Moscow in the Cincinnati Suburbs

Wednesday evening I had a rather surreal experience.

I went to see Rimas Tuminas's brilliant play of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, staged at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow. But it was one of those filmed plays that American movie theaters have taken to showing (I wrote about a National Theatre Live production here).

Which is great. I was thrilled to see it -- I'm going to Russia in a few weeks, but I won't manage to get to the theater, and theatrical offerings where I live are not on this level. I've heard a lot about Tuminas, but since I haven't really been in Moscow much in years, I've never seen one of his productions. And it was terrific.

Tuminas takes the classic Russian novel-in-verse, the centerpiece, really, of much of Russian literature, and turns it into a compelling spectacle. Tchaikovsky's opera of Eugene Onegin is well-known, of course, and there have been numerous attempts to render the novel in film, but this staged version is the best I've seen. Creative, and true to the novel: funny, and tragic, and beautiful.

A family portrait: from left, standing: Lensky and Olga,
Tatiana, and her husband-to-be, Gremin;
seated: Mme. Larina, and the older Onegin

The cast of characters is enormous, made more so by doubling the main characters -- we see a young Onegin and an older one, a couple of Lenskys, and a character who is surely the narrator, "Pushkin." And Tatiana and Olga, of course -- Olga much more enticing than Pushkin's version, I have to say. She is lively, and funny, and has the most sparkling eyes. And she plays the accordion. In the novel (and in the play) Onegin insists that the older sister, the dark, quiet one, is the more interesting, but in Tuminas's play his Olga steals the show.

We also see a bevy of country beauties with their long braids -- the traditional Russian peasant braid which is chopped off when the girls marry. Tuminas stages this rite as well, and he repurposes his beauties as a ballet class too, which enables him to portray an aging, black-clad ballet mistress who speaks only in French. The dancing, the music, the singing -- none of it from the novel, but all of it turning this into a real spectacle, a real feast for the eyes and ears, and evoking folklore, reading conventions, social behaviors, linguistic habits.

For Russian readers, who know Russian classical literature well, the film or theatrical versions of any novel (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov) have to play with the original in order to keep an audience interested. Tuminas uses Pushkin's words, but not only, and he mixes them up, repurposes them, and even undermines them. The funniest scene, perhaps, is when the older Onegin appears to "translate" Tatiana's letter to him, a letter written in French, since she knows not how to express her innermost feelings in Russian. Millions of Russian schoolchildren have memorized the Russian translation offered by Pushkin's narrator in the novel:

I'm writing you this declaration--
What more can I in candor say?
It may be now your inclination
To scorn me and to turn away;

This is James Falen's translation into English. And the letter goes on and on, closing finally with a hope:

I close. I dare not now reread. ...
I shrink with shame and fear. But surely,
Your honor's all the pledge I need
And I submit to it securely.

In Tuminas's staging, the translation of the letter is significantly shorter, just a note, really, suggesting that Tatiana didn't have that much to say or the ability to articulate it. She was instead just a provincial maid falling for a mysterious newcomer -- not the eloquent, thoughtful, deep author of the love letter whom Pushkin gives us in his novel.

The audience--in the theater in Moscow, recorded in the film and thus part of the experience--burst out laughing.

I won't go on with a review of the play -- except to say that I would love to see it in person, several times, to really understand everything Tuminas did with the original text and portrayals. The three-and-a-half-hour production was so inventive, clever, entrancing that I wasn't bored for a minute. Which is a miracle, really, especially to anyone who has seen Martha Fiennes's 1999 film Onegin--a film that tried to stay true to the novel and thus revealed Pushkin's dirty little secret, which is that his plot is utterly trite. Girl falls in love with boy, he spurns her, she marries and grows into a sophisticated lady, he falls in love with her, she spurns him because, after all, she is married now and must be true to her marriage vows.

Liv Tyler as Tatiana

In the novel, the structure -- metered and rhymed lines, chapters with their epigraphs, playful anomalies -- and Pushkin's sparkling wit transform the plot. In the opera, too, at least we have beautiful arias and that wonderful polonaise in the midst of the ball scene. But in Fiennes's film a feeling of ennui is inescapable. The scenery is gorgeous, but Lensky is a frat boy and Liv Tyler is just weird, always peering out from behind window frames and even trees in the forest.

Back to the Cincinnati experience. The Vakhtangov film was playing at a place called "Cinébistro" in a suburban mall about an hour from my home. The bistro part is real -- the cinema's gimmick is a full-service restaurant on premises, with a full bar as well. The seats are like Barca Loungers, with trays for your meal -- and you can order three courses, plus movie snacks like popcorn and boxed candy. I thought of ordering a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, Pushkin's favorite champagne, but resisted -- after all, I was alone, and driving.

The most surreal part of the experience, perhaps, was indeed that I was alone. Almost entirely. All the raucous laughter and applause was coming from the film, and from Moscow, because besides me, there was only one gentleman in the audience in Cincinnati.

I spoke to him at intermission, and he said he's seen the opera twice and wanted to check out the play. Without knowing the novel, he may have been somewhat confused, and he certainly didn't get the joke about Tatiana's letter, I don't think.

But really I don't know what he thought of the whole thing -- by the time the credits were done rolling, he had vanished.