It’s hard to imagine two more mutually exclusive phenomena than poetry and theater. This has to do with the particularities of poetic speech, which is built around the individual reading-style, a minus-device. Slam poetry, bard music and related forms of individual accommodation of the word in action are important exceptions; these individual performances are for this very reason set apart as different genres. But in the case of avant-garde, language [poetry] writing, the theater format presents serious problems to say the least.

From the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, both the production of poetic statements in Russian and reading poetry written in Russian has become problematic for many people. Conversations about decolonizing thought and writing have become commonplace. Meanwhile, [two] years of war have paradoxically but predictably created the effect of a poetic avalanche, a genuinely torrential flow of Russian poetry.

Vsevolod Lisovsky’s play “Turns out it’s not you” proposes giving over to silence texts written in Russian over the course of 2022-2023. The play is accompanied by a poetic libretto compiled by Polina Barskova and Konstantin Shavlovsky. We hope that this act of performative silence will become an important pause in the conversation about the possibilities and limits of poetry during wartime.

The written Russian word today exists in the mode of Schrödinger’s cat. On the one hand, there are plenty of words, they keep falling into lines, rhymes and metaphors; on the other hand their voicing is problematic. On one side of the border they can be incriminated in connection with the nonexistent word “war” and their authors placed into a patently existing dungeon. On the other side of the border it is also hard to turn words into sounds. Many people, often including the authors themselves, cannot forgive words for being only words and not magic formulas that could stop the war, heal the sick and resurrect the dead. We came to feel sorry for these poor words, guilty of inadequate omnipotence. We want to give them life, if not a voice.

Vsevolod Lisovsky