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# Remember how it was at Zhenovach's?
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/pomnite-kak-bylo-u-zhenovacha/
- Published: 2026-04-07T09:52:58.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:23.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Moscow, Observations

Remember how it was at Zhenovach's? Why do people go to the theatre nowadays? Probably for the same reason that a besieged city goes on laying the table. Because a laid table is the last thing that separates us from those outside.

The table stands in the middle of a half-ruined manor house. What a charming flat you have! Scaffolding, chunks of concrete with reinforcing bars sticking out, protective netting, and in the midst of it all a white tablecloth with flowers. The set says everything before the first line is spoken.

The girls vie with one another in ogling the plain, bald Vershinin, not because he is handsome or clever. He comes from there, from Moscow. His shabbiness and feebleness do not put them off: in place of a balding henpecked husband they see their chance to get out of here into a new life. True, set against the remark he tosses off in passing, that everything is pointless and hopeless, Moscow sounds less like a dream than like an anecdote that nobody dares to tell aloud, but everybody recalls.

The idle officers, between one thing and another, toss out sharp remarks about the present day. About chaos, the senselessness of what is happening, hopelessness. Pushkin's "Feast in Time of Plague" is a text about people who know they are dying and go on feasting precisely because of it, not in spite of it. It is just that in our case the cart of corpses looks more like a collection of social truisms.

Zolotovitsky, it seems, puts the question more harshly: what if a feast is the only form of dignity still available, when everything else is already impossible?

The table is laid; the manor is being either painfully dismantled or clumsily patched up. There seems to be nothing to celebrate. The sisters are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Beautiful and educated, yet finding no use for their talents. The officers, in tunics of cheap khaki cloth trimmed with artificial mink, talk of the end of the world and go on rejoicing, waiting for the mummers.

Natasha, the embodiment of crushing vulgarity and grime, is the most local creature in this motley gathering of heroes from different eras. She appears in a tasteless outfit, with a voice that makes you want to shut the windows, something otherworldly, yet not mystical but domestic, and therefore all the more uncanny. And we all understand: the present day has come on stage in person.

Knabe wrote that Rome perished not from the barbarians. The barbarians came later, to a ready-made ruin. Rome perished when things ceased to mean what they had meant. When a table became merely a piece of wood on four legs, and a tablecloth merely a piece of fabric. It seems to me that Alexander Zolotovitsky staged Chekhov's "Three Sisters" at the Taganka Theatre precisely about this.

Knabe's barbarians did not listen to philosophical conversations; they simply strove to live, while the educated people wanted to go to Moscow. Here it is much the same, only with a pink dress instead of furs. Andrei, the spineless gawper who swells up as the action proceeds, is a man who has given up and is already worth nothing, yet takes up more and more room. Decay requires space. The main thing is to make out in time who is occupying his place now. As for the sisters' drama, well, you might sell the flat in good time and look for a new life; exit visas, after all, are not yet required.

And all this to live accompaniment from a duo in the wings of the scaffolding. Despite the seriousness of the context, the production is in fact cheerful and, just a little, soul-saving. No histrionics, true, but no mothballs either.

Young forces are storming the Taganka, and it is worth seeing.

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20315@07-04-2026_12-52-58.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20316@07-04-2026_12-52-58.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20317@07-04-2026_12-52-58.jpg)