In Vodka, Fucking, and Television Maksym Kurocbkin sketches - iSites

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helping to ensure Kurocbkin would write in Russian. But aside from tbe obviously prominent native Ukrainian speecb, Kurocbkin also occasionally heard, or at least saw, evidence of the familiar but opaque cbatter of Polish and Belarusian. For tbe record, Kurocbkin flatly denies possessing any exceptional linguistic powers. "My mixing of languages [in some plays] reveals a complex I have," he wrote to me in an email with typically merciless self-deprecation. "This is a real sore spot. The fact of tbe matter is I do not bave a good ear. I am very bad at capturing linguistic peculiarities" (27 October 2007). As he sees it, he was handicapped in comparison to his parents and friends who knew Polish well. As for Beiarusian, he notes ironically that bis first significant contact with that language occurred during perestroika when, in the Beiarusian satirical journal Vozhik (Hedgehog), be encountered the only caricature he had ever seen of Joseph Stalin (24 October 2007). Be tbat as it may, a broad cultural diversity simmered beneatb the surface of life in Kiev even as the Russian tongue claimed supremacy over ail things cultural. Emissaries of Western societies also pressed in upon Kurochkin's sensibilities, primarily by way of cinema and television. Born in 1970, he was a member of the last generation to mature in the crumbling Soviet empire. This was a time when technology unleashed an unprecedented and unrelenting deluge of information, knowledge, propaganda, and downright gibberish on a society tbat previously had been relatively controlled and comparatively closed. This sent an entire region's cultural barometer into paroxysms. For matiy in the lands east of Europe, the usual fiow of time was interrupted, although each person had his or her own reason for thinking so. Some saw these events as the end of the world, the loss of an entire social structure by whicb they deftned their very being. Others interpreted these developments as tbe fruition of their dreams, the culmination of historical inevitability and an opportunity to begin creating civilization anew. 86 TheatreForum Tbe result is that the greater Slavic world experienced a nearly catastropbic warp in time, the past seeming to vanisb altogether wbile the future rusbed in to overwbelm the present. To borrow a phrase he coined in 2004, in an article composed while in residence at Iowa University's Internationa! Writing Program, Kurochkin is botb a product and an explorer of "society's informational obesity" ("The Second Speed"). When Kurocbkin entered Kiev University in the early 1990s, he actually symbolized the paradoxes of his age by his choice of study. Applying the advaticed principles of astroarchaeology, he conducted research in the field of pre-Christian Slavic monuments. Kurochkin, it seems me, is an ideal writer for the global age. Amidst confiicting voices he hears a common message. Across vast breaches of time he espies timeless customs and rituals. Among differing cultural traditions he discertis shared values. In a play like Kitchen (2000), I find sitnilarities with Tony Kusbner's Angels in America—noi because of tbe topic but because of the works' scope and the authors' desire to map out cardiograms for tbeir respective nations. Tbe masterful, sweeping, and utterly untranslatable Kitchen conjoined characters from the ancient Nibelung myth witb modern Russians, wbile wrestling with one of ibe most painful subjects ot our time-—to avenge or not to avenge the sins of tbe past. Being a poet, Kurocbkin left the answers to tbe spectators, inspiring tbem as tnucb as baffling tbe critics. Kitchen is typical of Kurochkin's drama in its obliteration of conventional unities. His Stalowa Wola (1998), or Steel Will, mixed the Polisb Middle Ages with the Space Age and used both Russian and Polish languages. His Fighter Class "Medea" (1994)—like Vodka, Fucking, and Television, translated into Englisb by John Hanlon—observed an outlandisb, futuristic war of the sexes being fougbt on the edge of the last city standing, by Ukrainian, Russian, and American soldiers speaking a stew of languages.
These plays, however, reflect only one aspect of Kurochkin's tatent. I know of no other Russian-tanguage ptaywright who strives so to reinvent his art with each new play he writes. Eottowing the enormous success of Kitchen, Kurochkin delivered the ambitious Imago (2002), a radical reinterpretation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. This piece mounted a peculiar defense of everything unsophisticated in the eternal battle between the unwashed and the respectable. Simultaneousty, he unveited In the Retina (2002), the intimate dramatization of a strange story by the Ukrainianborn, Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky about a man disappearing into his tover's eye to encounter everyone she has loved before him. Vastly different in style and scope not only from Kitchen but from each other, these ptays shared only Kurochtcin's seemingly endtess flair for the eccentric and the paradoxical. None prepared us entirely for Repress and Excite (2006), an acerbic take on culture and human retations in the twenty-first century whose form is a kind of parody of a boutevard metodrama. Repress and Excite is being prepared for future publication in Theatre- Forum. Vodka, Fucking, and Television (written 2003, staged 2006) is a smatl ptay with big pretensions. It is a Janus-faced piece that can be read as a personal confession or a portrait of a generation. When the Hero proclaims he must prove to himself he "can speak the truth," this is a clear-cut and identifiable challenge for an individual, a society, and, perhaps, a whole planet overrun—in Kurochkin's memorable phrase—by "plush disposable heiresses." This play is a kind of suicide note, a declaration that life cannot go on as it has been. [Photo 2] Accordingly, the Hero calls in his friends. Vodka, Fucking, and Television, and gives them the news: one of them will have to go. The lies are everywhere and no one denies it. "Television is a magical window onto the natural world, a source of knowledge, a reliable friend in times of sadness and depression," gushes Television with no shame whatsoever. [Photo 1] "What a crock of shit," responds the Hero, probably muttering with loathing. Like most of his contemporaries, the Hero is contemptuous of those who came of age in the 1960s. "The Sixties generation," as that demographical group is known in Russia, is famed for its idealism and its failure to stop the nation from sliding into the devastating stagnation of the Brezhnev era. Kurochkin's irony here is as sharp as ever; not only does the Hero admit that he worships the great Sixties generation writers Alexander Volodin and Alexander Vampilov, but one has to wonder just how well the Hero's own generation is coping with the Putin era. Few will ever accuse it of being idealistic. "We are nobodies, we're nothing—we work in advertising and magazines," the Hero declares before wending his way around to one of those marvelously paradoxical observations that Kurochkin's characters are so apt to make or embody. "We're already nothing, we never existed," the Hero asserts. "But we will." If such a claim poses more questions than it answers, that, too, sounds very much like Kurochkin. SOURCES Kurochkin, Maksym. Emails to the author. 24 and 27 October 2007. Kurochkin, Maxim [sic]. "The Second Speed." University of Iowa, n.d. www.uiowa.edu/~iwp/EVEN/docu- S~T 1^ G^ ^ ^ 3 R w/fl . . . . . . . . ^e RG't t " • ^ " G^ R . . . . TheatreForum 87 •
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In Vodka, Fucking, and Television Maksym Kurocbkin sketches - iSites

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