A folk tragedy and the eternal mystery of the Russian soul - in the epic performance by Kirill Serebrennikov. Everyone in love with the genre of "political satire" must watch.

"Who lives well in Russia?" Source: Ira Polyarnaya.

The play based on Nekrasov's poem "Gogol-Center" took a long time to prepare, went on an expedition together with the Yaroslavl Theater. F. Volkov, he announced a joint premiere - for May. As a result, the first screenings took place only in September, and without the participation of Yaroslavl colleagues. The success, despite the media campaign against Serebrennikov and his theater, was deafening. The audience gives a standing ovation to the complex multi-genre action. And he is clearly not going to blame the director and his team for anti-patriotism.

On stage - a sober and angry look at Russian reality, the same from century to century. There is no hatred in her. There is a bitter laugh and healthy stubbornness - "they don't choose their homeland." In the one that got it - to live, work and die. The picture of “life in Russia”, demonstrated for more than four hours, is like one big stage performance. Eerie KVN.

In the first part (it is called "Dispute") in front of the audience - a talk show, an imposing guy from the capital picks up a microphone and, measuring the audience with a cynical glance, finds out who is still good for us. The audience is seven peasants, in today's version they include a hipster, an intellectual, an alcoholic, an eternal fighter for the truth and other recognizable characters. One with fear pronounces - "to the minister", the second - in a whisper - "priest", the third unfolds a poster with the inscription "to the king." None of Nekrasov's answers need to be specifically updated - it is enough to simply reproduce them from the stage, so that the main message of the performance - “we never knew how, we can’t and, apparently, will not be able to live freely” - became completely transparent.

"Who lives well in Russia?" Source: Ira Polyarnaya / Gogol Center

The scenography is also speaking. A gas (and maybe oil) pipe is stretched across the entire stage. A carpet is thrown over its very edge, and barbed wire is stretched here and there. An eternal dungeon, a prison to which they have already become accustomed.

One of the brightest scenes of the play is "about an exemplary serf, Yakov the faithful." The slave could not stand the master's abuse and hanged himself in front of his eyes in order to take revenge. The director's technique is discouragingly simple - Serebrennikov shows close-ups: the faces of the characters filmed on camera. One is written at the same time humiliation and desperate protest, on the other - smug rudeness and cowardice.

The second part ("Drunken Night") was solved completely unexpectedly - through a dance. The choreography by Anton Adasinsky is breathtaking. The whole scene is "littered" with the naked bodies of "men", they convulse, stubbornly stand up and again fall as if knocked down. All the color of the female half of the troupe at this time arranges a fantastic fashion show. In bulky Russian haute couture sarafans, they stroll across the stage and sing the eerie song "There is no death."

"Who lives well in Russia?"

The production was carried out within the framework of the Chereshnevy Les festival, on which occasion I came to the play as a white man for the first time in the history of the Gogol Center, and got a place in the 7th row with my own surname (! - I still can't believe it), however, immediately moved to the 1st, fortunately there were free chairs, although in small numbers, remained. Extreme for me happened in a different way - all the previous week I was ill, somehow still moving my legs and trying not to miss the most significant events planned in advance, as a result, by the cherished date of visiting the "Gogol Center" I left myself to the point that without I could hardly breathe exaggeration, and completely out of any connection with what was happening on the stage, in the third act, bleeding opened up - pleasant, understandably, not enough, but whatever one may say, it affects the general mood - the whole following after "Who lives well in Russia" day I lay half-dead and did not get anywhere at all. Nevertheless, I wanted to see Serebrennikov's performance, and it was worth watching, and I am pleased that I came, and moreover, I am glad that I did without any, to admit, the excesses expected by me, because in the current state of I definitely wouldn't have enough.

The production based on Nekrasov's poem was prepared by Serebrennikov for a long time. The actors managed to ride "across Russia", shoot a documentary film following the results of "immersion in the atmosphere of Russian life" if not to the public in the end, then it really gave something to its direct participants in the process). Nevertheless, "Russia" in the play is presented more than predictably and does not differ much from the "Russia" that could be seen on the stage of the Gogol Center in the scripts adapted to local realities by Fassbinder, Trier, Visconti, plays by Wedekind and Mayenburg, as well as performances by Goncharov and - first of all, unequivocally - by Gogol. Apparently, "Dead Souls" became at a certain stage for Serebrennikov the work that determined for a long time not only the style with a set of very specific standard techniques, but also the worldview, ideological "format" of the director's relationship with textbook literary material. Serebrennikov subtracts from the "classics" - and this does not require serious intellectual labor, and that is why the classics - timeless, archetypal, fundamental plots, images, motives - and then collects them into the author's composition of a conventionally mysterious sense, where the heroes and events of the texts from school textbooks are no longer just phenomena that are eternal for Russian life, but reflections of essences and processes of non-everyday, extrahistorical, divorced from earthly human existence, brought into space simultaneously both playful and mystical. So it happened in "An Ordinary Story":

The same is in "Who Lives Well in Russia" - in the three-part, three-act composition of the play, one can see a reference to "The Divine Comedy" (which, by the way, Gogol was guided by in his original idea of ​​"Dead Souls"), and to "Walking on torment "; In the wanderings of Nekrasov's "men", in addition to talking birds, angels of mercy, demons of rage, etc., materialized from poetry, are accompanied by angels of mercy, demons of rage, etc., and in a context far from the fabulous folklore flavor that was given to them in the original source. True, where the "game" ends here and to what extent Serebrennikov is serious in his "mysticism" is an open question, and, incidentally, not the most entertaining one.

The structure of Nekrasov's poem "Who Lives Well in Russia" remains an urgent textological problem, at least it remained twenty years ago, when I was studying. During the life of the author, individual chapters were published, in what order they should be read now - since the 1920s, fierce philological discussions were conducted, the canonical version, as far as I know, does not exist to this day, and the fact that the poem in most of the publication ends with a chant dedicated to "downtrodden and omnipotent mother" (at school, students are also taught this way) is, to put it mildly, controversial, since the internal chronology presupposes the distribution of material in accordance with the peasant labor calendar, from spring to autumn, respectively, from the chapters that Nekrasov managed to complete, the latter should follow "Peasant Woman". But as soon as Serebrennikov places the Nekrasov plot in a conditionally mysterious context that exists outside the historical, calendar time, then he composes the episodes of the poem arbitrarily, sometimes pulling out individual microplots from one part and transferring them into another, but at the same time without violating the established, established by inertia perception of the structure of the text and observing the movement from the prologue to the song "Rus".

The prologue is played out in the spirit of student sketches - maybe deliberately primitive, using the techniques of television reporting, interviews, clips: I would say that the beginning does not inspire, it is too ordinary, predictable, secondary, and it is not expressive as an actor, as if they have long passed from students in the professionals, the performers decided to fool around by chance. Further, the characters try on the same standard, already seen and re-seen in previous performances of the Gogol Center (and if only the Gogol Center) a wardrobe - sweatpants, jackets, khaki overalls, floral dressing gowns, taking out a second hand made of also used metal lockers located on the left in the proscenium. And on the right the musicians settled down, and I must say, the musical component of "Who Lives Well in Russia" is much more curious than others. In the first and third parts, the music of Denis Khorov sounds, in addition, in the musical composition of Andrei Polyakov, adaptations of Soviet retro hits are used, enchantingly sung by Rita Kron, for whom a suitable visual image of the official Soviet pop star was also invented.

In general, from the entourage, it is easy to conclude that the period of "serfdom" at the present historical stage in the play means the Soviet years (everyday signs: carpet, crystal, pioneer ties ...), and the post-reform 1860s-70s, when Nekrasov's poem was created, interpreted as the post-perestroika 1990-2000s (at that time many, and not only men, but also associate professors of universities, and kindergarten teachers, were forced to acquire checkered bags and went not in search of happiness, but just for rags for resale). But the pipe with the bridges thrown over it remains unshakable (either a sewer pipe, or an oil and gas one - it clutters up the stage for the entire first act) and a wall (either a factory, a prison, or a border) with barbed wire on top - the wall sometimes disappears, but appears again, and just over the barbed wire the LED reads "Who lives well in Russia". Both goblet rugs and a pipe with a wall are, of course, signs, not even metaphors, not symbols, and it is impossible to read these signs "literally". It is unlikely that Serebrennikov and his former students do not know, or are not able to find out that the word "bucket" by Nekrasov is used not in a meaningful sense, but as a unit of measurement of liquid - in the play an enameled bucket serves as one of the attributes of theatrical play, paradoxically emphasizing the extraordinary the meaning of what is happening. Or in the words "there is no death, there is no bread" you cannot read what is said here about the fact that there is no possibility to live, and death does not come, and not about the fact that outside the category of time and the category of death is irrelevant. Know, read. But they put their own meaning, even if it is opposite to the original source.

After the prologue solved by the "etude" method, the fabulous Penochka and Chickey invade such a highly theatrical, but according to the elements used, everyday, mundane situation. In the role of Chick with a guitar - Georgy Kudrenko, a relatively new creation for the "Gogol Center", before "Who ..." I saw him only in "Kharms.Myr" "on the" Platform ", where he walked with a feigned greasy smile and pasted stickers" do you want to play? ", but maybe it was not he). In the role of Penochka, giving the self-assembled tablecloth to the peasants-truth-lovers, in the play, too, is not beaten - Evgenia Dobrovolskaya. The appearance of Dobrovolskaya in the "Gogol Center" is natural - once, for a long time (time flies!) She participated in the recruitment of students for the Serebrennikov course at the Moscow Art Theater School, but did not have time to start teaching, she left to give birth. Now her "return" to the former supposed "pets", as a bird-nurse, is as gratifying as it is logical. But Serebrennikov does not perceive Penochka through fabulous folklore symbolism - she is a beggar old woman-wanderer, a beggar, akin to Timofeevna, played by her, Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, in the third part, or maybe she is. But in the third part there will be a "defile" of symbolic girls "birds" in magnificent pseudo-Russian outfits as if from the collections of Slava Zaitsev, which by the final appearance of Dobrovolskaya will bring her real, unhappy, drinking Timofevna from the social plan to a given performance as a whole, mysterious. Despite the fact that, like the 1st, 3rd action starts with an open student skit, with "two-part" horses and with an interactive To my surprise, "happy" this "feast for the whole world" reveals in sufficient quantities, there would be enough alcohol reserves.

The second part of the play - "Drunken Night" - was invented and performed in its pure form as an expanded insert number, a musical and plastic performance. The music for the female vocal group was written by Ilya Demutsky (the composer of the ballet "A Hero of Our Time" staged by Serebrennikov at the Bolshoi Theater), Anton Adasinsky is responsible for the plastic. The musical plan is much more advantageous and expressive than the choreographic one. Actually, this flawed "physical theater" (the term itself is flawed, but here I can't find anything else) does not dare to name the language as choreography, dance. It seems that Adasinskiy didn’t set any other tasks for himself except to play for time. The jerking of young "men" in underpants to the singing of a female choir with the participation of one male voice (the part of Andrei Rebenkov, who convincingly spoke for the landowner in the first movement of the "last-born" landowner), living pyramids, swinging on ropes, the final "solo" of Philip Avdeev - among the "seven temporarily liable" in the first part of his vidocq is the most intelligent, with a beard, with glasses, and there he is immediately hit in the face, the rest of the first act he walks bloody, with plugs in his nose (well, almost like I was sitting in the hall for 3- m, I had to bring myself up ...), and when, having kicked up and tumbled on the stage, while the choir sang "the light is sick, there is no truth, life is sick, the pain is strong ...", his partners in the plastic ensemble leave into the darkness and into the depths of the 1st part, free from scenography and an unexpectedly spacious area, Avdeev remains under the drops of artificial rain pouring from above - well, by God, this is not serious, I would even say, undignified. Probably, in the rhythmic structure of the three-part composition of the play, such a musical-plastic interlude has a certain weight, but it does not add anything substantively to the production. Unless it allows you to take a break before the 3rd act.

Who lives well in Russia - this was no longer a question for Nekrasov, not even a rhetorical one: it is clear that no one, everyone is bad. In the middle of the 19th, the questions were formulated differently - first "who is to blame?", Then "what to do?" The first was answered - serfdom is to blame. Then serfdom was abolished, life became more fun and easier in Russia, and then the question "what to do?" they offered the answer - it is necessary that the means of production should be owned by those who work, well, like "the land to the peasants," and so on. They tried, already later, in the 20th century, according to the recipes of the 19th century, to build a just, socialist society - again it did not help, the same thing turned out that it was before, only even worse, uglier and bloodthirsty. Already in our memory with Kirill Semenovich (the overwhelming majority of the target audience of the Gogol Center had not yet reached a conscious age), the same questions from the 19th century sounded again, with new answers: the Soviet government is to blame, they say, and communist ideology, and property must be privatized and distributed to private hands. We tried private property instead of socialism - again nothing comes of it. In short, the plot is more likely for Saltykov-Shchedrin, and not for Nekrasov. Here is Serebrennikov (who, by the way, dealt with the prose of Saltykov-Shchedrin and, not only in my opinion, "Lord Golovlevs" is one of the heights of his directorial career), through the questions and answers posed by Nekrasov and reposted by history, he comes to generalizations that are not socially political, but anthropological order: bar = slave.

The bar-slave is an unoriginal palindrome and the joke is not the most witty, but written on sheets of paper in the hands of the artists, these three letters are read from right-to-left and left-to-right in different ways, but expressing essentially the same concept, certainly not existing one without another - the problematics of the play "Who Lives Well in Russia" is exhaustively characterized and determines not only the ideological message, but also the structural and compositional feature of the performance, in particular, the choice of fragments for staging. For example, such a memorable school chapter as "Pop" was not included in the composition. And I did not think that this was due to the fear of “offending the feelings of believers” - of course, it’s more important to get in touch with the Orthodox once again. By the way, when in the final of the third part a guy jumped out of the audience and began waving a black flag with a skull in front of the artists wearing T-shirts with some syllables on top of other T-shirts with others, but also mostly of "patriotic" content (like "Russians don't give up "), then, although the guys on the stage did not react to him, at first I decided that it was Orthodox, but I quickly realized that the Orthodox would not have stayed in the hall swinging, the Orthodox would climb onto the stage, start yelling and fighting, as usual among the Orthodox, and this one waved and left - as it turned out, he turned out to be an anarchist, he had it written on the flag "freedom or death". But nevertheless, the chapter "Pop" really would not have come to court, in addition to the fact that the realities described in it are still a little outdated - the main thing is that whatever the talk about in the play, let it be about the last landowner, is still for Serebrennikov comrades in the center of attention are not "bars", but "slaves", that is, the notorious "Russian people", so beloved by Nekrasov.

In the first part of the production there is an unusually touching episode - taken from the end of the poem (if you look at the usual order of publication of chapters) and brought out closer to the beginning of the performance a fragment "About an exemplary servant - Yakov the faithful", which tells a terrible one even in comparison with many other Nekrasov micro- plots are the story of the landowner Polivanov and his serf Yakov: the incapacitated, deprived landowner, jealous of the girl Arisha for her fiancé, the nephew of his faithful beloved slave Grisha, sold his "rival" into recruits. The slave Yakov took offense, then came to ask for forgiveness, but after a while he took the master, drove into the ravine and there he hanged himself, leaving the legless owner to lie in the ravine. Barin was found by a hunter, the landowner survived and returned home, lamenting "I am a sinner, a sinner! Execute me!" It is noteworthy here that Serebrennikov, in addition to Polivanov and his Yakov, focuses on the love of Grisha and Arisha - in the poem, indicated by a couple of lines and mentioned once, the young guy with the girl become full-fledged characters. Free from the slave yoke, from the fear inherent in elders, and at the same time completely from all clothes (I watched the composition where Grisha is played by Georgy Kudrenko, but Alexander Gorchilin was announced in line with him - it turns out that in a different composition Gorchilin runs without panties? go again), the young rush into their arms, but only so that the groom immediately ends up in a wooden box. Nekrasov, if I’m not mistaken, does not say anything about the further fate of the recruit Grisha, maybe he survived in the soldier's service, but the service in Nekrasov times was long, and Serebrennikov, thinking extrahistorically, no doubt drives the last nail into a love story: a young man who allowed himself freedom of feelings without regard to social barriers is dying. But what is more important - the scene "about an exemplary slave" is compositionally placed in the "Happy" section, and Yakov, who "took revenge" on the master by laying hands on himself, finds himself on a par with the slaves who were sucking expensive foreign food from the dishes behind bars.

In the episode "The Last One", a similar re-emphasis is especially noticeable, the "bars", of course, are not justified, but responsibility for what happened, in particular, for the death of Agap, largely falls on the "slaves" with their readiness to hypocrite, humiliate themselves now for the sake of illusory gain in the future (by the way, if I didn’t miss anything, Serebrennikov didn’t say that the peasants for their comedy didn’t receive the promised heirs of the landowner of flood meadows, that is, it’s not in the cheating bars, again), with an effort to please anyone, with blind acceptance any share, with the ability to obey in the absence of guilt, with infinite patience, with forgiveness. Slavery, which cannot be marked by a decree from above, aborted by reforms, broken by upbringing, enlightenment - I was very glad that about the time when the peasant Belinsky and Gogol will carry from the bazaar, start a barrel organ Serebrennikov and does not try, realizing that he has been carrying it for a hundred years, but confused a little. "He sang the embodiment of national happiness" - not about Serebrennikov and not about his performance. Such a surprisingly sober look in "Who lives well in Russia" bribed me. Eat jail, Yasha!

Slavery as happiness - not just as a familiar, normal, only possible, but as a desirable, dear condition for a slave: this is how I saw the main subject of Serebrennikov's thoughts in connection with his stage development of Nekrasov's poem. It is no coincidence that the culmination of the third part and the entire performance, he makes "The Peasant Woman" - the story of a woman who has lost everything dear, and, one has only to listen to her sad story, not at all because of the cruelty of the landowners, after the abolition of serfdom. In the role of Timofeevna - Evgenia Dobrovolskaya. And one cannot but say that her acting work in the third act is at least an order of magnitude higher than the rest. It should be noted that for Dobrovolskaya herself, this role is not the most perfect and does not reveal something unprecedented in her own acting nature, but simply once again confirms her highest skill - in something opposite, but in something very similar female fate She recently played on the occasion of her anniversary in the Moscow Art Theater play "The Village of Fools" on a different quality and modern literary substrate (you can treat Nekrasov's poetry in different ways, but Klyucharyova's prose is just put out the lights):

However, I would pay attention to the image of Timofeevna, created by Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, not just as a separate, towering personal acting success against the general background, but also on how everyday, routinely a tragedy is presented in Serebrennikov's production, in general, unthinkable, by any civilized standard, the monstrous life of a heroine. Timofeevna leads her story, imposing porridge for the "peasants" from a saucepan, accompanied by the vocals of Maria Poezzhaeva, in which the suppressed pain is reflected indirectly - after all, Timofeevna's appearance in Serebrennikov's composition takes place within the framework of "A Feast for the Whole World", and it is "Peasant Woman" that becomes the apotheosis of this a feast of the doomed - not foreshadowing the imminent triumph of good, but quite the opposite, reminiscent of the commemoration of those few and choked-up strangled sprouts of truth, rays of light in a dark kingdom that, until recently, could deceive someone, give rise to illusory hopes. Just as there is no chapter "Pop" in Serebrennikov's composition based on Nekrasov's poem, so there is no place in it for Grisha Dobrosklonov either. "The cause of the people, their happiness, light and freedom above all" - this text is muttered in a recitative. "Russia does not move, Russia is as if it were killed, but a hidden spark ignited in it, they got up nebuzheni, left unbidden, the lives of the grain of the mountain were applied" and is not at all sounded aloud, fired on the screen by the final credits, and the refrain "the bullet will find the guilty one" sounds aloud - not from Nekrasov's poem, but from the song of the "Civil Defense" group. How to understand the latter - I, I confess, do not catch up, but it is obvious that after circling a century and a half, both history, and historiosophy, and socio-political thought, and, after it, art focused on social themes returned to questions that were not even Nekrasov's (who living well in Russia), not even to the Chernyshevskys (what to do), but to Herzen's (who is to blame). The statement of regression is unambiguous, the question "who is to blame", like everyone else, is also rhetorical, and I certainly will not live to see a new "what to do". (They say that they tried to raise Mighty in the BDT on the material of Chernyshevsky - he himself, of course, did not see it, according to reviews, it was not possible). And there was no need for the peasants to go so far, to argue so desperately - an impartial look at themselves would have been enough.

The play contains a lot of redundant, secondary details, overloading the figurative-symbolic series and confusing the development of the main idea. These are, say, Ironic blotches of dictionary comments to archaic vocabulary (a technique from the director's everyday life of the late Yuri Lyubimov). And optional, ornamental "vignettes" (like the embroidered "como" on the tricolor). And a worn-out "trick" with inscriptions on T-shirts (in the final with dressing up nothing, but in the 1st part, Avdeev's character on the T-shirt says something like "this society has no future" - I don't remember exactly, but I remember well , like the choir in Serebrennikov's "Golden Cockerel" on the T-shirts was in the same way "your we, soul and body, if they beat us, go to work"). And senseless, well, in extreme cases, incomprehensible plastic figures, especially in Adasinsky's choreography for the 2nd part - the exercises of some participants in the action with a plastic pipe remained a mystery to me - and can this object be perceived as a "cut" from a pipe crossing the stage in 1 part, or is it some kind of isolated symbol, or just an object for pantomimic exercises?

At the same time, unambiguously, "Who Lives Well in Russia" is a shameful, non-vulgar, conditional, absolutely formatted product for the Gogol Center and, despite the fact that it is uneven, quite solid work; there are certain moments that can hook emotionally (I have singled out for myself at least two of them - in the 1st part with Grisha-Kudrenko and in 3-1 with Timofeevna-Dobrovolskaya), there are also some formal finds, not on the scale of the opening , but more or less original, not entirely secondary. But, in my opinion, there is no creative search in the play, there is no experiment, risk, challenge - as regards not only the fear of the chimeras of the Orthodox-fascist censorship (also, probably in many respects justified and especially forgivable in the current unstable for the given " city ​​cultural institution "situation), but also fears, unwillingness to sacrifice the well-established personal status, image, reputation, if we talk personally about Serebrennikov. And although I, in one way or another, despite my poor physical condition, "Who lives well in Russia" looked with interest and, as the mad professor says in such cases (also, of course, among other numerous small art lovers who attended the premiere in " Gogol Center "), in no case would I allow myself this event - of course, an event - to be missed.

And yet for me there is no art, no creativity where provocation is replaced by manipulation. And "Who Lives Well in Russia" by Serebrennikov is an extremely manipulative, monologue story, somewhere and, which is especially unpleasant for me, didactic. Serebrennikov in each of his decisions knows exactly what reaction he wants to receive in response - sometimes he manipulates the public quite subtly and deftly, sometimes rudely, clumsy, in some cases the calculation is justified by two hundred percent, in some less, but such an approach is dialogue initially, in principle, it does not imply, the director simply chews (and not for the first time, which is offensive and unpleasant) a gum that has long lost its taste, and then presents it on a silver platter under the guise of a delicacy - for example, the gum is of high quality, but eat it for a delicacy I'm sorry, I'm not ready. I would like that from the stage of the Gogol Center (and where else - the choice is small, the ring is shrinking) thoughts not from someone else's shoulder and not in factory packaging, but living, momentary, albeit expressed a little clumsily, would be broadcast. Unfortunately, in the new production of Serebrennikov, I did not discover anything new for myself, nothing sharp, nothing important, nothing that I would not have known without Serebrennikov and before I got to the Gogol Center.

I speak with regret and partly with annoyance, because, for all the drama (and to some extent comic) of my own relationship with the Gogol Center, I would not want the project, with such pomp, pathos and shabby enthusiasm of the founders, that started everything then less than three years ago, it was bent on the vine - or, more simply, it was artificially, maliciously destroyed - ahead of time. Moreover, quite recently I unexpectedly had to enter into a discussion from the standpoint of an apologist for the "Gogol Center" and Serebrennikov, not without benefit - much in my attitude to the project, its productions, to Serebrennikov as a director at the current stage of his career - I am finally for myself clarified and clearly formulated:

Perhaps, it will turn out differently with the next opus of "Gogol Center" - prepared together with Serebrennikov by his students "Russian Fairy Tales" are released immediately after "Who Lives Well in Russia" and informally continue the dilogy. Moreover, they gave me a ticket to the "Russian Fairy Tales" (I asked for it myself), now no matter how the circumstances of health and condition develop, I have to go to "Fairy Tales". In this situation, like no one else, I wish the Gogol Center stable work, at least for the near future, because I already have the ticket in my hands and the money has been paid for it.

The new season at the Gogol Center opened with a premiere played under the auspices of the Chereshnevy Les festival. Following Nekrasov, director Kirill Serebrennikov asked the question: "Who lives well in Russia?" I was looking for the answer together with the actors. To begin with, they went together on an expedition to the places where the author and the heroes of the poem lived. The first stop was Karabikha - Nekrasov's estate.

Nekrasov wrote that he collected the poem "Who Lives Well in Russia" "by word." Kirill Serebrennikov began to put together a production based on this poem from a trip with the Gogol Center troupe across Russia.

The director took the young artists to see how the country works, and to fall in love - which is important! - its just that. He says that in a comfortable capital you cannot understand this! They play here not about peasants. Nekrasov's text was put into the mouths of today's heroes - a people who left a contradictory impression on travelers. Actually, like the author of the original source.

“This“ quality ”, this range -“ you are poor, you are rich, you are poor, you are rich, you are terrible, you are beautiful ”- the range of feelings, passions, human qualities - this is a very important property of Russia, and this is important for understanding Nekrasov, ”the director Kirill Serebrennikov is convinced.

Like Nekrasov's, the play was assembled from different parts, separate chapters. The principle of collage was reflected in the genre as well. There is performance, drama, and rock opera here. The second part of the play is called "Drunken Night". She is without words. Built exclusively on choreography.

“We left the history of the" drunken ", we left the history of vodka, we left the history of a sinful man in a quilted jacket - we came to some other reality of this man flying over the world who wants happiness!” - explains the director-choreographer Anton Adasinsky.

The collective image of the "Russian woman" rested on the shoulders of Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, invited specially for this production. It is not the first time that Serebrennikov has plunged into experiments with classics. The actress did not go on the expedition.

“I don’t need to travel across Russia. I know all this well enough. Nekrasov is a kind of poet, he wrote about that Russia, which the guys just traveled and watched, and the result was a wonderful documentary film. But this is all unconsciously and is still in the blood, ”says People's Artist of Russia Yevgenia Dobrovolskaya.

Both the poem, written after the abolition of serfdom, and this performance is about freedom and slavery. About the choice that a Russian person makes. And about the "Russian world", the boundaries and essence of which the creators of the play are trying to find. And they, like Nikolai Nekrasov, do not answer the sacramental question - "Whoever lives happily, freely in Russia".

Who lives well in Russia. Gogol Center... Press about the performance

NG, September 21, 2015

Grigory Zaslavsky

No vein not stretched

"Who Lives Well in Russia" at the "Gogol Center"

"Who Lives Well in Russia" is the first premiere of the Gogol Center in the new season. Yesterday they played the second - "Russian Fairy Tales", which included the classic "Turnip" and no less classic, but less known in Russia - from the collection "Russian Treasured Tales", collected by the same Alexander Afanasyev, but published, as you know, Abroad. And "Who Lives Well in Russia" is the same poem by Nekrasov, which is still being held in school today and which, despite all the horrors of Russian life described in this epic poem, did not suffer from censorship. However, in the program, Kirill Serebrennikov is rightly named the author of the play (as well as the stage director and set designer).

“In what year - count, / In what land - guess, / On the pole path / Seven men came together: / Seven temporarily liable, / Tightened province, / Terpigorev Uyezd, / Empty volost, / From adjacent villages: / Zaplatova, Dyryaeva, / Razutova, Znobishina, / Gorelova, Neelova - / Neurozhaka identity, / Agreed - and argued: / Who lives happily, / Freely in Russia? / Roman said: to the landowner, / Demyan said: to the official, / Luka said: to the priest. / Kupchina fat-bellied! - / The brothers Gubin said, / Ivan and Mitrodor. / The old man Pakhom tried hard / And he said, looking into the ground: / To the noble boyar, / to the Minister of the sovereign. / And Prov said: to the king ... "- these very words from the prologue of the epic Nekrasov poem begin the performance. No, it’s wrong. The play begins with a look at the stage, on which - uncomfortable, heavy school chairs with metal legs and an inclined back, from end to end of the stage, from right to left, a pipe of an unknown "gas pipeline" or heating main, which so often even in Moscow crawls out to the surface, has been laid. Above the wall, which later will open the entire depth of the stage, but for now, which marks the next obstacle behind the pipe, a barbed wire twisted in rings sparkles. In one place, however, a carpet was laid out right on the pipe. But in general, you think, there is a well-equipped space for talking about who lives well in Russia. This is where men come from different villages, all of them are recognizable types. The picturesque old man Pakhom (Timofey Rebenkov) cannot make up his mind in any way, rushes his thoughts from the boyar to the minister and back ... answers, since they have nothing to say about themselves in this respect. Of them - definitely none. All - "according to Nekrasov."

Kirill Serebrennikov's new performance has a very rare quality of today's theater - there is no fuss in it. Kirill Serebrennikov's various experiences of the last difficult months were not reflected in it in any way - about the absent director, various other difficulties. It could be assumed that in response, wishing to prolong the life of the theater, he would do something distilled, “quiet” or, conversely, he would give out something so scandalous (Nekrasov just gives reason for this!), Which would allow to slam the door loudly ... There is neither one nor the other in the play. It contains not a calculating, but a very natural combination of the horror of Russian life, told by Nekrasov, and the beauty of Russian folk intonation - music, melodic ... to live ... Whoever read the poem, probably noticed how Nekrasov, who felt and well imitated the melody of a folk song, moved from naturalism and physiological essay over the years to the side of yet unannounced symbolism. In the lyrics of the late Nekrasov, this movement is very noticeable. And "Who lives well in Russia" is the very last thing he managed to write, the last lines were written a few days before his death.

“Who Lives Well in Russia” is a large three-act performance, it ends at about 11.00, but it looks easy ... Well, as far as we can talk about lightness when it comes - almost without exception - about joyless, terrible, tragic things. Serebrennikov, one might say, returns to the stage a pure, genuine tragedy, not relieved by any irony, self-irony or reservations. In the third part - "A Feast for the Whole World" - Evgenia Dobrovolskaya accepts and bears the severity of the tragedy, to whom the director gives the role of the peasant woman Matryona Korchagina. The story of this half-woman, half-boy in asexual ski pants is scary, scary - until the deathly silence in the hall, before fading, but the outstanding (in this scene there is no doubt about that) dramatic and even tragic actress is not left alone with the public. Her story is at the same time in dialogue with the dreary, drawn-out song of Marina Poezzhaeva. In this scene, in general, a lot of things have been invented, a lot of things - but nothing superfluous. When Matryona just starts her story, the camera is adjusted, and we see her face in close-up on the screen, and the initial almost stupid joy of the "interviewing" peasant woman does not immediately allow us to realize the horror of her story. Behind her is a table and loaves of bread, which she divides among the peasants - a completely religious and mystical scene of communion with her inhuman sufferings, her and - His.

In "Who in Russia ..." Serebrennikov again works with the composer Ilya Demutsky, who wrote music for "(M) student", and recently - for the ballet "A Hero of Our Time", here Demutsky is again the author of ballet music for the second act "Drunken Night ", On which the director-choreographer Anton Adasinsky worked with Serebrennikov, whose drunken round dance instantly transforms into a terrible cancan, and the round dance is the same extreme and terrible ballet. Also - about the musical side of the performance: Serebrennikov tries different keys, and, I must say, the tricycle iambic of the poem sounds good, and when it is "tested" with Russian rock, where guitar strings are tried to break, and when it sounds like rap, and jazz accords to Nekrasov verse - also in the suit.

There are many different things in the performance, far-fetched, kaleidoscopic, like a farcical intonation and variegated conversations, Nekrasov drapes for the time being, hiding the hopelessness of the local road movie, the fundamental unhappiness of the peasant, and in essence - any other life "in Russia." Because no one in the city or somewhere up there can consider himself happy if this happiness is built on such tragic "bones". “To Whom in Russia…” is a very beautiful performance, where when the men, under the refrain of the female choir “There is no death…”, go into streams of water illuminated by theatrical light, you inevitably recall Bill Viola's “water” series. And the appearance of the "drunken" in the audience before the beginning of the second part, as well as before the beginning of the third - the appearance of two "men" in the hall with a bucket of vodka and asking the audience to tell about their happiness, following the director's intention, diversifies the action, but does not relax.

Novaya Gazeta, September 18, 2015

Elena Dyakova

Matrenin Dvor from Perm to Tavrida

At the Gogol Center - "Who Lives Well in Russia"

The play by Kirill Serebrennikov came out exactly on time. This is important: not one more change of management, not oral and printed rumors about the economic difficulties of the theater prevented the Gogol Center from opening the season with a premiere.
Three-part. Three hours. Different genres and patchwork - like Nekrasov's poem itself. By the way: no one before the Gogol Center tried to stage it on a dramatic stage.

The set designer is Serebrennikov himself. A blank wall with thorny curls of thorns on top replaces the backdrop. A gas pipeline shines across the stage with the warm glow of the people's welfare.

In the shade of the chimney, there is a simple household of the Tightened province of Terpigorev county: a sewing machine, an ironing board with a white office shirt, an old TV, a kitchen table, checkered shuttle bags, rugs - a parental blessing, a 1970s shortage.

In the coils of barbed wire on the backdrop, white neon flares up, not rich, as in a roadside cafe, an advertising inscription: "Who lives well in Russia." What's behind the wall? Unknown. But she, the wall (this is somehow immediately obvious) is not a prison. And ours, dear. We are sitting behind her, holding the defense. She stands not on the border of the state, but in our mind.

But in the world, outlined by the wall, there is a will-will. And seven men, a self-assembly under the pine trees with the serving of strong drinks, can wander unrestrainedly there in search of meaning.

The "Guys", the young actors of the "Seventh Studio", of course, are not peasants of the 1860s. Their coveralls move along the stage harmoniously, like an artel of barge haulers. At the same time, everyone has their own type and character: a security guard, a shuttle, an "individual entrepreneur", covered with the first gloss of well-being, a weasel, a goof ... And yet - Fiendish, always unsure that he is respected.

And also - a bespectacled man in a T-shirt with the inscription "THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY HAVE BEEN HAPPENED" and a pioneer tie.

... But their wives are all alike: long-legged beauties in stale floral flannel dressing gowns.

The world is quite recognizable. The world is so dear to the teeth. And somehow, in his own way, he is comfortable on stage.

« The entire poem of Nekrasov, written after the abolition of serfdom, asks questions of freedom and slavery. It is about the impossibility of gaining freedom and the convenience of habitual slavery.", - writes Kirill Serebrennikov, anticipating the premiere. The first part of the play - "Dispute" - is all about it. Nekrasov episode "Foundling", in which the freed peasants of the aged prince Utyatin, intoxicated, bitterly, deceitfully, with a foolish twist, continue to play serfs to comfort the old master (the St. reform of 1861), - grows on the stage of the Gogol Center into a real bestiary. Again - a bestiary, dear to shiver.

The pseudo-burgomaster Klim (Nikita Kukushkin), ready to steer this booth (a serious man will not undertake this), the hangover rebel Agap (Yevgeny Kharitonov), the “world” emanating from poison, laughs, gossip, but habitually playing “faithful slaves” in the hope of the future benefits, the "young elite" of the Utyatins princes, who are benevolently watching the toadying of the servants (in fact, legally, they have long been free people). Nekrasov's biting lines, like rods, and surrealistically exactly inscribed in this delirium, a stately blonde beauty dressed as a Snow Maiden (Rita Kron), who sings in a deep chest voice at the footlights "I look into the blue lakes ...".

Burnt Russia, unfaithful Russia, Russia, always ready to bow down to the ground - and get a knife from behind the boot in a bow. Russia, in which Nekrasov himself sometimes seems to be a character of the same bestiary (who would call our crowd to an ax without a people's protector ?!).

… Nevertheless, the first act of a long performance flies by in one breath.

Part Two - "Drunken Night". There are no words here: only a chorus of girls in black, with half-mourning, half-kupala wreaths on their heads, sings vocalizations to the fragments of Nekrasov's lines: hungry, dear, hungry ... Music by Ilya Demutsky and choreography by Anton Adasinsky rule this act, transforming the quite lively revelry of righteous and sinful peasants at Nekrasov in a terrible plastic study, in Russian purgatory. An artel of actors from the "Seventh Studio", a brew of free truth-seekers from Zaplatov-Dyryavin-Razutov-Znobishin turns into a single, strong and exhausted, half-naked body, which is not given a mortal shirt: only ports!

Either this is famine - but not Nekrasov's, but the Volga famine, of 1921, one of the most terrible. Either a camp bath. Either he was felling. Either a shooting ditch, a foundation pit, Chevengur, infantry with three lines under machine-gun fire. Either the Last Judgment fresco in the village church. Pines are being felled here in hellish frost. Here they carry the dead on bent backs. Here they are mutely tormented, banishing by all the people the cheerful sin of half-drunk servility and the insane holiday of rebellion.

… In the third act, enlightenment comes. He is wearing a quilted jacket, rubber boots and a scarf.

Matryona Timofeevna, mother of the innocently murdered infant Demushka and five living sons, a Klin peasant woman nicknamed the Governor, is played by Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, one of the best actresses of the Moscow Art Theater. Plays, making natural, like breathing, Nekrasov's poetic monologue. Humanizing the wanderers' artel with their story: they whisk away tears and sniff, listening, they take heavy earthenware plates of cabbage soup from Matryona's hands, pour a glass for the hostess, cut a loaf. And here every gesture is recognizable: what Russian did not sit at such a table? And it is no coincidence that the black-and-white video of Matryona's story about her youth looks like a movie of the "severe style" of the 1960s.

It’s not like “living well in Russia” ... It’s more about the fact that a village is not worth it without a righteous man. And if ours - from Perm to Taurida - stands against heaven on earth - the reason is Matrenin's yard.

... Strange people cross it in Kirill Serebrennikov's Nekrasov dream. Beauties in Russian costumes, in kitsch and embroidered shirts of museum beauty endure the feet of solid colored shirts and serve them with a bow to the men who seek truth. But this is not the needlework of the Frog Princess.

Men unfold and put on T-shirts with pictures in seven layers. Of those that hang on every resort, bazaar, station stall throughout Russia. There are polite people here, and the Hedgehog in the fog, and beer and vodka, and fishing with a bathhouse, and a church with a cross, and an ax with a Kolovrat, and Vysotsky with the signature “Everything is wrong, guys”, and President Putin with the slogan “It’s for you NATO? "..." Russian means sober "," Call Rus to the ax "," I don't remember offenses - I write them down "...

Everything that we bring from the bazaar instead of Belinsky and Gogol. And now instead of the foolish milord.

All that - incompatibly motley, but somehow closely packed in almost every head - protoplasm, which slowly sways in the brains of the entire population of Terpigorev County.

And no one seems to know which enzyme in this mixture will be the most important for synthesis.

... And who will try to catch Russophobia in the patchwork quilt of this performance (with all its brocade, matting, soldier's cloth and barbed wire) ... the one who never lived in Russia.

I didn’t talk with fellow travelers on the train. Didn't stand on the pioneer lineup. He did not tell jokes about Brezhnev. I didn’t eat pasta in a navy way - spaghetti bolognese performed by midshipman Zhevakin. Didn't go to the small wholesale market for Poshekhonsky cheese and stationery. I didn’t swallow a lump when I watched my parents watch a 1960s black-and-white movie on TV.

And it is absolutely certain that I didn’t go to Nekrasov’s school.

TheaterALL, 19 September 2015

Anton Khitrov

Fall in love with Nekrasov

"Who Lives Well in Russia" at the Gogol Center

The new performance by Kirill Serebrennikov, who will become the headliner of the Territory festival, is the director's greatest victory as artistic director of the Gogol Center to date.

Kirill Serebrennikov began working on Nekrasov's poem more than a year ago: in the summer of 2014 he traveled around the Yaroslavl Region in the company of his former students from the Seventh Studio and artists of the Volkovsky Theater, the oldest in Russia (it was planned that the production would be a co-production of two theaters; center ”had to release the premiere alone, but Muscovites expressed their gratitude to their Yaroslavl colleagues). The actors interviewed farmers, librarians, district police officers, went to museums and prepared excerpts from the poem. Every evening a group showed a small sketch. One of them even entered the play, but in general Serebrennikov pursued a different goal: he wanted to try different approaches to Nekrasov with the artists and to reject dead-end tricks in advance.

Maybe even then the director was sure that "Who Lives Well in Russia" is a text for which it is not enough to find a single key. Serebrennikov, one of the art directors of the international festival "Territory", artistic director, who is well aware of the most diverse areas of modern theater, his own man in opera, drama, ballet, demonstrates an unprecedented variety of genres in his new work. There was nothing like this in his career, except perhaps "A Midsummer Night's Dream": this Shakespearean performance consisted of four short stories different in atmosphere. And yet the latest premiere is much more ambitious. Here you can find stylish European direction with video cameras, crude political satire, opera, physical theater, shameless acting improvisation, and even the good old "Russian school" with emotions.

The director-choreographer of the play is none other than Anton Adasinsky, the creator of the avant-garde Derevo theater. His contribution is especially noticeable in the second, plotless act, based on the chapter "Drunken Night": wet, half-naked men perform a wild, brutal dance, accompanied by a choir and a live orchestra. It's hard to believe that after intermission the same artists will run around the hall with a bucket of vodka and offer a drink to anyone who can convince them that he is happy.

Nekrasov does not indicate either place or time: the poem, as we know from school, begins with the lines "In what year - calculate, in what land - guess." Serebrennikov has even less specifics. If "Idiots", "(M) student" - his performances of the "Gogol Center" period - clearly referred to "here and now", then in the new work the signs of modernity are combined with the realities of tsarist Russia. Nekrasov has all seven representatives of the people who are looking for a happy person in Russia - peasants, peasants; the director, realizing that farmers have long ceased to make up the majority, makes them people of different social groups - here there are “kreakly” and proletarians from the conventional Uralvagonzavod. It is clear that they get along badly - but after all, Nekrasov also described skirmishes and fights between his heroes.

In search of happy compatriots, the motley company learns about various curious, ridiculous and terrible cases, of which Serebrennikov staged four: "Judas Sin" by the headman Gleb, who sold his fellow villagers; revenge of Yakov the faithful, an exemplary servant, to his cruel master, expressed in suicide in front of the offender; an unusual deal of peasants from the village of Vakhlachina with the heirs of their madcap landowner; the terrible life of the peasant woman Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina. Matryona is played by Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, who completely owns the stage for at least fifteen minutes, and for this role she will most likely be given the Golden Mask.

In recent years, Serebrennikov has been his own production designer; and, as an artist, he gives out a simple, intelligible solution: on the stage - an oil pipeline and a fence with barbed wire, two reasons why someone in Russia lives well, and someone does not. However, as a director, he does not distinguish between "people" and "power", the exploited and the exploiters: the actor playing the master will become a slave in the next plot, and the man, on the contrary, will be the master. Nekrasov wrote a poem shortly after the abolition of serfdom, and the worst of everything he describes is voluntary, not forced, slavery. In one of the most terrible chapters, the heirs of a rich landowner promise the peasants land so that they pretend to be serfs and do not upset the sick old master - and free people gladly accept the offer: in a corresponding episode of the play, young artists of the Gogol Center disguise themselves as Soviet pensioners, causing an understanding laughter from the audience.

There are turning points in the life of a literary work, and, perhaps, the premiere at the Gogol Center will become such for the poem by Nikolai Nekrasov, which has lost the interest of readers due to the fact that the Bolsheviks and the Soviet government took it into their hands. The point is not only that Nekrasov (it turns out) wrote about the choice between freedom and sausage, about family violence and the rights of women, it is also about his very style.

The poetic language of Nekrasov turned out to be surprisingly flexible: at the will of the director, the poems began to sound both like everyday speech, and like an oratorio, and even like hip-hop. Dobrovolskaya, who plays an old peasant woman, has apparently watched a lot of interviews from various ethnographic expeditions - in any case, the poetic rhythm does not in the least prevent the actress from reproducing characteristic “village” intonations. The prologue familiar to everyone - the one where “seven men converged on a pole path” - Serebrennikov decides as a talk show, breaking it down into the lines of the presenter and the guests of the program: Nekrasov easily allows such an operation to be performed on himself. The classic gives composers Ilya Demutsky and Denis Khorov no less opportunities than a director with artists: musically, this premiere is even more diverse than Serebrennikov's Dead Souls with Alexander Manotskov's hits on the same stage. There is a performance for every taste - from classical choral singing to pop music. The artistic director of the Gogol Center, among other things, did a good service to the classic, about whom everyone has forgotten - isn't that what connoisseurs and defenders of Russian literature should do?

Circus, cabaret, tragedy:

Kirill Serebrennikov staged Nekrasov

The Gogol Center opened the season with the premiere of the play Who Lives Well in Russia, based on a poem familiar from middle school age. The interpretation of Russian classics, proposed by an outstanding Russian director, does not fit into the Procrustean bed of the school curriculum.

The first naive thought: is Nikolai Nekrasov's poem really so interesting - both scary and funny, a fairy tale in an embrace with a physiological sketch, a pamphlet - with lyrics? Is it really she? Did we study a fake at school? Not a fake, of course, but a greatly abbreviated version that flew past the eyes and ears. Yes, I remember the wretched and the abundant, powerless, omnipotent Mother Russia, but here is the scorching story of the “happy” village woman Matryona about her son Demidushka, eaten by pigs and opened as part of the investigation (“and they began to torment and plast the white body”), from the last Soviet schoolchildren were definitely concealed. And the whole text, in fact, was hidden behind official formulations, selective quotations and a haze of omissions.

Second thought: it is strange that bureaucrats, at least in words, are promoting Russian classics, and it’s high time to leave in public use perhaps only Tolstoy’s “Filipka” (and “Resurrection” - under the barn lock), because the classics were not distinguished by either political correctness or respect for dignity ... And the beginning of the play / poem, where seven men come together, arguing "who lives happily, freely in Russia", was decided as a political talk show. In Chekist training, the storytellers-investigators (Ilya Romashko and Dmitry Vysotsky) cling to the participants' name-badges and persistently pry: "To whom?" Poor Provo (Philip Avdeev), the youngest and most courageous, who said: "To the Tsar!", Wears glasses and a T-shirt "The days of this society are numbered", they forget all the time (and when they remember, they immediately crumble their nose). Luka's answer (Semyon Steinberg): "Pop!" - in the light of the inexorable merging of the state and the church, they are hushed up. This is very funny - and superbly invented: Serebrennikov creates a dramatic miracle, transforming the dense, massive, like a guitar sound wall in the songs of "Civil Defense" Nekrasov text into an essay, as if specially written for the theater - distributes the text by roles, without changing a word, exclusively placement of accents and intonations. They sing a lot in the play (both the lines of the poem and borrowed songs - in particular, Russian folk songs and patriotic stage of the times of the USSR), but the entire sound sequence flows like music. And every hero, even people - men Roman (Ivan Fominov) and Ivan (Evgeny Sangadzhiev), Pakhom (Andrey Rebenkov), Demyan (Nikita Kukushkin) and Mitrodor (Mikhail Teynik), even fabulous creatures - Bird (Evgenia Dobrovolskaya) and Chick ( Georgy Kudrenko) is a detailed and wittyly thought out character. But if you choose the main role in this ensemble performance, then it will belong to Evgenia Dobrovolskaya - she was given the semantic monologue of the third act, the story of Matryona.

In terms of style, this is perhaps the most relaxed and unpredictable performance by Serebrennikov; contrasting with respect to the rhythmically homogeneous poem; steep hills or, if you use the images of Nekrasov, a self-assembled tablecloth. The first act, "The Dispute", is a dashing, but relatively traditional staging with elements of cabaret, a genre tested by the director in the Moscow Art Theater "Zoyka's Apartment". The parade of Soviet songs begins with the arrival of peasants in the land of master Utyatin; "Now the order is new, but he is fooling in the old way": there are children, fearing that the tyrant father will deprive him of his inheritance, "take it and blurt out to the master that the landowners were told to turn back the peasants." An ingenious stage move illustrates a return to the old days - men dress up in clothes that I have already forgotten about: mohair scarves, muskrat hats - from which cupboards were they pulled out? And the meeting with the magic tablecloth ends with dressing up in khaki: self-assembly sends armed men to war - and in this swagger there is, of course, a painful reference to the war in Ukraine, and there is also a timeless snapshot of the male fighting spirit, eternal as the world; a metaphor, akin to the one used by Vadim Abdrashitov in the "Parade of the Planets" - his heroes went to military training, but found themselves neither far, nor close, neither high nor low, in a surreal space, where a man is looking for himself - "what a bull": “Having argued - quarreled, quarreled - got into a fight, got into a fight - decided not to disperse, not toss and turn in houses, not to see either wives, or little guys, or old people, until we find a solution to our dispute”.

The second act, "Drunken Night", is preceded by the riots of the heroes who received the coveted buckets of vodka from the chiffchaff: during the intermission, the guys rampage in the hall, bullying the seated spectators - as the "beggars" once did in the Moscow Art Theater production of the Threepenny Opera. The action itself, on the contrary, is majestic, strict, ascetic: here the poem turns into an oratorio (the composer of this part is Ilya Demutsky, who worked with Serebrennikov on the recent Bolshoi Theater premiere, the ballet “A Hero of Our Time”, the original music for two other acts was written by Denis Khorov ) and plastic performance. The actresses declared in the program as "Women" in evening dresses are singing - and the lines of "Soldier" become a refrain: "The light is sick, there is no bread, there is no shelter, there is no death." "The men", dressed in underwear, plunge into a painful bodily trance (the choreographer of the performance is the legendary Anton Adasinsky, the founder of the "Derevo" theater).

The third act, "A Feast for the Whole World," is a slap in the face to good taste: it begins with a rough circus, smells of vodka and is generous with desperate clowning. And it is from this multicolored litter that a high tragic episode is born - a long, terrible, heartbreaking and soulful story of Matryona (an outstanding work of Evgenia Dobrovolskaya), entering into dialogue with drawn-out and bitter Russian songs (a wonderful young actress Maria Poezzhaeva demonstrates an extraordinary vocal gift)

And in the finale - contrasting, sharp, one could say “knocking down”, if the audience in the theater hadn’t been sitting anyway (by the way, the production is so exciting that you forget how hard the chairs in the “Gogol Center” are) - they sound in a row two songs by Yegor Letov. Bravura "Motherland" (about which the author himself said: "This is one of the most tragic songs that I have composed. The song is about how the motherland rises from its knees, which, in fact, does not exist, which is not something that rises from its knees, but it gets bogged down in an unprecedented ass all deeper, and tighter, and more hopeless. And at the same time, singing about how the motherland is rising is very powerful "). And the sounding pistol shot "The bullet will find the guilty one." The heroes, who are frontally lined up along the stage in a row, put on dozens of T-shirts - that kitsch trash with which souvenir tents of new Russia are littered with stormy prominences of popular consciousness - from "the most polite president" to "better belly from beer than hump from work." Is this satire? Bitterness? Mockery? The beauty of the ugly? Just beauty? Who lives on - a damn rhetorical question; at least a hundred iron shoes of a stack, but you won't get an answer. And if you try to define the genre of a polyphonic performance in one word, then this is not a quest in search of an answer, but a portrait of the country. With unofficial, but root, innate as a blood group, patriotism. Woven from the struggle of stylistic opposites, from horror and joy, pain and hops, Vano Muradeli and Yegor Letov.

Theatre., 23 September 2015 year

Olga Fuks

Where is happiness?

Nekrasov's poem "Who Lives Well in Russia" is a school curriculum, it is held in high school, when adolescents are not interested in Russia after serfdom. I don’t remember that any of the adults, having been poisoned by school didactics, voluntarily returned to this text. The poem seems to have no stage history at all. Nevertheless, when the Gogol Center announced this production, there was a feeling that the idea was lying on the surface. But no one except Serebrennikov took it.

Russia is a delusion, endless and endless captivity, inexorable fate, shadows of the past, absurdity and pain, old songs about the main thing and new songs about the eternal - here it is, the cross-cutting theme of the work of Kirill Serebrennikov. "Forest", "Bourgeois", "Dead Souls", "Lord Golovlevs", "St. George's Day", "Kizhe" in different ways proved how inexhaustible it is. Most of the rehearsals took place not in the rehearsal hall, but on a trip around the Yaroslavl region - to the places where the Nekrasov estate of Karabikha was located, to the modern villages of Razutov, Neelov and Neurozhayk, among the descendants of Nekrasov characters. Serebrennikov and his actors were looking for stage authenticity, like the early "artists", the Dodino "brothers and sisters", the Shuksha "freaks" of Alvis Hermanis - in a word, those for whom theater is a process of cognition. But the performance of Kirill Serebrennikov, of course, does not exhaust itself with reliability, it sweeps away any genre restrictions, including everything: documentary accuracy, political satire, online filming, oratorio, modern dance, psychological theater techniques, performance - a whole anthology of the new theater comes out.

The musical score of the performance is as multi-layered as the dramatic one: from the repertoire of Lyudmila Zykina performed by the colorful and vociferous Rita Kron to the crystal oratorio of Ilya Demutsky. The score is also built for numerous disguises - from underwear to luxury "haute couture a la russe" (costumes were designed by Polina Grechko and Kirill Serebrennikov). The rhythmic dressing of actors in T-shirts with various symbols becomes the code of this ready-to-wear porter: "polite" Putin flashes on a pink background, Lenin - on a red one, "Russian means sober", Che Guevara, "The days of this society are numbered", " I don’t remember offenses - I write them down ”,“ Where is happiness? ” - all that thrash mix that boils in the heads of our poor compatriots. The views of the population change easily, like T-shirts with symbols: I was special - I became Orthodox, I was nobody - I became everything.

The first layer of this multi-layered performance is the most topical, peppery. Head-on collision with the day today. Having also acted as a set designer for his performance, the director led her Majesty Trumpet (with oil, gas?) Across the stage - the backbone of modern Russia. The dwellings of Nekrasov's peasants are molded to it - in fact, not even dwellings, but places around televisions. In the first scene, the peasants turn out to be participants in a talk show, the host of which (Ilya Romashko) asks a provocative question: who lives happily, freely in Russia. The peasants reluctantly hum into the microphone their name and version of the answer: a boyar, a noble dignitary, a fat-bellied merchant ...

On the answer "priest" the presenter stumbles and prefers not to repeat aloud the seditious answer - well, how will they be attracted for insulting the feelings of believers. And he is clearly in no hurry to approach the puny bespectacled man for an answer - he feels that this subject was called in vain. Feels right: the bespectacled man silently pulls up a crumpled placard with his answer - "to the king." He will be beaten more than once by his comrades in misfortune: for the fact that he swings at the sacred - they understand everything about local crooks and thieves, but they do not want to pull the thread any further. True, the intellectual has nowhere to go - he has no other people, and, with a broken nose, he trudges along with everyone, fascinated by the great goal - to find at least one lucky person in Russia.

Scorched by the "TV truth", the peasants return to their homes, where their wives are waiting for them, ready to take off their shabby robes at the first call of their husbands. But, offended, the husbands no longer look at the women, but ardently look into the distance - they change their worn clothes for brand new camouflage and even raise the DNR flag: the soldiers of the “Russian world” are again fleeing from routine, again reaching for the illusory goal of making others happy, whether to find a happy one. And lay out the road to hell with more good intentions. However, this is perhaps the most controversial point - after all, it is not easy to put an equal sign between the epic peasants of Nekrasov and today's separatists.

Paying tribute to topicality, the performance in the second act breaks out into Russian space - into the enchanted kingdom of being-drinking, frozen for centuries (chapter "The Drunken Night"). The ugly pipe, surrounded by barbed wire and overgrown with everyday rubbish, disappears, everything disappears - only emptiness, height, angelic voices for the chorale of Ilya Demutsky (this is their second work after "A Hero of Our Time" with Serebrennikov) and plastic soaring in an airless space, freed from gravity of bodies (choreographer Anton Adasinsky). “There is no death,” the angels exhort the drunken men. Of course not - after all, it is not known whether there was a life.

The performance flies in a kite, then falling to the ground, then soaring up. The story of the terrible revenge of the exemplary Yakov the faithful lackey, who hanged himself in front of his previously adored offender, is given in close-up: Serebrennikov's games with video projections get along well with psychological theater and even more - give him a new impetus for development. The episode about Prince Utyatin, whose numerous offspring - the golden youth - persuaded the peasants to continue playing serfs (so that the old tyrant would die alone) is staged as a creepy farce. Nekrasov's bitterness is perfectly projected today: the men agree to break the comedy and play slavery for a very reasonable price. The protagonist here is Nikita Kukushkina's Klimka - a sloven and a liar, rapidly turning from a dashing lumpen into a steel functionary, ready to step over any life.

And yet the center of the play is the episode with Nekrasov's Matryona, a woman with many children, a woman who suffered a lot, who survived the loss of her first child. Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, Anninka from Serebrennikov's "Golovlevs Gentlemen" and Julitta from his "Forest", plays in such a way that all her roles enter into a nuclear reaction: village intonations - with a poetic line, a powerful theater of experience with a conventional form, pain passed through yourself - with the delight of the game. To look at this is happiness.

Only a very free person could stage such a performance. Free from many things. But he cannot free himself from the wretched and abundant, powerful and powerless Mother Russia, from the almost hypnotic sensation of the forces seething in her. And he doesn't want to.

RG, September 24, 2015

Alena Karas

Sang with the voice of Nekrasov

The poem "Who lives well in Russia" came to life in the Gogol Center

The idea to compose a joint performance with the Yaroslavl theater. Fyodor Volkov did not appear at Kirill Serebrennikov by accident. Yaroslavl land - the birthplace of Nekrasov. And his endless crying poem, laughter poem, verbatim poem "Who lives well in Russia?" Seemed to fall into the very heart of today's Russian problems. Accompanied by enthusiasts and "stalkers", they walked through abandoned villages and amazing nature, past stunning museums and decayed, long-gone life.

They began, of course, with Karabikha, the homeland of Nekrasov, and then moved deeper into the province. "Small towns - Rybinsk, Poshekhonye, ​​Myshkin, once rich villages - Prechistoye, Porechye, Kukoboy - still barely live, but around them the space overgrown with forest, weeds, hogweed, where there is almost nothing else", - told Serebrennikov.

It seemed to many that the performance would move towards verbatim, documentary, dangerous conversations with those who now live there and are looking for an answer to the question of Nekrasov's men. Is it for this reason that the Yaroslavl Theater dropped out as a partner, and the Gogol Center ended up staging the performance on its own, releasing the premiere at the height of the most disturbing conversations about its future. But it turned out that Serebrennikov and his wonderful actors did not need any other text. Nekrasov's poem was more than enough for three hours of scenic fantasies and adventures of the most outlandish character, and the actors took out the material of Afanasyev's Forbidden Fairy Tales from the expedition to Karabikha, at first planning to combine them with the poem. But these tales became the basis for another performance, which will become part of the dilogy about the "Russian world".

It is already a no small matter to rebuild a text that seemed like a boring part of the obligatory "program" since school days, to give the theater back the opportunity again - through all Soviet and post-Soviet censorship, whatever it may be - to speak, to play a fairytale, "pochvennicheskiy", Nekrasov's paradise - is already a no small matter ... It turned out that it was Serebrennikov, who always and only thought about Russia, who had already heard it through the Prilepin's "scumbags" and the infernal mechanics of "Dead Souls", through the "forest" characters of Ostrovsky and Gorky's "philistines", through the diabolical bureaucracy of erasing a person in Tynyanovsky's Kizhi ", - only he managed to take on this outlandish" buzz "and open the stage new poetic worlds. Plowed by the theater, this amazing text sounded with the furious, frightening, hopeless and life-giving voices of a real, unwritten life. Following not the letter, but the spirit of the Nekrasov poem, which is very different in its poetic and substantial structure, he divided the performance into three completely different - including genre - parts.

In the first - "Dispute" - seven young actors from the Gogol Center meet with Nekrasov's men, try them on from the XXI century. The narrator - a sort of Moscow wise guy, a resident of the Garden Ring - with amazement, repeating what accompanied the guys on their Yaroslavl expedition, discovers their unknown ... and familiar world. Here is a bespectacled dissident from all Russian swamp areas, here is a street robber, here is a martyr of slavery, here is a warrior. We recognize them in their quilted jackets and T-shirts, in their jeans and rags, in their camouflage of prisoners and guards who are always ready to go to the "bloody battle." They talk about the tsar in a whisper, about the priest and even just with lips, about the minister of the sovereign - with fear ... There is nothing to actualize here - the Nekrasov world endlessly reproduces itself in Holy Russia, repeating all the same words about the tsar, and about the priest, and endlessly harnessing itself into a new yoke, a new strap of barge haulers.

Several stories keep this narrative on a taut nerve, and among them the strongest - "about an exemplary servant, Jacob the faithful," who loved his slavery more than anything else, until he was inflamed with hatred and hanged himself in revenge; and - the main one - the last, about those who, for the sake of the sick master, continued to play serf slavery, as if it did not end in 1864. It is this very state of the "Russian world" on the border between slavery and freedom, life and death, humiliation and uprising, sin and holiness - following Nekrasov - and is explored by the Gogol Center.

Calling for help Anton Adasinsky with his expressive, passionate choreography, two composers - Ilya Demutsky (author of the ballet "A Hero of Our Time") and Denis Khorov, dressing the actresses in incredible "Russian" sundresses "from haute couture", armed them with saxophones and electric guitars, folk -jazz compositions and folk choirs, the energy of pagan Russian melos and rock and roll, Serebrennikov turned Nekrasov's poem into a real bomb. When in the second - choreographic - act "Drunken Night" the bodies of the men are "seeded" the huge stage of the Gogol Center, open to the brick wall, and the witch's maiden voices scream their almost erotic mortal songs over this dead (drunken) field, it will seem that in modern theater there is the same tragic spirit that has not existed for a long time.

In the third movement, one soul - a woman's - emerged from the choral beginning to turn a folk tragedy into a song of fate. Adding vodka to the "peasants" Evgenia Dobrovolskaya - Matrena Timofeevna - returns to the Russian theater the intonation of the great tragic actresses of the past. At first, it even seems that this cannot be, that her soul-tearing confession is only playing into tragedy - quite postmodernist. But after a few minutes there is no strength to resist the pain to which she surrenders entirely, and the power of spirit towering over her. Of course, this long confession will be replaced by a choral, rock'n'roll finale, will build its uneasy relationship with Nekrasov's “Rus”, sing - without embarrassment, backhand and seriously - his words about the “mighty and powerless”, and it will seem that the army , which rises, is similar to Jacob the faithful, killing himself in his unknown strength and weakness.

The New Times, 28 September 2015

Ksenia Larina

Legend of the Russian land

The long-awaited premiere of the "Gogol Center" "Who Lives Well in Russia" turned out to be funny and creepy, as befits a Russian fairy tale

Nekrasov in the Soviet school was "given" as a guardian for the people's happiness. “Here is the front entrance”, “Only one strip is not compressed”, “You share! - Russian, female share ”- we all sadly gundels at the blackboard, rolling our eyes to the ceiling out of boredom. “Who Lives Well in Russia” was performed in fragments, focusing on the civic pathos and the hysterical finale: “You are poor, You are abundant, You are downtrodden, You are omnipotent, Mother Russia!” The meaning was not particularly grasped. They explained everything to us in simple party language. It was worth living up to the premiere of the Gogol Center to discover the true meaning and terrible abyss of this apocalyptic legend about the Russian people.

What will happen to the Motherland

Kirill Serebrennikov had been preparing his stage version for a long time: the upcoming expedition to Nekrasov's places was announced more than a year ago. The project was prepared jointly with the Yaroslavl Theater named after F. Volkova - the premiere was supposed to take place last May at the "Chereshnevy Les", and Nekrasov united with Afanasyev's tales.

As a result, "Who in Russia ..." came out to the public this fall without the participation of Yaroslavl people, Afanasyev's tales spun off into a separate parallel premiere, Russian Fairy Tales, and Nekrasov fraternized with Yegor Letov (several Civil Defense texts became part of the dramatic outline).

And of course, one cannot but mention the proposed circumstances in which the Gogol Center team has been for several months now: leapfrog with the change of directors (resignation of Alexei Malobrodsky and Anastasia Golub), endless financial checks and public suspicions of budget spending, accusations of bullying over the classics, over the homeland and over the people - all this contributes little to creative growth. The release of such a large-scale multi-storey stage canvas in such conditions is an almost professional feat and Kirill Serebrennikov's response to all accusations and suspicions.

"Who in Russia ..." is a highly patriotic performance. In him there is no arrogance, no cleanliness, no hypocritical servility, no false sincerity. Answering the question, “what will happen to the homeland and to us,” the author does not step aside in disgust, he himself is a part of this world, one of the seven men who dance their desperate dance in the road dust. And words are no longer needed, there would be strength for laughter and tears.

Life on a pipe

"To whom in Russia ..." is a genre melting pot into which everything that comes to hand is thrown: drama, ballet, opera, circus, popular print, defile, club party, rock concert. The play is like a nesting doll, where all the sisters are from different parents. The rhythm is frantic and torn, the orchestra wheezes with brass and stumbles over the drums, the pictures change, as in a fair show: you don't have time to see one, as it is replaced by the next, and it seems that there are hundreds more in stock (artist - Kirill Serebrennikov, composers - Ilya Demutsky, Denis Khorov).

"Rus, where are you rushing, give me an answer?" - It is impossible not to notice the connection with Dead Souls, staged by Serebrennikov in the same theater. This is the same frantic road to nowhere, only instead of the tires that were used in Gogol's play, here a huge gas pipe is stretched across the entire stage. On it, like on the Fish-Whale, there are cities and villages, houses and apartments, where men in alcoholic T-shirts and women in sweatshirts sit at a flickering TV box, kissing and fighting. And no one notices that behind the pipe there is a wall to the sky, and barbed wire winds along the wall.

The coveted self-assembled tablecloth will first feed and drink, and then distribute camouflage and machine guns - and well-fed drunk men, glossy with pleasure and swaying slightly, will line up in a picturesque group under the flag familiar from TV news. "The days of this society are numbered" - we read on the T-shirt of Provo from Neurozhayk - a puny hipster with glasses, who is beaten by his own and others.

Serebrennikov is often compared to Yuri Lyubimov of the 1970s: they are related by the style of direct expression, frontal metaphors, energetic charge of the present day, the street. Yes, of course, they are very close in tone: in Serebrennikov's apartments there is the same mockery that always bubbled up in Lyubimov's performances when he addressed directly “them” - the rotten piles of the regime. But there is a major significant difference: the addressee has changed. And today, a conversation with a person about a person is much more important than with the authorities about power. And Kirill Serebrennikov caught this most important change in the atmosphere of time from the very beginning of his professional life in the capital - starting with "Plasticine" by Vasily Sigarev and "Terrorism" by the Presnyakov brothers.

Everything goes according to plan

"To whom in Russia ..." is not a diagnosis, it is a painful, sweet, bitter, hungover path. The predetermined path, to which we are condemned, in which we are harnessed, inscribed, rubbed in. A path where doom borders on rapture. If it is true that every talented director puts on one performance all his life, then Serebrennikov's Rus is a continuation of the Golovlevs and Kizhe with their mystical horror, as well as the already mentioned Dead Souls and The Golden Cockerel with their popular prints confusion. In a word, this is a hard-won dialogue with the audience, which the director fully trusts. The three acts of the play are absolutely self-sufficient and autonomous - both in terms of the plot and in terms of genre. The grotesque plot from the chapter "The Last One" - about how the peasants who had long been released into the wild portray serfs in front of the out-of-mind master, Prince Utyatin, - returns to our century, revealing familiar Soviet motives. The collective Duck's nostalgia for the old days rattles with Soviet songs, pioneer ties, mohair scarves, fawn hats and fleeced sweaters. Against the background of drunken unshaven poverty, the light symbol of a great power rises above the stage as a busty beauty with a fair-haired braid and piercing Zykin's “I look into the blue lakes” (one of the discoveries of the play is actress, singer and musician Rita Kron).

The dramatic ballet of the second act (choreographer Anton Adasinsky) - "Drunken Night" - refers us to the images of the silent poetic cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko in his "Land": to sweaty and black naked bodies, to veins stretched from a soundless cry, to those knocked into blood in the mad dances of the feet, to the rain that fell too late, unable to resurrect anyone or anything on this scorched field. The second act is a woman's cry, a tongue torn from the bell, the sound of bare feet on the dead hungry earth.

The third act meets with the carelessness of a circus reprise: red clown noses, a horse-man, a bucket of vodka (“whoever lives happily, they bring him a glass). Devastated after the second act, the audience is relieved and eager to join the game.

But the center of the last action will be a play in the play: Matryona's monologue about her “happy” woman’s share, which Evgenia Dobrovolskaya masterly performs - bringing horror down with humor, pathos - with details, grief - with humility, humiliation - with pride. This is how another Russia appears before us - without light brown braids, kokoshniks and kitsches, without lingering heartfelt songs, without ruddy cheeks, white-toothed smiles, without red boots and snow-white downs on the sleeves. Actually, that glamorous, ceremonial Russia is not and never was. There is only an abyss, slowly and menacingly rising from its knees. "For whom it is good to live in Russia" - these are the same eighty-six percent through the eyes of the fourteen remaining.

Vedomosti, 6 September 2015

Maya Kucherskaya

Afterbirth

"Who Lives Well in Russia" directed by Kirill Serebrennikov - the story of the collapse of the "Russian world"

The heroes of the play bear little resemblance to Russian peasants, but they still do not resist slavery and love vodka.

Once Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov wrote the poem "To whom in Russia ..." - well, he almost wrote, did not finish, - in which the Russian people invented. Desperate, stubborn ("a man like a bull"), cocky, lover of vodka and terrible stories about repentant sinners - but most importantly, many-sided. The poem absorbed dozens of different fates. The poet drew rhythms, vocabulary, images from folklore, but he thought of a lot, finished singing it himself.

Kirill Serebrennikov tried to do both without inventions and without stylization - and showed the people not Nekrasov, today. The one whose spirit, together with the troupe, while preparing for the performance, he was looking for last summer in the Yaroslavl region, traveling through towns, dilapidated villages, entering current houses, talking with people, ethnographers, priests - you can watch the footage of this trip during intermission in the foyer "Gogol Center". And he showed who Nekrasov's Roman-Demyan-Luka-brothers Gubins-old man Pakhom-i-Prov had become in the 21st century.

A guest worker in sweatpants, a riot policeman in camouflage, a revolutionary fool with an eternally broken nose, a hard worker with string bags, a bum, barely spitting out words. And everything seems to be the same person. Universal grease instead of Nekrasov's variegation. Lumpen, half-criminals, aggressive and lost, not needed by anyone. Neither a fat-bellied merchant, nor a landowner, nor a tsar. Although sometimes they even try to pull them all into the TV - the scene of the argument that opens the performance is wittily presented as a talk show with the host (Ilya Romashko), who is trying to find out from the participants who is having fun, at ease in Russia. But real guys are laconic.

The "boyish" style is also supported by the design of the performance, which takes place against the uncomfortable background of the outskirts: a metal pipe stretches sadly through the wasteland, some plant thorns on the brick wall, the wasteland breaks off into blackness. Here is an eternal cold night, in the center of which is a bucket of vodka. The second part, "Drunken Night", a pantomime, picks up and makes the vodka motive the main one: it is a dead booze, a staged "squirrel" with convulsions of half-naked male bodies in the twilight, merging now into an eerie multi-legged caterpillar, now into bursting barge haulers. In the finale, lifeless corpses dot the same dark black wasteland (Anton Adasinsky was invited to stage the choreography of the play).
The appearance of the "peasant woman" Matryona Timofeevna (performed by Evgenia Dobrovolskaya) in the third movement, dressed, of course, like a collective farmer - a quilted jacket, a scarf, boots - pushes this thick male darkness. Dobrovolskaya lives her completely unbearable "female share", the death of a child, beatings of her husband, shouts of her mother-in-law with a smile, incredibly humane and charming, drowning sorrow not in fault - in labor and love for "children." Her appearance adds an unexpectedly lively, warm tone to the pamphlet unfolding on the stage. But soon everything again drowns in rap, in Yegor Letov's hopeless "Homeland", in the approaching dusk and empty slogans on T-shirts, which, as usual, change and change characters in the last scene. On T-shirts everything flashes, from Winnie the Pooh to the portrait of Vysotsky, from "Stalin is our helmsman" to "USSR" and "I am Russian" - all that remains of us today.

This vinaigrette supplanted what inspired Nekrasov 150 years ago, what inspired him with hope - a holistic folk culture, deep, multicolored, powerful. Now, instead of the life calculated according to the calendar, with baptism, wedding, funeral service, prohibitions, joys, fairy tales, salty jokes, now we have this: T-shirts with vulgar pictures, a checkered shuttle bag, a computer monitor with the screensaver "It's nice to live for the people in holy Russia." Instead of the songs that were sung by the whole village, there was a beauty with a scythe, giving out a verbal non-dissection about blue and Russia, embodied falsity (her appearance was not without reason causing bitter laughter in the hall). Instead of Grisha Dobrosklonov, "the people's defender", whom Nekrasov made the only one happy in the poem, he is a miserable bespectacled man, a white ribbon, helpless, powerless.

One thing has not changed since Nekrasov's times: voluntary slavery and vodka. The heroes of The Last One, played in the first part of the play, played along with the insane old landowner, who did not want to recognize the abolition of serfdom, and pretended that slavery continued. An innocent seemingly undertaking turned into the death of the peasant Agap - he tried to rebel, but, drunk, nevertheless agreed to lie down for the lord's amusement under the rod. And although he was not even touched with a finger, he died immediately after a playful whipping. I wonder why? This is not the only question we are asked to answer. Every scene bristles with topicality and merciless questions about today.

The poem "Who Lives Well in Russia" directed by Kirill Serebrennikov is an artistic, but publicistic statement about our general ruin.

Teatral, September 21, 2015

Marina Shimadina

Who lives well in the Gogol Center?

Premiere of the play by Kirill Serebrennikov based on the poem by Nekrasov

Despite financial difficulties and the hassle of an absent director, the Gogol Center produced one of its most ambitious performances, which was prepared for over a year and even went on an expedition in the footsteps of Nekrasov's heroes. The Chereshnevy Les festival extended a helping hand to the theater, the premiere was held under its auspices and caused a long standing ovation from the audience.

“In what year - count, in what land - guess,” - Ilya Romashko begins for the narrator. And you don't need to be particularly smart to guess - the action takes place not in distant tsarist Russia, but here and now. Although over the past century and a half, little has changed in our country: the peasants are still poor, greedy for vodka and quick to fight, and officials and priests are still with their trump cards.

The meeting of the heroes on the pillar path in the play turns into a talk show, where the frightened proletarians from Gorelov, Neelov, Neurozhaki, too, offer the presenter their own answers to the title question of the poem. Some are huddled and shy, some are showdown and stubbornly stand their ground, and the hero of Philip Avdeev - a real hipster in sneakers and glasses - jumps into a chair with a homemade placard, as if at a single picket.

The men have the same answers, Nekrasov. And they do not at all enter into dissonance with the emphatically modern and laconic design of Kirill Serebrennikov. The current symbols of Russia: a fence with barbed wire and a huge gas (or oil) pipe across the entire stage, near which the heroes of the poem huddle, equipping their simple dwelling. Everything here is painfully familiar: colorful dusty carpets, sewing machines, old TVs, dressing gowns of women trying to keep their husbands-truth-seekers at home ... But where is there. If a Russian man starts up, he cannot be stopped. And now the motley company, having got hold of a self-assembled tablecloth, turns into an armed detachment of militias.

However, Serebrennikov does not insist on precisely this development of events. The director selects different keys for each scene. The episode about "an exemplary servant - Yakov the faithful", who, unable to withstand the mockery, hanged himself in front of the master, was resolved as a duel of two close-ups. The camera shoots and shows on the screens the faces of the servant and the owner, and in the expressive silence of Yevgeny Kharitonov, one can read the entire people's grief and the age-old chronicle of humiliation.

One of the main themes of the production is voluntary slavery. In the chapter "The Last One," the peasants again pretend to be serfs in order to amuse the old master, who does not accept the new order - the heirs for this deception promised the peasants a good jackpot. In the performance for the masquerade, the heroes have to put on shovel mohair sweaters, sweatpants with extended knees, and the young hipster gets a school uniform with a pioneer tie. We must see his complicated relationship with this legacy of the past: disgusting, disgusting, but the hand still reaches out and freezes in the pioneer salute.

Here, the audience, of course, will recognize their contemporaries, those who happily, willingly or involuntarily, by biting their lip, return to Soviet ideology and rhetoric.

But for all the obvious journalism, the new performance of Serebrennikov is an aesthetic show, a free editing of scenes of different genres, where there is a place for booth reprises, and for a defile of enchanting costumes a la rus, and for inserted musical numbers of Rita Kron, who gorgeously performs Soviet hits about mother of Russia. And then there is a whole dance act to the music of Ilya Demutsky (the same one that he composed for the Bolshoi ballet "A Hero of Our Time") staged by Anton Adasinsky. It is called "Drunken Night", like one of the chapters of the poem. But in the convulsions of the falling, trying to rise and again knocked down by invisible blows of the bodies, one feels not so much the effects of hops as desperate attempts to stand up, which rhyme with the lines of Yegor Letov: "I see my Motherland is rising from its knees." Nobody manages to get up ...

In the third act, Evgenia Dobrovolskaya reigns on the stage, invited from the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater is absolutely justified. Perhaps, no one except this interior actress could read a long and hysterical monologue about a heavy female share with such strength and virtuosity. Before her performance, cameras with monitors and the accompanying vocals of Maria Poezzhaeva faded into the background, and the audience was numb as if spellbound. And this ruthless monologue ultimately brought history to the level of a real folk tragedy.

The final solemn hymn of the poem "You are wretched, / You are abundant, / You are powerful, / You are powerless, / Mother Russia!" the director displays the captions on the screen. Apparently, today he could not stage-justify the lofty words about a free heart, a calm conscience and an innumerable army too. Left on the conscience of Nekrasov. Instead, he forced the actors to put on a bunch of T-shirts with patriotic symbols and stupid jokes about polite people. Nowadays "people's truth" has turned into stereotyped slogans, a set of ready-made labels, stencil ideas about the world.

Serebrennikov and his actors turned out a sober and bitter production about Russia, full of healthy anger, conscious stoicism and acting drive. And to the question "who is it good to live here?" you can answer with confidence - to the audience of the Gogol Center. While such bright and meaningful premieres are being released in Moscow, there is something to breathe here.