Anna Karenina

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"

Leo Tolstoy
Stage adaptation: Rimas Tuminas, Maria Peters
Translated to Hebrew by Roy Chen
Directed by Rimas Tuminas
Scenography: Adomas Jacovskis
Costumes: Olga Filatova
Music: Giedrius Puskunigis
Light: Alexander Sikirin
Sound: Michael Vaisburd

Dramaturgy: Katya Sassonsky
Choreography: Anželika Cholina
Director Assistant: Daria Shamina

Cast
Anna Karenina: Efrat Ben-Tzur
Aleksei Karenin, her husband: Gil Frank
Aleksei Vronsky, an officer: Avi Azoulay / Gal Amitai
Stiva, Anna`s brother: Alon Friedman
Dolly, his wife: Karin Seruya
Kitty, her sister: Neta Roth
Levin: Miki Leon
Sergey, his brother: Yuval Yanai
Wanderer: Nikita Goldman-Kokh

William Faulkner, the famous American writer and Nobel Prize winner, was once asked to name three of the best novels in world literature, to which he replied without hesitation: "Anna Karenina," "Anna Karenina," and "Anna Karenina" all over again.

On April 17, 1877, Leo Tolstoy completed his famous novel "Anna Karenina," over which he had worked for more than four years. If War and Peace, the great Russian classic called "a book about the past" in which he described the beautiful and lofty "holistic world", then Anna Karenina he called "a novel from modern life," where the chaos of good and evil reigns
Tolstoy began writing one of the most famous novels in the history of Russian literature in 1873.

At the end of 1874 Tolstoy decided to give the first chapters of the novel (which was still very far from its completion) to the Russian Gazette, and now he "willy-nilly" had to keep himself busy with the book in order to keep up with the monthly magazine. Sometimes he sat down to work with pleasure, and sometimes he exclaimed: "Unbearably disgusting" or "My Anna bore me like a bitter radish.

All reading Russia was burning with impatience, waiting for new chapters of "Anna Karenina", but work on the book went hard. Only the first part of the novel had ten revisions, the total amount of work on the manuscript amounted to 2560 sheets.

Tolstoy sat down to work on the book under the impression of Pushkin's prose. This is evidenced by both the testimony of Sophia Tolstoy and the author's own notes
In a letter to the literary critic Nikolai Strakhov, Tolstoy reported: "... Once after work, I took this volume of Pushkin and, as always (I think the seventh time), read it all, not being able to break away and as if reading again. But not only that, it was as if it resolved all my doubts. Not just Pushkin before, but nothing, it seems, I've never admired so much: "The Shot", "Egyptian Nights", "Captain's Daughter"!!! And there's a passage in there called "The Guests Were Going to the Dacha." I unwittingly, inadvertently, without knowing why and what would happen, conceived the faces and events, began to continue, then, of course, changed, and suddenly got tied so beautiful and cool, that came out the novel, which I now finished in draft, a very lively, hot and finished, which I am very pleased and which will be ready, if God gives health, in two weeks But two weeks later the novel was not ready - Tolstoy continued working on "Anna Karenina" for another three years.

Tolstoy was repeatedly reproached that he was too cruel to Anna, "forcing her to die under the wagon. To which the writer replied: "One day Pushkin said to his friend: "Imagine what a thing my Tatiana did. She got married. This I did not expect from her. "I could say the same about Anna. My characters do what they should do in real life, not what I want them to do".

Coproduction with Les Gemeaux, Sceaux, France.

First performance: January 25th, 2023.

Duration - 2 hours 30 minutes with intermission.

Image taken by Michal Chelbin.