A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity.

I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Solaris.

The version that was shown at the time was cut, and I didn’t see the uncut version until later. But in both versions, the power lies in the female character, in that memory of a woman who can’t vanish into oblivion. What struck me and disoriented and frightened me – Solaris is still a film that seduces and at the same time scares me, more than any thriller or horror film – was the woman’s atrocious deaths and implacable resurrections, her obstinate persistence, the fierce and at the same time self-destructive will not to be definitively annihilated by the beloved man even as pure memory. If I had to make a list of the most authentic female characters invented by the great male directors, I don’t know if I would put the woman in Solaris at the top, but certainly I would place her in the first ranks – because of the blind suffering she emanates, because of her serene yet furious refusal to be eliminated.

Solaris is also astonishing because the book by Stanislaw Lem that inspired it, while powerful, doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film. The page can stimulate a surprising visionary force when a great talent finds the necessary nourishment in it.

Many years later, the American director Steven Soderbergh gave us another Solaris, one that also started from Lem’s text. But this time it didn’t produce a memorable film. The processes that lead from words to images are mysterious. Tarkovsky read in Lem his own need and urgency; Soderbergh tried to but couldn’t. Or maybe Tarkovsky’s Solaris left no room for the birth of another great film. Written words can generate a wide variety of film versions, but a great one is so particular, so commanding, that, once made, it bars the way to any other masterpiece.

• Translated by Ann Goldstein