Onegin

The performance is produced by Alexander Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1823-1831). This is one of the most significant works of Russian literature and an integral part of Russian cultural code. The novel tells the story of life, dumpiness and love of a young aristocrat Eugene Onegin, who leaves noisy Petersburg and comes to a village because of the decease of his uncle. There he meets a poet Vladimir Lenskiy (whom then he kills in a duel), and a young girl Tatyana Larina falls in love with him.

School literature presents the plot of Pushkin's novel in verse as "the encyclopedia of Russian life" – but the play shows that this story is not so single-valued. Onegin by Timofey Kulyabin becomes not a literal transfer of the novel to the stage, but plays with the novel and with the fact of its existence, where it "resets" the familiar accents and meanings. The director decides to put the novel's characters into a kind of vacuum space of a technical pavilion without any attributes of a specific period. With such approach, the literary hero gets rid of the historical pressure and is opened in the context of contemporaneity as a hero-nothing, almost equivalent to the director himself.