Smell the country

The future play “Enchanted by Death,” staged by the St. Petersburg Author’s Theater, is dedicated to the tragedy of the Soviet man, who, according to Merab Mamardashvili, experienced an anthropological catastrophe. The main difficulty is to realize that each of us carries this catastrophe within ourselves, and everyone must make efforts to get out of it.

“Enchanted by Death” is the last part of a theatrical triptych under the general title “We live without feeling the country beneath us...”. The first part - the play “Mandelshtam Is No” - was created based on the memoirs of the poet’s wife Nadezhda Mandelstam. The questions she posed in the middle of the last century remain unanswered: is it possible to repeat what happened to Mandelstam? People are moving into the future, not realizing the past, which is rapidly being forgotten; they are still trying to live, “without feeling the country beneath them.”

The second performance of the triptych - “Night Watch” - was staged based on the story of the same name by Mikhail Kuraev. It explores the life and existence of the “professional guard” Comrade Polubolotov, who served the state security agencies “faithfully and truly” all his life.

The third performance, which is being prepared for production (based on the yet unfinished book by Svetlana Alexievich), shows the story of three generations of one family: the grandmother, sent to the camp in 1937 as a member of a family of repressed people (her brother was imprisoned), her daughter, born in the camp, who received orphanages, October-Pioneer-Komsomol education, and her son, a career officer, who went into business with the beginning of perestroika. All her life the grandmother remains silent about her husband, who abandoned her during the investigation and who eventually became a big boss; the mother is unable to come to terms with perestroika, which has taken away her sense of pride “for a great country,” and tries to commit suicide; the son wants to understand: what kind of human creature, unprecedented in the history of civilization, was bred in the laboratory of Marxism-Leninism through the efforts of the tireless workers of Lubyanka and settled on one sixth of the land? Is a nation divided into executioners and victims capable of becoming a united people?

The script for the final part of the triptych was masterfully read by the actor and creator of the Author's Theater (St. Petersburg) Oleg Dmitriev, who called the production “the performance of our hope, since it is not only about what country we definitely don’t want to live in, but also about what country we want to live in.” "

After the reading, a discussion of the play took place, in which students and teachers of the St. Philaret Institute and the guests they invited took part.