An Iconoclast with Tongue-In-Cheek

The story of contemporary Russia is surely one of the most baffling enigmas of our time. What really has happened in the land of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Vladimir Lenin since Mikhail Gorbachev took over the ship of the Soviet state in 1985 and unleashed a series of geopolitical changes that continue to shape our world to this day? I suggest we are not yet close to answering that question.

Consider this: I began writing these notes on the day of Yegor Gaidar's death. Gaidar was a staunch ally and trusted economic adviser of Boris Yeltsin. A key strategist behind the so-called "liberal market" reforms that restarted the moribund Russian economy in the early 1990s, he at first was hailed as a bright political star, then vilified and hounded out of office in 1994 because his policies brought extreme hardship. Within hours of his death in December 2009, Gaidar was praised as Russia's one-time savior and one of its most brilliant minds. And yet at the same time a poll showed that only seventeen percent of Russians believed Gaidar played a positive role in Russian history. By comparison, thirty-five percent considered Joseph Stalin a positive force.¹

This has everything to do with Russian drama since the mid-1990s. While the contradictions of Russia's political and social development piled up chaotically, often making it difficult to discern where the truth lay, Russian playwrights left a strikingly clear, multifaceted record of Russia's journey into the twenty-first century. As the media again came under the draconian control of Vladimir Putin's and Dmitry Medvedev's administrations in the 2000s, playwrights' voices were marked by a distinct variety and boldness. As public opinion tended to support notions of strong-handed rulers, dramatists explored the lives of individuals who did not fit into neat sociological niches. In short, anyone who wishes to know what is happening in Russia must take into account the extraordinary fruits of the boom in dramatic writing that began in the late 1990s and continues to this day.

Maksym Kurochkin, a soft-spoken, self-effacing man who studied astroarcheology at Kiev University, has been a leader of this remarkable flourishing of diverse, challenging, and innovative writing. Although he began writing plays simultaneously to Gaidar's rise to power in the early 1990s, Kurochkin first truly came to the attention of the theatre world in 1998 when his play Steel Will won him the prestigious anti-Booker prize for "experimenting with new avenues in drama." Employing elements of multiple languages, cultures, and time periods (it is set in both Poland in the Middle Ages and a future space age), this play signaled the appearance of a major new voice.

Kurochkin, who was born in 1970, followed in 2000 with Kitchen, his most important play to date. This roiling, funny, ambitious, genre-crashing epic intertwines the heroes and heroines of the twelfth-century Nibelung saga with twenty-first-century Russians employed in a modern castle kitchen, while addressing the theme of how easily the constructive force of cultural memory slips into impulses for violent revenge. As age-old conflicts simmered throughout the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and the Balkans, this play had an enormous resonance with audiences that made it the biggest cult hit of its time. Throughout the next decade, Kurochkin produced numerous plays on vastly different scales and topics. Among them were Imago (2002), a radical reworking of the Pygmalion myth; Tsurikov (2002), depicting a man traveling to hell in search of his past and future; Repress and Excite (2006), a wicked parody of boulevard theatre, backstage comedies, and contemporary social mores; and Vodka, Fucking, and Television (2007), an intimate piece exploring a writer's futile attempts to break free of his most crippling vices.²

Kurochkin invariably writes with his tongue in his cheek and a few drops of blood dripping from his pen. It is a style that perfectly fits the kitsch-saturated, popculture-laden world we inhabit. His style is inventive, theatrical, larger-than-life, and it always wreaks havoc with the myths by...