“But nothing lasts long in this world, and in the second minute our transports of joy are never as vivid as in the first; by the third minute they subside altogether and our soul returns to its usual state, just as a ripple created by a falling stone eventually merges with the smooth surface of the water around it.”
-Gogol, “The Nose”






Dinner before the opera was really nice. The whole group of students got together, along with the Brown faculty that are here (including Prof Dorontchenkov) and our Russian instructors from the Nevsky Institute. The restaurant was beautiful and the food was pretty good, not to mention that the menu was in English. Well… sort of in English. Check out the picture. It made me laugh longer than it probably should have, maybe because it’s nice to feel like I’m not the only one who makes ridiculous sounding errors when trying to speak/write in a foreign language. The whole dinner was on Brown too, which was nice. Having everyone together was amusing, especially with Prof Golstein’s random toasts.



The opera started around 8 at the Mariinsky. We had much better seats than at the ballet, although I ended up standing the whole time because my back tends to bother me when sitting for hours in cramped places. I had a better view standing anyway, which was definitely worth the sore feet. The opera was a little known work by Shostakovich and was very interesting. (The pic of Shostakovich sheet music is not music to this opera, it’s to some symphony—if you know Russian you might be able to make out the card.) The orchestra was phenomenal, which Alisa confirmed (she’s a violist at Brown). It was a modern opera with lots of strange and dissonant moments.

The set design was amazing—it’s impossible to even describe. But I’ll try. Everything was very surreal, disorienting, both grotesque and beautiful. Gogol’s story is absurd (a man loses his nose and has to chase it around Petersburg), and I feel like the opera really exploited that absurdity and how this city can affect the psyche and alter one’s sense of reality and self. The sets were mobile and from the perspective of the audience, it was if you were looking down with a bird’s eye view upon the city--like looking down into a box with these two set pieces that moved out from the wings looking like the walls of buildings, and another wall of a building descending from the ceiling of the stage. They were tilted and tapered so that they looked especially threatening and so it felt as though you were about to fall into the stage. These set pieces would move in and out giving a sense of claustrophobia and confusion. There was also this really cool set piece that looked like a subway tunnel that was lit from its interior and had distorted perspective with a skewed vanishing point (narrowing toward the back like a cone)—it shined lights out toward the audience from the back while rotating, half blinding us. There were also some big screens that played video at times—mimicking newspaper adds or sometimes making it seem as though you were moving. This probably makes no sense, but I’ll just say it was cool.

The singers were pretty good, but I’m not sure how well the opera showed off their voices. After the ballet’s dull sets, I was just so overwhelmed with the sets at the opera that I didn’t even pay attention to the singers as much as I should have. The opera was well constructed and thankfully had one of those translation screens into English above the stage to “follow” what was going on (if that was even possible in any literal way). The costumes were also pretty interesting and cleverly designed—although they did rip off Martha Graham for one part (this person moving inside a flexible piece of fabric). I was surprised that I enjoyed a modern opera as much as I did—maybe because it was so based on visual performance. I think the opera would have been pretty difficult to understand, however, if you hadn’t read the short story before or did not know anything about Petersburg culture and literature. I still don’t think I really got it and by the end I simply stopped trying to follow what was going on and what everything meant. Pretty much everyone hated it from our group, except for Alisa, myself, and Tania. Hahaha. Oh well.