The Tarkovsky line becomes continuous from the time of Woyzcek’s descendant Matvei (1780-1853), who also lived in Zaslav, married a certain Yulianiya Kardasevich and fathered three sons of whom the middle one, Karl (born 1815), was Andrei Tarkovsky’s great grandfather. By this time, as a result of the various partitions of Poland, the Ukraine had been assimilated into Russian sovereignty. Following family traditions Karl enrolled in the military as a boy, transferring at the age of 17 to the Cadets before retiring in 1850 with the rank of Captain of Cavalry. In his post-military life he became a pillar of the local dramatic society. He too, like his father, married a Kardasevich, Mariya Kaetanovna, and brought up four children. At some stage during his lifetime the family converted to Orthodoxy, becoming, in effect, Russians by doing so.

As just remarked, the family of this couple comprised four children, three girls and a boy. The boy, Aleksandr Karlovich Tarkovsky, Andrei Tarkovsky’s grandfather, was nine years younger than his closest sister, Vera. When he was ten years old both his parents died of cholera, so orphaned Aleksandr was transferred to the guardianship of another sister, even older,  Nadezhda, together with her husband I. K. Tobilevich who took him eastwards to live with them in the town of Elisavetgrad (now Kirovohrad), at that time a steppe settlement, small but cosmopolitan, containing a mixture of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Jews, Germans and Serbs. Tobilevich, Aleksandr’s guardian, appears to have been an interesting character. He occupied the post of Secretary to the Police Commission, and was thus a pillar of society; but like his father-in-law Karl Matvievich Tarkovsky he was also an actor and, under the pen-name Karpenko-Karym, a dramatist who wrote plays sympathetic towards Ukrainian independence.

Following the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the stormy decade that followed this (the decade of revolt recorded by Turgenev in his classic novel Fathers and Sons), social protest was much in the air. The technical school in Elisavetgrad to which Aleksandr was sent had a gifted headmaster, Zavadsky, who encouraged debate about issues of the day – issues that included, of course, the morality of terrorist action. Newspapers of the various social factions – Land and Freedom, People’s Will, Black Re-distribution – circulated clandestinely. At this school, and subsequently in student circles at the universities of Kiev, Petersburg and Kharkov where he went on to study in the early 1880s, Aleksandr imbibed the spirit of the times. A strikingly handsome figure as one can see from the photograph below, he is described by a contemporary as “honest, proud and thirsty for justice”: a dangerous burden to bear in autocratic Russia. Personal nemesis descended in 1884 when he was arraigned by the court in Odessa for “organizing public readings in preparation for revolutionary activity” – a just and accurate accusation as it happens, since Aleksandr at the time was “librarian” of the local cell of the most ultra of contemporary terrorist factions, the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will). (It was this organisation that, three years previously, in March 1881, assassinated Tsar Aleksandr II.)

 

 
 
Aleksandr Karlovich Tarkovsky (1862-1924), Andrei and Marina’s paternal grandfather, at the age of 18, four years before his arrest for revolutionary activities. His life was marked by loss: first of his sister Evgeniya, then both his parents (they died on the same day of cholera when he was ten); then his sister Nadezhda, who had taken his mother’s place. His first wife Aleksandra, who had waited patiently for him throughout his exile, lived only five years after their marriage; his son Valery died aged 19 in battle during the Civil War. Andrei first saw this photograph in 1948, when he was sixteen. Marina writes: "There was something mysterious and romantic in [Aleksandr Karlovich’s] appearance that captivated Andrei. He even started knitting his brows more often and kept looking at himself in the mirror to see if he had acquired the same vertical line that grandfather had. When you get to know Aleksandr Karlovich better…it becomes obvious that Andrei inherited many of his features. From an early age certain family characteristics made both grandfather and grandson incapable of fitting in with the circumstances they lived in — whether in the epoch of the early 1880s, or the years of 'socialist reconstruction'. From early youth [both men] were... restless and searching."

 
Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky (1907-1989), Andrei and Marina’s father, pictured here in 1942. One of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, he had to wait until his mid-fifties to publish his first collection (Before the Snow, 1962). Eight other volumes followed. For most of his lifetime he was best known as a gifted translator, and during the war worked as a correspondent and composer of verse for the army newspaper Battle Alarm. Arseny was thrice married: in 1937 (when Andrei was five, Marina two) he left his first wife, Mariya Vishnyakova, to join Antonina Aleksandrovna Bokhanova; ten years later he left Bokhanova for Tatyana Aleksandovna Ozerskaya, with whom he spent the rest of his life. In 1940 he became a close friend of Marina Tsetaeva, whom he had long admired; Marina, his daughter, was named after her.

 

This couple had four children, three girls and a boy. The boy, handsome Vladimir Nikolaevich (“Volodya”) - the black sheep of the family – caused his family great sorrow by running off with a maid to Odessa for three years. When he finally re-appeared – by that time married to another woman and a father of two -  he horrified the servants by showing himself tattooed from head to foot with a giant snake whose forked tongue emerged from his collar and curled around the back of his neck. Soon after his reappearance, he died of drink. His daughter Natalya married a Kiev landowner at the age of 17, while  his son Georgy disappeared without trace in the Civil War.