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Cassandra Department: A play based on historical materials about scientists and researchers whose ideas were ahead of their time

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

Today, the world's problems are changing our society, forcing us to question our identity and even making us anxiously think about the survival of humanity as a species. If we had been able to see and hear the people who were extremely concerned about these issues before we were confronted with their consequences, we would have coped with the global problems much better. But in the past, at best, these scientists were invisible. At worst, they seemed to be mad prophets, persecuted and even destroyed. I am a Russian playwright who moved from Russia to Finland in February 2022 because of the war in Ukraine, and so I keep asking myself what needs to be done today to hear voices ahead of time. I want to find historical prototypes. These are real researchers and scientists who, back in the last century, were concerned about ecology, asked about gender issues and took the first steps in the study of human psychology. Using their biographies and fates, I will place them in the department I invented at a research institute that dealt with the Problems of the Future. This was only possible in the USSR during a short period in history called the Thaw in 60’s. The story of these people, their resistance to time, to power and to the indifferent majority can give us a clue as to how to improve our society today with the tools of democracy. I want to write a play that combines the sparkle of scientific intelligence with clear, living human characters and destinies, and I hope the actuality of its theme will make it in demand not just in Finnish theatre but all over the world.

The time I spent working on the play as part of the Kone grant changed both me and the project.
I worked on the annual grant project over a period of three years, and those three years were my first years living in Finland – a time when I truly got to know this country and its culture in depth. This knowledge transformed the concept.
In 2022, when I was writing the application, I had in mind to show Finland the causes of totalitarianism in modern Russia through images from the 60s. But I gradually realised that this historical period would not be of interest to the theatre in Finland today. A play always speaks directly to the present day. It is precisely this relevance that provides the impetus for a play to be taken on for production by a theatre.
So, I settled on a different, no less—and perhaps even more ambitious—concept and decided to tell Finland and the world about the life and death of the foremost opponent of Putin’s regime, the symbol of Russian resistance, the opposition figure Alexei Navalny.
I immediately faced the problem of portraying a historical figure who had lived until recently.
Alexei Navalny had many faces, and none of them captures him fully. And such a description is impossible, especially now, when there are thousands of witnesses who worked with him, fought against him and alongside him, those who feared him and those for whom he was the only hope. And each of them has their own, true Navalny.
That is why this fantastic, rapidly cooling and acquiring the solidity and monumentality of bronze, legendary story can only be told by giving voice to this polyphony. It is something like an ancient Greek chorus, which served as the voice of the world, a thousand-faced witness to great deeds.
I have told his story through the accounts of witnesses, which, like a mosaic on a vast canvas, piece together the path travelled by a man and a country over a quarter of a century, from the early 2000s until his death in 2024.

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