On his anniversary, Igor Vernik will have a dream about a masquerade

And he will become a Russian Moor

Leading actor of the Moscow Art Theater. On her anniversary, Chekhov will appear on stage in the role of Arbenin in Masquerade. True, not exactly the same Arbenin who, out of jealousy and suspicion, poisoned his wife with ice cream. St. Petersburg director Pyotr Shereshevsky, for whom the capital’s theaters are fighting, called his work “Masquerade with Closed Eyes,” inspired on the one hand by the drama of the Russian rebel poet Mikhail Lermontov, and on the other, by the story of the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler “The Novella of Dreams.”

Well, Vernik lived to play the role of the Russian Othello – that’s how Arbenin is usually called. What is he like? The same jealous person, living on the edge of feelings and passions, or a cynic, tired of life and with a cold heart, committed reprisals against the pure soul of his young wife? Now literally the last rehearsals are underway at the Moscow Art Theater, the hero Vernik appears completely unexpected – he is not a nobleman at all, but an intellectual, a philologist, moreover, a Lermontov scholar, capable of easily expounding at a lecture the misconceptions of the hero of the drama “Masquerade”. But the lessons of others, especially those of literary characters, as you know, do not teach anyone anything, do not protect anyone from the savagery of actions and the torment of disastrous passions? A small push is enough for a modern person, quite fashionably dressed, with fashionable views on life, to hang on the edge of an abyss.

So Vernik hangs up. And it is no longer possible to tell where Arbenin is and where his modern researcher is. The border is thin and unsteady, and even worsened by dreams. After all, the director, as a naturalist, instilled Schnitzler’s “Stories about Dreams” into Lermontov’s “Masquerade”. Please note that these same “Dreams” begin with a description of a masquerade ball.

Lermontov composed a drama that never saw the stage and was not published during his lifetime. Although he rewrote it many times, trying to overcome the censorship ban, says the director. – But the main thing in this story is what he could not give up – an extremely gloomy, pessimistic view of human nature. Arbenin initially perceives the world as a container of vice. The world is evil and criminal for him from the very beginning, and the immaculate Nina is an exception to the rule. Almost two hundred years after the play was written, we are trying to study the consciousness of modern man. We composed an original play reflecting on the themes of Lermontov’s Masquerade. Schnitzler’s “Story of Dreams” became the second pillar in the study of the dark, hidden sides of the human soul.

Wernick, understandably, is worried – he has never had such a role before. He is sure that a person of the 21st century, capable of transmitting an image from one point of the globe to another in a second, cannot cope with passions. During a break between rehearsals he tells me:

– This does not save him from the abyss into which he looks at certain moments of his life. So I’m thinking – has human nature changed or not? Where do fears, revenge, jealousy, despair lead him today?

It remains to add that Maria Fomina (Nina), Evgeny Perevalov and Sergei Belyaev (Zvezdich, named Adam Petrovich), Yulia Vitruk (Shtral, who became Zvezdich’s wife) and Ilya Kozyrev (their son from his first marriage) work on stage next to Vernik.