The coffin inside and out – Weekend – Kommersant

In the second – and last – play by Nikolai Erdman, the absurd Soviet layman cannot decide whether to be or not to be. Hamlet’s question, being brought to the communal kitchen, expectedly acquires a parodic poignancy and, oddly enough, retains a metaphysical poignancy. The Soviet government preferred to keep away from the viewer for a long time both the hero who faced such a non-Soviet choice, and his author. Decades later, Erdman’s “Suicide” returned to the stage in seemingly completely new historical circumstances, but the funny in it is still as deadly as before.

Text: Olga Fedyanina

The most terribly funny Russian play begins harmlessly, literally like a joke about a mother-in-law. Night scandal in the matrimonial bed: Semyon Podsekalnikov wakes up his wife, because it got into his head to eat the leftover liver sausage from dinner. A portrait of a catastrophe in five acts, Nikolai Erdman begins with a detailed joke about the fate of the sausage – and even the most flat reprise does not seem superfluous to him.

But with the very first reprises-replicas, the plot of “Suicide” also includes the ghost of death. Comes in as a joke.

Maria Lukyanovna. So, Semyon, you can’t live. So, Semyon, you can show tricks in the circus, but you can’t live like that.
Semyon Semyonovich. How is that not possible? What do you think I should breathe? Die? Yes? You, Maria, tell me directly: what are you coveting? Are you yearning for my last breath? And you will.

Semyon Semenovich Podsekalnikov is an unemployed tradesman from the time of the NEP. He is lazy, cowardly, stupid, sneaky and hopelessly gone. Erdman’s vulgarity is the root from which both the creepy and the funny grow. Or rather, terribly funny. To the quarrelsome squeal of Podsekalnikov that he is not allowed to live, summing up his suffering over sausage, the universe responds with unexpected readiness.

Maria Lukyanovna. But understand that he shoots.
Alexander Petrovich (poking his head out). Who is shooting?
Maria Lukyanovna. Semyon Semyonovich.
Alexander Petrovich. Where is he shooting?
Maria Lukyanovna. Do not think too much, Alexander Petrovich, in the dressing room.
Margarita Ivanovna. Who, excuse me, shoots himself in the restroom?
Maria Lukyanovna. Where else can the unemployed go?

The wife, mother-in-law and neighbors are frightened by the emptiest threat of suicide to the point of fainting, the hunt for the ill-fated liverwurst begins like a revolver. And now, in the next scene, the revolver becomes real – and around the imaginary suicide a lively crowd of people gathers, which demands that such an event not be spent without ideas. Disappointed widows, clergymen, merchants, old-time intellectuals are fighting for the content of Podsekalnikov’s suicide note and, accordingly, for the right to appropriate the motives of a suicide. The funeral banquet is in full swing before and after the appointed moment of transition to eternity, wreaths, gypsies, vodka, citizens, we chip in for expensive mourning for the widow.

The author seems to invite the viewer (reader) to join this fun, doing everything to sympathize with the future deceased was absolutely impossible. But the funnier the imaginary suicide Podsekalnikov becomes entangled in his obligations to the world of the imaginary living, the gloomier it becomes not the dialogue (Erdman writes reprises flawlessly until the very last line), but the position of the laugher. And the point is not in the dancing at the coffin itself, but in who is balancing there on the verge of an unfortunate death.

In Erdman’s coffin lie, neither alive nor dead, two great traditions of Russian culture at once. Podsekalnikov parodies at the same time both a small person and a superfluous person, and Akaky Akakievich, and Oblomov, he is a grotesque result of the degradation of both. Instead of unfulfilled dreams and ideas, he has a bass helicon, instead of an active everyday life, he has his wife’s salary, which buys liver sausage.

The parody of Podsekalnikov and the crowd of freaks burying him (and they all have a history of a total of three-quarters of great Russian literature) is frightening, because Erdman did not invent this parody, but fixed it. It is not the author of “Suicide” who makes heroes (whether positive or negative) of the 19th century useless, dropped out of the life of ordinary people, it is their twentieth century with the First World War and the first years of Soviet power that was done. In “The Suicide” he brawls, dances, gets drunk until he loses his memory and groans all that was once the main object of culture, but became its garbage.

At the same time, Erdman was not at all the one who parted with the past laughing – he exposes to ridicule what he himself is at least not indifferent to, but actually quite expensive. As well as a significant part of his audience, which, however, he did not have in the case of “Suicide” – and this is also part of the story.

Here you need to make a digression.

Semyon Semyonovich. How can I tell them why, comrades, I am dying, if I have not even read my suicide note.
Aristarkh Dominikovich. Take the trouble to read, citizen Podsekalnikov.
Semyon Semyonovich. What’s this?
Aristarkh Dominikovich. It is written here.
Semyon Semyonovich. “Why can’t I live!” Here, here, here. I have been interested in this for a long time.

“Suicide” Erdman wrote under a specific order. The director of his first play, The Mandate, Vsevolod Meyerhold, was waiting for a sequel. Erdman turned out to be a slow writer – starting in 1925, he gave the play to the theater only in 1930. The performance will never come out – neither at Meyerhold’s, nor at the Art Theater, which tried to “intercept” the play from Meyerhold. Neither connections, nor persuasion, nor compromises helped – “Suicide” through Soviet censorship I failed. At the same time, the author did not consider that he was writing something seditious. Claims to the Soviet authorities in The Suicide are made only by the characters themselves – that same ridiculous garbage of history. If, of course, not the fifth act.

It is hard not to notice that the beginning and the end of the play are written in very different feelings. During the time between the start and end of work on The Suicide, the NEP ended in the Soviet Union and a conservative turn began. This directly affected both the layman and the artist – and in this case, the character and the author. The “Great Break” offered both Erdman and Podsekalnikov the same choice: become a function of the Stalinist state or cease to exist altogether. In the feeling of this sudden convergence of fate, the finale of the play is written. In which the almost buried Podsekalnikov at first thinks that he has nothing more to lose, and experiences a short attack of megalomania about this.

Semyon Semyonovich. Hush! (Picks up the receiver.) Everyone is silent when the colossus is talking to the colossus. Give me the Kremlin. Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, let’s go, young lady. Someone? Kremlin? Podsekalnikov says. Pod-se-kal-ni-kov. Individual. Individual. Call someone in charge. Do you not? Well, then tell him from me that I read Marx and didn’t like Marx.

Before us is still a farce – but only the very end of it. Through the parody speech of Podsekalnikov, other intonations sprout, this is not quite the character speaking. The coffin around which they dance turns out to be common for the hero, the author and, as it will soon become clear, for a considerable part of the public.

Semyon Semyonovich. Are we doing anything against the revolution? Since the first day of the revolution, we have done nothing. We just go to visit each other and say that it is difficult for us to live. Because it is easier for us to live if we say that it is difficult for us to live. For God’s sake, do not take away our last means of subsistence, let us say that it is difficult for us to live. Well, at least like this, in a whisper: “It’s hard for us to live.” Comrades, I ask you on behalf of a million people: give us the right to whisper. You will not even hear him behind the construction site. Trust me. We will live our whole lives in whispers.

Here it is no longer the past, but the future before our eyes turns into the garbage of history. For decades, censorship saved the Soviet theater from this either premonition or prediction – and the author-predictor was first sent into exile, then to the NKVD song and dance ensemble, then allowed him to exist as a screenwriter and author of interludes. This did not prevent him from remaining until the end of his life one of the most witty Soviet authors. Only Nikolai Erdman no longer wrote plays.

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