Translated material
ROC against
On April 5, when this number is already withdrawn from the printing house, a rally of supporters of the prohibited opera Tangrier will be held in Novosibirsk.
This will be the voice of a crying in the desert, since the state has already taken the side of the persecutors of the performance. The New Times found out that the believers and the church did not suit the opera 
“The Academic Theater is a place where schoolchildren are taken and show them a classic program. And we have continuous experiments in our city! ” - Anastasia Suprun, the Orthodox parishioner and participant of one of the first rallies in Novosibirsk against the scandalous staging of the Wagnerian Tangayzer in Novosibirsk. Then, March 1, about a thousand people gathered in the main square. On behalf of the Orthodox community, they demanded to remove from the repertoire a “defamatory Orthodox faith and insulting the feelings of believers” opera.
The wall to the wall of a claim by the Orthodox community to Timofei Kulyabin, which recently headed the Red Torch Drama Theater in Novosibirsk, and the opera and ballet theater cooperates as an invited director, did not appear yesterday, ”says Anastasia. But only this spring the dissatisfaction of believers turned into a real scandal. Kulyabin transferred the action of the classical opera to the present, replacing the tangiazer knight with film director Henry Tannheiser, making an anti -religious film, on the poster of which the image of Christ is placed between female legs
* * The poster is an allusion to the famous advertisement of the American film Milos Forman “The People Against Larry Flint” (1996). . This film causes outrage of the characters in the performance, ready to tear the tangiaser, but the demonstrators do not remember about this moment.
“Previously, he mocked Pushkin and Lermontov (in 2012, Kulyabin staged the performance“ Onegin ”in the“ red torch ”, and in 2009-“ Masquerade ”.- NT ), but when Christ appeared on the stage, this became the last straw,” the parishioner is indignant. Since then, the prosecutor’s office managed to initiate administrative case against the director and director of the theater and lose it in court, and Orthodox activists to hold “prayer standing” on Lenin Square with the participation of State Duma deputy Nikolai Valuev.
“If, suppose, your mother was depicted in the play by a prostitute, would you be offended? A believer perceives Christ as a loved one, this is a very personal, intimate feeling that you can’t mock, ”Anastasia herself did not see the production, but the ticket for a blasphemous idea is not going to buy:“ To know that drugs are bad, it is not necessary to try them yourself. ”
Supporters of the theater are preparing a response rally, which they plan to conduct on April 5 on the same area where there were recently “prayer standing”. “In our city, a traditionally free -loving atmosphere. The time has come when we must take the streets and show that we exist, that we are Novosibirsk, ”the initiators of the action to citizens on the VKontakte network call. In anticipation of the rally, activists have already held a series of street single pickets: “They had an informational nature, many of the townspeople heard about the“ Tangazer ”only in the corner of their ear, so we went out to attract their attention,” says Julia Isakova, one of the activists. She believes that their rally will collect no less than that of the “Orthodox”: “Most of the townspeople are on our side.”
Two directors of the Novosibirsk Metropolitan, who supported the protest of the flock, emphasized in its appeal: the church does not interfere in the personnel policy, this is the prerogative of the state. But the director of the theater violated the law protecting the "feelings of believers", and therefore, is obliged to be punished. “To portray Christ in the context of depraved scenes is unacceptable,” the head of the Patriarchate Department of the Church and Society, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, who turned to the Siberian colleagues, to which NT turned for an official commentary. “When a person compares the sacred with debauchery, he understands what he is going on,” Cuplin concludes.
Despite the rhetoric of the church authorities, the position of ordinary clerics is not so monolithic: “The notorious director Tangaiser, that is, the character of the opera, and director Kulyabin, who set the opera, is not the same face,” Protodiacon Andrei Kuraev, a famous publicist and missionary, turned out to be one of the Russian Academy of Sciences who stood up to protect art from art from the Russian conservative critics. “Director Kulyabin does not offer the viewer to solidarize with the scandalous act of his character. The film, which makes a tanneser, turns into a tragedy: brothers in the workshop condemn the artist and turn away from him, ”says Kuraev. He agrees that it was better to be more careful with religious symbols, but the kulyabin needed to concern and intelligibly explain to the viewer why the tangiazer film caused such a scandal, and in the history of cinema there is one guaranteed occasion for the scandal - this is a combination of the sacred and pornography, the missionary explains.
“The director of Tangayzer was invented by director Kulyabin, and he expressed his position repeatedly,” Cuplin retorts. The Patriarch did not receive a scandal with comments, and the correspondence discussion between the clergy hung in the air. Officially, the Synodal Information Department was limited only to the diplomatic call to "hear believers and complete the conflict situation without court sentences."
The manipulation of manipulated “in my opinion, there is no insult to the production of feelings, since the performance does not deal with religious symbols in the sacred context, but with symbols belonging not only to religious, but also to secular culture,” said the religious scholar, associate professor of the center of comparative study of the RGFU Boris Falikov. Earlier, Falikov has repeatedly opposed the adoption of the law on “insulting the feelings of believers” - in his opinion, under this law, if desired, it is possible to bring any bold artistic statement on religious subjects: “I warned that the bill would call to the life of the“ professional offended ”group that would speculate them in order to convert resentment into political capital.” What happened in Novosibirsk, in his opinion, is the product of manipulations to believers from the uragic-patriotic organizations.
Protodiacon Andrei Kuraev formulates much sharper: “This is not the Orthodox community, but the fascizoid scumbags that have now risen throughout the country, amid the struggle“ for the Holy New Russia ”. They felt that there was a demand for them. And pay attention, because all these rallies went under political flags, St. George ribbons, ”says Protodiacon. In his opinion, the Patriarchate deliberately does not comment on the conflict: “It is obvious that everything suits it. Like, look, how cool we are, we need to be afraid of, we are the most important in the area, so we need to be friends with us, otherwise you will have problems, ”Kuraev concludes.
The fight to the last is interesting that after the dismissal of the director of the theater, the Novosibirsk Metropolitan, who had previously adhered to a sufficiently sharp rhetoric, she tried to disown the worldly protests, to which he herself with the lips of Metropolitan Tikhon and urged: “The church does not consider itself a side of the conflict,” they told NT in Metropolis and suggested focus on the official statement widespread on April 1. It says that the Russian Orthodox Church “does not bind the freedom of creativity and does not impose church censorship,” and the Novosibirsk Metropolitan did not file complaints with the prosecutor's office. According to the church leadership, ordinary parishioners turned to the authorities
* According to TASS, it was after the appeal of Metropolitan Tikhon that the Novosibirsk prosecutor's office opened administrative affairs. . The clergymen of the diocese, who previously actively advocated for the director’s punishment, refused to comment. The organizers of the rally for freedom of art associate the origins of the clerical campaign with the name of the rector of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral of Novosibirsk, Archpriest Alexander Novopashin (he refused to comment) and a group of radical “sovereigns”, close to the pro-Kremlin movement of NODs. Yuri Zodia, the head of the Novosibirsk branch of the People’s Cathedral public movement (he is one of the organizers of “prayer standing” on March 29), informed NT that despite the self -removal of the diocese, “activists of the movement will continue the struggle until the director and director of the theater will go to prison”. To this end, the parishioners have already submitted dozens of appeals to the city prosecutor's office. The prosecutor’s office was confirmed by the fact of such appeals, but they explained that this does not mean that a criminal case would certainly be opened.
Photo: Yevgeny Kurskov/TASS