AN IMAGE OF THE PAST

The theatre season traditionally opens with premieres, and the 142nd season at the National Drama Theatre was marked by the premiere of "The General's Last Order", a tragic-comic mystery based on the play by Vaqif Samadoglu. The director is People's Artiste Ramiz Hasanoglu, artistic director Nazim Boyukisiyev and composer Cavansir Quliyev.

Redundant ideals

History is as old as the world itself - man and his world; man and society; man and his choices; how he should live, whom he should serve, whom he should worship and what he should believe. As the Russian fairy tale says: go to the right and you'll find happiness; go to the left and you'll get your head blown off; but go straight ahead and you will find wealth. 

The titular hero, the General, without beating about the bush, chose the direct and honest path. At least, that's what he believed. And so he religiously served the ideals of his motherland, loyally and truthfully, in such a way as he could understand a task which was shaped by the demands of the time and the ideological orientation of the state and sounded roughly like this: everything for the motherland and for the people. Fuzuli Huseynov plays his hero in just such a way: cool and restrained, hard and at times judgemental. From his whole be-aring, his habit of keeping his finger on the pulse and his way of handling people, it is clear that he is a man of stature, whose daily routine has been mapped out to the last detail and everything in this life is subject to his - the General's - concept. 

So, what is this concept? Could it be that he is seeking in today's life echoes of what he once fought for? But there was a whole life of 53 years between the past and the present! And the longer General Huseynov peers through his field-       glasses, trying to bring today's life a little nearer even by one millimetre, the further it retreats from him and the less he understands it. 

His descendants - grand-daughter (Dilara Aliyeva) and grandson (merited artiste Sabir Mammadov) - are worthless and misfits. His grandson is drinking himself to death, dreaming about taking over his grandfather's house, and his grand-daughter raves on about fancy clothes being the greatest thing in this world. That's all they ever think about. The imprint of the moral decay of this generation proved stronger than the General's concepts. When did his life start to malfunction and when was the programme for his family's destruction switched on? Alternating pictures of the past and present intertwine into a tight knot of man's moral problem which once went against his own conscience. When could that have been? When he joined SMERSH? Probably. (This organization was created at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War to spy on and monitor dissidence among servicemen and the civilian population. It meant death to fascists. Threats of reprisals often led to cooperation with the secret service and to unfounded charges against servicemen and civilians. - Author).

They say that man always has the right of choice. This has not always been the case. Sometimes he doesn't. The motherland decreed, and the General, who was not yet a general, replied: "Yes, sir!" So Fuzuli Huseynov's hero was much more at home there, with his memories and his endless dialogues with the past, which had its own image - the executioner, the whistle-blower, the deserter. They enter his mind not by choice, but at his own - the General's - wish. They are his past and present. And it is only with them that he can be himself. How did he get to be a general? That's another question. They didn't dish out ranks just like that at SMERSH. What glorious deed did a person receiving this rank have to do? He simply fitted the ideal image of a SMERSH operative and complied with the system. He was suitable and dedicated. He learned to be the cog on which the work of the huge mechanism depended. Much that was evil burdened his weary conscience. And who knows, if the system which the General had served so devotedly had not crumbled, perhaps his conscience might not have been aroused? And would the images of those whose souls he once destroyed not have begun to appear before him at night? The pacifist soldier, the Executioner, the Whistleblower… They come to him when the world falls into a deep sleep, to create his mystery play. 

He created this fellowship of the dead in order to return again and again to the secrecy of the dialogue-confessions, to use them again and again to draw on the ritual of the resurrection of the past. And only they had the right to this - selected by his conscience and let into the secret of recollections, like in a special, almost sacred ritual. He and they! A small part of his life, hovering between the past and the future. The General is fine when he is just with them. It is only in this fellowship that he feels alive and…right. Because there is no place for him in the real life, where everything is not as it should be. But he carries on living, resurrecting memories, tormenting his heart and mind with pictures of the past. And when the Executioner (merited artiste Aysad Mammadov), who in the prologue pronounced "It is better to die than live in fear", wants to destroy the sanctity of the secrecy of nocturnal vigils and take his own life, hanging where a soldier sentenced to death by SMERSH once hung, we will understand that the General is deliberately forcing himself into a corner. Then the Deserter-pacifist (merited artiste Parviz Mammadrzayev), whose soul cannot bear these nocturnal mysteries of the General, will ask him about the liberation of the nocturnal mysteries. It wants to be at peace with the world in that grave near Kiev where the soldier-pacifist's life was taken because he refused to shoot people. The soldier-deserter did not wish to blindly comply with an order: he dared to have his own opinion and for that he was executed. But that was his choice. General Fuzuli Huseynov has long wished to join those who were left to lie in the graves of Kiev, Gomel and Kustanay. But he can't. 

Games with conscience

So he lives in fear of retribution and the coming day. And he waits. He waits for someone to come and state their rights to justice. And she does come. It is a woman. His nemesis. The daughter of the man from Kazakhstan who he executed. She is coming to lose this battle with the General. And then it becomes deadly boring for him. He is an experienced player. And those who came after him were not cleverer and stronger than he. So…A semblance of men and women who are not even trying to play fair. What can he do in this empty and alien world? Nothing. And he summons the one thing he has been calling for all his life. The only sweet thing for him - joy, long-awaited happiness, his bride and betrothed. His bride-to-be called Death. He has chosen his own sentence. And he himself has given the order.

It is the last order of his life - to die! "It will be best for everyone," he says. "For you and for me." And what, indeed, could be better? The General, just like the Generalissimo Iosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] will first die, having shot himself in the temple, and will then open his eyes and, smiling at us from the screen, will wink and wave his hand. The favourite gesture for the people, the one we all know. And craftily screwing up his eyes, he cries to the hall: "I am here, with you." And then the Maiden Tower appears on the screen with a pomegranate tree growing on it. This is a symbol of a happy life, long since promised to the General by his aunt…  

Those are the confession and the reflections of the playwright Vaqif Samadoglu, the director Ramiz Hasanoglu and the actor Fuzuli Huseynov. And each of them has found his own story in this universal problem.

Ramiz Hasanoglu's play and the reflections of the playwright Vaqif Samadoglu are not an attempt to land the audience with a trivial comedy. They are a desire for an open, serious and very frank dialogue - about identity, about choice, about treachery and about a man and his time, about a man as an individual and a man as a puppet. And about his responsibility to time and to himself.