FROM ENGLAND, WITH LOVE...
My first acquaintance with St Petersburg was through literature: seen from a distance, the city seemed to be the setting for extraordinary dramas in which the characters were reduced to incomprehension and despair by encounters either with their own nose or with themselves in the form of a double. My first real sight of St Petersburg, or rather, with Leningrad, as the city was then called, took place a few years later during the latter phase of perestroika, but its spirit already seemed familiar to me.
In my view (the view of someone looking in from the outside) this collection, in its very essence, captures a quality which is ty l of St Petersburg. It does not matter that some of the plays in this volume are not set in St Petersburg or even in Russia. Nor does it matter that the plays cover a wide thematic range: here you will find contemporary Russia and the Soviet past, political questions and the writer's predicament, new technology and the complexities of personal relationships. Even though the plays in this collection cover such varied ground, they are all connected by a common thread which links them to the particular tradition of St Petersburg literature established by Gogol. At the end of his story "Nevskii Prospekt" the author advises his reader to beware the city's main thoroughfare, where: "all is deception, all is a dream, nothing is what it appears to be". Night is even more terrifying, a time "when the demon himself illuminates the lamps for the sole purpose of revealing everything in a false light".
The authors of "New Petersburg Drama", in one way or another, break down the familiar and comfortable idea that there is only one unambiguous version of reality.
The main character in Sergei Nosov's play takes his visitor to be someone other than who he actually is. The author then leaves us to face the question of whether his hero's fanaticism has gone over into fantasy.
Alla Sokolova presents the night-time world of a poet, where the dividing line between ordinary existence and an alternative mysterious reality has broken down.
In Leonid Kudriashov's farce, as one would expect, deception is at the forefront. The characters' attempts to get hold of a large sum of money don't always turn out as they expect, and not all of them prove capable of living up to their claims to be a hero.
An unending fairy-tale about the sinister connections between power and slavery acts as a kind of commentary to the political and personal dramas in Aleksandr Obraztsov's play.
Igor Shprits transplants Joseph Stalin beyond the bounds of world history into purgatory. There he is scrutinised from the perspective of eternity.
Liudmilar Petrushevskaia's play repeatedly puts into question the reality of the events it portrays, in turn creating and destroying the world of the playwright heroine.
Andrei Zinchuk's characters move between the real world and the world of virtual reality. Crossing the borders between the two realities is fraught with serious consequences, yet it can also lead to new insights.
None of the authors offer an easy way out of the web of deception and self-deception in which their characters are entwined, not to mention, on occasion, their readers. But that is not what really mattersÑ- by arousing their readers' doubts and pushing them towards further reflection, the authors declare their affiliation to the finest traditions of Petersburg literature.
Joseph Brodsky wrote in an essay that St Petersburg, which seemed to many of its first writers rather like an un-Russian city, gave them the opportunity to see their surrounding world with an alienated and critical gaze. I feel that the authors of this collection are continuing to view their city with the same gazeÑ- one directed from within and, simultaneously, from the outside.
Katharine Hodgson
Cambridge University Ph.D in Russian Literature
Specialist in Russian literary history