PAPER LIFE

Diary of a Madman, or Sonata for Cello and Piano. This is the title of a new play based on Gogol's Diary of a Madman and staged at the State Youth Theatre by Jannat Salimova, where Honoured Artist of Azerbaijan Shovgi Huseynov plays the main character.

To the delight of the audience, the play, created many years ago, was announced as a premiere. Why? Because it was created and played for a festival. Shovgi has played his character in Azerbaijani at international theatrical festivals in Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and has been highly praised by the jury and the audiences. Even a rigid language barrier is not an obstacle for understanding and perception of talented artistic performance.

Local audience is not as lucky as the foreign one, because some theatres have a certain prejudice towards plays of small forms. It is believed that they cannot attract wide audiences, hence such creative experiments are knowingly unprofitable. Alas! This is the reality of our days! Perceived to be a kind of great art, theatres are gradually losing positions turning to be subjects of commercial interest. Yet the State Youth Theatre has unmistakably decided to take the story of the little man back to the small stage.

Duality of the world

Combining the genius of Nikolai Gogol and Alfred Schnittke under a single title, the production director of the play Jannat Salimova presents the scenic story of Gogol’s character Aksenty Poprishchin through a prism of complicated vicissitudes of surrounding events. Salimova’s reincarnation of Poprishchin is confronting the duality of the world, sometimes being as ambiguous as Faust. In this context, the author of the play perfectly matches the author of music. But a real joy for the audience was actor’s performance, who was an ideal “tool” for combining the perceptions of two geniuses and a conductor of director’s conceptual view.

Aksenty Poprishchin - Shovgi Huseynov

According to Gogol's plot, Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin is a low-ranking civil servant of 42 years, who serves at one of the state departments of St. Petersburg and maintains a diary, where he keeps his notes about himself and his life for almost four months. He loves the daughter of his manager and dreams of marrying her. The disparity of social statuses does not bother him at all. He believes that he is smart and handsome. However, from the conversation of two dogs, and the correspondence that he has stolen from them, Poprishchin learns that the beautiful daughter of his manager loves another person. This drives poor Poprishchin crazy. He claims that he is the Spanish King Ferdinand the Eighth. He is taken to an asylum, where cold water is poured on his head and he is beaten with sticks. He conceives this as an old Spanish tradition: cruel, but necessary. And in the most unbearable moments, Poprishchin calls his mother.

Now comes the stage version of the director and actor. How do we imagine Gogol’s “little man”? Timid, bustling, funny? How do we imagine him without the writings of literary critics of the nineteenth century for whom he was a man of “low social status and background, not endowed with outstanding abilities, not distinguished by his strength of character, but at the same time kind and harmless.”

For Jannat Salimova and Shovgi Huseynov, Aksenty Poprishchin does not look weak-spirited at all. He is neither fussy nor pathetic; he makes an impression of an absolutely adequate person.

October 3. The day of the first diary entry. Nothing indicates discord in the mind of our character and with the world around him. Shovgi lives this day of his character as if nothing unusual and illogic happened. If we do not consider the overheard conversation of two dogs, Meji and Fidelka, which he met on his way to one of the shops in St. Petersburg. Their mistress took them there, of course. Aksenty begins his investigation from this moment on! The actor conducts his “inquiry”: why does the beautiful Sofia prefer him, Aksenty, such an intelligent, subtle, excellent person, to another? To some wretched handsome camera-cadet? Why?

The inquiry of Shovgi’s Aksenty has no sign of humiliation and sluggishness of a small man who imagines himself as big and significant, according to Gogol. The actor lives the life of a character who is really a professional in his field! This “small” person is not going through pains, but he is simply confident in his abilities and skills. The actor does not play an “illness” that arose in his hero due to excessive self-esteem or unreasonable ambitions. He introduces the thought, feelings, and emotions of his hero into circumstances that are stronger than his moral and physical capabilities. Poprishchin, who became a household character for previous generations of theatrical researchers, personifies small pretentious losers, grows to the level of an unclaimed professional. Nobody needs his personal qualities, knowledge, practical experience, and talent to be just a man! These qualities suddenly become superfluous, unnecessary for both his superiors and the beautiful Sophie. He is neither a right professional nor a right person! Has life passed by? And then his brain cannot stand it. To prevent “explosion of mind”, he escapes from reality into a fictional world of kings, where the “right” attitude towards a person is dictated by the very fact of birth. From now on, Poprishchin of Huseynov is protected from injustice by the crown. Alas! A cruel reality is stronger than a weak defense of a person: it overtakes him by beating with sticks and pouring cold water on a thread... It turned out that even in insanity one cannot escape from reality even for a while!

Completely exhausted, Shovgi’s Aksenty, tired of trying to save himself and his truth, is crying and calling his mother under a sheet. He finally calms down.

He lies among a large number of torn papers, like on an island. And there, behind his lying body, we can see the pages of his diary forming a cross. A cross representing his life, his personal Golgotha embodied in paper; his clerical past and his epistolary present. And even the beloved Sophie and her dog is made of white paper! Sophie is made of sterile white paper, devoid of both volume and soul. Pure, like a dream of beauty. But cold and soulless. Paper Sophie! And the paper life! Not a real life! Just an illusion. An illusion of what could have been, but never come true. Life has passed by...

Epilogue

The audience highly appreciated and accepted The modern interpretation of imperishable Russian classics. Under the long-standing applause of the audience, the actor bowed several times, but it was absolutely obvious that the audience wished to continue the dialogue. The topic was relevant.

That is why I would like to conclude my thoughts with the following... The topic of a little man so popular in the Russian literature of the first half of the nineteenth century is still relevant. It has not disappeared. Rather, it has changed, taken to global scale in the works of Kafka, Camus, and Beckett.