Maly Teatr,
Saint Petersburg

LIFE AND FATE

It is 1943 and Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia have entered a struggle for life or death. A prominent scientist, an academic physicist who has finally come close to discovering the secret of creating an atomic bomb, returns to Moscow from evacuation. He is Jewish, and in this respect he has been decidedly unlucky. Though the holocaust is supposed to be happening on the other side of the front, nationalism and anti-Semitism have slowly become an unspoken policy of Stalin’s system. Jewish mentality, Jewish art, Jewish physique—these are the terms emerging in Soviet academic, cultural and political spheres. The physicist is ostracized, expelled from his Institute and is facing a terrible dilemma: to stay faithful to the truth, the science, to himself and perish; or to repent, and confess non-existing sins and non-existing mistakes. He fully understands the consequences of the first choice. Too many of his relatives are now in Stalin’s concentration camps. In these terrible times a man is too easily turned into concentration camp dirt. A historical coincidence will save the academic—the Soviet State needs the atomic bomb, and Stalin is aware of it. Stalin’s personal phone call to this outcast scientist becomes the miracle that will bring back life, hope, success and recognition to him and his family. The scientist is elated—once more he believes in the system and in the logic of the Soviet State being right. He is ready to forget all his relatives, friends and colleagues who are now gone.

Life goes on. And very soon the physicist, Strum, will again face a dilemma. It so happens that to be true to oneself when acclaimed, recognized, and miraculously saved, is much harder than when one is a hated outcast. He is not alone. He is surrounded with a world of his near and dear—people he loves, on whom he cheats, and who love each other. At the front, in evacuation, in the capital of the country waging war, or in the terrible torture rooms of Lubianka, life does not stop. In the ghettos, in a German concentration camp, and in one of the endless camps of Stalin’s Gulag, people continue to live, make love, and suffer. Everywhere they are trying to understand how this could have happened, how this horror could have happened to them.

God grants life but man shapes his own fate. Grossman’s LIFE AND FATE is in fact a simple family story, and it presents us with a vast panorama of the events and problems of the 20th and 21st centuries. In our everyday lives we still encounter modern guises of fascism, communism, nationalism, totalitarianism, extremism, cruelty, and lack of freedom. In spite of everything, people still continue to live, love, and hope.

Lev Dodin, one of the modern Russian directors best known in his country and abroad, was born in Siberia in 1944. After WWII, his family moved to Saint Petersburg, where Dodin has lived since. His interest in theatre developed very early. After some work as an amateur, he was admitted to the Saint Petersburg Theater Institute where he studied under Boris Zon, who had been a pupil of Stanislavski’s. Having graduated, he became a guest director with many prestigious companies such as the Moscow Art Theatre and the Bolshoi of Saint Petersburg. His first success was directing One Always Arranges Things With Oneself by Alexander Ostrovski, an independent production. Subsequently he would direct works by Valentin Rasputin, Karel Čapek, Tennessee Williams and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. His staging of Fyodor Abramov’s The House affirmed his fame throughout Russia. In 1983 Dodin took over as the artistic director of the Maly Teatr.

The “truth” in Soviet art was well defined within limits that were not to be crossed, and very few ventured beyond these limits. Lev Dodin was among them. Seeking to perceive the “truth” in man and in the world that surrounds him through his art he chose a dependable and powerful ally: great literature – above all great Russian classics.

The Maly Teatr was founded in Leningrad in 1944, at the end of the Second World War. It’s theatre and a permanent company was located at 18 Rubinstein Street. The attention given the company was the result of the importance of Yefim Padve, its first director, who surrounded himself with a company of young actors and directors, among them Lev Dodin, who became the company’s director in 1983. To the Maly Teatr Dodin brought his best students from the Theatre Institute of Leningrad, with whom in 1976 he started a collective project focusing on works by several modern authors. Through the years the ties between the Maly Teatr and the Theatre Institute became tighter and more privileged: many pieces first developed at school went on to form part of the permanent repertoire of the Maly, and are regularly performed today. However, the most important gift of this bond was that, in this way, a new group of artists was formed, a group that developed a new language based on their common experience. The Maly Teatr has performed all over the world; in Japan, the United States, all over Europe, staging many of their groundbreaking works.