Last week, the “Voices of the Country” project, invented by me and implemented by a large team of enthusiasts, came to an end. These are 12 one-man performances created by young directors in collaboration with playwrights, composers, artists and wonderful actors: from Alexandra Rebenok and Natasha Shchukina to Denis Paramonov and Sasha Vinogradova, from Igor Mirkurbanov and Ivan Agapov, Alexandra Ursulyak and Alexander Semchev to Dmitry Chebotarev, Kirill Vlasov and Anastasia Svetlova.
The production team of each performance, together with photographers, went to their heroes, whom they chose themselves – to villages and cities, spent long hours and days with them, communicated, filmed, recorded. And they brought these ordinary people onto the stage. And the heroes of these plays came to Moscow, to the “Russia” exhibition, where the first performances were being shown, and together with the audience they looked at the wonderful performers talking about their lives. They watched, cried, laughed, applauded and were happy. They took bows with the production group, they said the words, and it was an incredible separate performance in which fiction and reality did not conflict, but joyfully recognized each other.
The idea of the project was to continue the life of documentary theater in Russia . And at the same time in the modernization of this type of theater.
Documentary theater in Russia was created as a theater of pain. But often trying to treat pain ends up causing more pain. After all, pain sells well. She is the same oil. And a wonderful manipulation tool.
There is an ancient thought that many, many today would do well to remember: being a victim corrupts no less than being an executioner. So is pain. It, like weakness, like the position of a victim, corrupts. It allows you to demand attention, rights, privileges – more, more, more. It hooks you on the needle of endless public sympathy and help when the “sufferer” ceases to strive for recovery or improvement, because misfortune allows you to take, and not give, to whine, and not to act. Under these conditions, the space is often filled with fakes that have nothing to do with art, but work with the “agenda”. Aesthetic, formal perfection cannot be imitated – talent is either there or not. And it’s easier to fake concern about socio-political issues. “My heart hurts for…” says the artist, and try saying that he is mediocre and his statement is opportunistic. After all, he is in trend. He talks about pain.
In Russia, this “necessary” trend was formulated back in the 90s. Having escaped the shackles of communist ideology, Russian art seemed to be at a loss. Who is the customer now? Who should I lean against? The state gave up – and Russian culture, pushed around, took an example from the economy: everything is for sale. It has become exportable. And an escort. Traderish to the core. At first she sold “bathhouse, vodka, accordion and salmon” to the West, gypsy culture, the vastness of the Volga and revelry. And when the market became oversaturated and this product ceased to be in demand, Russian culture asked the world: what do you want? The world has issued an agenda. Thus a unique product was born – a simple Russian man with cancer, who suddenly put on a dress, put on lipstick and became the object of persecution by the Russian village chthonic crowd.
“The Siberian huntsman Egor is an exemplary family man and a respected person in his village. He and his wife Natalya are expecting their second child. Suddenly Egor finds out that he is terminally ill and that he has two months to live. Neither traditional medicine nor shamanic witchcraft help in the fight against the disease , and in the end Yegor decides to take a desperate step – he tries to completely change his personality in order to deceive the approaching death, as did the legendary drake Zhamba, the hero of the ancient Siberian epic.” End of quote. What's next? Then the hero of this story puts on women's clothes. He wears women's clothes. Putting on makeup. Of course, he runs into homophobia. And so on. The ideal combination of rural flavor, chthonic Russian darkness, fatal disease and homoeroticism – is this not a new analogue of caviar-Khokhloma export? This real artistic statement, luxurious in its shameless opportunism (we will omit the title), is an image of what Russian culture became when it decided to correspond to the new European context.
Russian culture turned into the lackey Smerdyakov, who hates his father and hints at Ivan, who arrived from Europe, of devotion to the point of meanness. She despised that from which she was born and grew – the land, the people – like Smerdyakov, her own father. The country was called a drunken, dissolute, degenerate voluptuous person, whose fate was to be stuck in the crown. It was the hatred of a bastard, the hatred of an underground man. He was looking for a new owner. And I found it. And he was ready again and again to write, film, speak from the stage about Russian chthony and Russian degeneration, about Russian degradation and Russian hopelessness. And of course, about the timid sprouts of a new European consciousness breaking through the asphalt of Russian obscurantism.
The ideology of the “Voices of the Country” project was formulated immediately. At the entrance. In November, when the project began. Then many times I spoke about this publicly: we want to move away from tendentiousness and try to create a new type of documentary theater.
But when the first performance came out – and it was a wonderful, deep and complex performance by Talgat Batalov with Alexandra Rebenok – a wave of indignation and hate arose on the Internet and in the emigrant media. And it's so clear. The “Tusovka” suddenly discovered that young talented guys had joined the project, whom they, this “Tusovka”, considered “their own”. The personal messages of the project participants were bursting with insults and calls: “Wake up!” To which those involved in the project shrugged their shoulders and continued working. Passionately. Honestly. Free. Because from the moment they are invited to the project until they reach the audience, no one exercises any censorship control over them.
Young talented people living in Russia and not planning to leave anywhere have created a series of wonderful performances. And many of the performances became not only a social event, but also artistic events: wonderfully written, staged, performed, they will live on – on large and small stages, and go on tour.
These are very different in form, language, way of existence of the work. These are full-length one-man performances – the most complex theatrical genre – telling about complex, completely imperfect, sinful people who sometimes live difficult and dysfunctional lives. But very beautiful. Because their life is filled with meaning. And love. These are people who do not understand how much is truly heroic in them. Very modest. Incredibly deep. And very light.
I am not a sentimental person. But I cried during many stories. And I saw the audience crying. And then they smile happily as they leave the hall.
We are proud of our project. It took place. It will develop. “Voices of the Country” proves that documentary art, like art in general, may not be black if there is no order for blackness.
And one more important conclusion from this project. If art concentrates on pain and darkness, it means that it looks at reality through the same distorting optics as the idiotically optimistic optics of ideologized art, where only the struggle between the best and the good lives. In both places, true reality floats away from under our feet and is replaced by a total illusion. The art of sweet dreams causes diabetes and obesity, the art that describes the world as a kingdom of grief and darkness causes a suicidal feeling of hopelessness. But the problem is that if “sugar” art is obviously false, it will not deceive anyone except those who are happy to be deceived, then art that sells pain is subtly deceitful. And it easily deceives a gullible consumer. After all, it hides behind the idea of truth. And this is a trap. It seems that the art of pain always comes from the exposed nerves of the artist. But! You can order not only the construction of a temple, but also a terrorist attack. You can get money not only for treatment, but also for murder.
Ivan Karamazov’s “Diary” is a terrible and honest document . And if we judge humanity by it, humanity is not worth living and the one who scorches the earth with napalm will be right. However, Ivan’s “Diary” is only part of the great polyphony of Dostoevsky’s novels, where the terrible abysses of the human soul are replaced by incredible ascents.
Bakhtin once applied the term “polyphony” to Fyodor Mikhailovich’s texts. “Voices of the Country” is not a praise choir. And not the “howl” of mourners, as some would like. This is the polyphonic diversity of life, where there is only one setting: to have no presets. Where the artist listens and peers into reality without prejudice. And yes, this means looking at the world, at people, at the country not with hatred, but with love. Because the state of love is natural. This is the first. This is original. And this is the most difficult thing. But this is the truth. Everything is born from love. Even hatred. And even death tramples death so that life can triumph.
For me personally, the project was not only a special artistic experience. Being present at each performance of the cycle was like reading a book. I turned over the pages of a tome that opened up a completely new world to me. It was like I was rediscovering my country. Her people. Their character. Their values. Their strength.
Looking again and again at the incredible Sasha Ursulyak, playing a pensioner from Nyagan caring for her paralyzed husband, or at Denis Paramonov, talking about a guy sentenced by illness to unbearable pain, but managing to live and be happy, or plunging into the story of a miner who daily descends into depths of the earth and filled with some incredible, unearthly wisdom, peace, meaningfulness of every second of existence, I thought again and again about such a blurred concept as the “mysterious Russian soul.”
This expression has become almost an anecdote, a literary and social meme, a dummy. In the Russian culture of the pro-European wing, a stable contempt for any attempt to talk about the Russian national has long been formed. In the culture of the 19th century and the Silver Age, this national thing was the subject of free conversation, reflection – unashamed and even mandatory among the educated class. And in the middle of the 20th century, the national was forced into the zone of marginality. Actually, Russianness became Sovietness back in the 20s. But if in the 20s this rejection of the national contained the utopianism of building a new society, then in the 60s and beyond the national was simply labeled as archaic and “unfashionable.”
Solzhenitsyn's lonely voice was scornfully ridiculed. Outstanding village prose is labeled as Black Hundred. The national and the archaic were closely intertwined. As a result, today it is impossible to imagine that the following text was written by Diaghilev: “… all our art has hitherto been clouded by the influence of the West, the West seemed to be a distant seductive land, where unknown and gigantic art was developing, and Russian artists caught every grain and sought to do “how it is there” “They had absolutely no time to think about themselves. There was no pride in them, and this was their misfortune.” Where there? If ten years ago a Russian Eurocentric artist had suddenly tried to talk about Russianness in art, about nationality, he would have become the subject of contemptuous snorting and would have been accused of at least “tenderness,” or even worse, of working for “Russian fascism.”
The unfortunate Dostoevsky, who dared himself and through his heroes to formulate the most original and, in fact, completely cosmopolitan idea of the universality of the Russian soul, has long been called in this context a talented but cowardly obscurantist who made a shameful deal with the “bloody tsarist regime.” Blok's “Scythians” are labeled as the result of drug intoxication. And Brodsky’s poems on the independence of Ukraine are discussed as an unfortunate chauvinistic mistake of the Russian genius – they say, in principle he is great, but here specifically – m…k.
And yet, the main reason for the conscious or unconscious displacement of the national to the periphery was probably that the national in the Russian consciousness is too closely associated with messianism. With energy that is untamed and not subject to money or cold diet. National and religious here in Russia are blood brothers. And Russian consciousness, like no other European consciousness, has retained these features: fatalism and sacrifice as an everyday philosophy, unpretentious readiness for deprivation and a special hierarchy of values.
It was almost impossible, unbearable for a secular person, and especially a late Soviet one, to interact with this. Only ridicule. However, there was something to laugh at. Russianness was too often raised to the top by ignorant and rabid graphomaniacs, whose speeches and thoughts discouraged any desire to immerse themselves in discussions about the selfhood of their native culture, whose ideas obviously crossed into the zone of full-blown nationalism. Meanwhile, talking about the Russian soul is not only possible, it is necessary. Because it exists. You can't help but see this. Not to hear. Don't feel.
Looking at the performances of our cycle, at our heroes, I suddenly realized that perhaps one of the most important elements of the special Russian code is the attitude of our people to the central concept of modern Western civilization. This is the concept of comfort. For Russians, it’s a borrowing that seems to have an analogue in our language in the form of the word “convenience.” But “convenient” does not mean “comfortable”. Convenient is when nothing physically interferes. “Comfortable seat”, for example. Comfort is when physical comfort turns into mental peace. “Are you comfortable?” – a question about psychophysical comfort. “A comfortable person,” one might say. But a “convenient person” is not. That is, it is possible, but there is some kind of disgusting note in it. In Russian there is a concept of “comfort”. Coziness is more important than comfort, because comfort is a physical concept, and comfort is a spiritual concept. Russian people love comfort. And comfort makes him feel anxious, melancholy, and stopped. Russian people are steppe people. And without movement he cannot imagine existence. Here's a paradox about the Russian man: in happiness he has a presentiment of death. In tranquility there is nothingness. In joy there is sorrow.
Russian civilization has always been a civilization of restlessness. Not only did she not try to sing a lullaby to the average person, but she endlessly bothered him and demanded that he reflect a long way. She did not have a recipe for happiness, did not know the entrance to Shambhala, did not know soothing and psyche-balancing practices, and did not give shelter and peace to a restless spirit. Just as Eastern religions practiced peace, so Russian civilization “practised” restlessness. And Russians have always thought of their Motherland as a native person. Mother Earth. Land soaked in the blood and sweat of our ancestors. Motherland. It remains the same, no matter what it is called.
I thought about this, looking at our heroes. They are all about restlessness. About search. About selflessness. About the fact that happiness does not come from comfort. But in something else. And this is different, monastic – it is present in them.
“Voices of the Country” is a cycle of performances. And at the same time one big performance. About the country, about the people of the country. This is Russian polyphony. Complex, woven from the individual voices of incredible personalities living next to us. Let's notice them. Let's see what wonderful people surround us. Let's admire them. They deserve it.
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