I Choose to Live

Screening of a documentary by Maria Bregman
Lydia Grigorieva. I Choose to Live
Prokofiev Studio
13 Ramsgate Street, London E8 2FD, United Kingdom

The film opens with scenes of Lydia Grigorieva’s London home and garden, gradually transporting the viewer to memories of her childhood spent in the Far North. Lydia reads her own poetry, while archival footage of the 1960s “Thaw” era evokes the atmosphere of her youth, her first steps in poetry, and the circle of young writers she belonged to — among them Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Rein, and Dmitry Bobyshev.

The film is dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the renowned poet. Together with her, we embark on a journey through personal losses — the deaths of loved ones, the weight of private tragedies. Yet even in these moments, Lydia remains resilient: her poetry and inner world continue to flourish. We follow her through the garden, witnessing its lush bloom, and begin to perceive the richness of her inner life, where the earthly and the eternal intertwine.

Lydia Nikolaevna Grigorieva is a poet, prose writer, and photographic artist. She graduated from the Faculty of Philology at Kazan University. In the 1980s she was the author and host of the radio programmes Poetic Encounters and The Poet’s Studio on All-Union Radio. Since 1992 she has lived both in London and Moscow. She is the author of television films about the time Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev, and Alexander Scriabin spent in London, as well as poetry collections, verse novels such as Circle of Acquaintances and The Russian Wife of an English Gentleman, and prose and essays including England — The Country of Councils, Earthly and Heavenly Gardens, and the three-volume Novel in Strokes: The Termite Mound 1, 2, 3.

She is the creator of the synthetic genres “Photopoetry” and “Cinepoem.” A member of the Union of Writers of the USSR, the European Society of Culture, and PEN International, she is the recipient of the WOW Award 2025 “For the fire of the Russian word preserved in every line and shared with the world.”

Duration: 49:00