A performance about the fate of Jews in the Russian Empire was staged at the Nikitsky Gate Theater

Two loneliness and the Pale of Settlement

On the Old stage of the theater “At the Nikitsky Gates” they presented the play “The blue ball is spinning, spinning …”. The literary basis for the new production was a short story by Isaac Babel “Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofievna”. MK visited the premiere.

Babel’s story about the fate of the Jews in the Russian Empire, forced to put up with the existence of the “Pale of Settlement” and other forms of legalized discrimination, consists of only seven hundred words. To give us the freedom to co-create, Babel writes as if he were sending telegrams. This very “completion” was carried out by the famous director Arkady Katz, who filled the space of the Old Theater Stage with seemingly simple events. Elya Gershkovich (Yuri Golubtsov) arranges at the train station in Orel (in the play, however, the city is not named) with the local prostitute Margarita Prokofievna (Yana Pryzhankova) that she will spend the night with him for the agreed amount. Locomotive whistles are honking, Margarita leads a temporary companion to her home, where it turns out that Gershkovich does not need love joys, but simply to spend the night. He received an order to leave with the first train, otherwise they would be sent by stage. Margarita changes her face and tries to take advantage of the situation by quadrupling the scene. And the actress Pryzhankova would not be herself if she could not show the slow, like the growth of a wheat stalk, the evolution of relations between a courtesan and a “fool” from Odessa. Yana brilliantly revealed the image of a woman who carries the hump of her own misfortune behind her back. At some point, she articulates the thought she has suffered: people are evil. So that Gershkovich would object to her: “No, people are kind … They were taught to think that they are evil, they believed.” Gradually, between Margarita and the evening guest, mutual interest arises, and then feelings.

At the level of detail, the original source and the dramatization differ somewhat. Babel does not say anywhere that Elya’s wife is sick (he only tells a new acquaintance about his family and shaky affairs). However, the “correction” made by Katz enhances the drama of the meeting and unsaid love.

Arkady Fridrikhovich – a native of Nikolaev, who lived in Odessa and received his first acting education there – and the dialogues between the characters perfectly painted. It is through dialogues and the solemn handing by Gershkovich to his girlfriend of a brought apple or other trifle (“This is a pause for you. And this is a pause for me”), a person of the 21st century is explained in what poverty millions of inhabitants of our country lived a hundred years ago. Katz uses the South Russian vocabulary and the ways of constructing sentences that exist there. But he does not abuse the feigned Odessaness and dialecticisms, as the authors of the series “Liquidation” did.

“Accelerating” the timekeeping to an hour and ten minutes (you can read the story aloud in about five minutes) – it does not drag out the narration. Although there is no ready answer to the question why these two lonelinesses were drawn to each other, neither in the play nor in the story.

It remains to explain the name. The song “The blue ball is spinning, spinning” near the station, where Elya Isaakovich and Margarita met and parted, is played by an organ grinder. “Orchestra!” exclaims Gershkovich, hearing this melody.

Yes, for him the dull sound of a hurdy-gurdy is an orchestra, a dinner consisting of vegetables and a couple of potatoes boiled in their uniforms is a feast. Without such “positive thinking”, a person who finds himself a hostage of terrible times turns into a beast or breaks down and goes beyond the event horizon. And it is unlikely that anyone will disagree with the idea that preventing this departure of Man is the main task of our literature and art.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28976 dated February 21, 2023

Newspaper headline:
Two loneliness and the Pale of Settlement