In 1928 Nikolai Robertovich Erdman — one of the major Soviet and Russian playwrights and screenwriters — wrote “The Suicide” and, together with Vsevolod Meyerhold, tried to stage it at the State Theatre named after Meyerhold. Thirty years later, in 1958, the play first saw the light on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre of the USSR. Almost thirty years after that, in 1986, it was staged by Valentin Pluchek at the Satire Theatre. And now, on 2 September 2024, a Moscow audience filling the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre to the brim saw Semyon Podsekalnikov and those around him once more in the space of the stage. Let me say at once that the production was received by the audience wholly and without reservation, despite its considerable length of three and a half hours. The energy of the actors and the surges of stage action were taken up easily by the hall, in spite of the sombre colouring and the funereal music. And yet it turned out that the production works most strongly not on the feelings of the audience but on their minds. Leaving the hall, I caught myself wondering whether my own sense of the world, my own attitude to life and death, differs from that of the play’s hero.
An ordinary “little man”, Semyon Podsekalnikov, loses his vital force before our eyes and appoints himself a suicide (a revolver being to hand). And then things happen that make us consider what a person’s life and death actually are. The production takes on eschatological features. For society, Podsekalnikov dies long before the appointed moment of his suicide. The living Semyon Podsekalnikov interests no one and is needed by no one; Podsekalnikov the suicide turns out to be needed by everyone. A crowd tries to board the tram carrying the hero towards death, and it represents every layer of society: a brazen dealer, a well-bred dissident, a churchman, a trader, a writer, an anxious lady and others. In economics this situation is called the free-rider problem. Society exploits the hero, seeking through him the maximum effect at the minimum cost. Podsekalnikov the suicide acquires a force the living Podsekalnikov did not have. The energy compressed into the brief span of his last hours proves sufficient for life to continue, and here is a new Podsekalnikov already trying to become a free rider on the public tram. The hero has defeated the crowd and by that defeated death. In this, it seems to me, lie the sense of the play and the spine of the production. Podsekalnikov goes on living, having become the murderer of Podsekalnikov the suicide. Podsekalnikov the suicide is no more, while the former Podsekalnikov, “trampling down death by death”, remains with us.
Sixty-odd years before Erdman wrote his play, Russian society was shaken by Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”. What, besides the consonance of name and surname, brings Rodion Raskolnikov and Semyon Podsekalnikov together? Raskolnikov tries to gain vital force through the killing of another person, Podsekalnikov through the killing of himself. Raskolnikov’s design failed, because he disregarded the values common to all people; Podsekalnikov’s succeeded, because life itself brought about the hero’s transformation.
The heart of it is that life is both the illness and the cure at once.
Thirty years after “The Suicide” was written, and after several unsuccessful attempts to stage it, the fine Soviet playwright Viktor Rozov wrote “In Search of Joy”, staged in 1958 at the Moscow Art Theatre. It was in its way an answer to Erdman’s play. Rozov’s hero is also in search of vital force, and finds it through the joy of living. Rozov’s play cast a bright ray over the difficult time of the country’s emergence from a dark kingdom. “The Suicide”, staged with a clear conception by Nikolai Roshchin and played with talent by I. Volkov, Yu. Chebakova, I. Zolotovitsky, A. Semchev and others, enters into a conversation with Dostoevsky and Rozov and points a way through life to those who wander in search of joy.
