Nikolai Kolyada. Photo: Alexander Avilov / AGN "Moscow". Kolyada died on the night of March 2nd, and on the same day his theater released the play "Orpheus Descends into Hell." The indefatigable artistic director sneaked out of the hospital for rehearsals, but a week ago he was put on a ventilator, from which one cannot escape. The premiere took place in the evening – everyone continued to cry. This was seen not only by residents of Yekaterinburg. The theater conducted an online broadcast of the premiere, which Kolyada actually did not miss. He just slipped out through an inconspicuous side door, and his voice, spirit, and style in his eternal cap remained. The Ukrainian surname Kolyada goes back to the pagan holiday of the birth of the "new sun" on the winter solstice. He was, as his actors first called him, and now everyone repeats, the "sun of Ural drama." Sometimes they say - "modern," although it is clear that not classical. As a director, Kolyada willingly worked with classics, but in such a way that the most sensitive critics were left speechless. However, if there is classical drama in the Urals, then it is definitely Kolyada now. Shukshin's Landing A village boy from northern Kazakhstan, who entered theater school right after school on his first try, at 21 he joined the Sverdlovsk Drama Theater. At 26, he gave one of his hundred stories to writer Vera Kudryavtseva, who organized its publication in the newspaper "Ural Worker." In 2018, in his LiveJournal, Kolyada would write that they laughed at that publication in the theater. He needed that old resentment as a motivation for a complete collection of works, which would include mostly unpublished stories. He entered literature, having headed the magazine "Ural" for ten years of his life without interruption from directing, from the theatrical entrance. And having already become a classic of drama, he suddenly remembered prose. The actual complete collection of works did not materialize - a little earlier, 12 volumes of plays were released in the design of Soviet waste paper series. Kolyada knew that after his departure, there would be someone to take care of his legacy. At that time, he was more concerned about his student playwrights, whom he published. One of the most famous, playwright and screenwriter Vasily Sigarev, wrote on his social network in connection with the death of his teacher that he once gave him a pickled embryo as the most precious thing he had at the time. In response, the supposedly frightened Kolyada Christianly buried the container. Most likely, this was an adequate completion of a conceptual gesture. Being a religious man, Kolyada was not just a God-fearing peasant. He was a demiurge, leaving signs on earth that are visible from heaven. "120 plays, a third of which are lost or unpublished, and a third are staged all over the world in different languages, could only be written by a prolific playwright and workaholic director who created a theater named after him, but not in his honor. He cultivated the image of a self-made talent, and he was fortunate enough to do much more in this capacity than Vasily Shukshin or Alexander Vampilov, who also appeared as if from nowhere and left too soon. And Kolyada did it, as he once promised - "I will die at rehearsal, you'll see." It was difficult to imagine him as a venerable old man being brought to a plenary lecture by his wife and secretary. Apparently, the quality of life, as one would like to believe, has improved over the last 50 years. As it turned out, even in Russia, one can remain cheerful and young in their late 60s by living by one's own rules, which are not just an inscription on a souvenir t-shirt. Nikolai Kolyada as Vorobyaninov in a scene from the play "The Twelve Chairs" directed by "Kolyada-Theater" from Yekaterinburg at the Na Strastnom Theater Center, Moscow, January 21, 2020. Photo: Alexander Avilov / AGN "Moscow." Gonzo Theatricality Kolyada did not invent definitions for his method and did not seem to invent anything. According to him, he had difficulty with stage directions in plays, while the characters' conversations flowed naturally, and he just wrote them down. To say that Kolyada could play in each of his plays, one would have to read them all, and this is not an easy and not the most rewarding task. But it can be stated with certainty that in each play there is a character who at least sometimes speaks the author's words. Without such identification, contemporary drama will not take shape. This type of literature took shape for Kolyada at the very end of the Soviet era. In all its rottenness, it deserved satire and at the same time pity - and it was precisely this strange combination that Kolyada the playwright managed very well. And since the era, still called "post-Soviet," turned out to be even more leaky, filthy, and eternally leaking, the manner of Kolyada's early plays like "Blind Man's Buff" or "Murlin Murlo" organically developed and transformed in resonance with the reality of the 1990s, like "Persian Lilac" and other household plays from the "Khrushchevka" cycle. Short-term participation in foreign projects like a scholarship in Stuttgart or a play at the Hamburg SchauSpielHaus was in the spirit of the early 1990s and likely only helped Kolyada find himself at home. He later traveled to Moscow always as a fundamentally Ural person, a genius loci, and a local star who could only be interesting to the capitals in this capacity. Kolyada quickly understood how to sell without betraying. "With his labor and character, he managed to open a private theater in Yekaterinburg a quarter of a century ago, which functions as an embodiment of local distinctiveness and a unique microclimate. Kolyada skillfully assembled a team of loyal people around him who shared his far from obvious bet. Perhaps the heightened, atypical for a unified Russia Ural identity played a role. The region was and remains prosperous enough for the Moscow vacuum cleaner not to suck out its best forces even at the high school level. The Urals could secede from Russia, recently considered "European," and live its own life tomorrow. And Kolyada's theater became one of the vivid illustrations of this independence. The legendary props of "Kolyada-Theater" productions were items that the actors, led by the maestro, would fetch from the famous Uralmash flea market. Dressed in flashy, sometimes almost decomposed rags, the Ural gems would make faces at the audience, accustomed to the fact that one should wear their best clothes to the theater and eat a sandwich politely during the intermission. Not to mention regional lovers of beauty: at first, even Moscow suffocated with indignation at this grubby upstart who would flush Shakespeare down the toilet and make the heroes of Tennessee Williams masturbate in their American flag underwear. Kolyada literally mastered and reworked any material to make it "his own." Thus, he created his gonzo theater, where everything is measured by the genius of one person and where everything is possible if it is commensurate with his scale. Nikolai Kolyada as Vorobyaninov in a scene from the play "The Twelve Chairs" directed by "Kolyada-Theater" from Yekaterinburg at the Na Strastnom Theater Center, Moscow, January 21, 2020. Photo: Alexander Avilov / AGN "Moscow." Offerings to the Cockroach On New Year's Eve 2012, Kolyada got into a scandal by declaring himself a trusted representative of the future - who would have thought - president, who at that time coincidentally chaired the "United Russia" party. At that time, the defiant region was still allowed to express its attitude towards emerging prospects more or less, and some people decorated the "Kolyada-Theater" building with posters of a supposedly upcoming play "Masquerade" directed by the artistic director with Putin in the main role. Kolyada was terribly angry, went on TV studios, and explained that as a citizen and a free person, he would vote for the old president because he "likes him more." By the end of 2012, the situation with the premises of "Kolyada-Theater" began to improve, and in 2014, this non-profit partnership moved into the former "Iskra" cinema. It was renovated at the expense of the Sverdlovsk regional administration, which, like the Leningrad region, remained true to itself, despite any "burgs." By that time, Kolyada had developed a taste for touring Moscow and no longer burned discs with video recordings of performances on his personal laptop for sale in the lobby. Firstly, of course, discs were going out of fashion, replaced by the universal YouTube. And secondly, the cultural institution had matured, and there was historical logic in that. In the decade since then, outwardly little has changed. With the start of the big war, only the riskiest actors of "Kolyada-Theater," like the leader of the group "Kurara" and the first-magnitude star Oleg Yagodin, allowed themselves anti-war statements - and even then, rather in the form of isolated slogans. "In 2022, Yagodin was fined for "discrediting the army," and in 2024, they demanded that he be removed from the touring poster in Moscow. Kolyada remained loyal to his leading artist and canceled the tour. In addition, Yagodin's group was soon also canceled, their concerts declared undesirable. All this is so petty against the scale of Kolyada himself that it is shameful to dedicate so much space to this ripple on the water. Nevertheless, there is a moral in this, which becomes palpable in eras of triumphant rudeness. The huge world that Kolyada built throughout his working life will not disappear anywhere, but the shadow that fell upon it "in the name of" and "for the sake of" assurances that one should be friends with power has also become history. Moreover, it is now that the genius's biography is ending. By the way, he himself said that "the smart fight with fools, and the pathetic mediocrity always wins." Nikolai Vladimirovich knew life well.
