Between Dog & Wolf
Illustrations to the novel by Saha Sokolov
Director Andrey Moguchy
Between Dog & Wolf is the second play, after School for Fools, in the planned scenic trilogy staged by the Formal theatre and based on Sasha Sokolov’s works.
The unavailing efforts to translate Sokolov’s novel adequately from Russian to any other language encouraged the play’s authors to make a translation to the language of theater, the language of poetic images.
This play is not intended to relate the plotline of the novel. Rather these are certain sketches or scenic illustrations to the literary text. Don’t try to unravel immediately the meanings and fragments of the conflicts coded into scenes of the play; after all, a sentient, emotional perception of the play’s imagery set out by associative, musical, or poetic logic, is much more important.
The state of elusiveness, inexplicability, a sense of fragility of worldly existence, waiting for Life Everlasting, in a word, an ‘in-between’ state so inherent to the Russian human being is likely to be that principal ‘argument’ allowing us to have patience and to hope.
Between dog and wolf, between Hope and Darkness, between Misery and Affluence, between Past and Future, between Earth and Heaven, there lead their unperturbed existence the stars, as is believed by the inhabitants of the vicinities of the Itil River (the ancient name of the Volga) which is also called in the novel the Wolf’s River. The ugly and the beggary, thieves and trigger-happy murderers, artel workers and grinders, sailors and railroad men, our protagonist, one-legged Ilya Dzyndzyrela – in general, people of our clime copied from Pieter Breughel the Elder’s pictures and transplanted to the heart of Russia.
On the other bank of the river there are remnants of the cultural tradition of an intellectual Russia. The 19th century. Petersburg. A.S. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin… Yakov Ilyich Palamakhterov is a freelancer, writer, now a gamekeeper, hunter, chief huntsman, an ‘odd man’ living right here in the valley of the river.
And ‘between’ there is Maria, once called Marina, Orina by others – Love Everlasting calling for death.
