The black swans of our times

After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, one of the dilemmas that has troubled the European theatre world (and briefly sparked debates in the Romanian digital bubble as well) was how to approach the texts of the Russian classics in this new context. How can lines that evoke the “Russian soul” and “ruskii mir” (the Russian world) still be uttered on stage without risking sounding biased, disrespectful to the Ukrainians fighting for survival, or appearing to justify the humanist nationalism of Russian literature? Can theatre creators, who grew up revering Russian literature, critically and lucidly question their own sympathies? Or is it more honest to take a break before revisiting these texts?

Alvis Hermanis, the Latvian director with a reputation for being a provocative artist, decided that at the New Riga Theatre (Jaunais Rīgas Teātris, JRT), where he serves as artistic director, Russian classical texts would only be staged if they can directly comment on current events. The play Black Swan (Melnais gulbis), which I saw this summer at the end of JRT’s season, is an unconventional adaptation of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky.[1] Hermanis uses this opportunity to craft a sharp commentary, like a complex Matryoshka, with multiple layers of meaning and eclectic references.

The first scene of the Black Swan opens with a subtle trick played on the audience—while our eyes are fixed on the coldly illuminated stage, an ingratiating and lively voice sneaks into our ears, its source not immediately detectable. The narrator, cautious like a predator, literally crawls on a metal net above our heads. Before his figure takes clear shape in the minds of the spectators (at times he seems like Rasputin, the mad monk, then Polunin, the ballet dancer with Putin’s face tattooed on his chest, or other projections this appearance triggers), the bare-chested man with a red beard tells us about the experience of epilepsy as lived by none other than Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. For emphasis, he runs a trembling hand along the metal bars (a subtle reference to prison bars), imitating the harsh sounds and convulsions of an epileptic seizure, then jovially descends into the spotlight.

Black Swan, dir. Alvis Hermanis/JRT; photo credit: Jānis Deinats

The mystical figure, fabulously played by Kaspars Znotiņš, embodies Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the protagonist of the novel The Idiot. He is mirrored in Dostoevsky’s hyper-realistic portrait in the background of the stage. The two look identical. The figure before us, Myshkin, with his dim-witted smile and attributes of a former convict (“zek”)—a cross around his neck, tattoos with communist and Orthodox motifs, rubber slippers, and sweatpants—is accompanied in the background by the image of a pensive Dostoevsky, seated at his writing desk, his quill dipped into a purple flow, the dominant tone of the show.

This descent onto the stage, made possible by the technical possibilities of the new theatre hall, symbolically inaugurated with the premiere of this production in a completely renovated, modern theatre, establishes the director’s perspective. Hermanis chooses to adapt only the first part of The Idiot, extracting the Russian world he needs to support his commentary. For three hours (in three acts, with two intermissions), the play largely follows the novel’s narrative line, updated and occasionally condensed into monologues. The script flows from the providential meeting of Prince Myshkin with Parfyon Rogozhin on the train, through his introduction to the Epanchin family, to the tumultuous birthday party of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, where things take an unexpected turn, and Nastasya defiantly runs away with Rogozhin—the beginning of the end for the main characters.

However, the pièce de résistance of this production and Hermanis’ ingenious twist is the transposition of the novel’s material into an unexpected framework: the convention of classical ballet. Although the actors are not professional dancers, they wear ballet costumes and pointe shoes, entering and exiting the stage in synchronized ballet formations. Throughout the entire performance, the characters are, above all, ballet dancers. They converse while warming up at the ballet barres, move with the constrained elegance of tutus and tights, and maintain an imposing posture. Through its strict discipline, ballet evokes the rigor and submission demanded by a military regime—the costumes (designed by Jana Čivžele) become a metaphor for uniforms, establishing clear hierarchies where individuality is sacrificed for an imposed order.

Myshkin’s monologue (Kaspars Znotiņš); from left to right: Nastasya Filippovna (Evelīna Priede), Ganya (Ritvars Logins), General Epanchin (Andris Keišs), and Totsky (Gundars Āboliņš); photo credit: Jānis Deinats

Nastasya Filippovna (played by Evelīna Priede, whose intensity recalls Natalie Portman in Black Swan) and Rogozhin (Ivars Krasts, portraying a stylized role as a slender ballet dancer, with few opportunities to explore the character’s inner complexity) illustrate the misfitting black swans in a lake of a conservative society. Myshkin, on the other hand, does not belong to this disciplined “corps de ballet.” In his gray track pants and with his plastic bundle (“apparently all his belongings”), he records from the periphery (which could also be understood as the underworld of uncontrolled impulses) the stories dictated to him by these aristocratic characters. Zane Teikmane, a former principal ballerina of the Latvian National Opera and Ballet, who was invited to work with the actors at JRT, succeeds in creating memorable, visually pleasing dance moments, like animated postcards from another era, adapted to the physical abilities of the actors.

The role of ballet, the stage form the play takes, is not to impress with virtuosity but to transform the literary material into a comedy of manners. The humor of this swan lake, with dancers who don’t rise onto their toes or execute perfect pirouettes, brings to light the human limitations of the characters. General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin (played by Andris Keišs, a prominent name on the Latvian stage), face to face with Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky (Gundars Āboliņš, another JRT veteran), hanging from the ballet bars in tight costumes, cannot help but look ridiculous and provoke giggles, even as they unscrupulously discuss the fate of the women in their lives. The talented Baiba Broka brings to life Lizaveta Prokofievna, with a bossy attitude, while also being childish and kind. Her quarrelsome interactions with the trio of “white swans”—her daughters Adelaida (Agate Krista), Alexandra (Grieta Diarra), and Aglaya (Sabīne Tīkmane)—are both endearing and comical. The only moment when the dancing takes on a truly dramatic note is the appearance of the young ballerina Šarlote Puriņa, who, through her dance, evokes the trauma from Nastasya Filippovna’s childhood, suggesting an emotional collapse from which the character seems never to have recovered.

The tension and drama in Black Swan do not arise from within the stiff caste of Russian nobility, but are brought in by external elements that disrupt this closed universe. One such element is the Rekord TV, installed against the carmine background of the stage, under the watchful gaze of Dostoevsky in the massive portrait. The tiny screen endlessly plays archival footage of Swan Lake ballet, in the classical choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. The frantic, fluttering movements of the ballerinas evoke moments of political upheaval, such as Stalin’s death or the 1991 coup that led to the dissolution of the USSR. When the Party didn’t know how to announce the death of its leaders or the political situation was uncertain, Russian state television would loop the same solemn ballet, featuring the renowned pas de quatre. The “Dance of the little Swans” has today become a symbol of protest graffiti in Putin’s Russia, and the presence of the TV with its blurred and distorted images in Black Swan conveys that ominous atmosphere, or perhaps even an awaited premonition.

In the layers of meaning constructed in the production, Swan Lake intersects with the “black swan” theory proposed by Lebanese-American essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb[2], which refers to rare and unpredictable events that have a major impact on society or the economy. Although unexpected, after they occur, people try to explain them as if they were predictable. The term “black swan” in the title of the play refers to the old assumption that all swans are white, until the discovery of a black swan in Australia contradicted this rule. The black swan in the literary material extracted from The Idiot is Lev Myshkin, who, through his unexpected appearance, influences the tragic events in the intrigue-filled world of St. Petersburg nobility. From Dostoevsky’s correspondence, we know that in his initial plans, the protagonist had no name and was simply noted as “Prince Christ”. The “perfectly good man,” conceived by the writer after many attempts, was meant to be the result of purification from “immeasurable pride,” strong passions, and any trace of vice.[3] Although closely tied to Dostoevsky himself and his illness, Myshkin becomes a double of the author, a “saint” with pure ideals. In Black Swan, however, the beauty of Myshkin’s goodness and purity is corrupted. Beyond the characteristic stillness of epileptics, his gaze hides an ambiguous cunning: he enjoys the rubles he receives from General Epanchin, wins the trust of Lizaveta Prokofievna and her daughters, seducing them one by one (except for Aglaya, who, not coincidentally, is reading Dostoevsky’s Demons) and avidly gazes at the portrait of Nastasya Filippovna, shown to him by Ganya (Ritvars Logins).

However, the “black swan” in the director’s vision is not limited to Myshkin but extends to the beliefs and philosophical ideas expressed by Dostoevsky through his characters. Dostoevsky is, no more and no less, the father of fascism in today’s Russia: this is the thesis Hermanis states in the program notes. In the memorable monologue from The Idiot, Prince Myshkin speaks of the “restitution of lost humanity”, which can be accomplished through “Russian thought alone”, through “the Russian Christ”.[4] These ideas have fueled the propagandistic philosophy of Aleksandr Dugin, the Kremlin’s mystically inclined ideologue, who urges Russians to read Dostoevsky’s work and the Bible twice a day, morning and night. Dugin considers Moscow to be the “Third Rome,” with the sacred mission to become the center of an anti-European rule (against the spiritually corrupt West), carrying forward the spiritual and cultural legacy of the Roman and Byzantine Empires.

In the play, Prince Myshkin’s ardent words are moved to the scene of Nastasya Filippovna’s birthday, where Znotiņš humorously steps out of character to remind those “who haven’t read The Idiot to the end” that this is the monologue from part four. The references to Russian exceptionalism and messianism are translated in the script into the language of Russian propaganda: like a magnet, Russia “irresistibly draws all the Slavs,” who, no matter how much they “flirt and profess to love Europe,” will feel that it “is the natural enemy of Slavic unity” and will always return to Mother Russia, the only one that can quench their “thirst for spirituality.” As in the novel, Myshkin’s excited speech is interrupted by an epileptic seizure, performed here to emphasize the character’s obscurity (and implicitly, that of his alter ego) and to revisit the dissonance surrounding “that happiness [of epileptics], just one second before a seizure.”[5]

The emphasis on epilepsy in Black Swan brings Dostoevsky down from the heights of literary genius to the vulnerable human condition of the epileptic writer. Indeed, the epileptic seizures, which he lent to the character Myshkin, have been the subject of many studies over time. There has been debate about whether the illness had an organic or purely psychological cause—Freud suggested it might have been a symptom of neurosis.[6] Ecstatic epilepsy, a rare form associated with a positive aura before the seizure, has often been considered responsible for the writer’s personality changes. Thus, his heightened emotionality and excessive religiosity are sometimes attributed to the worsening of his epilepsy after his years in Siberian penal servitude. Epilepsy is also believed to have influenced Dostoevsky’s hypergraphia—the phases when he could write continuously, as if in a trance.[7] However, it would be reductive to limit Dostoevsky’s thought and work to his illness. Hermanis seems to use this biographical dimension to provoke us into a thought experiment: is Dostoevsky’s epilepsy a black swan through which posterity attempts to explain his fallacious ideas? Is this Myshkin at JRT a prototype of the “perfectly, beautiful man” imagined by Dostoevsky, who uses his apparent idiocy (or unconsciousness) as a weapon in today’s Russia?

Portrait of F. M. Dostoevsky from the Blue Lard exhibition; photo source: https://guelmanundunbekannt.com/

In the end, Black Swan leaves you with the feeling of having witnessed an intelligent political satire, full of cutting humor, played out in front of a tragedy that lurks in the background but never unfolds before your eyes. The performance does not offer the satisfaction of catharsis, like any story that is still pulsating—under the pen, under the keyboard, or perhaps even under the trajectory of rockets about to strike. Yet, in the quiet of your home, you might shudder when you catch yourself laughing at another meme from the front, or when the image of the quill dipped in blood from the hand of the gigantic Dostoevsky suddenly flashes through your mind. It was a revelation to discover, retrospectively, by reading the program notes, that the enormous image in Black Swan, pervasive and dominating, was acquired by JRT from the Russian visual artist and writer Vladimir Sorokin. The work is part of the Blue Lard exhibition, at the Guelman and Unbekannt Galleries in Berlin[8], where Sorokin expresses his own visual interpretation of his eponymous novel. Using artificial intelligence technology, he explores the idea of the “cultural cloning” of famous Russian writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in a Siberian laboratory. The exhibition presents clones of these classics who, as they write, accumulate a unique substance called “blue lard” (goluboe salo), symbolizing the essence of creativity, a substance that resists entropy and decay. The clones are periodically stripped of this substance, a process that illustrates the reduction of writers to mere production mechanisms, with their ideas being recycled and reused in monstrous forms. The Dostoevsky in the background is one of the clones from Sorokin’s Blue Lard novel, who looks identical to Fyodor Dostoevsky but is, in reality, a passive monster, condemned to endlessly write and produce ideas he no longer controls, ideas that can be twisted beyond his time in the most odious ways.

Sorokin’s creation inspired Alvis Hermanis, becoming the starting point for Black Swan. By aligning with Sorokin’s themes, Hermanis reveals another indirect facet of his commentary: the image of Dostoevsky, with his bloodied hand distorted by AI, becomes a metaphor for the inevitability of arbitrary cultural and historical forces. Artificial intelligence operates on massive datasets of images and texts, which fuel the generated output. Once a text is written or typed, it takes on a life of its own, and authors no longer have control over how their work is interpreted or used. The era of sanctifying authors and artists ended long ago, and now their specters are forcibly introduced into automatically generated content. In our age, AI could amplify and accelerate the birth of passive monsters. The play highlights the danger of idolizing great writers and blindly absorbing ideas that are endlessly “cloned” through tools and political agendas shaped by the spirit of the times. We are moving toward a world filled with “black swans,” which we end up seeing everywhere.

[1] The premiere of Black Swan took place on April 10, 2024. For more details about the performance, visit the JRT website: https://www.jrt.lv/en/performances/black-swan/.
[2] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Penguin, 2008.
[3] Valeriu Cristea, The Dictionary of Dostoevsky’s Characters – Myshkin, Lev Nikolaevich, The Idiot, https://atelier.liternet.ro/articol/133/Valeriu-Cristea/Dictionarul-personajelor-lui-Dostoievski-Miskin-Lev-Nikolaevici-Idiotul.html.
[4] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, Digireads.com Publishing, 2011, p. 344.
[5] Reference to Dostoevsky’s words, as recorded in the memoirs of Sofia Kovalevskaya, one of the world’s first female mathematicians. This reference appears in the first scene of the performance.
[6] Iniesta I., “Epilepsy in the process of artistic creation of Dostoevsky,” Neurology, 2014; 29:371–378, https://www.elsevier.es/en-revista-neurologia-english-edition–495-pdf-S2173580814000686.
[7] Ananthaswamy A., “Ecstatic epilepsy: How seizures can be bliss,” New Scientist, 22 January 2014, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129531-000-ecstatic-epilepsy-how-seizures-can-be-bliss/.
[8] Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard Exhibition, Guelman and Unbekannt Galleries, Berlin, https://guelmanundunbekannt.com/projects/project-one-ephnc-drm6a.