The game of imagination of Alexander Griboedov: for the sake of the writer, cinema was crossed with theater

DK “Dawn” presented a performance about the author of “Woe from Wit” Alexander Griboedov, and the Soviet writer Yuri Tynyanov, who wrote a novel about him. The latter is not the cult figure of Russian culture to which directors dedicate films, serials, ballets. Moreover, the fact of the discovery of the old / new name deserves at least attention. At the premiere of the performance with a difficult-to-remember name – “Yusha, Yur, Yurina and Alexander Sergeevich” – the MK columnist visited.

Yusha, Yur, Yurina – this is how his family called him in the family of the future writer. But who is Yuri Tynyanov is well known to philologists, connoisseurs of literature. To the mass reader and viewer, the name of Tynyanov, to be honest, will say little. Meanwhile, he was a highly educated person, a prominent figure in the literary process of his time: before the revolution, he graduated from the Faculty of History (Slavic-Russian Department) of St. Petersburg University, and remained there to work. And after the revolution he worked in the Comintern, first as a translator of the French department, then as its head. He was a prominent theorist and historian of literature, was a member of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ).

Scientific research and prose intertwined in his works, like close, and, most importantly, loving relatives. This was shown by his first vivid novel “Kyukhlya”, dedicated to Pushkin’s friend and Decembrist Ivan Kuchelbecker. And six years later, the writer’s second historical novel, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, was published, revealing to the reader the personality of Alexander Griboyedov. The author of “Woe from Wit” – a comedy for all Russian times, appeared as a completely unfamiliar, interesting and complex person. The performance is dedicated to how Tynyanov composed his Griboyedov.

It is played in a new, not at all theatrical space – in the Palace of Culture “Rassvet”, in a fashionable cluster around 1905. And it would be strange if they showed just something traditional (with a plus or minus sign). The creators of the project – the author of the idea and director Andrey Stadnikov, the producer Lina Arifulina – preferred to match the new space and presented a film performance. But this did not become clear immediately – the performance was revealed like a flower.

Moreover, the first scene did not promise anything unusual: a group of young people in costumes in the fashion of the 1920s and 1930s at the table are having a literary dispute, denoting it with little-speaking remarks – something literary-radical. Then, one by one, they descend from the low stage into the hall, where the first rows are vacated for them. They take their places, like the most ordinary spectators, but after a while they return to the stage, and then back to the hall. The main stage decoration here is a screen on which a film will run in parallel, which the farther, the more semantic it will be connected with what is happening on the stage.

I note that the screen does not contain video content, which theater often uses as a visual effect that complements the content or is completely unrelated to it. Or as a close-up of the actors, brought online to enhance the effect. In this theater, the film part was filmed in advance: its main character is the playwright, diplomat, composer Alexander Griboedov, about whom Yury Tynyanov writes his novel. How he, in fact, composes a game of his imagination and tried to show in a movie / performance.

The mise-en-scenes (one repeats the other) are static: to the left of the screen, behind a table behind an antediluvian typewriter, Tynyanov sits next to one of the characters in his future book. The writer peers at him, studies – what, they say, for the fruit, and the character – at the writer, and soon he will appear in the next plot on the screen already in connection with Griboyedov: with or without him. Thus, the directors Stadnikov and Alisa Kretova build a multi-layered structure: on the screen Griboyedov with his life (personal, state service), on the stage – Tynyanov, composing his historical characters about him, with a narrative. But also with his own life, reflected on the screen by correspondence with Viktor Shklovsky, fragments from his own book (“The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar”, as well as books about him as a writer and scientist). And he was a writer and scientist, and therefore his works are so interesting to read, for example, the study “Gogol and Dostoevsky” of 1921. They are not just a flight of fantasy, which carries the author and often brings it in, but he checked the harmony with algebra.

“It is most difficult for a person to believe in a fact, the fact of his existence,” he writes in The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar. – But how many miles in a circle does it exist, for how many years? Watching who. There is a diameter of consciousness. Interest in the past is simultaneous with interest in the future The man from Chekhov’s notebook looked out the window at the funeral: now you are dead, they are carrying you to bury, and I will go to breakfast. This person, of course, can also talk about the future: you haven’t been born yet, you don’t have a last name, and now I’m going to have breakfast.

On the screen is breakfast (and maybe lunch) at Thaddeus Bulgarin, the same one who printed excerpts from Woe from Wit almost 200 years ago in the almanac Russian Thalia. As you know, censorship banned the entire print of the comedy, and it went around Moscow in handwritten lists.

In parallel, the writer develops a terrible disease – multiple sclerosis, about which he writes to a friend and colleague Shklovsky, and yet continues to work. And on the screen are black/white shots of the life of Alexander Sergeevich Griboyedov.

There is also minimalism in the cinema – mise-en-scene, textual and with a predominance of white and light over black. The process of writing, as well as the story of two compatriots who did not meet in life, but met in the space of cinema / theater, seems to be very interesting and finely built.

One actor – Pyotr Skvortsov performs, and very well, the role of Tynyanov and Griboedov, which is quite justified. His difficult character, difficult relationship with Teleshova (Aina Arifulina), the dispute with Karl Nesselrode (David Kaas), the monologue of Pyotr Chaadaev (Yuri Mezhevich) and others are all faces of Russian history. Finally, the appointment of the secretary of the Russian mission in Persia, where six months later he would be brutally murdered.

Cinema is cinema, and in the finale of the literary film show, the directors will still put a theatrical end – parodying the comedy Del Arte, the artists will play several fragments from “Woe from Wit”, placing it, as it were, in a shadow theater.