Oleg Lysenko en Hans Boland present: The Snowstorm by ALEXANDR PUSHKIN It is 1812, Napoleon is about to invade Russia. Unaware of the impending danger, Masha, a sweet girl of seventeen, and Vladimir, a young ensign on leave, are desperately in love. Marriage is out of the question, because she is rich and he is poor. They decide to marry in secret and run away together. A snowstorm disrupts their plans…
Alexandr Poesjkin (1799-1837) is without doubt the primus inter pares of the great Russian classical writers. To this day, he is admired en masse by all Russians between the ages of four and over a hundred. Pushkin is unlike any of his colleagues, in fact, in his work as well as in his person, he forms a stunning contrast to the greats after him: Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. We as non-Russians search diligently for the Russian soul with them, not with Poesjkin, or much less. Poesjkin seems light-footedness itself and it is not for nothing that it is always and eternally compared to Mozart. His style is pointed and concise. His mind is permeated by Western values: freedom of the individual, independent thinking, democratic ideals. Although Poesjkin mainly wrote poetry, his prose is also unsurpassed. The combination of speed, suspense and humor creates an art of storytelling that has no equal. But what makes Poesjkin so special is the deep human feeling, without any sentimentality, but also without any reserve, which is expressed in all his work.
In a duo performance of one hour, Hans Boland and Oleg Lysenko will present Poesjhkin’s magnificent short story ‘The Blizzard’. Boland has translated Poesjkin’s entire collected work, for which he was awarded the Martinus Nijhoff Prize in 2015, the most important award for literary translators; he is also regarded as a very skilled elocutionist.
Lysenko is a virtuoso accordionist (Kyïv and Rotterdam conservatories) and has a preference for cross-disciplinary projects in which literature and music complement and flow into each other; for ‘The Blizzard’ he was mainly inspired by the ‘musical illustrations’ that the well-known composer Georgi Sviridov (1915-1998) wrote for Poesjkin’s story in 1975. Oleg plays his own transcriptions of ‘The Blizzard’ suite on the bayan.