The documentary play “Hemorrhage at the Moscow Union of Artists” was staged at Praktika. Review

The Moscow Praktika theater recalled how Nikita Khrushchev destroyed an exhibition of avant-garde artists in the Manege in 1962. Alexei Zhitkovsky’s documentary play “Hemorrhage at the Moscow Union of Artists” about this ill-memorated resonant incident was staged by director Yuri Pechenezhsky. Attended the premiere Marina Shimadina.

Soviet wits called Khrushchev’s visit to the anniversary exhibition for the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists “a hemorrhage in the Moscow Union of Artists.” The First Secretary of the Central Committee was dumbfounded by the new art, incomprehensible to him, and poured abuse on the artists, calling them “pederasts” and their works “daubs” and “shit.” “Don’t you know how to draw? My grandson can draw even better!” – Nikita Sergeevich shouted with his characteristic spontaneity. And the officials accompanying him helpfully agreed: stop! destroy! ban!

Fortunately, in those already vegetarian times, no one was arrested. Khrushchev ordered the expulsion of the youth who angered him from the party and from the Union of Artists, but it turned out that none of them were members of either one. Actually, the members of Eliya Belyutin’s studio “New Reality”, who so outraged the head of state, should not have participated in that exhibition – they were invited at the last moment and clearly with the intention of “framing”. After all, Khrushchev himself later claimed that he did not know why, in fact, his entourage then invited him to visit the Manege. But this planned scandal had far-reaching consequences – it launched another campaign against formalism and abstractionism, and the art of the “second avant-garde,” which had just emerged during the Thaw, found itself underground.

“Praktika” decided to take the audience back half a century and allow them to attend that loud “performance”. But not at once. The performance is divided into two almost equal parts. The first is “Blue Light,” dedicated to welcoming the New Year of 1963. Workers and collective farmers with sparkling eyes share their labor successes with television viewers – they report an increase in milk yield, pig numbers and steel production. All this is accompanied by cheerful musical numbers performed by a charming female trio and seemingly harmless jokes addressed to the “new-fangled” artists and poets, whom the working class does not understand and does not accept. But from time to time, when the audience is already immersed in the pleasant nirvana of “old songs about the main thing”, this varnished picture begins to crack – the movements of the dancers become broken, the light flickers, as if another reality is seeping into the air through the interference, the voices of “canceled” artists are heard , scared and confused.

The second part of the play reconstructs Khrushchev’s visit to the Manezh, which happened a month before this New Year. Playwright Alexei Zhitkovsky relied on documentary sources – clippings from the newspaper Pravda and the magazine Ogonyok, a transcript of Khrushchev’s visit to the exhibition and the memories of eyewitnesses. The production designer Lesha Lobanov also used in the set design, in addition to the recreated interiors of a typical Soviet apartment, prints of works by exhibition participants Eliya Belyutin, Boris Zhutovsky, Vera Preobrazhenskaya, Nikolai Krylov. And finally, the Estonian artist Yulo Sooster – in fact, the creation of this play began with interest in this original painter with a difficult fate (after the war he was imprisoned in the camps as an “enemy of the people”).

Sooster is played by Denis Yasik, who in the first part of the play portrayed a broken TV presenter. And it seems that these are really different people, so successful is the actor’s transformation – a sparkling showman and a quiet, shy artist-intellectual. Nikolai Kovbas also created a colorful image of Khrushchev – not a functionary, but a narrow-minded “collective farmer” who quite sincerely cannot understand the new art. The remaining roles are occupied mainly by recent graduates of Marina Brusnikina’s workshop at the Moscow Art Theater School, among whom I would like to highlight Oleg Sapiro, who managed to embody the powerful and decisive figure of Ernst Neizvestny. The famous sculptor also took part in that ill-fated exhibition and quite boldly responded to the attacks of the state leader. Ironically, it was he who was ordered to create a tombstone monument for Khrushchev – in the finale it will also be demonstrated on stage, one might say, in life-size.

In general, the new performance “Practice” could be called an interesting educational project with an immersion in the history and artistic life of the last century. It quite straightforwardly illustrates how far the young experimenters were from official Soviet art, not coinciding with the state discourse, not even ideologically, but aesthetically. But today, when exhibitions that offend the feelings of vigilant citizens are again being canceled and closed, this “historical curiosity” does not look so funny.