family photograph from years later, I am there with my daughters, Lara and Sevan. Berj is standing on the right, wearing a Parajanov T-shirt I designed for him as a small homage. In front, my sister Ani is seated behind her African hand drum. Looking at that picture now, I think: the kid knew it all along. He had recognized Parajanov’s genius early, long before I had fully caught up.
Parajanov’s work does not reveal itself all at once. It unfolds over time, depending on what you bring to it. In a culture that produces more and more stimulation with less and less meaning, his work remains steady. It asks for attention and rewards patience. It reminds you that images can still carry soul, memory, ritual, danger, and truth.
I met him once.
That was enough.
It just took me years to understand what that meeting meant.
That is the real reason to return to Parajanov now. Not as a monument or a museum piece, but as a living challenge: to see more deeply, to feel more precisely, and to protect whatever in us still resists becoming flat, obedient, and easy to consume.
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Glossary of Terms
- Armenian SSR / Georgian SSR: Soviet Socialist Republics within the USSR. In 1981, Armenia and Georgia were not independent states but constituent republics of the Soviet Union.
- Gurdjieff’s objective art: A concept associated with G. I. Gurdjieff: art consciously constructed to transmit something precise through form, rhythm, and impression, rather than merely expressing personal mood.
- Intourist: The official Soviet state travel agency that managed foreign tourism in the USSR.
- Sayat-Nova: The original title of The Color of Pomegranates. Sayat-Nova was an 18th-century Armenian troubadour, poet, and musician, widely celebrated across the Caucasus for his songs and verse. Parajanov’s film was inspired by his life, though it presents him through poetic imagery rather than conventional biography.
- Socialist Realism: The official Soviet artistic doctrine that favored clear, ideologically acceptable depictions of workers, progress, and socialist life.
- Stalinist / Stalinist Empire architecture: Monumental Soviet architecture associated with Joseph Stalin’s era, marked by oversized scale, symmetry, and a strong projection of state power.
Sources & References
- Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Sergei Parajanov for core biographical facts, arrest chronology, and major films. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
- Museum of the Moving Image centenary program on Parajanov’s multicultural roots and artistic significance. (Museum of the Moving Image)
- BFI on The Color of Pomegranates and the Scorsese quote. (BFI)
- Official Sergei Parajanov Museum sources for museum holdings and visitor details. (Sergey Parajanov Museum)
- Washington Post and Time archive reporting on the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycott and NBC’s financial exposure and lost advertising expectations. (The Washington Post)
- Official and related Parajanov sources on imprisonment, release, and Fellini’s support. (Parajanov-Vartanov Institute)
- Gurdjieff sources on objective art and art as conscious transmission. (Gurdjieff International Review)
- W Magazine and Parajanov-related sources on Lady Gaga’s “911” homage to The Color of Pomegranates. (W Magazine)
Photo Credit
Key visuals developed by the author using AI image generation, digital editing, and conceptual art direction, inspired by historical photographs for educational and transformative use.
About the Author
Vazken Kalayjian is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and branding strategist working at the intersection of creativity, consciousness, and intelligent systems. His work focuses on coherence, helping individuals and institutions translate lived experience, values, and intelligence into finished form through art, writing, and design. Drawing on decades of practice across global branding, visual arts, spiritual traditions, and emerging technologies, his work emphasizes embodied intelligence, disciplined creativity, and the sacred made practical.
