“In terms of genre, this is borscht, but in essence it is a study of the phenomenon of the Russian chthonic,” is how Maxim Didenko sums up his production. With Leskov’s tale “Lefty,” he goes looking for the Russian unconscious—that “underground irrational force” which has run Russian life for as long as anyone can remember.

“The idea of this performance was given to me by Evgeny Mironov. Together with designer Masha Tregubova, we had been thinking it over for a long time and created a kind of neural network on the stage, where any element can cause the most unpredictable consequences”, says Maxim Didenko. “Playwright Valery Pecheikin wrote interesting monologues for Lefty, and we decided to give the text of Leskov’s work itself in the form of captions to pictures on the screen. And between all of this, a real polyphony should emerge.”

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Leskov coined words—“nymphozoria,” “tinyscope,” “slanderton,” “the Terranean Sea”; Didenko coins strange compound terms and characters, any one of whom, like Lefty himself, can tip the affairs of an entire state. Village peasants, say, dancing a “plastic kulebyaka” to Japanese haiku. The showpiece is the steel flea, danced alternately by Diana Vishneva, prima ballerina of the Mariinsky, and Ksenia Shevtsova, of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre. The master craftsman Lefty is played, in rotation, by Evgeny Stychkin and Alexander Yakin.

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The main element of the stage design is a huge mountain of (Russian) earth, which was made in special workshops for monumental scenography.

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“Our first rehearsal began when a machine that makes cotton candy was brought onto the stage,” the director reveals. “We used this candy floss to make curled wigs. And in order to understand how the material will behave in conditions of high humidity, we walked down the street near the Theatre of Nations with this candy floss on our heads and tested it for strength. This kind of research scope and meticulous attention to detail became the tuning fork of our future work.”