The Play Pushkin. Incidents

PUSHKIN. COINCIDENCES

Performance in Serbian with Russian subtitles

Dear audience, we invite you to our performance!

We want to talk about the role of chance in history, in Pushkin's works, in his... and our lives...

📌 February 26, 2026, at 8:00 p.m. LOZIONICA

Director: Philip Vinogradov
Assistant Director: Irina Sharonova
Lighting Designer: Andrey Elenin
Set design production: Evgeny Marder
Stage movement: Alexandra Arizanovich
Costumes: Natalia Neshovich

Actors:

• Evgenia Eshkina
• Daniil Kovachevich
• Rade Marichich
• Nikola Shtrbac

THEATRE REVIEW

Ana Tasic

The Fates of Uprooted People

Pushkin. Incidents, based on Pushkin's short stories.
Director — Philip Vinogradov

Based on Pushkin's stories "The Snowstorm," "The Shot," "The Stationmaster," and "The Peasant Girl," the play "Pushkin. Incidents" explores the meaning of chance in a mosaic-like and open form through several different narratives (dramaturgy by Philip Vinogradov and Daniel Kovachevich). The fragmentary action reveals the bizarre circumstances of one unplanned wedding, which only much later reveals itself as the seedbed for the emergence of another (unexpected) happiness; further on — eternal, cruel clashes between men (over women), as well as gloomy lives in the provincial wilderness. On a modestly designed stage, with the unobtrusive addition of the necessary props, the actors reveal the unusual course of events in a narrative and dramatic form.

Philip Vinogradov's direction has brought an unusual freshness to our repertoires, which are in dire need of a new theatrical language. The uniqueness of the approach is set from the very beginning—with the repetition of the wedding scene in the church, which can be interpreted as an emphasis on the significance of deceptive fate; this also signifies the presence of the director, which later takes on a fuller meaning. The ecstatic awareness of the groom's personality in the first part ("The Snowstorm") and the tragic news of the death of the father, whose heart broke because of his daughter's departure to Vienna, in the third part ("The Stationmaster") are particularly notable for their dramatic and epic power.

Evgenia Eshkina, Daniel Kovacevic, Rade Maricic, and Nikola Shtrbac skillfully construct different images, playing noticeably and enjoying this sparkling theatricality, which also has comic significance — thanks in part to the deliberate absence of realism, for example, in cases where bearded actors play female roles. The performance is accompanied by Russian subtitles, and the actors occasionally speak in Russian (the premiere audience was Serbian-Russian). The audience is constantly and repeatedly involved in the action: we are given texts to read during the pauses between scenes; the narrators address us directly and from time to time bring audience members from the front rows onto the stage to dance with them or take photos of them.

The form of the performance is thus very open, Brechtian: the illusion is ruthlessly destroyed, and the narrator, among other things, introduces us to the circumstances of the recontextualization of Pushkin's plot, playing self-ironically with the fragments of shattered expectations. In this space, important questions also arise, which are posed directly to us, pointing to the timelessness of Pushkin's meanings and the recognition of his ideas in our time. Among other things, the themes of identity, the meaning of life and artistic creativity, freedom, repression and change, as well as the incompleteness of existence, imposed lives and the unattainable truth that passes us by are raised. In this regard, the very act of directing is repeatedly problematized, not without irony, as a form of lack of freedom, of imposing techniques and methods of action — both on stage and in reality, which serves as its starting point.