| Author | Boris Vakhtin |
| Director | Pyotr Fomenko |
| Stage Design | Vladimir Maximov |
| Costume Design | Maria Danilova |
| Costume Design Assistant | Sergei Bartoshevich |
| Designer | Irina Bachurina |
| Teacher | Vera Kamyshnikova |
(12+)
12+
This is one of Pyotr Fomenko’s universally acknowledged masterpieces, based on the prose of his friend, writer Boris Vakhtin, who wrote about World War II. Aspiring to create the kindred atmosphere, the production’s creators stage the play as a series of studies and vignettes, absolutely symbolic and open to spectators’ interpretation. “As for the absolutely happy village, it’s not a novel or a poem, it’s just a song… And the war rushed into this song…”
In the course of production, the actors and their characters gradually move from the animation of things, mechanisms, animals, and the river, to the animation of humans, animation of life. They go from an honest play to an honest life. From the earthly, horizontal life to the soulful, vertical life. The life is soulful, not spiritual. Spirituality is the business of ideologists and ethicists. But here, we learn without any commandments and rules that people go away to war in order to come back. That our dead ones are never far gone, they are close to us, and love doesn’t die when they do. It’s just that if we have to go on living, we have to, we are obliged to love those who are alive. Love is the only justification of our life.
Olga Fuks, Evening Moscow