«I’ve written everything in *Anna Karenina* — there’s nothing left.» This is what Leo Tolstoy himself said about his great novel. A century and a half later, this text continues to captivate readers around the world, who recognize themselves and their own circles in the characters and the family and love‑related twists and turns they experience. In Yegor Peregudov’s new production, the audience meets the characters when the main events of the novel, it seems, are already behind them. Anna’s meeting with… Vronsky, the beginning of their romance, her confession to her husband, and her breakup with him — all of this was left in the first volume. Only the denouement and the tragic finale lie ahead, but it’s not that simple. «Tolstoy is interesting and powerful in his attention to detail, his nuances, and, of course, his psychology: his understanding of how complex and non‑linear the relationship between a man and a woman is. How difficult it is to preserve love and build a family. It is precisely this that I want to explore in detail.» We are expecting a thoughtful audience at the performance — an audience that is interested not in a retelling of the plot, but in the search for a theatrical language equivalent to Tolstoy’s epic novelistic prose, — the director of the performance, Yegor Peregudov. The audience will see one of the Theatre’s most ambitious productions. The set designer, Vladimir Arefyev, calls *Anna Karenina* a Grand Performance: all three acts are completely different, and there is a complete change of scenery. The performance moves from Tolstoyan realism to a fantastical, conventional theatre of the «stream of consciousness». «Working with prose makes it possible to show the subjective perspectives of different characters. Part of the performance will be seen through Karenin’s eyes, part through Vronsky’s, and part through Dolly’s. And only the third act will be seen directly through Anna’s eyes. This is not the story of one person. It is the story of a family — the disintegration of one and the failure of the second. Following Tolstoy, we call the genre of the performance ‘the family idea,’» says the production’s director, Yegor Peregudov.
