CHARLOTTENGRAD - A PIECE OF RUSSIA IN THE HEART OF BERLIN

From the series "Berlin Stories"

A staged reading about the lives and works of Russian writers in exile during the 1920s - featuring Alina Gause and Carl Martin Spengler (acting, singing), with Lidia Kalendareva on piano. Musical arrangement: Ute Falkenau. Text adaptation: Ildiko Bognar. Set design: Alexander Barmenkov, Anna Piro, Angelina Dashkevic. Costumes: Tatjana Hajdukova.

About a hundred years ago, hundreds of thousands of Russians emigrated to Berlin. The October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war drove aristocrats, businessmen, and intellectuals from their homeland. While political leaders gathered in Paris and Prague became the Russian scientific center in exile, writers headed to Berlin. Nearly all major Russian authors of the twentieth century lived here temporarily or visited the city: Vladimir Nabokov, Vladislav Khodasevich, Andrei Bely, Boris Pasternak, Viktor Shklovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Alexei Remizov, Mark Aldanov, Alexei Tolstoy, Ilya Ehrenburg, Maxim Gorky, and many others.

Charlottenburg earned the nickname "Charlottengrad" at the time; Berlin itself was called "Moscow on the Spree" and "Russia's Third Capital." The production explores how the emigrants perceived the city and whether exile stifled or stimulated their creativity - shedding light on a chapter of Berlin's history deeply intertwined with flight, exile, and homeland.

Text excerpts from "In the Realm of Shadows" by Andrei Bely (translated from Russian by Birgit Veit) are used with the kind permission of Insel Publishers. Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes, including an intermission after approximately 45 minutes. Premiere: 08.06.2023.