It seems that Revyakina wrote somewhere on social media that a genetic test discovered Irish genes in her. Despite the considerable number of good Irish poets, I immediately thought that she was one of the Irish who came with Yuz to build Yuzovka. It is very much about Donbass and Donetsk, which Yuz also founded. Make steel rails better than the English ones.
On the screens of the New Theater stage Donetsk appears like this: metallurgical, mining, industrial, strong. And Anna says her “apology for Donetsk”, which she loves in all its perfections (mining work, the culture of the big city and its suburbs) and imperfections (everything is a little excessive here: bright red swollen female lips, 14 – centimeter heels…) And since – Yevtushenko did not lie – she has talent, Donetsk begins to shine with her.
Alexey Parshchikov, of course, began to make a modern poetic understanding of the life of Donbass, a figurative extract from his great quarry and metallurgical life. In his poetic gaze there was always a recognition of this reality, its legitimacy, the tragedy (“Miners. Their appearance. Dreams. Their deaths”), the imagery. For the good poets who have come into contact with it, the appearance of this land changes from verse to verse.
But Reviakina’s Donetsk is also a “martyr city.” And the martyrdom of the bombed city since 2014 (Anna’s grandfather didn’t understand where the shots were coming from in 2014 and kept asking “Who?”) dyes everything a different tone: the women’s shiny lips and their heels, and the sun, and piles of garbage, and coal dust on the miners’ faces.
In her poems, Anna does not usually step on the accelerator of feelings and does not exploit pathos. “In the Name of the Father” is a performance where you won’t immediately cry. If you pay something. It is more about “thinking” than “feeling”. But thinking about military operations, with all the possible depth of the questions that open before you, is no less a burden on the soul than the tears that wash away the dirty dirt of evil.
It’s as if there is some kind of magical device in his hands, but at the same time attuned to a rational vision, allowing him to pause and lengthen the most powerful moments: childlike happiness, non-childish pain, the truth. And see something similar to what we see in photographs of people who have left us. “Today children are married to war”: the fact that this is said in a half-cold poetic voice only increases the internal charge of the words.
Dedicated to poets and poetry, the Teatro Nuevo’s performances consist of poems and the confessional diary of a poet who decided to tell the story of his soul. Meanwhile, this diary is professionally organized into a plot, and a very good playwright, Alexey Zenzinov, is in charge of this folding. And these performances have everything inside them that is very precisely structured: they have their own prologue, climax and points of catharsis.
The poet in the New Theater is usually “played” by three people: himself and two actors. In the case of Revyakina, these are Evdokia Germanova and Valentin Klementyev. Expansive in her performance, Germanova benefited incredibly from the strict framework of poetic performance, and Klementyev even took on the second lead role and image of the play: Anna’s father.
Anna Revyakina comes from a single-parent family, which is not at all unusual today, but after her parents’ divorce she, and this is rare, stayed not with her mother, but with her father. She long and silently confesses her love on stage to her father, who died in the fall of 2014, through dreams, poems, hopes and memories. And Valentin Klementyev shows us what we have lost, barbarically displacing the masculine institutionality of life, the family, the school, of all the places where men are so lacking: intelligent calm and energy of love gathered in a different way.
Directors Eduard Boyakov and Sergei Glazkov made this performance not to show and mark (here is another page of poems from Donbass), but to build that very poetic theater, with a conversation about which Boyakov precedes each new performance about poets.
The women of poetry Z, Vatutina, Dolgareva, Revyakina (in this order, performances about them are presented in the New Theatre), are marked by something unforgettably bold. But Revyakina has more style, manners and the necessary restraint (apparently, this is due to her masculine upbringing), without which these manners are impossible.
An associate professor in the Department of Economics at Moscow State University, she teaches courses at the university that are not poetry courses. She had her own literary studio “Coffee-Cat-Mandelshtam”. And she is an adult. In the performance dedicated to her poetry, she especially feels the value of the words of an adult.
