Gogol Center

During his life, Franz Kafka was a modest closed clerk, literature was his secret passion. By his own admission, he felt Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Gogol as his "blood brothers", but he bequeathed to burn his manuscripts. However, friends violated the last will of the author. Kafka's works, filled with bizarre images and paradoxical plots, were published posthumously and brought him worldwide fame. Today, Kafka is perceived as a brilliant prophet of the madness of the 20th century, and his name has become synonymous with a special type of absurdity.

Young and enthusiastic Alexander Aduev comes to St. Petersburg from the province, ready to conquer the whole world. Very soon all his ideals were crushed, and he himself repeated the fate of his practical and impassive uncle Peter.

On the same day that Stalin was buried, Sergei Prokofiev's funeral took place completely unnoticed. And if the farewell to the composer quietly went against the backdrop of the farewell to the dictator that swept the whole country, then in the play everything is the opposite - Prokofiev's music is in the center, and it is interrupted by the stories of those people who would probably ignore Stalin's funeral and went to say goodbye to the great composer.

From Alla Demidova's book "Akhmatova Mirrors": "When I began to decipher the "Poem without a hero", the more I found doubles in it, which, in turn, bifurcated and so on — to infinity (the same thing happens if you approach the wall of the mirror hall with a mirror and see in it an infinite a series of reflections), the more clearly I understood that it was probably not necessary to literally decipher it. Specific persons are not so important in the "Poem", the fragrance of time is important, because, among other things, a huge layer of culture of an entire epoch has entered into the "Poem", which for many young people today has become a long-past history."