Recently, the Griboyedov Russian State Drama Theatre in Tbilisi celebrated its 170th anniversary. The Rector of the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute, People's Artist of Russia Yevgeny Knyazev, told Vestnik Kavkaza about whether art is able to play a role in solving the political turmoil between Russia and Georgia.
"I want to believe that theater and culture in general brings people together. When people watch performances, listen to music, all negativity goes away, because the audience understands that we are all people, all of us have similar problems, in spite of different nationalities. The meaning of human life is not to fight each other, but to develop spiritually," he said.
"Every country and every nation has its main language. It is English in the US, Spanish in South America, but this part of Europe, Eurasia, communicates in the Russian language. I do not claim the supremacy of the Russian language today, but it is very important in this sense. In this sense, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that, despite our complicated relationship, Russian theater has been preserved in Georgia. Therefore, we must pay tribute to the Georgian authorities and the people who saved it," the rector of the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute stressed.
"It could be easy to close the theater. Let me remind you that after the 1917 revolution everything was destroyed, and since 1990 we have been destroying everything that was associated with the Soviet era. It is always hard to restore and preserve something. I believe that a theater should speak about the individual. It must speak about peace, it must summon an individual to perfection," Yevgeny Knyazev concluded.
