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 can live well in Rus'?” I searched for the answer to it 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 Rus'” “word by word.” Kirill Serebrennikov began putting together a production based on this poem from a trip with the Gogol Center troupe around Russia.

The director took the young artists to see how the country works and to fall in love - which is important! - hers is exactly like that. He says you can’t understand this in the comfortable capital! They are not playing about peasants here. Nekrasov's text is 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 abundant, you are poor, you are rich, you are terrible, you are beautiful” - the range of feelings, passions, human quality - this is a very important property of Russia, and this is important for understanding Nekrasov,” director Kirill Serebrennikov is convinced.

Like Nekrasov, the performance was assembled from different parts, separate chapters. The principle of collage was also reflected in the genre. There is performance, drama, and rock opera here. The second part of the performance is called “Drunken Night”. She is without words. Built solely on choreography.

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

The collective image of the “Russian woman” fell on the shoulders of Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, who was invited especially for this production. This is not the first time Serebrennikova has plunged headlong into experiments with the classics. The actress did not go on the expedition.

“I don’t need to travel around Rus'. I know all this well enough. Nekrasov is a kind of poet, he wrote about the Russia that the guys went and saw, and it turned out to be a wonderful documentary. But this is all unconscious and still in the blood,” says People’s Artist of Russia Evgenia Dobrovolskaya.

Both the poem, written after the abolition of serfdom, and this performance are 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 to the sacramental question - “Who lives happily and freely in Rus'” - they, like Nikolai Nekrasov, do not answer.

Photo by Ira Polyarnaya

Grigory Zaslavsky. "Who Lives Well in Rus'" at the Gogol Center ( NG, 09/21/2015).

Elena Dyakova. . At the Gogol Center - “Who Lives Well in Rus'” ( Novaya Gazeta, 09/18/2015).

Anton Khitrov. . “Who Lives Well in Rus'” at the Gogol Center ( TheaterALL, 09.19.2015).

Vadim Rutkovsky.: Kirill Serebrennikov directed Nekrasov ( Snob., 09.21.2015).

Olga Fuks. ( Theatre., 09.23.2015).

Alena Karas. . The poem "Who Lives Well in Rus'" came to life at the Gogol Center ( RG, 09.24.2015).

Ksenia Larina. . The long-awaited premiere of the Gogol Center, “Who Lives Well in Rus',” turned out to be fun and creepy, as befits a Russian fairy tale ( The New Times, 09.28.2015).

Maya Kucherskaya. . “Who Lives Well in Rus',” directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, is the story of the collapse of the “Russian world” ( Vedomosti, 06.10.2015).

Marina Shimadina. Premiere of the play by Kirill Serebrennikov based on the poem by Nekrasov ( Theatrical, 09/21/2015).

Who lives well in Rus'? Gogol Center. Press about the performance

NG, September 21, 2015

Grigory Zaslavsky

No vein is not pulled

"Who Lives Well in Rus'" at the Gogol Center

“Who Lives Well in Rus'” is the first premiere of the Gogol Center in the new season. Yesterday we played the second one - “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 Rus'” is the same poem by Nekrasov, which is still taught in school today and which, despite all the horrors of Russian life described in this epic poem, has not suffered from censorship. However, in the program the author of the play (as well as the stage director and set designer) is rightly named Kirill Serebrennikov.

“In what year - calculate, / In what land - guess, / On a pillared path / Seven men came together: / Seven temporarily obliged, / Of the tightened province, / Terpigoreva County, / Empty volost, / From adjacent villages: / Zaplatova, Dyryaeva, / Razutova, Znobishina, / Gorelova, Neyolova - / There is also a poor harvest, / They got together and argued: / Who lives happily, / At ease in Rus'? / Roman said: to the landowner, / Demyan said: to the official, / Luke said: to the priest. / To the fat-bellied merchant! – / Said the Gubin brothers, / Ivan and Mitrodor. / Old man Pakhom strained / And said, looking at the ground: / To the noble boyar, / To the sovereign’s minister. / And Prov said: to the king...” – these very words from the prologue of Nekrasov’s epic poem begin the performance. No, that's wrong. The performance begins with an examination of the stage, on which there are uncomfortable, heavy school chairs, with metal legs and an inclined back; from end to end of the stage, from right to left, runs a pipe of an unknown “gas pipeline” or heating main, which so often comes to the surface even in Moscow. Above the wall, which will later reveal the entire depth of the stage, but for now - marking another obstacle behind the pipe, barbed wire sparkles, twisted in rings. In one place, however, a carpet was laid out right on the pipe. But in general, you think that the space for talking about who lives well in Rus' is well organized. This is where men from different villages come, all recognizable types. The picturesque old man Pakhom (Timofey Rebenkov) just can’t make up his mind, his thoughts rush from the boyar to the minister and back... When there is a pause after the question “about whom”, a light chuckle runs through the hall: looking at these men, it is clear that they will now be confused in answers, since they have nothing to say about themselves in this regard. Of these, definitely none. Everything is “according to Nekrasov.”

Kirill Serebrennikov's new performance has a very rare quality in today's theater - there is no fuss in it. It did not reflect in any way the various experiences of Kirill Serebrennikov over the past difficult months - regarding the absent director, various other difficulties. One could assume that in response, wanting to prolong the life of the theater, he would do something distilled, “quiet” or, conversely, something so scandalous (Nekrasov gives reasons for this!) that he would loudly slam the door . The play has neither one nor the other. It contains not a calculated, but a very natural combination of the horror of Russian life, told by Nekrasov, and the beauty of Russian folk intonation - music, melody... Suffering and laughter, these very sufferings of the end, allowing one not to get into a noose, but to live and live... Anyone who has read the poem must have noticed how Nekrasov, who felt and imitated well the melody of a folk song, moved from naturalism and a physiological outline over the years towards an as yet undeclared symbolism. In the lyrics of the late Nekrasov, this movement is very noticeable. And “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is the very last thing he managed to write, the last lines were written a few days before his death.

“Who Lives Well in Rus'” is a large three-act play that ends at about 11.00, but it looks easy... Well, as far as one can talk about ease when we are talking - almost without exception - about things that are joyless, terrible, tragic. Serebrennikov, one might say, returns to the stage pure, genuine tragedy, not alleviated by any irony, self-irony or reservations. In the third part – “A Feast for the Whole World” – the burden of the tragedy is accepted and borne by Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, to whom the director gives the role of the peasant woman Matryona Korchagina. The very story of this half-woman, half-boy in sexless ski pants is scary - to the point of deathly silence in the hall, to the point of freezing, but the outstanding (there is no doubt about that in this scene) dramatic and even tragic actress is not left alone with the audience. Her story is simultaneously in dialogue with the melancholy, drawn-out song of Marina Poezzhaeva. In general, a lot of things were invented in this scene, a lot of things - but nothing superfluous. When Matryona just begins the story, the camera is adjusted, and we see her face close-up on the screen, and the initial almost foolish joy of the peasant woman “giving an interview” 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 men - a completely religious and mystical scene of her communion with inhuman suffering, hers and His.

In “Who in Rus'...” Serebrennikov again works with composer Ilya Demutsky, who wrote the music for “(M) the Student”, and recently for the ballet “Hero of Our Time”, here Demutsky is again the author of ballet music for the second act of “Drunken Night” ", on which director-choreographer Anton Adasinsky worked with Serebrennikov, in which a drunken round dance instantly transforms into a terrible cancan, and the round dance is an equally extreme and terrible ballet. More about the musical side of the performance: Serebrennikov tries different keys, and, I must say, the iambic trimeter of the poem sounds good, and when it is “tested” by Russian rock, where guitar strings are tested to break, and when it sounds like rap, and jazz harmonies of Nekrasov the verse also matches the suit.

There is a lot of different things in the play, farcical, kaleidoscopic, as with the farcical intonation and diversity of conversations Nekrasov for the time being drapes and hides the hopelessness of the local “road movie”, the fundamental misery of the peasant, and in the sense of any other life “in Rus'”. Because no one in the city or somewhere up there can consider themselves happy if this happiness is built on such tragic “bones.” “To whom in Rus'...” is a very beautiful performance, where, when the men, to the refrain of the women’s choir “There is no death...”, go into streams of water illuminated by theatrical light, you inevitably remember Bill Viola’s “water” series. And the appearance of “drunk” people before the start of the second part, as well as before the start of the third - the appearance of two “men” into the hall with a bucket of vodka and asking the audience to talk about their happiness, following the director’s plan - diversifies the action, but does not relax.

Novaya Gazeta, September 18, 2015

Elena Dyakova

Matrenin Dvor from Perm to Taurida

At the Gogol Center - “Who Lives Well in Rus'”

The performance by Kirill Serebrennikov was released exactly on schedule. This is important: neither another change of management, nor 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. Multi-genre and patchwork - like Nekrasov’s poem itself. By the way: no one before the Gogol Center has ever tried to stage it on a dramatic stage.

The set designer is Serebrennikov himself. A blank wall with thorny curls on top replaces the backdrop. Across the stage, a gas pipeline shines with the warm glow of national prosperity.

In the shadow of the chimney is a simple household in the Smart Province of Terpigoreva 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 shortage of the 1970s.

In the coils of barbed wire on the backdrop, a poor advertising inscription flashes in white neon, like on a roadside cafe: “Who lives well in Rus'.” What's behind the wall? Unknown. But it, the wall (it’s somehow immediately obvious) is not a prison wall. And ours, dear. We are the ones who sit behind her, holding the defense. It does not stand on the border of a state, but in our minds.

But in a world outlined by a wall, there is free will. And seven men, setting up a self-assembly under the pine trees with strong drinks served, can wander there without any restrictions in search of meaning.

The “men”, the young actors of the “Seventh Studio”, are, of course, not the peasants of the 1860s. Their gang moves across 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 prosperity, a weasel, a sucker... And also - the ostentatious one, always unsure that he is respected.

And yet - a bespectacled man in a T-shirt with the inscription “THIS SOCIETY’S DAYS ARE NUMERED” and a pioneer tie.

...But their wives are all alike: long-legged beauties in stale flannel flowered robes.

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

« Nekrasov’s entire poem, 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 this. Nekrasov’s episode “The Foundling,” in which the liberated peasants of the elderly Prince Utyatin enthusiastically, biliously, deceitfully, and with a fool’s twist, continue to play serfs to console the old master (the St. Petersburg heirs-guards promised to give the flood meadows to the “monastery” if the priest dies happy, without knowing about reform of 1861) - grows on the stage of the Gogol Center into a real bestiary. Again - a bestiary, dear to the core.

False burgomaster Klim (Nikita Kukushkin), ready to rule this farce (a serious man would not undertake such a thing), hungover rebel Agap (Evgeny Kharitonov), “peace” emanating from poison, laughter, gossip - but habitually playing “faithful slaves” in the aspirations of the future benefits, the “young elite” of the Utyatin princes, benevolently observing the fawning of the courtyards (in fact, legally, they have long been free people). Nekrasov’s lines are biting, like rods - and surrealistically accurately fitted into this nonsense, a stately blond beauty in a Snow Maiden costume (Rita Kron), who in a deep chesty voice sings at the footlights “I look into the blue lakes...”.

Burnt Rus', unfaithful Rus', Rus', always ready to bow to the ground - and take out a knife from behind the boot in bow. Rus', in which Nekrasov himself sometimes seems like a character in the same bestiary (who will call our crowd to the ax without a people's intercessor?!).

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

Part two - "Drunken night." There are no words here: only a choir of girls in black, with half-mourning, half-Kupala wreaths on their heads, sings vocalises to fragments of Nekrasov’s lines: hungry, dear, hungry... The music of Ilya Demutsky and the choreography of Anton Adasinsky rule this act, turning a completely live revelry of righteous and sinful peasants Nekrasov's work into a terrible plastic sketch, into Russian purgatory. The artel of actors of the “Seventh Studio”, a gang of free truth-seekers from Zaplatov-Dyryavin-Razutov-Znobishin, turns into a single, strong and exhausted, half-naked body, which is not given even a mortal shirt: only ports!

Either this is a famine - but not Nekrasov’s, but the Volga famine, 1921, one of the most terrible. Or a camp bathhouse. Either he was logging. Either an execution ditch, a pit, Chevengur, infantry with three lines under machine-gun fire. Or the Last Judgment fresco in the village church. Here they are cutting down pine trees in the hellish frost. Here they carry out the dead on bent backs. Here they are silently tormented, the whole people suffering the joyful sin of half-drunk servility and the insane celebration of rebellion.

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

Matryona Timofeevna, the mother of the innocently murdered baby 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. He plays, making Nekrasov’s poetic monologue as natural as breathing. Humanizing the artel of wanderers with their story: they wipe away a tear and sniffle, listening, they take heavy earthenware plates of cabbage soup from Matryona’s hands, pour a glass for the hostess, cut a loaf of bread. And here every gesture is recognizable: what Russian has not sat 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 “severe style” movie of the 1960s.

It’s not that “it’s good to live in Rus'”... It’s more about the fact that a village doesn’t stand without a righteous person. And if ours - from Perm to Taurida - stands against the sky on earth, that’s the reason for Matrenin’s courtyard.

...Strange people cross it in Nekrasov’s dream of Kirill Serebrennikov. Beauties in Russian costumes, in tunics and embroidered shirts of museum beauty, bring out piles of good-quality colored shirts and present them with a bow to the truth-seekers. But this is not the handicraft of the Frog Princess.

The men unwrap and put on - in seven layers - T-shirts with pictures. One of those that hang on every resort, market, station stall throughout Rus'. Here are polite people, and a Hedgehog in the fog, and beer with vodka, and fishing with a bathhouse, and a church with a cross, and an ax with a Kolovrat, and Vysotsky with the caption “Everything is wrong, guys,” and President Putin with the slogan “It’s for you.” NATO?”... “Russian means sober”, “Call Rus' to the axe”, “I don’t remember insults - I’m writing them down”...

Everything we bring from the market instead of Belinsky and Gogol. And now instead of my lord stupid.

All that - incompatiblely motley, but somehow tightly packed in heaps in almost every head - is the protoplasm that slowly sways in the brains of the entire population of Terpigoreva County.

And no one seems to know which enzyme in this mixture will be 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) ... he, guess what, did not live in Rus'.

I didn’t talk on the train with my fellow travelers. Was not on the Pioneer line. He didn’t tell jokes about Brezhnev. I didn’t eat naval pasta - spaghetti bolognese performed by midshipman Zhevakin. I didn’t go to the small wholesale market for Poshekhonsky cheese and stationery. Didn't swallow the lump watching my parents watch black and white 1960s movies on TV.

And it’s absolutely certain that it didn’t take place at Nekrasov’s school.

TheaterALL, September 19, 2015

Anton Khitrov

Fall in love with Nekrasov

“Who Lives Well in Rus'” at the Gogol Center

The new play by Kirill Serebrennikov, which will headline the Territory festival, is by far the director’s biggest victory as artistic director of the Gogol Center.

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 from the oldest Volkov Theater in Russia (it was planned that the production would be a co-production of two theaters; “Gogol- Center" had to release the premiere alone, but Muscovites expressed gratitude to their Yaroslavl colleagues). The actors interviewed farmers, librarians, and local police officers, went to museums and prepared excerpts from the poem. Every evening some group showed a small sketch. One of them even entered the performance, but in fact Serebrennikov pursued a different goal: he wanted to try different approaches to Nekrasov with the actors and discard dead-end techniques in advance.

Perhaps even then the director was sure that “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is a text for which it is not enough to pick just one key. Serebrennikov, one of the art directors of the international festival "Territory", an artistic director who is well aware of the most diverse areas of modern theater, his man in opera, drama, and ballet, demonstrates unprecedented genre diversity in his new work. There had never been anything like this in his career - except perhaps for A Midsummer Night's Dream: this Shakespearean performance consisted of four short stories with different atmospheres. And yet the latest premiere is much larger. Here you can find stylish European directing with video cameras, crude political satire, opera, physical theater, shameless acting improvisation, and even the good old “Russian school” with emotions.

The director and choreographer of the performance is none other than Anton Adasinsky, the creator of the avant-garde theater "Tree". 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 drinks 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 “The Idiots” and “(M)Student” - his performances from the Gogol Center period - clearly referred to the “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 looking for a happy person in Rus' - men, peasants; the director, realizing that farmers have long ceased to be the majority, makes them people of different social groups - here there are “creaks” and proletarians from the so-called Uralvagonzavod. It is clear that they do not get along well - but Nekrasov also described skirmishes and fights between his heroes.

In search of happy compatriots, a motley company learns about various curious, absurd and terrible cases, of which Serebrennikov staged four: “The Sin of Judas” by the elder Gleb, who sold his fellow villagers; the revenge of Yakov, a faithful, exemplary slave, on his cruel master, expressed in suicide in front of the offender; an unusual deal between peasants from the village of Vakhlachina and the heirs of their crazy landowner; the terrible life of the peasant woman Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina. Matryona is played by Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, who reigns supreme on 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 a simple, clear solution: on the stage there is an oil pipeline and a fence with barbed wire, two reasons why some people live well in Rus', and others not so much. However, as a director, he does not separate “the people” and “the authorities”, the exploited and the exploiters: the actor playing the master will become a serf in the next plot, and the man, on the contrary, will be the master. Nekrasov wrote the poem shortly after the abolition of serfdom, and the worst thing he describes is voluntary, not forced, slavery. In one of the most terrible chapters, the heirs of a rich landowner promise land to the peasants so that they pretend to be serfs and not upset the sick old master - and free people happily accept the offer: in the corresponding episode of the play, young artists of the Gogol Center dress up as Soviet pensioners, causing 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 be one for Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem, which lost the interest of readers due to the fact that the Bolsheviks and the Soviet government took control of it. It’s not just that Nekrasov (it turns out) wrote about the choice between freedom and sausage, about domestic violence and women’s rights, it’s also in his style itself.

Nekrasov’s poetic language turned out to be surprisingly flexible: at the will of the director, the poems began to sound like everyday speech, like an oratorio, and even like hip-hop. Dobrovolskaya, who plays the old peasant woman, 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 came together on a high street” - Serebrennikov solves like a talk show, breaking it up into remarks from the host and 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 the director and artists: musically, this premiere is even more diverse than Serebrennikov’s “Dead Souls” on the same stage with the hit songs of Alexander Manotskov. 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, which everyone had forgotten about - isn’t this what connoisseurs and defenders of Russian literature should be doing?

Snob., September 21, 2015

Vadim Rutkovsky

Circus, cabaret, tragedy:

Kirill Serebrennikov directed Nekrasov

The Gogol Center opened the season with the premiere of the play “Who Lives Well in Rus',” based on a poem familiar from middle school. 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 combined with a physiological essay, a pamphlet with lyrics? Is it really her? Did we study counterfeiting in school? Not a fake, of course, but a greatly abbreviated version that flew past our eyes and ears. Yes, I remember about both the poor and the abundant, powerless, omnipotent Mother Rus', but here is the scorching story of the “happy” village woman Matryona about her son Demidushka, eaten by pigs and opened up as part of the investigation (“and they began to torment and plaster the white body”), from the last Soviet schoolchildren were definitely hidden. And the entire text, in fact, was hidden behind official formulations, selective quotation and a haze of omissions.

Second thought: it’s strange that bureaucrats at least verbally promote Russian classics, but it’s high time to leave only Tolstoy’s “Philipka” in public use (and even “Resurrection” - for the barn lock), because the classics were not distinguished by either political correctness or reverence for rank . And the beginning of the play/poem, where seven men come together and argue about “who lives happily and freely in Rus',” is decided as a political talk show. With Chekist training, the storytellers-investigators (Ilya Romashko and Dmitry Vysotsky) give the participants number-badges with their name and persistently inquire: “To whom?” They always forget about poor Prov (Philip Avdeev), the youngest and bravest, the one who said: “To the Tsar!”, wears glasses and a T-shirt “The days of this society are numbered” (and when they remember, they immediately bloody their nose). Luke’s answer (Semyon Steinberg): “Pop off!” - in the light of the inexorable merging of state and church, they are silent. This is very funny - and perfectly conceived: Serebrennikov creates a dramatic miracle, turning Nekrasov’s dense, massive, like a guitar wall of sound in the songs of “Civil Defense”, into a composition, as if specially written for the theater - he distributes the text into roles, without changing a word, exclusively placement of accents and intonations. There is a lot of singing in the performance (both lines of the poem and borrowed songs - in particular, Russian folk songs and patriotic pop songs from the times of the USSR), but the entire sound flows like music. And every hero, be it people - men Roman (Ivan Fominov) and Ivan (Evgeniy Sangadzhiev), Pakhom (Andrey Rebenkov), Demyan (Nikita Kukushkin) and Mitrodor (Mikhail Troinik), or even fairy-tale creatures - Bird (Evgenia Dobrovolskaya) and Chick ( Georgy Kudrenko) is a detailed and witty character. But if you choose the main role in this ensemble performance, then it will belong to Evgenia Dobrovolskaya - she is given the meaningful monologue of the third act, Matryona’s story.

In style, this is perhaps Serebrennikov’s most uninhibited and unpredictable performance; contrasting in relation to the rhythmically homogeneous poem; steep slides or, if we use Nekrasov’s images, a self-assembled tablecloth. The first act, “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 the peasants in the lands of the master Utyatin; “now the order is new, but he is fooling around in the old way”: there are children, fearing that the tyrant priest will deprive them of their inheritance, “go ahead and blurt out to the master that the landowners were ordered to turn back the peasants.” A brilliant stage move illustrates the return to old times - the men change into clothes whose existence I had already forgotten: mohair scarves, muskrat hats - what closets did they pull them out of? And the meeting with the magic tablecloth ends with dressing in khaki: self-assembly sends armed men to war - and in this courage there is, of course, a painful reference to the war in Ukraine, but 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 “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 - “like a bull”: “having argued, we quarreled, having quarreled, we fought, having quarreled, we decided not to go apart, not toss and turn in our houses, not to see our wives, nor the little children, nor the old people, until we find a solution to our dispute.”

The second act, “Drunk Night,” is preceded by the riots of the heroes, who received the coveted buckets of vodka from the warbler: during the intermission, the guys riot 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 premiere of the Bolshoi Theater, the ballet “Hero of Our Time”; original music for the other two actions was written by Denis Khorov ) and plastic performance. The actresses in evening dresses, announced in the program as “Women,” sing - and the lines from “Soldatskaya” become the refrain: “The light is sick, there is no bread, there is no shelter, there is no death.” “The men”, dressed in their underwear, are plunged into a painful bodily trance (the choreographer of the performance is the legendary Anton Adasinsky, creator of the “Tree” theater).

The third act, “A Feast for the Whole World,” is a slap in the face of good taste: it begins with a crude circus, smells of vodka and is generous with desperate clowning. And it is from this multi-colored litter that a lofty tragic episode is born - a long, terrible, heartbreaking and heartbreaking story by Matryona (the outstanding work of Evgenia Dobrovolskaya), which enters into dialogue with lingering and bitter Russian songs (the wonderful young actress Maria Poezzhaeva demonstrates a remarkable vocal gift)

And in the finale - contrasting, sharp, one could say “knocking you off your feet” if the audience in the theater weren’t already sitting (by the way, the production is so exciting that you forget how hard the chairs are in the Gogol Center) - they sound in a row two songs by Yegor Letov. The bravura “Motherland” (about which the author himself said: “This is one of the most tragic songs I have written. The song is about how the homeland rises from its knees, which, in fact, does not exist, which is not only rising from its knees, but gets stuck in an unprecedented ass deeper and tighter and more hopeless, and at the same time singing about how the homeland is rising is very powerful.” And the sound of a pistol shot, “The bullet will find the culprit.” The heroes, lined up frontally along the stage in a row, put on dozens of T-shirts - that kitschy rubbish that litters the souvenir tents of the new Russia, with stormy prominences of the people's consciousness - from “the most polite president” to “better belly from beer than hump from work.” Is this satire? Bitterness? Mockery? Beauty of the ugly? Just beauty? Who lives - damned rhetorical question; Even if you pack a hundred iron shoes, you won’t get to the 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 a country. With unofficial, but rooted, innate like blood type, patriotism. Woven from the struggle of stylistic opposites, from horror and joy, pain and intoxication, Vano Muradeli and Yegor Letov.

Theater., September 23 2015

Olga Fuks

Where is happiness?

Nekrasov’s poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is a school program; it is taught in high school, when teenagers are not at all interested in Russia after serfdom. I don’t remember that any of the adults, 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 on the surface. But no one except Serebrennikov took it.

Russia - darkness, endless and boundless 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 Kirill Serebrennikov's work. “Forest”, “Bourgeois”, “Dead Souls”, “Lord Golovlevs”, “St. George’s Day”, “Kizhe” proved in different ways how inexhaustible it is. Most of the rehearsals took place not in the rehearsal room, but on a trip around the Yaroslavl region - to the places where Nekrasov’s Karabikha estate was located, to the modern villages of Razutov, Neelov and Neurozhaika, among the descendants of Nekrasov’s characters. Serebrennikov and his actors were looking for stage authenticity, like the early “artists”, Dodin’s “brothers and sisters”, Alvis Hermanis’s Shukshin “eccentrics” - in a word, those for whom theater is a process of learning. But Kirill Serebrennikov’s performance, of course, is not limited to authenticity; 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 new theater is coming 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 by Ilya Demutsky. The score is also built for numerous disguises - from underwear to luxury “haute couture a la russe” (costume designers Polina Grechko and Kirill Serebrennikov). The code of this ready-to-wear is the rhythmic dressing of the actors in T-shirts with various symbols: “polite” Putin flashes on a pink background, Lenin on a red background, “Russian means sober,” Che Guevara, “The days of this society are numbered,” “ I don’t remember grievances - I write them down,” “Where is happiness?” - all that thrash mix that is boiling in the heads of our poor compatriots. The views of the population change easily, like T-shirts with symbols: he was a special officer - he became Orthodox, he was no one - he became everything.

The first layer of this multi-layered performance is the most relevant, peppery. A head-on collision with today. Having also acted as the set designer for his performance, the director walked Her Majesty the Pipe (with oil or gas?) - the backbone of modern Russia - across the stage. The dwellings of Nekrasov's men are molded to it - in fact, not even dwellings, but places around televisions. In the first scene, the peasants find themselves participating in a talk show, the host of which (Ilya Romashko) asks a provocative question: who lives a fun, free life in Rus'. The peasants reluctantly mumble into the microphone their name and version of the answer: to the boyar, to the noble dignitary, to the fat-bellied merchant...

At the answer “popU” the presenter stumbles and prefers not to repeat the seditious answer out loud - but how will they be brought to justice for insulting the feelings of believers. And he is clearly in no hurry to approach the frail, bespectacled man for an answer - he feels that this fellow was called in vain. He feels correctly: the bespectacled man silently pulls up a crumpled poster with his answer - “to the king.” He will be beaten more than once by his comrades in misfortune: for taking aim at the sacred - they understand everything about local swindlers and thieves, but they do not want to pull the thread further. True, the intellectual has nowhere to go - he has no other people, and, with a bloody nose, he trudges along with everyone else, enchanted by the great goal - to find at least one lucky person in Rus'.

Scorched by “TV truth,” the peasants return home, where their wives are waiting for them, ready to throw off their shabby dressing gowns at the first call of their husbands. But, touched to the quick, the husbands no longer look at the women, but fieryly look into the distance - they exchange their worn clothes for new camouflage and even raise the DPR flag: the warriors of the “Russian world” are again running away from everyday life, again reaching for the illusory goal - to make others happy, whether to find a happy one. And pave the road to hell with more good intentions. However, this is perhaps the most controversial point - after all, it is not easy to equate the epic peasants of Nekrasov with today’s separatists.

Having paid tribute to topicality, the performance in the second act bursts into Russian space - into the enchanted kingdom of being and drinking, frozen for centuries (chapter “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 with Serebrennikov after “Hero of Our Time”) and plastic floating in airless space, freed from gravity of bodies (choreographer Anton Adasinsky). “There is no death,” the angels exhort the drunken men. Of course not - it is not known whether there was life.

The performance flies like a kite, sometimes falling to the ground, sometimes soaring up. The story of the terrible revenge of the exemplary lackey Yakov the Faithful, who hanged himself in front of his previously adored gentleman-offender, is told in close-up: Serebrennikov’s games with video projections coexist perfectly 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 in peace) is staged as an eerie farce. Nekrasov’s bitterness is perfectly projected for today: the men agree to break the comedy and play slavery for a very reasonable price. The protagonist here turns out to be Nikita Kukushkin's Klimka - a slob and a liar, rapidly turning from a dashing lumpen into a steely functionary, ready to step over any life.

And yet, the center of the play becomes the episode with Nekrasov’s Matryona, a woman with many children, who suffered a lot, who survived the loss of her firstborn. Evgenia Dobrovolskaya, Anninka from Sererenikov’s “The Golovlev Gentlemen” and Julitta from his “Forest”, plays in such a way that all the components of her roles enter into a nuclear reaction: village intonations with a poetic line, the most powerful theater of experience with a conventional form, pain passed through yourself - with the delight of the game. Looking 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 Rus', from the almost hypnotic feeling of the forces seething in her. And he doesn’t want to.

RG, September 24, 2015

Alena Karas

Sang in Nekrasov's voice

The poem "Who Lives Well in Rus'" came to life at the Gogol Center

The idea of composing a joint performance with the Yaroslavl Theater named after. Fedora Volkova did not arise by chance from Kirill Serebrennikov. Yaroslavl land is the birthplace of Nekrasov. And his endless poem-cry, poem-laughter, poem-verbatim “Who lives well in Rus'?” seemed to fall into the very heart of current Russian problems. Accompanied by enthusiasts and “stalkers,” they walked through abandoned villages and amazing nature, past stunning museums and a decayed, long-gone life.

We started, of course, with Karabikha, Nekrasov’s homeland, and then moved deeper into the province. “Small towns - Rybinsk, Poshekhonye, Myshkin, once rich villages - Prechistoye, Porechye, Kukoboi - still somehow barely survive, but around them there is space overgrown with forest, weeds, hogweed, where there is almost nothing else,” - Serebrennikov said.

Many might have thought 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 eventually produced the play on its own, releasing the premiere at the peak of the most alarming 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 stage fantasies and adventures of the most outlandish nature, and from the expedition to Karabikha the actors also brought material from Afanasyev’s “Forbidden Tales,” initially planning to combine them with the poem. But these fairy tales became the basis for another performance, which will become part of a dilogy about the “Russian world”.

To reconnect with the text, which since school days seemed like a boring part of the compulsory “program”, to return to the theater the opportunity again - through all Soviet and post-Soviet censorship, whatever it may be - to speak out, to act out a fantastic, "pochvennichesky", Nekrasov paradise - this is no small task . It turned out that it was Serebrennikov, who always and only thought about Russia, who had already heard it through Prilepin’s “thugs” and the infernal mechanics of “Dead Souls”, through Ostrovsky’s “forest” characters and Gorky’s “philistines”, through the devilish bureaucracy of erasing man in Tynianov’s “Kizha” “- only he managed to take up this outlandish “tug” and open up new poetic worlds on the stage. Plowed up by the theater, this amazing text began to sound with the furious, frightening, hopeless and life-giving voices of real, uncomposed life. Following not the letter, but the spirit of Nekrasov’s poem, which is very different in its poetic and meaningful structure, he divided the performance into three completely different - including genre - parts.

In the first - "Dispute" - seven young actors from the Gogol Center meet Nekrasov's men and try on them from the 21st century. The narrator - a kind of Moscow smart 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 the Russian marsh squares, here is a street robber, here is a martyr of slavery, here is a warrior. We recognize them in their padded jackets and T-shirts, in their jeans and rags, in their camouflage of prisoners and guards, always ready to go to “bloody battle.” They talk about the tsar in a whisper, about the priest with just their lips, about the sovereign’s minister - with fear... There is nothing to actualize here - Nekrasov’s world endlessly reproduces itself in Holy Rus', repeating all the same words about the tsar, and about the priest, and endlessly harnessing into a new yoke, a new strap of barge haulers.

Several stories keep this narrative on a tense nerve, and among them the strongest are “about the exemplary slave, the faithful Yakov,” who loved his slavery more than anything in the world, until he was inflamed with hatred and hanged himself in revenge; and - the main thing - the last thing, about those who, for the sake of the sick master, continued to play out serfdom, as if it had not ended in 1864. It is this very state of the “Russian world” on the border between slavery and freedom, life and death, humiliation and rebellion, sin and holiness - following Nekrasov - that the Gogol Center explores.

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

In the third part, one soul emerged from the choral beginning - a woman's - to transform the folk tragedy into a song of fate. By pouring vodka for the "men" Evgenia Dobrovolskaya - Matryona 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 at tragedy - completely postmodern. But after a few minutes there is no strength to resist the pain to which she surrenders entirely, and the strength of spirit rising above her. Of course, this long confession will be replaced by a choral, rock and roll finale, he will build his difficult relationship with Nekrasov’s “Rus”, he will sing - without embarrassment, backhand and seriously - his words about “the mighty and the powerless,” and it will seem like an army , which rises, is similar to the faithful Jacob, killing himself in his unknown strength and weakness.

The New Times, September 28, 2015

Ksenia Larina

The Legend of the Russian Land

The long-awaited premiere of the Gogol Center, “Who Lives Well in Rus',” turned out to be fun and creepy, as befits a Russian fairy tale

In Soviet schools, Nekrasov was “given” as a guardian of people’s happiness. “Here is the front entrance”, “Only one strip is not compressed”, “You share! “Russian, female share” - all of us sat sadly at the blackboard, rolling our eyes to the ceiling out of boredom. “Who Lives Well in Rus'” was presented in fragments, focusing on civic pathos and a hysterical finale: “You are wretched, You are abundant, You are downtrodden, You are all-powerful, Mother Rus'!” They didn't pay much attention to the meaning. Everything was explained to us in simple party language. It was worth living until the premiere of the Gogol Center to discover the true meaning and terrible abyss of this apocalyptic tale about the Russian people.

What will happen to the Motherland?

Kirill Serebrennikov prepared his stage version for a long time: the upcoming expedition to Nekrasov places was announced more than a year ago. The project was prepared jointly with the Yaroslavl Theater. F. Volkova - the premiere was supposed to take place last May at Chereshnevy Les, and Nekrasov was teaming up with Afanasyev’s fairy tales.

As a result, “Who in Rus'...” was released to the public this fall without the participation of Yaroslavl residents, Afanasyev’s fairy tales spun off into a separate parallel premiere, “Russian Fairy Tales,” and Nekrasov fraternized with Yegor Letov (several texts from “Civil Defense” became part of the dramaturgical outline).

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

“Who in Rus'...” is a highly patriotic performance. There is no arrogance, no purity, no hypocritical servility, no false sincerity in him. Answering the question, “what will happen to the homeland and to us,” the author does not disdainfully step aside; he himself is part of this world, one of seven men who dance their desperate dance in the dust of the road. And there is no need for words anymore, if only I had the strength to laugh and cry.

Life on the pipe

“Who in Rus'...” 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 performance 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 performance: before you have time to look at one, it is already replaced by the next one, and it seems that there are hundreds more of them (artist - Kirill Serebrennikov, composers - Ilya Demutsky, Denis Khorov).

“Rus', where are you going, give me the answer?” - it is impossible not to notice the connection with “Dead Souls” staged by Serebrennikov in the same theater. This is the same crazy road to nowhere, only instead of the tires that were used in Gogol’s play, here there is a huge gas pipe stretched across the entire stage. On it, like on the Whale Fish, there are cities and villages, houses and apartments, where men in alcoholic T-shirts and women in flannel robes sit by the flickering TV box, either kissing or fighting. And no one notices that behind the pipe there is a wall reaching 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, shiny with pleasure and slightly swaying, will line up in a picturesque group under the flag familiar from the TV news. “The days of this society are numbered” - we read on the T-shirt of Prov from Neurozhaika - a puny hipster in glasses, who is beaten either by his own people or by others.

Serebrennikov is often compared to Yuri Lyubimov of the 1970s: they are similar in style of direct statements, head-on metaphors, energetic charge of today, the street. Yes, of course, they are very close intonationally: 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 main significant difference: the addressee has changed. And today it is much more important to talk with a person about a person than with the authorities about power. And Kirill Serebrennikov caught this most important change in the atmosphere of the time from the very beginning of his metropolitan professional life - starting with “Plasticine” by Vasily Sigarev and “Terrorism” by the Presnyakov brothers.

Everything is going according to plan

“To whom in Rus'...” is not a diagnosis, it is a path - painful, sweet, bitter, hangover. The destined path to which we are sentenced, into which we are harnessed, inscribed, rubbed. A path where doom borders on delight. If it is true that every talented director puts on one play 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 print trouble. In a word, this is a hard-won dialogue with the public, whom the director completely trusts. The three acts of the play are absolutely self-sufficient and autonomous - both in terms of plot outline and genre decision. The grotesque plot from the chapter “The Last One” - about how long-freed peasants portray serfs in front of the maddened master, Prince Utyatin - returns to our century, revealing familiar Soviet motifs. The nostalgia of the collective Utyatin for the old days rattles with Soviet songs, pioneer ties, mohair scarves, fawn hats and fleece sweaters. Against the backdrop of drunken, unshaven poverty, the bright symbol of a great power rises above the stage with a busty beauty with a brown braid and Zykin’s piercing “I look into the blue lakes” (one of the discoveries of the play is the actress, singer and musician Rita Kron).

The dramatic ballet of the second act (choreographed by Anton Adasinsky) - “Drunken Night” - refers us to the images of the silent poetic cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko in his “Earth”: to naked bodies sweating and black with dirt, to veins stretched from a silent scream, to bloody in mad dances to 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 escaping from a bell, the pounding of bare feet on the dead, hungry earth.

The third act is greeted with the lightheartedness of a circus reprise: red clown noses, a horse man, a bucket of vodka (“whoever lives happily” is offered a glass). The audience, devastated after the second act, joins the play with relief and readiness.

But the center of the last act will be the performance within the performance: Matryona’s monologue about her “happy” woman’s lot, which is masterfully performed by Evgenia Dobrovolskaya - knocking down horror with humor, pathos with details, grief with humility, humiliation with pride. So another Russia appears before us - without light brown braids, kokoshniks and kichkas, without lingering soulful songs, without rosy cheeks, white-toothed smiles, without red boots and snow-white down on the sleeves. Actually, that glamorous, ceremonial Russia does not exist and never has existed. There is only the abyss, slowly and menacingly rising from its knees. “Who lives well in Rus'” - these are the same eighty-six percent through the eyes of the fourteen remaining.

Vedomosti, September 6, 2015

Maya Kucherskaya

The last ones

“Who Lives Well in Rus'” directed by Kirill Serebrennikov - the story of the collapse of the “Russian world”

The characters in the play bear little resemblance to Russian peasants, but they still do not oppose slavery and love vodka.

Once upon a time, Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov wrote a poem “To whom in Rus'...” - well, he almost wrote it, didn’t finish it - in which he invented the Russian people. Desperate, stubborn (“man is a bull”), cocky, a lover of vodka and terrible stories about repentant sinners - but most importantly, many-sided. The poem has absorbed dozens of different destinies. The poet drew rhythms, vocabulary, and images from folklore, but he thought up a lot and sang it himself.

Kirill Serebrennikov tried to do without fiction and without stylization - and showed a people not like Nekrasov, but today. The one whose spirit he and the troupe, preparing for the performance, searched for last summer in the Yaroslavl region, traveling through towns, dilapidated villages, going into current houses, talking with people, local historians, priests - filming of this journey can be seen during intermission in the foyer "Gogol Center". And he showed who Nekrasov’s Roman-Demyan-Luka-the Gubin brothers-old man Pakhom-i-Prov turned into in the 21st century.

Into a migrant worker in sweatpants, into a riot policeman in camouflage, into a stupid revolutionary with a perpetually broken nose, into a hard worker with string bags, into a drunkard who can barely spit out a word. And everything seems to look the same. Universal grease instead of Nekrasov’s diversity. Lumpens, semi-criminals, aggressive and lost, not needed by anyone. Neither the fat-bellied merchant, nor the landowner, nor the tsar. Although sometimes they even try to drag them all onto TV - the argument scene that opens the play is wittily presented as a talk show with the host (Ilya Romashko), who is trying to find out from the participants who lives a fun, free life in Rus'. But real boys are laconic.

The “boyish” style is also supported by the design of the performance, which takes place against the uncomfortable backdrop of the outskirts: a metal pipe stretches sadly through a vacant lot, there are some plant thorns on a brick wall, the vacant lot ends in blackness. Here the eternal cold night stretches on, in the center of which there is a bucket of vodka. The second part, “Drunk Night”, a pantomime, picks up and makes the vodka motif the main one: it is a dead drunken, staged “squirrel” with convulsions of half-naked male bodies in the twilight, merging either into a creepy multi-legged caterpillar, or into struggling barge haulers. In the finale, lifeless corpses dot the same dark black wasteland (Anton Adasinsky was invited to choreograph the performance).
The appearance of the “peasant woman” Matryona Timofeevna (performed by Evgenia Dobrovolskaya) in the third part, dressed, of course, as a collective farmer - padded jacket, scarf, boots - pushes aside this thick male darkness. Dobrovolskaya lives her completely unbearable “female lot”, the death of a child, the beatings of her husband, the shouts of her mother-in-law with a smile, incredibly humanely and charmingly, drowning her grief not in wine - in work and love “for the children.” Her appearance adds an unexpectedly lively, warm tone to the pamphlet unfolding on stage. But soon everything again drowns in rap, in the hopeless “Motherland” by Yegor Letov, in the again approaching darkness and empty mottos on T-shirts, which, as usual, the characters change and change in the last scene. Everything flashes on the T-shirts, from Winnie the Pooh to a portrait of Vysotsky, from “Stalin is our helmsman” to “USSR” and “I am Russian” - all that remains of us today.

This vinaigrette replaced what inspired Nekrasov 150 years ago, what inspired him with hope - a holistic folk culture, deep, multi-colored, powerful. Now, instead of life calculated according to the calendar, with baptisms, weddings, funerals, prohibitions, joys, fairy tales, salty jokes, now we have this: T-shirts with vulgar pictures, a checkered shuttle package, a computer monitor with the screensaver “It’s glorious to live for the people in Holy Rus'.” Instead of songs that were sung by the whole village, there was a beauty with a braid, betraying verbal incoherence about the Blues and Russia, the embodiment of falsehood (it was not without reason that her appearance caused bitter laughter in the hall). Instead of Grisha Dobrosklonov, the “people's defender”, whom Nekrasov was the only one to make happy in the poem, there is a pathetic bespectacled man, a white-ribbon boy, helpless, powerless.

One thing has not changed since Nekrasov’s time: voluntary slavery and vodka. The heroes of the play “The Last One” played in the first part of the play played along with the crazy old landowner who did not want to recognize the abolition of serfdom, and pretended that slavery continued. A seemingly innocent idea turned into the death of the peasant Agap - he tried to rebel, but, drunk, still agreed to lie down under the rods for the sake of lordly fun. And although they didn’t even touch him with a finger, he died immediately after a mock flogging. I wonder why? This is not the only question we are asked to answer. Every scene bristles with topicality and ruthless questions about today.

The poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” staged by Kirill Serebrennikov, is an artistic but journalistic statement about our universal collapse.

Teatral, September 21, 2015

Marina Shimadina

Who can live well in the Gogol Center?

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

Despite financial difficulties and hassle with the absent director, the Gogol Center produced one of its largest productions, which was prepared for more than 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 took place under its auspices and caused a long standing ovation from the audience.

“In what year - calculate, in what land - guess,” Ilya Romashko begins for the narrator. And you don’t need to be particularly savvy to guess that 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 men are still poor, greedy for vodka and quick to fight, and officials and priests still hold trump cards.

The meeting of the characters on the sidewalk in the play turns into a talk show, where the intimidated proletarians from Gorelov, Neelov, Neurozhaika also offer the presenter their own options for answering the title question of the poem. Some cower and are timid, some are ostentatious and stubbornly stand their ground, while the hero of Philip Avdeev - a real hipster in sneakers and glasses - jumps onto a chair with a homemade poster, as if at a single picket.

The men’s answers are still the same, Nekrasov’s. And they are not at all in 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, arranging their simple home. Everything here is painfully familiar: colorful dusty carpets, sewing machines, old TVs, flannelette robes of women trying to keep their truth-seeking husbands at home... But where is it? Once a Russian guy gets going, he can't be stopped. And now a motley company, having obtained 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 the “exemplary slave - Yakov the faithful”, who, unable to withstand the bullying, hanged himself in front of the master, was resolved as a duel of two close-ups. The camera films and displays the faces of the servant and the master, and in the expressive silence of Yevgeny Kharitonov one can read all the people’s grief and the centuries-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 promised the peasants a good sum for this deception. In the masquerade performance, the heroes have to put on mohair sweaters and sweatpants with elongated knees, and the young hipster gets a school uniform with a pioneer tie. One must see his complex relationship with this legacy of the past: disgusting, disgusting, but his hand still reaches out and freezes in the pioneer salute.

Here the audience, of course, recognizes their contemporaries, those who happily, voluntarily or forcedly, biting their lips, return to Soviet ideology and rhetoric.

But with all its obvious journalisticism, Serebrennikov’s new performance is an aesthetic show, a free montage of multi-genre scenes, where there is room for farcical reprises, and for a fashion show of enchanting costumes a la russe, and for inserted musical numbers by Rita Kron, who elegantly performs Soviet hits about Mother Russia. And there is also a whole dance act to the music of Ilya Demutsky (the same one who composed the ballet “Hero of Our Time” for the Bolshoi) choreographed by Anton Adasinsky. It is called “Drunken Night,” like one of the chapters of the poem. But in the convulsions of those falling, trying to rise and being knocked down again by invisible blows of bodies, one feels not so much the consequences of drunkenness as desperate attempts to get back on their feet, which rhyme with the lines of Yegor Letov: “I see my Motherland rising from its knees.” No one can get up...

In the third act, Evgenia Dobrovolskaya reigns on stage, invited from the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater with complete justification. Perhaps no one other than this visceral actress could read a long and heartbreaking monologue about the hard lot of women with such strength and virtuosity. Before her performance, the cameras with monitors and the accompanying vocals of Maria Poezzhaeva faded into the background, and the audience was numb, as if spellbound. And this merciless monologue ultimately brought the story to the level of a real national tragedy.

The final solemn hymn of the poem “You and the poor, / You and the abundant, / You and the mighty, / You and the powerless, / Mother Rus'!” the director displays the credits on the screen. Apparently, today he was unable to justify on stage the lofty words about a free heart, a calm conscience and an innumerable army. Left it on Nekrasov’s conscience. But instead he forced the actors to wear a bunch of T-shirts with patriotic symbols and stupid jokes about polite people. Nowadays, “people's truth” has turned into template slogans, a set of ready-made labels, and stereotyped ideas about the world.

Serebrennikov and his actors produced a sober and bitter production about Russia, full of healthy anger, conscious stoicism and acting drive. And to the question “who lives well here?” we can answer with confidence – to the audience of the Gogol Center. While such bright and meaningful premieres are taking place in Moscow, there is something to breathe here.

Built on associations, Kirill Serebrennikov’s performance “Who Lives Well in Rus'” at the Gogol Center evokes a response of exaltation in the associative sensibility of the viewer. This is what I will try to demonstrate with my incoherent text. The presence of quotes is not a desire to show education, but the impossibility of reflecting everything only in one’s own words. There are authors who are crutches that help you stay on your feet when a ship like this performance is approaching you.Six months ago, talking with my student actors at the Moscow Art Theater School (course of E. Pisarev), I realized that for them there is no difference or distance between the 19th and 20th centuries. And just recently, a very young and very talented man working on television, seeing a photograph of Viktor Nekrasov, asked me: “Who is this?” He responded to my answer: “This is the one who “Who lives well in Rus'» wrote"?

Having already been prepared by the conversation with the students, I was not surprised. At first I thought that the inability to divide history into periods and see the differences speaks of their lack of education, but gradually it began to seem to me that the matter is different: time for them is like space in a movie, shot with a long lens - it seems like a person is walking (that is, time passes, space passes), but the movement is not noticeable to the viewer.

Or maybe this insensitivity to the movement of time is a special psychological state that occurs during periods when history makes a traumatic leap. Another explanation can be accepted, i.e. a completely different understanding of time and space, to reinforce the thought I will quote Helena Blavatsky:

“Eternity can have neither past nor future, but only the present, just as infinite space, in its strictly literal sense, can have neither distant nor near places. Our concepts, limited to the narrow arena of our experience, try to adapt, if not to the end, then at least to some beginning of time and space, but neither one nor the other actually exists, for in that case there would be no time. eternal, and space - limitless. The past exists no more than the future, as we have already said; only our memories survive; and our memories are only quickly flashed pictures that we grasp in the reflections of this past, reflected in the currents of astral light ... "

Now I'll turn the other way. Recently I attended a concert of the brilliant musician and friend Vyacheslav Ganelin. He improvised on the piano. Suddenly, his left hand went to the synthesizer, and his right might suddenly end up on the drummer for a second. Listening to the musical story, which the composer-performer told without words, I thought that Ganelin was probably ambidexterous, although after the concert I forgot to ask him about it.

The play “Who Lives Well in Rus'” was staged by Kirill Serebrennikov as follows: 1. there is no distance between the past and the future, it is compressed - with an imaginary long-focus lens deliberately chosen for the work. 2. This is an ambidexter’s performance, because the director’s right and left hands (like Ganelin’s) worked differently, creating an incredibly subtle, complex and powerful mechanism of the performance.

Almost all of Kirill Serebrennikov’s works are about the Motherland, i.e. about the country in which he was born and wants to live, and therefore tries to understand it with his mind, while avoiding the knowledge that “you can only believe in Russia.” He is engaged in intellectual psychoanalysis of Russia. Being an educated man of his generation, and at the same time having pure and deep respect for the experience of those who came before him, Serebrennikov demonstrates the results of his psychoanalytic session in the language of world culture, not tied to a specific historical period. Who created this language? I will name only a few directors (although there are also artists and musicians): Lyubimov, Efros, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Balabanov... An example? One of the first actors of the last Lyubimov Taganka, Dmitry Vysotsky appears in the play “Who Lives Well in Rus'” with a trumpet, as Leonid Kanevsky appeared with it in the play “104 Pages about Love” by Efros, and all this was rented from the final scene of the film “8 ½" Fellini (Efros also quoted Fellini). Someone may say that I’m making it all up, but Serebrennikov has portraits of his ancestor directors in the foyer of the theater, just as portraits of Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, Meyerhold and Brecht lived at Taganka.

If Serebrennikov reads this text, he will say that I am wrong and that he did not think about anything like that. Yes, he most likely didn’t think about it, but his subconscious thought about it, and to a person from the outside the work of someone else’s subconscious is more noticeable, therefore, even if Serebrennikov disagrees with my ideas, I will not lose confidence in my guess of his performance.

This is a play about Russia, about its micro and macrocosms, about the Russian abyss between the real and the unreal. In “To Whom in Rus'” Russia is a prison, by analogy with “Denmark is a prison”, so somewhere in the distance there is barbed wire, from which the name of the play is woven. It periodically lights up in neon, imitating the sign of a modern store.

The first action is “Dispute”. Here, a fight between two men turns out to be a form of Russian dialogue, and a group fight turns out to be a manifestation of Russian conciliarity. Everything is built on the traditional duality described by Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky in the article “The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture.” They derived Russian dualism from the Orthodox tradition, in which there was no place for purgatory and where only heaven and hell remained, and therefore, although the Russian hero stands at the fork in three roads, he has to choose only from two: life or death; God exists, and I am God's servant; or there is no God - and everything is permitted.

The main Russian dual model in the play is the opposition of men to women. The two gender groups mix in only two scenes. In this regard, I would like to recall another topic described by the wonderful scientist Mikhail Epstein, about the peculiarities of Russian friendship. I quote:

« Of course, it was not under Soviet rule, but even earlier, in the Tatar steppes and in the Russian countryside, that this separate lifestyle and same-sex preferences developed. Men, as it should be, are with men, and women are with women, and God forbid that the former should become too rich or the latter demand equality. From here it is not far to the asceticism of the Bolsheviks, not at all monastic, not of the Christian type, but precisely implicated in peasant spontaneous homosexuality. “I tinkered with a woman one night, and the next morning I became a woman myself.” And then the proud Razin gets rid of his shame - he throws the Persian princess at Mother Volga in order to re-enter the male circle. So the revolutionaries threw their families and other male “weaknesses” into the Volga, so that, God forbid, they would not become too rich and cause the contempt of their comrades. So teenagers gather in a pack and giggle at the girls. This is a nervous stage of immaturity, when they have already left childhood sexual indistinction, but have not yet arrived at adult sexual intercourse - and now boys and girls walk in flocks, separately ”.

So in the play, men and women are separated. The warbler bird promised to assemble a tablecloth, and the men are waiting for a miracle from heaven, and from there falls... a soldier's uniform. The army is a form of a male collective, where the soldier is fed and washed, as the warbler promised, however, as a result of the active actions of this collective, more than one generation of Russian boys is raised exclusively by women, for male fathers remained lying in the land of the endless expanses of our homeland. This will be discussed in the second act: “Drunken Night.”

The second act is built on women’s singing that “there is no death,” and on men’s somnambulistic dance. It begins as if it were not “Who Lives Well in Rus'”, but “Bobok” by Dostoevsky, i.e. with zombie movements. Gradually, this dance turns into a confession of a holy fool, then into a dance of barge haulers, into a funeral of a revolutionary, so that at the very end of the act, suddenly into the depths of the stage, which seems endless, with a tragically defenseless gait, Russian boys who have grown up from zombies, whom someone sent “to their deaths,” walk away. with an unshaking hand." To what death? It is unknown, there were many chances to kill, as we know, in Russia in the 20th century alone: Civil War, 1937, Patriotic War, Afghan War... you name it, there were plenty of wars. The boys leave, and rain pours down from above, which becomes foggy. The fog seems to be the endless beard of God, so long that a Russian man cannot reach where it grows from.

This finale of the second act of Sereberennikov reminded me of a scene from “Eugene Onegin” by Rimas Tuminas at the Vakhtangov Theater. Tatyana Larina was traveling to Moscow in a wagon, and for some reason suddenly the wagon, without changing visually, seemed like a black funnel from 1937. I don’t know how this happened, but I saw it clearly, or maybe it was an imprint of family history on the retina of my eye.

The third act is the fate of Matryona (Evgenia Dobrovolskaya), which grows into the fate of the country. In the first act, it was Evgenia Dobrovolskaya who played the bird who sent military uniforms to the men, i.e. "The Motherland is calling." In the final episode, the actress’s monologue raises the performance to the level of a folk tragedy.

In the third act there are two fashion shows. Women's, where the folk costume remains true to the theme and red color in all variations. With one exception - mourning black. And the men's - at the very end of the performance, when men in khaki pants, according to a musical phrase, as if on command, put on T-shirts with different inscriptions one on top of the other. The inscription speaks of affiliation and passion for a group, idea, leader, alcoholic drink or a handful of apofigists. Simple, like the Baron in “At the Bottom”: “It seems to me that all my life I’ve only been changing clothes... why? ... and everything... like in a dream... why? ... A?"

Suddenly it seemed that

« Who can live well in Rus'?» - a play about women, about their stoic immutability, and about men who come to death in search of happiness. And he also talks about (I’ll say it in the words of Nikolai Erdman):« into a mass of demoted people» .

Kirill Serebrennikov, like Lyubimov once, gathers like-minded people - his students, and representatives of other theaters, and musicians, and artists, and singers. He invites Anton Adasinsky. Serebrennikov does not throw the whole body of his talent at other people’s points of view, does not crush them under himself, but seeks his own point of view, working with and in the team.

Serebrennikov is a brilliant collagist, he is the Russian theater Kurt Schwitters, who works with different layers of the performance. There is overlap, mixing, and transparency, when one theme, time, idea shines through another theme, time, and idea. And not only the themes - there is also a historical carnival with clothes from different times and social strata, and a musical mixture of folk, pop, classical and rock melodies from different periods. And here Serebrennikov, if not Lyubimov’s heir, then is a direct conductor of the term that Lyubimov brought from emigration and was the first to use in Russia -

"assemblage" .

The layers in Serebrennikov's performance are products of free associations on a given topic, that is, this is what the surrealists called automatic writing. He works with impulses coming from the subconscious. He is a questioning medium, a contactee, and the play “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is a channeling session for both the actors and the audience. The answers come in the form of images. Theater is a magical means of purifying a person, returning him to a state of innocence. What happens at the play “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is redemption through art.

9 February 2017, 20:57

Leaving the hall of the Gogol Center, I realized that I had seen something sweeping and immense. Exactly these same epithets could be used in relation to the Russian soul.

To prepare for the production of “Who Lives Well in Rus',” Serebrennikov organized an expedition with his young actors to cities and villages, or rather to the native places of the author of the poem and its characters. The purpose of the experiment is to exhale the air of the capital and inhale the air of fields, meadows and villages. Otherwise, the people's Nekrasov cannot be understood by the minds of Moscow youth. I don’t know whether it’s this field research or just the talent of the Gogol Center troupe, but for my taste the performance revived the classics.

The action is divided into 3 sections.

The beginning of the first part, which is called “Dispute,” is a question familiar to anyone sitting at a school desk. Who lives happily and freely in Rus'? It will be answered by a variety of men, sitting on chairs, dressed in different clothes. A narrator will walk between them with a microphone, his message and manners more reminiscent of the leader of some kind of training or even an anonymous circle of sufferers. And the lines he voiced were addressed to the audience:

In what year - calculate

In what land - guess

On the sidewalk

Seven men came together...

The spectator giggles. The viewer remembers school, a literature lesson about Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, a history lesson about the abolition of serfdom.

And an imposing girl already appears on stage at the microphone and starts a song. The program says it's Rita Krohn. All the Voice judges would turn to her. She will be the decoration of the first part of the performance.

On stage, poor men will be bully, play tricks, seek the truth, and be frank. Nikita Kukushkin, Ivan Fominov, Semyon Steinberg, Evgeny Sangadzhiev, Mikhail Troynik, Filipp Avdeev, Andrey and Timofey Rebenkov love their roles, subtly capture the simple essence of the peasantry and transmit the energy of village prowess to the audience.

The director's discovery was a warbler bird, speaking in Nekrasov's book in a human voice and promising the men a large ransom for the chick that fell into their hands. There are no birds on stage. They are played by the young man and his mysterious wandering mother, who is performed by Evgenia Dobrovolskaya. This will only be a primer for the viewer. The actress is wrapped in a black robe from head to toe, her eyes hidden behind black glasses. But the acting power is still palpable. Her grand entrance will be ahead, in the third part.

The entire first action has many nerve endings, but the main nerve is Nikita Kukushkin. The fact that this actor is a nugget and out of this world, I realized even while watching (M)student.
If you see him on the street, you will think that this guy has been to a correctional colony, and if you see him on stage, you will be ashamed of such a judgment based on his appearance.
I would say that he plays somehow in a Christian way, as if with an eye either on the Gospel or on Dostoevsky.

And the audience cannot hold back their applause when he finishes his monologue to the master with a powerful refrain Everything is yours, everything is the master's, in which a dangerous accusation is heard on one side, and humility and submission on the other:

Everything is yours, everything is the master's -

Our houses are dilapidated,

And sick tummies,

And we ourselves are yours!

The grain that was thrown into the ground

And garden vegetables,

And the hair is unkempt

To a man's head -

Everything is yours, everything is the master's!

And finally, music. I would like to say a big respectful thank you to those who worked on the musical design of the performance. It is of such high quality that even if you blindfold everyone sitting in the hall, flowers will bloom in your ears. Sorry, but I can’t help but list these names:

Keys and vocals - Andrey Polyakov

Drums - Roman Shmakov

Trumpet - Dmitry Vysotsky and Vladimir Avilov

Bass guitar, vocals - Dmitry Zhuk

Brilliant vocalists - Rita Kron (also a saxophone player) and Maria Seleznyova performed “Where can I get such a song”, “Oh, it’s blown, it’s dusty”, “I look into the blue lakes”, “I am the earth”, “A snow-white cherry blossomed under the window "

The musical composition with improvisation on “The House of the Rising Sun” (The Animals) was composed by a graduate student of the Moscow State Conservatory. P.I. Tchaikovsky Denis Khorov.

We're heading into the 1st intermission. For the sake of ambiance, you can pretend that you are in a buffet - go to the call of the refrigerator and make yourself a sandwich.

Call. Part two - "Drunken night." It does not last long for the viewer, about 25 minutes. The actors don't say a word. We will watch the choreography of drunken bodies. Responsible for it was Anton Adasinsky, a well-known musician in certain circles, founder of the DEREVO theater, and actor (in 2011, for his Mephistopheles in A. Sokurov’s “Faust,” he received a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival). But it turns out that he is also a choreographer.
When I watched what was happening, I could not help but compare it with the controversial production I saw in 2013 at the Bolshoi Rite of Spring.

Chaos of movement and complete freedom of anatomical plasticity. Drunk men move to the acappella singing of 7 girls. Subtle and very beautiful. After all, this is a musical event, and not just a performance.
The music for this section was written by Ilya Demutsky - composer, conductor, performer, leader of the vocal ensemble Cyrilique.

The second part is talented as its kindred brevity.
The spectators are escorted out of the hall for the 2nd and final intermission, and we move on behind the wandering men. In the third part they arrange a “Feast for the Whole World”.

Matryona (Evgenia Dobrovolskaya) will cover the tablecloth in front of them. True, even before the meal they will turn to her with a question that torments them about happiness, since “It’s not always possible to find a happy one between men, let’s feel the women!” (touch = ask). At the beginning of her response, the men film Matryona. The viewer, even sitting far away, sees on the screen at first the timid and puzzled face of a simple woman.

Dobrovolskaya's game is scalding.
What Nekrasov put into Matryona’s mouth is certainly poignant and tragic in itself. But it’s one thing to read about this grief on the pages of a poem, and another thing to see Matryona in front of you.
Evgenia Dobrovolskaya reliably embodied the image of a village woman, humble on the outside, but incinerated by troubles on the inside, and soulfully revealed to the peasants and viewers the bitter episodes of her life hidden in the depths of her memory, the most painful and tragic of which was the death of her infant son Dyomushka, whom the old grandfather did not look after, while Matryona was in the hayfield, and the pigs ate him. The curse that she sends to her offenders is torn deeper than from the throat.

I thought that tears would flow from my eyes like from a watering can, and those sitting in front of me would think that it was rain.

The moral of her confessional monologue is addressed to men - it is not appropriate to ask a Russian woman a question about happiness:

And you came looking for happiness!

It's a shame, well done!

Go to the official

To the noble boyar,

Go to the king

Don't touch women,

What a god! you pass with nothing

To the grave!

Matryona's misfortune is black, but not everything is so gloomy in the third act. There are bright and fabulously beautiful costumes that women demonstrate as if on a catwalk. Why not Moscow Fashion Week?

We don’t always perceive the poem as something grandiose, but through Serebrennikov’s production you understand what an epic fabric Nekrasov has woven. At school age, it was rare for anyone to discern the scale of prose, rather than poetry, behind Nekrasov’s sonorous, cheerful syllable.

I was touched by Kirill Serebrennikov’s care not only for the original text, but also for Nekrasov’s special love for Russia:

You're miserable too

You are also abundant

You're downtrodden

You are omnipotent

Mother Rus'!

While I was writing this post, I realized that I would definitely go a second time soon. This rarely happens to me, but a lot coincided here. And one more thing. So far, the performance has become one of the leaders of what I saw at the Gogol Center.

P.S. The hand did not rise higher to remember one fly in the ointment. But any praise is good when a pinch of criticism is added to it. I didn’t like the actors’ “going to the people” with a bucket of vodka and bread at the very beginning of the 3rd part. They offered a shot to anyone who could name the reason for their happiness. Well, this is unnecessary, guys. You will do without these circus tricks.