In his latest novel, the Moscow thriller “Revolution”, which was published in German in 2021, the Belarusian author Viktor Martinowitsch has explored in a literary-anthropological way how it is possible for a comparatively small mafia-like group to conquer a large country with a complex population tries.

The 44-year-old Martinowitsch, who also extrapolated life and love under the conditions of totalitarianism in earlier, often dystopian books, is one of the few liberal intellectuals in the Russian-speaking world who consciously opposed emigration to the West after the start of the Ukraine war have decided.

Kerstin Holm

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Perhaps the most important writer in his country, but unable to publish there, lives near Minsk, teaches at the European University in Vilnius and has just returned from a study trip in Greece to the Hamburg Schauspielhaus, where a stage version of "Revolution" premiered .

Martinowitsch told the FAZ in a Hamburg café that he wanted to take part in what was happening in his homeland and not be a spectator, as is the fate of those who have fled Russia and Belarus, most of whom would become “formers” for their culture.

That's why he will return to Minsk tomorrow, Tuesday.

Set in the noughties, “Revolution” chronicles Russia's deep state during the resource boom, as the Russian capital captivated many Western visitors as the luxury-obsessed Sin City.

The book shows how the alter ego of the author, a European intellectual from Belarus, is "flipped" and turned into a monster by the real existing power structures.

The Czech director Dušan David Pařízek turns it into a type and thesis drama that is as scary as it is comical, which, thanks to a committed ensemble, switches between chamber drama, cabaret and first-person shooter frenzy with virtuosity.

Movable white walls keep opening up new empty rooms, which also become psycho-cabinets through shadow play, bloodstains or video projections.

The phenomenal Daniel Hoevels, who looks a bit like Martinowitsch on the outside, plays the main character of the culture semiotic Mikhail German as a quicksilver driven man who has an emotional anchor in the clever Olja (girlish, but strong: Sandra Gerling).

But two bald heads with huge shoulder pads and a cape beard (nasty-cheerful: Paul Herwig and Markus John) arrange in an acrobatic threesome dance for him an accident debt, from which they then magically redeem him - and he, increasingly theatrical bloodstained, no longer escapes their nets.

Russian intelligence agents are obsessed with literature

In contrast to the rather uneducated Belarusian secret service agents, their Russian colleagues are obsessed with literature, says Martinowitsch, who finds it symptomatic that Putin's attack on Ukraine was the first time a war was started with a lecture.

In "Revolution," the godfather of the system is a former Soviet leader and veteran intelligence officer.

With pompous references to Freud and Foucault, he defines the mission of his legally intangible “circle of friends” communicating via SMS by saying that society would descend into chaos if its reluctant desires weren’t put under a hard bandage.

Ernst Stötzner embodies the demonic retro figure as a Napoleonic senior athlete with sunglasses and a silver mane, who occasionally transforms into an old man in a wheelchair.

As a current gag, Pařízek also has him head a circle of “Friends of Russian Opera” and, as a game within a game, includes an appearance by Dmitri Shostakovich (at the piano: the multi-talented Peter Fasching, who embodies many roles) and the chansonnière Eva Maria Nikolaus.

Wearing a fur hat and transparent dress, she sings passages from "Lady Macbeth of Mzensk" and explains the role.

But when Nikolaus laments about the Gulag and the blackness of their conscience, the "friends" counter that the Gulag never existed, and the godfather has the opera's ending deleted.

Because awareness of injustice is transformed into anger in both her and Putin's network.

When Hoevel, whose cramped hand gestures and twitching facial expressions speak volumes, refuses any assistance to a dying agent, he still sees it as a reproachful voice of conscience.

When he then put an opposition entrepreneur behind bars by giving false testimony and his academic friend insulted him for it, he lashed out and let him, since he himself was climbing steeply up the career ladder, be dismissed with a maximum of dishonor.

"Revolution" is the hilariously disturbing story of the will to submit to power.

She turns people into shadows, as Rebekka Dahnke's lighting direction illustrates, but she also rewards Hoevel's heroes with video suggestions of fast car rides and high-performance sex.

At the godfather's command, he renounces Olja.

And even the liberation only brings him the final role reversal with that.

Applause for a highly inspired evening of theatre.