LIFE AND FATE

Vasili Grossman’s novel with its numerous pages, figures and levels “Life and Fate” – the bible of the Soviet dissident literature – was, as it were, specially written to be directed by Lev Dodin. In fact, the MDT’s art director needs primary literary sources with a wide popular background, epic breath and social cataclysms like nobody else in our theatre. Even the method of work on the adaptation echoes that of the stage versions of Feodor Abramov’s novels “Brothers and Sisters” and “The House”, also heavily populated and epic. Dodin started adapting Grossman with his students and worked on it for four years. He made expeditions to former camps, ours and theirs. He studied the texture of life back then.
Technically speaking, the production “Life and Fate” is created in the same way as all the MDT’s best shows, from “Brothers and Sisters” to “Moscow Chorus”: abrupt changes between close-ups and general scenes; fine psychological character portrayals together with deliberate placativity; life condensed to a symbol; a breathtaking counterpoint. The Moscow bed scenes unfold here in the immediate proximity of camp life and military actions. The diagonally stretched volleyball net compares to the prison fence, the striped pyjamas of the main hero – the ingenious physicist Victor Shtrum – unambiguously rhyme with the striped uniforms of the prisoners: everybody in this country serves time, only some people don’t know it yet.