Today, January 9, we remember Sergei Iosifovich Paradzhanov, a bright, sparkling, shocking and, at the same time, unusually subtle artist in the broadest sense of the word. Alexander Korotko on the eve of the date of Paradjanov’s birthday wrote a poetic philosophical essay, as deep and unlimitedly voluminous as the personality of his hero. What is not in the essay? There is no descriptiveness, there is no enumeration of the facts of the biography of the master, no names of his cinematographic and other works, and at the same time all this is present behind the scenes. The poet writes about the poet – master of poetic Ukrainian cinema, which, without pathos, considers a genius. The essay is titled: EXPLAINING THE GENIUS. The genius of Sergei Paradzhanov was also called by his friends – Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, Yves Saint Laurent, Andrei Tarkovsky…  About the Kiev period of the life of the director, scriptwriter, actor, artist, sculptor, composer, choreographer, master of the epistolary genre and great mystifier – the virtuoso of his own life, Alexander Korotko spoke with Pavel Zagrebelny at his country house, sitting in the Paradzhanov chair, once gifted to the writer. Perhaps, even then the poet Korotko actually “exposed” the genius. Only one poetic mystical picture of the “Shadow of Forgotten Ancestors” won 39 awards and 24 Grand Prix of international film festivals, and how much the hidden one saw and felt in this incredible, enchanting and unconditionally tragic fate the author of the essay, denoting his feelings with code words: “We need a vertical”! A new essay by Alexander Korotko, as expected, took its place on the main page of the site under the heading THE NEWEST.