林荫幽径

On the stage: seven men with the faces of silent film actors: cigars, coats and tails, nostalgic decadence, with the sounds of a waltz in the background… not to mention vivacious young ladies, standing motionless like crippled puppets in cardboard boxes. The heroes are like photographic prints from the beginning of the 20th century – a sort of composite image of a Bunin character, gripped by an insane and pernicious passion for some woman, who inevitably becomes this feeling’s victim.

Director Dmitry Krymov turns to Bunin's collection of stories, “Dark Alleys,” or, more exactly, to the succession of memories they contain – tragic, dark, disgraceful, even cruel, but all the same – sickly-sweet. The soulful sadness of bygone love: the whole collection is infused with this feeling, written by Bunin at a ripe old age, far from his motherland. And as per the laws of poetry, the show is of course deeply penetrated by this feeling, but in counterpoint Dmitry Krymov proposes a mature new look at the canonical work, free of false sentimentality.