Preface

Already after Svetlana Petriichuk's arrest, Freedom Letters published a collection of her plays entitled Tuaregs. The book contains plays written since 2017, when Petriichuk began attending a dramaturgy workshop at Moscow's Theater.doc Theater by New Drama ideologue Mikhail Ugarov. There she absorbed the spirit of freedom and creativity, an interest in people, their stories, in what happens in the most closed communities, where people reveal themselves from a completely unexpected side - this is what Mikhail Ugarov and playwright and co-founder of Theater.doc especially valued. Elena Gremina.

I wrote to Sveta Petriichuk just a week after her arrest and asked her if she had thought, when she wrote the play Finist Yasny Sokol, where several scenes take place in court, that someday she herself would have to stand trial. Petriichuk then replied, “No, of course not. I still can't believe this is happening, and I consider it a sudden and treacherous attack of absurdity.”

In the collection “Turegi” there is a play “ZAO”. Here is how director Mikhail Durnenkov writes about this play in the preface to the collection:

“ZAO” means ”absentee. This is the name given to women who fall in love by correspondence with convicts. After that they start visiting prisoners, sending them packages and taking care of them. And also wait for them on the outside. And this play is a real encyclopedia of Russian life, about which we know little, but which is represented by tens, if not hundreds of thousands of human destinies. There is prison newspeak (what are the grassroots feminitives “date-girl” and “transfer girl”), and instructions, and a lot of love stories, and a huge amount of warm and gentle humor. The author defines the genre of the play as “musical,” and there are indeed several choruses here: “Chorus In White”, which of course condemns, ‘Chorus In Dark’, which is nothing but the social pressure of society, ‘Chorus With Bauls’ - countless women, wives, lovers and mothers, and ‘Chorus From TV’ - the voice of totalitarian power, which ignores, intimidates and gives ideological instructions... The collective heroine of ZAO after a date with her lover informs us: ”So much unspent inside me lay in humus. And now it's as if everything in my belly has blossomed and budded. Now I know why. Now I know why. I know where it's black and where it's red. Where it's human and where it's cop.”

Life, of course, is stronger than literature: Svetlana Petriichuk, long before her arrest, was interested in the life of prisoners, tried to understand it, without guessing what awaited her in the future.

Zoya Svetova

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