The Moscoviad

On a bleak autumn morning in 1991, the Ukrainian poet Otto von F. wakes up with a crazy hangover on the top floor of the Moscow Institute dormitory – a temporary home for the literary crème de la crème of writers’ unions. In search of some hair of the dog, he sets out on a phantasmagorical journey through the capital of a collapsing empire. Descending from the heights of his ivory tower, he visits an infamous pub on Fonvizin Street, takes a hot bath in the flat of his snake-hunting Russian lover, witnesses a terrorist attack and finds the gate to the underworld in the Children’s World shopping centre.

As he wanders a Soviet metropolis full of generals, secretaries, strangers, patriots, drunks and psychics, he finds time to write letters to His Royal Highness Olelko the Second (Dolgorukiy-Rurikid), a fictional heir to the throne of the Kievan Rus’ – the first known reference to Moscow dates from the time of this empire. On his way, Otto von F. is tested and tempted; sometimes he responds with mockery, sometimes he resists and sometimes he yields. Otto von F., the Ukrainian poet, gambles with his soul.

Yuri Andrukhovych (1960) is one of the most important contemporary Ukrainian authors, poets and essayists. His famous book The Moscoviad (1993) is subtitled “a scary novel.” In a carnival-like atmosphere combining the high with the low, the author describes the dissolution of the Soviet empire, a state which is trying to re-think its ideas about totalitarianism, pretends to have changed its laws and lifestyle, and hopes for renewal and immortality.

Audience: Adult, Children 15+

Divadlo X10 is an open platform for contemporary theatre and other types of live art. A collective of creative personalities, it seeks to create independent, critical ways of thinking that reflect the world in which we live. Divadlo X10 does not work only with existing dramatic texts but also initiates the creation of entirely new plays with an authentic and unique point of view that respond to current events in society and the universal questions of human existence.

Divadlo X10 was founded in 2013 by the current Artistic Director Lenka Havlíková, director in residence Ewa Zembok and actress Anna Císařovská. Until June 2018, it was based in the Štrasnice Theatre in Prague’s Solidarity housing development. Since September 2017 the theatre has operated out of the Art Industry Building in downtown Prague (Dům uměleckého průmyslu), where it fully relocated after its voluntary departure from the Strašnice Theatre in June 2018.