E. Yevtushenko and V. Shukshin

Vasily Makarovich Shukshin was born on 25 July 1929 in a small village in the Altai Territory. After school he worked as a fitter and served as a sailor in the Baltic Fleet, then taught Russian in a village school and became director of an evening school. In 1954 he came to Moscow and entered the directing department of VGIK. His first film was «Живёт такой парень»: in 1964 it won the “Golden Lion” among films for young audiences at the Venice film festival. Later films: «Ваш сын и брат», «Калина красная» and others; in many he acted himself. He died suddenly during the shooting of the film «Они сражались за Родину». His first book is «Сельские жители» (1963). Shukshin's heroes are country people, “not made good”, each with his own “zest”: one invents a perpetual motion machine («Упорный»), another buys a microscope and dreams of inventing a remedy against microbes («Микроскоп»). The hero of «Упорный» (1973) is a state-farm driver, Dmitry Kvasov, nicknamed “Monya”. He reads in a book that a perpetual motion machine is impossible, but does not believe it and sets about inventing one. The idea comes at night, he draws it, and in the morning he is not excited. In the excerpt Monya shows the drawing to a mathematics teacher, then to the physics teacher Gekman; Gekman explains that the forces are equal, and Monya leaves with a bitter «go to blazes with your equality». In a shed he makes the device from a bicycle wheel and a chute from an old bucket, pushes the wheel with his foot — it turns a little and stops; he adds a counterweight, it stops again. Monya does not suffer: tomorrow everyone will laugh, so be it, people need to laugh; he even grows fond of them. In the morning he goes to the engineer's yard and says: “It's turning, all night!”; the engineer, seeing the wheel standing in the shed, says: “Not funny, lad.” Monya asks with real curiosity why it does not turn; the engineer says: “It shouldn't turn, that's the whole point”, and “Learn, friend.” A perpetual motion machine is physically impossible: friction wastes energy, and the law of conservation of energy forbids getting more energy out than is put in.