DIRECTOR’S NOTE

The man of the materialistic culture Gogol writes about, which is also the culture of our own time, deeply believes that by acquiring money he becomes invulnerable and immortal.

The characters of Dead Souls, led by Chichikov, purposefully and relentlessly pursue their source of invulnerability – the kopek, a constant, uninterrupted flow of money, the elixir of immortality. They know of no other source of life, because they were never given the opportunity to discover one, having been taught from an early age that property is synonymous with identity. These strange, enigmatic, grotesque and sad people of Gogol live under the constant tyranny of ambition, caught between tragedy and comedy, or rather, under the rule of passions that are destroying them, yet at the same time serve as their only fuel for living.

Enchanted by the dream of invulnerability, driven to the point of feverish obsession, they hurl themselves after the kopek into the abyss of the most improbable ventures. The situations they find themselves in are the source of the typically Gogolian melancholic humor that also permeates this staging of his most important work, one of the most significant works in world literature.

Our production was created with the intention of exploring one of the many aspects of this enigmatic, unfinished prose masterpiece, fully aware that the full breadth of its meaning cannot be encompassed in a single theatrical act. Nevertheless, this theatrical act is an attempt at a profound and sincere dialogue with the literary original and with today’s local audience at the same time. And that is no small thing.