Nikolaevich, push!

Theater.doc showed a play based on Yuzu Aleshkovsky

Yuz Aleshkovsky’s story “Nikolai Nikolaevich” fell into my hands somewhere in the late 70s, as usual, in the form of a blind typescript on gray, translucent paper. The first page, which served as the cover, was lost, so that, without recognizing either the author’s name or the title of the story, you immediately saw the first phrase, as if you were wedging in the middle of a conversation: “Listen. I already know it won’t be boring...” and I couldn’t tear myself away until the very end. The one who gave me this stack of sheets did not know the name of the author himself; finding out who was previous in the chain was not accepted according to the old testament “the less you know, the less you can tell,” we decided that perhaps the author living in the Union, fearing the consequences, released his work into samizdat without a name. But we gave this story the name “Nikolai Nikolaevich” ourselves and guessed it right.

This is how Aleshkovsky’s story, written in 1970, and published only ten years later in America, a year after the author emigrated, came to us almost like folklore. Just as his own songs lived for many years and still live in the minds of most people as camp folklore: “Comrade Stalin, you are a great scientist”, “The cigarette butt”, “Soviet lesbian”...

“Nikolai Nikolayevich” is a very short story, it’s just a monologue over a bottle of vodka, so lively and charming that you can only be surprised that it hasn’t been staged in the theater before. On the other hand, why be surprised: the story of a former pickpocket about how he became a sperm donor for the first genetic experiments and ended up in the Soviet meat grinder of the fight against Mendelism-Morganism is so thickly peppered with obscenities and so full of savory and picturesque details “below the belt” that on the bashful Russian stage it was unclear how to approach him.

St. Petersburg director Vladimir Mikhelson and actor Anatoly Khropov turned out to be the bravest. They themselves, without any theater behind them, staged “Nikolai Nikolaevich” and played it four times in St. Petersburg, and now they showed it for the second time in Moscow, on the stage of the tiny Theatre.doc. This performance was called “Dynamo-Arzamas”, apparently remembering that Khropov was a sports commentator for the Zenit football club for ten years in a row, and on the homemade program they drew a falling goalkeeper and a female figure in the distance. “Nikolai Nikolaevich” by Mikhelson and Khropov became a love story.

Anatoly Khropov (pictured) , about whom it is written in the program that he studied with Lev Dodin, and then hosted the program “One, two, three, Zenitushka, push” at St. Petersburg stadiums, seems suitable for the role of Nikolai Nikolaevich. A huge guy in a jacket and cap, with arms completely covered in tattoos, he barely fits on the small space of the dock stage, and his football voice rushes beyond the basement. Khropov is a charming artist and wants to play as if he had not been given a way out for a long time: he thunders, growls, burrs like an academician, hoarse like an “international lesson.” Hearing this slyly simple story is a pleasure, but I want to say: “Hush, hush, look into my eyes. We're sitting in the kitchen, here you are, and here I am. You’re telling me about love.”

And the director took the story from Aleshkovsky’s story only about love. There is no Weismannism-Morganism, Lysenko, informers and the closure of the laboratory, which left on the street the nineteen-year-old “laboratory assistant” Nikolai Nikolaevich with his “evil spirits”, and the research assistant Vlada Yuryevna, with whom he was in love, and the geneticist Kizma, who was waiting for the Nobel Prize. Well, there is no reverse flight of the swing with the death of Stalin either. The artist intersperses the story of his red-haired love with lines from the Song of Songs. And the words of the hero “Love... this is not a chervonets worth of money for you, Kiryukha. This... is for life. From bell to bell” echo the biblical words “love is strong as death; jealousy is fierce as hell.”

It's a pity for the historical background. And not only because without it the love plot itself pales. It’s a pity because, having decided to do without him, the director is forced to cut off the love story in the middle. If there is no pseudoscience of genetics and the dispersal of the laboratory, then there is no continuation of love, how the loving pickpocket woke up his scientific sleeping beauty, and everything else. Nikolai Nikolayevich's story suddenly - in the middle of an extraneous discussion about how millionaires are crazy and therefore cannot satisfy their women - stops dead in their tracks, and the artist comes out to bow. “It’s probably intermission now?” - those who have read Aleshkovsky are trying to guess. In relation to the confused others, it turns out to be completely dishonest, as if “Romeo and Juliet” were interrupted by the fact that Romeo was expelled from Verona, and Juliet was about to get married. And they would never have given the audience the opportunity to find out how it ended.

However, now everyone has the opportunity to read “Nikolai Nikolaevich,” so for uninformed viewers, the loss of the second half of the story is not final. And I keep thinking, why, why did they do this? This story is not so long, it could easily be put into a play. Or maybe my typewritten copy reached Mikhelson and Khropov along the chain, but over the years it lost its last pages?

Dina GODER