Tour of the play “The living and the dead. Nobody is born a soldier” according to hero cities will end in Moscow
01.12.2025
December 22 musical and dramatic performance “The Living and the Dead. Nobody is born a soldier» will be held for the first time on the stage of Nikita Mikhalkov’s Workshop 12. This performance will be the completion of a major project in the year of the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory, in which screenings of “The Living and the Dead” took place throughout the year in almost all the hero cities of Russia.
The play is based on the second book of Konstantin Simonov’s famous trilogy, dedicated to the Battle of Stalingrad. It was there that the writer, as the editor of Krasnaya Zvezda, wrote the essay “Soldier’s Glory,” which was built from conversations with people who had just come out of the fighting. For them, war is hard, exhausting work. This is work, routine and irrevocable, where even death, an extraordinary event in ordinary life, becomes an everyday occurrence. The Battle of Stalingrad consisted of many such days, where the war became a daily routine, without ceasing to be a tragedy.
– We don’t want to lose our history and we don’t want to hear it distorted from the lips of our grandchildren. This is our mission and the mission of this project. The premiere of the play took place in 2023 in Volgograd and was dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Battle of Stalingrad. This year, in the year of the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, we showed a performance in the hero cities of Russia.: St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Murmansk, Sevastopol, Tula, Smolensk and Novorossiysk, and the final performance of the grand tour of the hero cities will take place in Moscow on the stage of Nikita Mikhalkov’s Workshop 12,” says Yuri Bashmet, artistic director of the performance, People’s Artist of the USSR, Hero of Labor of the Russian Federation.
During 2025, the play “The Living and the Dead. Nobody is born a soldier” was shown in St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Sevastopol, Rostov-on-Don, Novorossiysk, Krasnodar, Tula and Murmansk.
Simonov wrote: “The war remained a tragedy until the last day. We had to pay the most expensive price imaginable for the victory and for every step of that victory.”
– Right now it is very important to talk about what a Homeland is, how a person can survive a war and preserve love for a person. That’s why I chose this topic. This is not my first experience in directing. I want to convey to both the actors and the audience an understanding of what human authenticity is, what the ability to have compassion and love is,” says Polina Agureeva, the director of the play, Honored Artist of Russia.
A tragedy that is forgotten tends to come back. Today we are all going through one of the difficult turning points in history. But we are sure that culture and academic art play an incredibly important role in people’s lives today. By decree of the President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin, 2025 was declared the Year of Defender of the Fatherland. One of the most important tasks of the Defender of the Fatherland Year is to preserve the memory of the exploits of our ancestors who fought for the Motherland.
