"I AM THE THIRTY-SEVENTH"

The Young Spectator Theatre presented a play that became popular among the residents of Baku right after the first performance. It is a very serious work supposed to establish a dialogue with an audience of 17+ years of age and is the first big production work by Mehriban Alakbarzade, the theatre's chief director.

It is suffice to look into the programme to feel the atmosphere of the play. The title of the programme reads: USSR, NKVD of the Azerbaijan SSR. Case No. 1937. Mehriban Alakbarzade, Codename: V.X.A. (Wive of the People's Enemy). Documentary drama.

After reading this, you realise that the play's author and stage director in no way separates herself from the characters. Those whose fates are fused together under the title Case No.1937. Their pain, their blood, their tragedy today, 85 years later, are beating in her heart, leaving her no room for peace and tranquility. Otherwise she would not have bothered spending so much time for studying the archived documents of the prisoners of the Bayil prison. Why bother converting the documentary evidence of her fellow countrymen's repressive persecution into a stage drama? Perhaps this kind of activism is part of the character of open-minded people with genuine love for homeland.

Short historical tour

The persecution of dissidents in the USSR began in the second half of the 1930s. State officials classified them as the people's enemies. Above all, this class of people included the members of the Soviet elite. Those who had emerged during the first two decades of Soviet rule. Joseph Stalin viewed most of them as the source of plots against the government and against himself. Gulag-type camps included special camps for women—wives, sisters, daughters of such people's enemies, like the ones in Mordovia (the famous Potma camp), Tomsk and Akmolinsk (Kazakhstan). The last one was established in December 3, 1937 in accordance with the NKVD order No.00758. It was dubbed as ALZHIR (sounded same as Algeria in Russian), but this name never appeared in official documents, only the prisoners called the camp that way.

The campers were young, beautiful women from all the republics of the USSR, including from Azerbaijan. Many of them had children, even infants. They were forced to disown their husbands, brothers and parents in terrible, inhumane conditions. It was here that multinational fates fused into a single one. The fate of a woman faced with a choice: to betray and survive? Or to remain faithful to her husband, herself, her convictions and principles - to pass through hell and possibly die? It is this moral and psychological problem that Mehriban Alakbarzade, stage director and author of The Code: The Wives of People's Enemies, explores together with the cast. She and her 36 real-life characters need four hours of scenic performance to confirm that in a situation where "all the fates are merged into one", there is always a place for a heroic feat. A spiritual one. Moral. And everyone has the right to choose...

"Whether known or unknown, they all deserve to be remembered!"

This is exactly what Mehriban Alakbarzade, the author of the idea that she has been nurturing since 2010, said. The author of the play about those who were deprived of their names, their families, their right to choose. About those who were sent after their husbands to the Bayil prison and then to the Akmola special camp as the wives of people's enemies. And the name of each character tagged with a numeric code reflects the life of a particular human, a woman's fate. For example, Shukriyya Akhundzade, the wife of poet Ahmed Javad, code number 30024; Umgulsum Sadikhzade, the wife of writer Seyid Huseyn Sadikhzade and a cousin of Mammad Emin Rasulzade (the first chairman of the National Council of Azerbaijan), 30037; Dilber Akhundzade, the wife of poet Mikayil Mushvig, 10506; Azerbaijan's first pianist Khadija Gayibova accused of her relations with the Musavatists and shot in Baku in October 1938, 30212; party worker Yelizaveta Gorbunova, 82185, and so forth. What happens to these women of different nationalities, ages, and professions?

The director places them in a single space, basically in a prison cell, thereby creating provocative conditions so that each of them could demonstrate her personality and character! Otherwise it would be very difficult and even impossible to tell our descendants about those pages of our common history that left an indelible mark in the people's memory due to time and space restrictions. Otherwise we will all become mankurts. Mankurts who remember neither their ancestral roots nor their homeland. This is achieved by placing all the women in the confined ward space. And it helps the viewer to see and understand the inner world of each individual character. After all, a ward for 37 prisoners with different beliefs and habits is an epicentre of constant minor conflicts! Through these conflicts caused as a result of personal interaction between the characters of different ages and classes, confined in a single cell, the director gives the cast an opportunity to create their characters as convincing and authentic as possible. This intensifies the main conflict, which revolves around the characters' confrontation with the public prosecution system. As if the impending danger makes everyone equal: both former noblewomen Shukriya Akhundzade and Sitara Garayeva and die-hard communists like Ayna Sultanova and Yelizaveta Gorbunova. In the moments of quite frequent emotional and psychological tension, when one of them is dragged away by guards for interrogation, the women forget their ideological and political differences. They get united by their shared understanding of suffering and danger. As each of them faces psychological and physical pressure, they show their individuality, hence gaining the respect, compassion and understanding from the audience...

Conceptual dialogue

Most of the productions dominating our theatres over the last decade have been focused on entertaining the audiences. This is not bad if every aspect of the production is done at high conceptual level, and the audience can appreciate its quality and the way it is presented to them. And why. With no synergy between the theatre (including the director) and the audience, with no conceptual real-time dialogue between the two, the question arises: why do we need a theatre that has nothing to say to its audience? The Young Spectator Theatre has something to say. And the chief director takes the position of a person understanding—in addition to her professional duties—her responsibility before the younger audience. Mehriban-khanim does not think that serious and deep themes usually inherent to dramas or tragedies are something that may scare away the young audience. She believes that it is possible to build a dialogue between the Theatre and the Audience only on the mutual trust, knowing that a precisely and correctly presented idea will always be understood. And she was not mistaken. Because the The Code..., which lasts four hours without taking into account the intermission time, was attended by young spectators aged 17+. Please note that these are the members of the very generation Next thought to have the so-called clipboard consciousness. After the performance, four young lads were in no hurry to leave the hall, as if extending their sense of inclusion in the performance. They were silent and watched the curtain close, as if hoping for a sequel. Suddenly one of them, breaking the silence, quoted lines from Ahmad Jawad's poetic message that his wife Shukriya recalled in prison. Another said it was a "powerful moment" in the play. Not hiding my interest in the conversation, I turned towards them. Noticing this, one of them said: "We need to know how it happened so that no one can ever steal our future again. Learning about the past is saving our future." Looking at the little gentleman, I clapped my hands expressively. Imitating a bow in return, the guy smiled and said: "It's not my words, khanim. It was the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. But I absolutely agree with him." I wanted to support the thought of the Soviet poet and this guy too (praise to his parents!). I thought about Yevtushenko's definition of what we call a director's super-mission decades ago. I can't find a better literary equivalent for defining the director's goal.

On behalf of myself and those viewers who were heartsick about this play-message, this play-pain, this play-memory, I wish more interesting and successful theatrical works to the director, screenwriter, playwright and stage director Mehriban Alakbarzade. Thanks also for the genetic memory of many generations of women who were able to withstand and survive all the tragic and turbulent historical events of the past. Women, who came to her dreams, knocking at her heart with the cry of the unjustly murdered, the cry of the tortured, the raped, humiliated and insulted hundreds of times. Today, thanks to a woman director, they have found their voice on the theatre stage. There should have been 48 of them. Unfortunately, the author of the play had to reduce the number of voices crying out for justice to 36. She didn't even suppose that 37th will be her own voice: the voice of the author of the idea, of the play, of the performance. Now she and her characters are invisibly present both on stage and in the hall. Because she was able to successfully combine the staged conceptual dialogue and the awakened emotional memory of generations!

Infinity of Memory

It is in all of us: the historical, genetic, emotional memory of generations. Passed down from mother to daughter, from father to son, it manifests itself in mystical dreams and the pain of hearts that remember everything that was and happened not to them!

I found the confirmation of this idea not only in Mehriban Alakbarzade's narrative from the stage, but also in the production of the artist Nigar Aliyeva. The work influenced by the play. This work is in line with Mozart's Requiem: the artist's deep and precise expression of the director's idea is to demonstrate that one can deprive the other one of the physical body, but not the soul! For the soul is eternal, as is the memory, as is love, as is hope and faith in life. 

The painting took my memory back to the play, and I realised that the bond of time has not been broken as long as our memory lives on. And if the present has a past, the present has a future! As long as there are artists like Mehriban Alakbarzad and Nigar Aliyeva, who care. Their memory code is our memory code too. And is that of our children and grandchildren.