The winners of the theater book prize have been named in Moscow

Last Friday can easily be called a bonus one. While filmmakers were handing out their “Golden Eagle” in the first pavilion of Mosfilm, in Kozitsky Lane, in a mansion built in 1777, where the Institute of Art History has been located for many years, theatergoers were handing out “Theatrical Novel”. This award, which recognizes and honors books about theatre, is the tenth.

It was ten years ago that this prize was born as a response to the fact that theater books began to fade into the background, which meant one thing – the next generations interested in the history of the theater would get a shallow understanding of its existence and everyday life. Meanwhile, we have strong authors – theater experts, ballet experts, critics, journalists who write history today, analyzing the process, explore the past, looking for unique evidence in the archives. It is their works that Theatrical Romance supports.

It must be said that this year experts and the jury chaired by Konstantin Raikin evaluated more than a hundred books competing for the “Theatrical Novel”, and only seven publications were finalists, which were named laureates without division into first, second, third and other places.

This is “War and Peace” by Rimas Tuminas. The Birth of a Performance” is a unique document that preserves for us the director’s work on his last performance at the Vakhtangov Theater. I remember this difficult and difficult graduation, which, due to circumstances, hung by a thread every day. And it was the year of the theater’s 100th anniversary, and the production of Leo Tolstoy’s epic was dedicated to this very day. Thanks to the editor of the book, Elena Dunaeva, we can now follow every moment of the creation of a theatrical masterpiece and study it through rehearsals.

Fascinating reading emerges from the two-volume “Letters to the Art Theater. 1898-1928” (editors Inna Solovyova, Olga Abramova, Olga Egoshina).

“I drowned in these two volumes and continue to drown with pleasure, reading letters written over thirty years by different people to the Art Theater,” admitted Konstantin Raikin. – Because this reading gives rise to a lot of thoughts about the purpose of theater and art. And most importantly, these letters are feedback from us to the audience.

The letters are truly incredible – from grateful ones, with a low bow to the waist (a young Leningrad student invites Konstantin Stanislavsky to visit and hurries him, because if he doesn’t come in the summer, her session will begin) to harshly critical ones (in “The Inspector General” the scenery is also good , and costumes, and only one black sheep who ruins everything – Mikhail Chekhov in the role of Khlestakov). The compilers of the two-volume work did a titanic job not only of processing the messages to the Moscow Art Theater, but also restored, as far as possible, the fates of their authors, and these fates, as Olga Egoshina noted, illuminated these letters with a special light (comic, but more often dramatic and even tragic). “Both the letters and destinies in our book were united by one thing – love for the theater,” Egoshina emphasized.

Actually, this can be said about other books that won this year – they were written with love. And “Theatrocracy. Catherine II and Opera” (author-compiler Anna Korndorf), and Liana Guillaume’s study “I, Tamara Karsavina. Life and fate of a Russian ballet star.” And full of drama, “The Vorkuta Notebook of Boris Mordvinov. Notes for a son – a future director” (compilation and afterword by Nadezhda Mordvinova).

The award ceremony was beautiful, theatrical: classical music and opera arias were played. Experts and jury members (Marina Timasheva, Marina Tokareva, Dmitry Rodionov, Dmitry Trubochkin, Galina Tyunina) vividly presented the laureates. “In the USSR, theater literature was published in large editions. “I recently opened a Soviet collection of plays by Euripides – a circulation of 25 thousand copies,” said Dmitry Rodionov, founder of the prize and editor-in-chief of the Scene magazine, “now 1000 copies for the author is happiness.” But among the laureates of this year’s “Theatrical Novel” there is a record holder – Nikolai Tsiskaridze, whose book “My Theater. Through the Pages of a Diary” made it to the top publications in the country and reached almost 80 thousand. The author of the idea and literary text, Irina Deshkova, remembers how an artist in a choreography class sat on the first desk, “and his legs were long, he didn’t fit in, and when I told something he was the only one who kept asking: “Is that how it happened?” And it is true?”. And that Nikolai, who could not attend the ceremony because that evening he danced “Vain Precaution” at the Mikhailovsky Theater, is a passionate collector of everything related to ballet: he keeps notes, all the pieces of paper, autographs, letters.

I remember how in 1995 Kolya came up to me at the Bolshoi Theater and asked me to sign a book for him that I had just published. “What should I write to you?” I ask. “You wrote about everyone there, but not about me” – “You know, Kolya, the time will come, I’ll write about you too,” I promised and put the date on the book – 1995. And so time passed, and it was no longer me alone, but he and I wrote more than a thousand pages. Directors rarely write books – over the long history of the Russian theater there have been only one or two of them. Kirill Krok stood up for the directors’ corps – his book “Theater must be loved, and in spite of it” also received the “Theatrical Novel” award. In addition to the fact that this is an honest story about yourself, your journey from a stage erector to the director of the largest academic theater, it is also a smart guide for those who decided to connect their lives with the theater, to shoulder not the beautiful artistic side of it, but to provide it realization, sometimes with nerves and blood. Who is ready to go from a small administrator to the leader of domestic theater management, which Kirill Krok is today? Well, I am especially pleased that I acted as the editor of this book.