Ilya Rozanov and his father

Ilya Rozanov’s relationship with his father, Grigori Rozanov, remains unresolved at the point when illness threatens to end it. Grigori was a strict, difficult man whose expectations helped make Ilya’s departure from Russia a lasting point of conflict. Now Alzheimer’s disease is changing their conversations, and Ilya finds an unsettling comfort in speaking with a father who is no longer fully himself. The relationship is marked not by reconciliation, but by the belated possibility of tenderness and an enduring hope that Grigori might say he is proud of his son.

A strict father and the choice to leave

Ilya describes Grigori as set in old ways and never easy to live with. His brother Andrei resembles their father, reinforcing the sense that Grigori’s manner and values were part of the family environment Ilya grew up in. The available account does not make their disagreements a simple rejection of Russia: Ilya says he loves his country, but could not stay there.

Grigori wanted Ilya to remain in Russia rather than leave. His opposition carries particular weight because Ilya’s departure was not merely a career decision in the family’s eyes; it placed distance between father and son and made their different expectations plain. Grigori was also a police officer. When Ilya considers what might happen if his family knew about his relationship with Shane Hollander, he identifies his father’s occupation as a reason to fear the consequences, then says he does not want to find out. The detail binds family authority to the dangers surrounding Ilya’s private life without specifying what Grigori would do.

Illness changes their conversations

When Ilya first tells Shane that his father is sick, he clarifies that it is Alzheimer’s, not cancer. He offers the fact with little ceremony, then recognizes its significance in the quiet admission that now someone knows. His controlled delivery does not mean the illness is inconsequential to him; the scene establishes how much he has kept private.

Later, Ilya says his father is dying, but insists that this is not the problem he is trying to explain. The distinction does not lessen the threat of the illness. Instead, it shows that the immediate pain is entangled with other family pressures, including his stepmother Polina and relatives whom Ilya believes are interested in his money rather than his well-being or career. Grigori’s decline is therefore part of a wider crisis, but it remains the loss at the center of Ilya’s complicated family history.

The smallness of one remembered phone call makes that change tangible. A couple of weeks earlier, Grigori asked Ilya to pick up bread on the way home. The ordinary errand contrasts with the distance between them: Ilya lives away from Russia, and his father’s illness has altered what their conversations can hold. Shane has no ready answer when Ilya recalls it. The detail matters precisely because it is mundane, a fragment of everyday family life made poignant by the knowledge that Grigori is dying.

The wish for recognition

Ilya’s response to Shane’s suggestion that his father must be proud of him exposes a hope that celebrity and success have not settled. Grigori did not want him to leave Russia; being a superstar has not supplied the affirmation Ilya wanted from his father. Ilya says he had always hoped Grigori might tell him he was proud. The longing persists alongside resentment: Ilya remembers his father as an asshole when he was himself, not as an uncomplicated source of comfort.

That contradiction gives the relationship its unresolved character. Ilya does not revise the past into a story of a secretly gentle father, nor does he deny the wish for approval simply because Grigori was difficult. He can acknowledge that the man he remembers caused pain and still want something from him that may never be said. With Grigori’s illness advancing, the possibility of recognition becomes more urgent even as the person who might offer it becomes less reachable.

Speaking, listening, and what remains unsaid

While Ilya is in Russia with his family, Shane asks how he is doing and how his family is treating him. When Ilya says he feels bad, Shane offers to listen to everything he wants to say in Russian, despite not understanding the language. Ilya accepts. For several minutes he speaks with an animation Shane has rarely heard from him, while Shane sits on the stairs and listens without being able to follow the words.

In his private thoughts afterward, Ilya recalls that he had wished things could have been different with his father and had hoped to hear that Grigori was proud of him. The Russian outpouring also carries an admission about his feelings for Shane, but its connection to the father-son relationship lies in the act of voicing what had remained locked away. Shane’s attention gives Ilya a witness, not a solution: the father cannot be made easier to live with, and the illness cannot be undone. The scene instead shows how Ilya’s grief and unmet need for recognition become speakable in the presence of someone willing to stay and listen.

An unfinished bond

The relationship does not arrive at a clear reconciliation. Grigori is dying; Ilya has not received the words of pride he wanted, and his memories of his father remain divided between strictness, hurt, and the altered conversations brought by Alzheimer’s. Yet Ilya says he likes talking to his father better now than when he was himself. The remark is neither forgiveness nor a claim that illness has repaired their past. It registers the strange intimacy of a changed voice and the pain of finding a gentler exchange under circumstances that make it impossible to recover the father Ilya once knew.

That unfinished bond helps explain why his departure from Russia and his father’s decline carry more than practical consequences. Ilya loves the country he left, but could not remain there; he is still emotionally tied to the father who wanted him to stay. What remains between them is a mixture of resistance, longing, and grief, with no assurance that the hoped-for recognition will arrive before the relationship ends.