A Boring Story. After a short story by Anton Chekhov

The main character of A Boring Story is a professor famed all over Russia, a brilliant scholar who believes in science as man's highest occupation. But he is experiencing torturous days of doubt about everything: science, people and himself. Nikolai Stepanovich is 62 years old. He has a family, students, colleagues, a good friend named Katya - an adopted daughter and a close friend – but he finds absolutely no pleasure in life. Realizing he has little time left to live, this idealistic, Chekhovian melancholic spends his sleepless nights twisting and turning as he recalls his past and present.

The main character of A Boring Story, played by Leonid Zverintsev, narrates in the first person, but always keeps distance from the tale he tells. Chekhov's original title for this work, written in 1889, was My Name and I.

Director Vasily Skvortsov, a graduate of Boris Yukhananov's Studio of Individual Directing (MIR-4), sets the action in an anatomy workshop with a classical professor's rostrum. The performance is given an epic-dramatic structure that allows us to see the world alternately through the eyes of the hero, then from a distance provided by the famous Chekhovian "objectivity." Composer Fyodor Sofronov deconstructs the music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky (to whom Chekhov dedicated his collection in which A Boring Story first appeared), transforming it into noise.