How I Ate a Dog

There was life before Grishkovets—and there is life with Grishkovets. Five years ago, a man of about thirty stepped onto a Moscow stage. He stepped out and announced that he would tell about a person who no longer exists—in the sense that he used to, but then he didn’t. So when the audience hears from the stage “I thought...,” it will be precisely about that person. The young man was called Evgeny Grishkovets, and he remembered what other people recall only in passing and never say out loud—about the conscript’s album, about the hurt that the cartoon he’d been waiting for turned out to be a puppet show, about the feeling of how time flows. That monologue was called “How I Ate the Dog,” and it split theatrical reality in two. There was life before Grishkovets—and there is life with Grishkovets. More precisely, five years ago, together with Grishkovets—his monologues and plays, where the words and interjections are exactly in balance and there isn’t a drop of falsehood, with his charming way of speaking as if he’s struggling to find the words—life came on stage. He no longer performs that show; instead, other shows appeared. Since then, he has “eaten the dog,” selecting the most accurate words for universal human emotions. In essence, he taught theater to speak in the language of people.