“Workshop” of Grigory Kozlov brought “Dovlatov” from St. Petersburg

The once persecuted writer moved to the USA 45 years ago

Tours of the St. Petersburg “Workshop” under the direction of Grigory Kozlov in Moscow are becoming a tradition, and the audience is waiting for them. The current ones are held in two sessions – in February and March and include performances from different years. “Dovlatova. PPS” had to be played twice – due to the actor’s injury, “Notes of a Young Doctor” based on Bulgakov’s early stories was canceled.

The performance was on time. On February 22, 1979, Dovlatov moved to the USA permanently. After 45 years, you are surprised that life has hardly changed.

“Dovlatov. PPS” was staged by stage speech teacher Alla Zimina at the course of the artistic director of the “Workshop” Grigory Kozlov at RGISI. His students, who graduated in 2018, mastered modern prose for educational purposes in stage writing classes, and later their sketches grew into a performance that expanded the Workshop’s repertoire. So only young artists take part in it, and the production has not lost its student spirit.

This is a story about Dovlatov and his heroes, the amazing life of a literary text penetrating into reality, the impossibility of freeing oneself from the past, no matter where fate takes it. As they declare in the “Workshop”, the play is about those who surround you and accept you, and about those who will never understand. Before its release, the actors took part in a photo shoot on the streets of St. Petersburg, and the black and white photographs look like rarities of a bygone era, they have Dovlatov’s intonation.

The performance turned out to be a little old-fashioned. Soviet realities five years ago seemed exotic to young actors. They did not live in a land of empty shelves and communist morality. Today the emphasis has shifted, and some things from the past are becoming clearer. Dovlatov himself is visibly and invisibly present in his own short stories, trying to publish his stories, running into censorship obstacles and spiritual insensitivity. As a result, he emigrates to the USA, remaining forever in his past life.

The actors instantly transform into different characters, or two or three of them play the same character. There are at least three Dovlatovs on stage. He speaks in the first person. Gleb Savchuk rises on stage like a bell tower. He is taller than the rest. In a white sweater and jacket he looks very much like Dovlatov. In one of the interviews at the time of the play’s release, the young actor was surprised at how people lived in the USSR, how one could kill for a pack of tea. Now the characters’ conversations about Kafka and Leo Tolstoy seem somehow unreal. You rarely hear arguments about literature anymore, and not because they are discussing an agenda. They just think about material things.

And on the stage there is asceticism: a black table resembling a cabinet, chairs, three paper ribbons hanging from the grate, like papyrus, with the handwritten titles of Dovlatov’s stories popping up. “The Road to a New Apartment”, “Once We Lived in the Mountains”, “Driver’s Gloves”, “Role”… Beautiful and reed-slim girls in black dresses replace each other, but this does not mean that their heroines will certainly in black. Don’t believe your eyes. It may follow from the text that the heroine is wearing a green dress. So let’s use our imagination.

Perhaps the best short story is “We Met and Talked,” where an unprepossessing young man named Golovker (Nikita Kapralov), an eternal object of ridicule, suddenly becomes the husband of the beautiful Lisa (Daria Solovyova), and then settles down in America, returns home as a foreigner, before whom all the doors are open. Everything is done so subtly, and one feels the impossibility of accepting the past life again, but one cannot refuse it either.

In the short story “Once We Lived in the Mountains,” the characters speak with an Armenian accent, because the main character of the play was half-Armenian, half-Jewish. They remember their former free life, where they could breathe easily, not like in the cramped cities. The spirit of freedom goes somewhere, and you have to live with it. In the same year of 2018, when the play was born, the premiere of the film “Dovlatov” by Alexei German Jr. took place at the Berlin Film Festival, who had to answer for modern Russia. The main role was played by Milan Maric, who was found in Serbia. Dovlatov was not found in Russia.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29221 dated February 21, 2024

Newspaper headline:
Land of empty shelves