The new play by Vasily Sigarev - a Ural playwright with a successful fate, ferocious character and phenomenal ability to work - is a responsible and humanitarian play with the cultural myths of Russian literature. Moreover, we must immediately make a reservation: there is more reconstruction in it than deconstruction, characteristic of such postmodernist experiments. Less play, more action. Sigarev gives a very precise and subtle, delicate and detailed look at a man, at the complex life of male self-consciousness, at a man’s sense of self in the paroxysms of a love drama. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, very successfully stylized, is inverted, but not distorted: this is a look at the problem of adultery from the point of view of Alexei Karenin. /…/ The male drama gradually, like water in a pool, fills the entire world of the play - Karenin is lonely, but not self-sufficient. Grief, anxiety grows. The viewer is immersed in the underground, hellish world of a suffering man, whose mental anguish and torment were obscured by the mental anguish of Anna. Human tragedy in general has this property: the artist’s gaze singles out some heroes, illuminates their actions and thoughts, while no less interesting characters remain in shadows. It's like watching how to set the lights in a theater. Sigarev changed his point of view. Vasily Sigarev defends a man’s right to personal drama, a man’s right to suffer. /…/ This play is a serious work for a very important artist.

P. Rudnev, March 2, 2011, Literary and philosophical magazine “Topos”