“Museum” is the third play in Evgeny Vodolazkin’s collection “Sister of Four.” “The play “Museum” is neither historical nor social. This is not “history,” but, to put it in Lermontov’s language, “the history of the soul.” More precisely, two souls. I define the genre as tragic farce - but as the action progresses, the farce evaporates, leaving tragedy. A sad story about how, according to Gogol, “two only people, two only friends” quarreled. The heroes are Stalin and Kirov, the place and time of action is the USSR in the thirties. I could call them, say, Solovyov and Larionov, but then I would have to explain for a long time that one is strong-willed, and the other is not so much; I would be happy to place my heroes on the Moon in 2020, but then it would be necessary to tell why there was such a bleak atmosphere there at that moment. I usually avoid writing about historical figures because the actual context is distracting. We are not talking about specific people, but about human types.” Evgeniy Vodolazkin