Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama. John Freedman
play that has no demonstrable connection to new drama. This is important because, for all its influence and achievements, the movement that we call new drama was selective. Many playwrights of value remained outside its province, and Osipov is one of those. Scapegoats draws its inspiration from more traditional sources, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment and the classic detective tale, while seeking to subvert both – the author defines its genre as an “eccentric prank.” However, there is no mistaking the serious, even harsh (though funny) picture it paints of contemporary Russian society. A murder is committed inexplicably among a group of friends celebrating a reunion, and when the police begin to investigate, things grow murky indeed. This, in fact, is the kind of story that many a new drama writer would have loved to have written in order to explore the specific realities of some crime followed by punishment. Instead, in Osipov’s hands, the tale remains at all times a literary construct, filled with literary references and philosophical conceit. There is, in other words, more Franz Kafka in The Scapegoats than street cred.
The history of new Russian drama and the drama of its time has yet to be written. It is too early to draw firm conclusions about it for the phenomenon itself continues to unfold. New writers, new plays and new trends are emerging as these words are written. One thing is certain, however: The first decade or so of the new century unleashed a boom in dramatic writing that had not been experienced in Russia since the 1920s. In these few short years an unprecedented number of writers conspired to change the face of Russian dramatic literature. This anthology provides a few snapshots of that change.
John Freedman
Moscow, February 2014
Yury Klavdiev
In Brief:
•Born November 30, 1974, in Togliatti.
•Currently lives in St. Petersburg.
•Considers his first major success to be his reading of Samuil Marshak’s poem “Tale of the Unknown Hero” as a five year-old in kindergarten.
•Began writing plays in 2002.
•First play staged was I am the Machine Gunner in Togliatti in 2005.
•First significant theatrical success in 2006 when his plays Let’s Go, A Car is Waiting and The Bullet Collector were staged in Moscow.
•Martial Arts first produced, in English, in 2010 at Towson University in this translation, directed by Yury Urnov.
•Plays have been translated into English, Polish, French, German, Slovak and Czech.
•Wrote over 20 plays through 2013.
•Married to Anastasia Moskalenko (aka Brauer), with whom he wrote the children’s play Little Piggy and Little Carp: A M-m-m-m-onstrous Vegetarian Drama (2008) and the screenplay for the Russian MTV sports serial Female Champions (2012).
•Founder and lead singer of noise rock group Klad Yada (Poison Treasure).
•Has authored several short-story cycles about historical figures (Che Guevara, Jim Morrison, Jesus Christ and Robin Hood) in a genre that he has dubbed variously as “anti-Soviet spy action” and “Communist horror stories.”
•Author of several significant screenplays and teleplays, including Flint (2007), Everyone Will Die but Me (2008, with Alexander Rodionov), various segments of the controversial School television series (2010), and Blueberry Fields Forever (2014).
Yury Klavdiev is one of the most distinctive and powerful writers to emerge in Russia in the first decade of the 21st century. His works paradoxically combine violence and tenderness in a way that shows a deep influence of both modern international pop culture and traditional Russian cultural values. There is no mistaking his debt to Quentin Tarantino, Japanese anime films, Hong Kong martial arts films and old Hollywood westerns. And yet there is also a line in his work that leads back to the tortured and torturing characters developed famously by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Specifically, Dostoevsky’s fascination with the innocence of youth – often corrupted brutally – is one that Klavdiev has plumbed repeatedly in his plays.
Young people in Klavdiev’s dramas are pitted against the aggressive, intolerant, corrupt, and potentially lethal behavior of adults. This is true to varying degrees of two teenage women struggling to find their places in a male-dominated world in Let’s Go, A Car is Waiting; of the young man caught up in gang violence in I am the Machine Gunner; of the teenage boy estranged from an insensitive father in The Bullet Collector; of the young people battling with AIDS in The Polar Truth; of the children starving during the Siege of Leningrad in The Ruins; and of the two children warding off thieving police and blood-thirsty drug dealers in Martial Arts. What is perhaps most important about this is that Klavdiev tends to provide his young characters with intelligence, healthy instincts and occasionally good fortune, that often allow them to outwit or, at least, stand their ground with, their older adversaries.
Klavdiev, however, is anything but an author merely exploring the problems of pre-teens and teenagers. Young characters may offer him clear-cut opportunities to explore the contrast between innocence and experience, good and evil, but what motivates him as a writer is the nature of the battles that occur between these concepts and the conclusions that can be drawn from them.
The Polar Truth, for instance, turns the tragedy of people being infected with the HIV virus on its head. Yes, neighbors and family around these young people reject them and victimize them. The youths themselves, however, take a completely different approach. Dropping out of society at large, they create their own insular world. It is, for them, an opportunity to succeed where society has failed – they struggle to overcome their personal jealousies and shortcomings to establish a community that truly is built on justice, trust and goodwill. Being a play by Klavdiev, this is of course no simple-minded tale with a happy ending. There are plenty of attacks on the tale’s mini-utopia, and the participants themselves know only too well that they are doomed. But the notion that in the ten years’ life left them they have the opportunity to accept the challenge of creating something better and more meaningful than the world that preceded them is a significant moral victory.
For different reasons and under different circumstances the ending of Martial Arts is similarly a victory on a limited scale. The sympathetic, but inept parents are dead. Grandma is pretty much out of the picture; she is too old to have any say in the children’s future. And, thanks to the kids’ quick thinking and a bit of mystical intervention from an enigmatic folk figure, all the horrible intruders with their drugs and guns meet their deserved bloody ends. The children, eleven years old, are victors left with the spoils, so to speak. But what awaits them? Will they repeat the story of those they outlived? The boy claims they will not. But what reason does Klavdiev give us to believe that this is a pledge the boy and his girlfriend can honor for the rest of their lives?
Klavdiev repeatedly places us in the intersection between good and evil, failure and success, innocence and corruption. (It seems important to me that he never lowers himself to addressing questions of right and wrong – he always takes a higher road than that, or makes a deeper incision into the truth.) In Martial Arts he freezes a moment of moral victory long enough for us to take sweet pleasure in it. What happens beyond that is no longer his business as a writer.
Martial Arts
By
Yury ‘Strike’ Klavdiev
Translated by
Dave White with Yury Urnov
We are young, we must be happy and not part ways.
Why should we care about the wars our parents undertook?
– Erich Maria Remarque, Time to Live and Time to Die
I dedicate this play to Stanley Tookie Williams, founder of the Crips, convicted and reclaimed. On the decree of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of the State of California, Stan was executed in 2005. He wrote books for kids.
– Yury ‘Strike’ Klavdiev
CHARACTERS: