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# I saw "Living T." at the Theatre of Nations, with Dmitry Lysenkov playing Protasov, more or less
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/posmotrel-v-teatre-natsii-zhivoi-t-s-dmitriem-lysenkovym-kotoryi-igraet-kak-by-protasova-da-ne-sovsem/
- Published: 2023-10-06T10:20:50.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:35:39.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, Moscow, Observations, People

I saw "Living T." at the Theatre of Nations, with Dmitry Lysenkov playing Protasov, more or less. It is ostensibly a staging of Leo Tolstoy's play "The Living Corpse", but the T. is meant to stand for "Living Tolstoy". Accordingly, the protagonist Protasov, who stages his own suicide instead of divorcing his wife, is Tolstoy. And his wife Liza, who during her husband's lifetime begins living with another man, is Sofya Andreyevna.

What unfolds is a greatly simplified retelling of "The Living Corpse", dotted with inserted passages of text. Every 15 minutes the play is interrupted, the lights go out, and a voice from the wings asks: "How did you meet? When did you decide to marry? Do you remember your first quarrel?"

Fyodor Protasov answers, and does so in quotations from Tolstoy's diaries: "I love it when … she says: 'why are the flues in the fireplace laid straight?' or: 'do horses not die for a long time?' … I love it when she is a girl in a yellow dress …". Liza answers in quotations from the diaries of Sofya Andreyevna. The extracts from their diaries are chosen with a clear design: to create the impression of an extremely contradictory, difficult and painful relationship between Leo Tolstoy and his wife, who turns out, every single time, to be the victim. The whole story ends on a final chord, in which Protasov, speaking on Tolstoy's behalf, talks about leaving Yasnaya Polyana.

I am no admirer of prototype-hunting in literary scholarship, though there are specialists who detect in Protasov traits of Andrey Lvovich, the unlucky son of Leo Nikolayevich. He divorced his wife, his life was full of misadventures, and a Georgian princess took her own life because of him. But this is the first time I have seen the plot of "The Living Corpse" stretched over a conveniently edited biography of Leo Tolstoy himself.

There is no connection between "The Living Corpse" and Tolstoy's diaries, just as there is none between the events of the play and the facts of its author's biography. If they wanted a production based on the diaries, why build such speculations?

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_9980@06-10-2023_13-20-50.jpg)