War and peace in one biography: Rimas Tuminas died

In Italy, at the age of 73, the great Lithuanian theater director, former artistic director of the Moscow Evgeni Vakhtangov Theater and the Vilnius Maly Theater Rimas Tuminas died.

The son of a Lithuanian father and a Russian mother, Rimas Vladimirovich Tuminas seemed destined to become a person-bridge between two such different, but closely watching each other, theatrical cultures. In his youth, a graduate first of the Vilnius Conservatory, and then of the Moscow GITIS, in adulthood he directed in parallel the Vakhtangov Theater in Moscow and the Maly Theater in Vilnius, which he founded, Rimas Tuminas never sought to embody the well-known formula “one of our own among strangers, a stranger among our own” – but in force the insurmountable circumstances of recent years, it was she who determined his final drama.

In the last years of his life, the definition of “genius” was firmly connected with his name in the minds of many theatergoers, both unknown and eminent. But this was not always the case.

His peer, constant companion and forced competitor turned out to be Eimuntas Nyakrosius, recognized as a genius almost after the first performances. Rimas Tuminas, who interestingly and brightly began his independent career both in Vilnius and Moscow, and in the 1990s headed the National Theater of Lithuania, was obviously in the shadow of Nyakrosius (for all the stupidity of any hierarchy), because he developed and embodied, albeit obviously, his , but for obvious reasons a related theatrical language: not everyday, metaphorical theater, alien to boring verisimilitude, fundamentally paradoxical, requiring non-banal, imaginative thinking from the viewer. Rimas Tuminas liked to repeat that on stage you need to talk to God – and there was no pretentiousness in this, it was a practical orientation to discovering the main, essential, and therefore hidden in the material taken into work, which too often goes against the usual, accessible interpretations .

When Tuminas left the National Theater, he was welcomed by Moscow, which has always had a secret (and also obvious) passion for the Lithuanian theater. The first “tests” were made at Sovremennik. Two of Tuminas’s performances, “Playing Schiller” based on the play “Mary Stuart” and “Woe from Wit”, were not only successful and unusual for Galina Volchek’s theater – they showed that Tuminas’ language “works” not only for the success of touring Lithuanian performances, Russian actors, who seem to have been brought up in a completely different coordinate system, are also able to speak this language clearly and meaningfully.

Now everyone is crying and bowing to the ground. But when Tuminas began working at the Vakhtangov Theater, some of those who later canonized him wrote complaints to the Ministry of Culture, accusing the foreigner of “Russophobia” and other fictitious sins. Nevertheless, the fact remains: having become in 2007, at the invitation of the visionary Mikhail Shvydkoy, the artistic director of the Vakhtangov Theater, Rimas Tuminas not only brought back to life the half-dead academy on Arbat and restored, without exaggeration, the worldwide fame of the Vakhtangov brand, but also staged (in the commonwealth with two other outstanding Lithuanian masters, artist Adomas Jacovskis and composer Faustas Latenas) probably their best performances. And all the best of the best – according to Russian classics: repeated after Vilnius, but sounded in a completely new way in Moscow “Masquerade”, “Uncle Vanya”, “Eugene Onegin” and, finally, his last Moscow performance “War and Peace”completed in November 2021 and which, as it soon unexpectedly turned out, became the final result for an entire era of Russian theater, and prophetic too.

And Tuminas’s Russian classics always looked unexpected – he seemed to come from the other side, saw magical dreams in them, experienced emotional transformations and was not afraid to turn them inside out.

Rimas Tuminas was rehearsing Leo Tolstoy’s novel, having already been sentenced to imminent death by doctors, having changed greatly in appearance and experiencing severe pain. Since the mid-2010s, he ironically and courageously fought against cancer – he made no secret of it and told everyone that War and Peace would be his last performance. But fate decreed otherwise and gave him two more years. In the spring of 2022, he was forced left Theater named after Vakhtangov, and it is better now not to discuss the circumstances of this in all respects ugly story – let’s leave that to the future. However, in his homeland, where Tuminas arrived, he was treated no better – he was accused of “Russophilia” and was actually kicked out of the Maly Theater.

The director found his last theatrical home in Israel, where he received treatment and worked fruitfully at the Gesher Theater, founded in the 1990s by immigrants from Russia. His last premiere, Cyrano de Bergerac, took place in December, and his penultimate performance, Tel Aviv’s Anna Karenina, was shown with great success on tour in Paris in January. Death overtook Rimas Tuminas in Italy, where he was preparing for rehearsals of a new play. He talked and thought a lot about death in recent years, explained that he thinks about it all his life, because it is the main event that everyone living has ahead of them. More than ten years ago he staged a review performance at the Vakhtangov Theater “Pier”, giving the most famous Vakhtangov actors benefit roles, for many of whom they were their last. “I argue with death, I push it away,” said the director. “But I have never fought with it. I just tried not to give in to her. And to fight means to lose. There is no point in fighting it.”

Esther Steinbock