The Museum

“The Play ‘The Museum’ is neither historical nor social. It’s not a ‘history’—and, putting it in Lermontov’s terms, it’s a ‘history of the soul.’ Or rather, of two souls. I define the genre as tragicomedy—but as the plot develops, the farce evaporates, leaving only tragedy. A sad tale, in the way Gogol put it, of how ‘two the only people, two the only friends’ quarreled. The characters are Stalin and Kirov; the place and time of action are the USSR of the 1930s. I could call them, say, Solovyov and Larionov, but then I’d have to explain for a long time that one is strong-willed and the other is not so much; I’d be glad to place my heroes in the Moon of 2020, but then you’d have to tell why at that moment such a bleak atmosphere formed there. Usually I avoid writing about historical figures because the real context distracts. After all, this is not about specific people—it’s about human types.” Evgeny Vodolazkin