On 30 September the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre will mark the birthday of its artistic director Boris Yukhananov, who died a year ago

On 30 September the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre will mark the birthday of its artistic director Boris Yukhananov, who died a year ago. The programme of the evening, titled "Picnic. Requiem", includes the opening of an exhibition and the presentation of the Foundation and of the festival "Boris Yukhananov and His MIRs". Next year the festival will be joined by the theatre's grand old master Anatoly Vasiliev. And to the coming event Boris Yukhananov's teacher has responded with a special message:

Yukhananov

Once, in one of the theatres, there was a premiere. I was at that performance. A brilliant, profound, philosophical piece of directing, in one of the strange, even fantastical, in their conception, theatres of our provincial city. At the banquet after the premiere the company of actors, in great numbers, together with the technical staff, gathered in the foyer to put a full stop to a journey that had lasted almost three years. I was given the floor. I do not know for what reason, or what compelled me to make this short speech, more of a valedictory charge: whether it was a personal moment in my own life, or whether I sensed something ominous in the atmosphere of that party, but this is what I said:

"Remember this happy and, perhaps, unique moment in your lives: you became participants in an artistic event to which your Master has led you. Do not forget it, because anything may come to pass, and life, such as it happens, is capable of trampling this moment underfoot. Now you are the happy accomplishers of something beautiful, but tomorrow you may become ordinary citizens of an ordinarily flowing time, and you will never be able to return to this…"

I said something more by way of a farewell charge, I was ready to burst into tears, and I sealed my involuntary message with a loud congratulation. Soon afterwards I left the party.

I do not know how to build fairy tales around what is not and never was; I prefer facts, and reflections on the facts of art itself or of the creator of that art.

Boris loved fairy tales; he is the author of numerous legends and inventions with which he surrounded his creations, and his monographs on his stage works occupy more than one shelf of a library of the theatre of mirages. In his last great opus he created a mirage city, settled four angels in it and put an end to their angelic hypostasis, condemning them to being. The angelic matter crumpled, died, and he died together with his work.

Pik Nik on the verge of death. Requiem.

Boris had no need of actors, he did not know what to do with them; he needed performers. He had "walked out" of the actors' theatre, and walked out long ago, as soon as he graduated from the institute, walked out and settled on the territory of free angelic directing, in a space free of the canons of routine theatre. Then he came into his own. In his study he kept on a shelf a portrait of Efros, his Master, and I felt hurt on Boris's account, but never told him; I always wanted my portrait to hang beside it too. I was his guide: I threw pebbles tied with knots, and he walked along them. And then Boris soon learned to open, with a magic key of his own, portals into the worlds of mirages.

Boris bade farewell to Efros as a pupil and future creator of a theatre in which nothing of the "Soviet" lyrical style remained. He was interested in the life of all beings, living and dead, together, bound by a single cosmos in which there are neither living nor dead, only those who exist for ever.

Anatoly Vasiliev, 12.09.2026

After Boris Yukhananov's death the director Alexei German Jr recalled that in his youth Yukhananov convinced beautiful women that he was a prince from a distant land, and the women believed him. The theatre critic Marina Davydova cited a phrase with which Yukhananov himself explained his work: "The performance is already under way, but the play has not yet been written." He called this method new-processual art, by which he meant a theatre in which the performance is not a finished product and goes on changing together with those who make it and watch it.

The evening in his memory will end at 7 p.m. with a screening of the short version of Boris Yukhananov's last production, "Pik Nik, or Tales of the Old Raven". Details are on the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre website.

The photograph used is by an unknown author and Olimpia Orlova, from the production "Pik Nik, or Tales of the Old Raven".