About half an hour from Salzburg lies the small Austrian town of Hallein. On Perner Island, a major salt plant operated in the 19th century, and in the early 1990s its vast galvanic hall was turned into a festival stage for productions that do not fit within conventional theatrical boundaries.
It was in this space, still marked by its industrial past and the memory of salt, that Kirill Serebrennikov presented his version of “The Blizzard”. The production is based on the novella of the same name by Vladimir Sorokin, written as a stylization of Russian classical prose and constructed according to the logic of metamodernism.
The central character, district doctor Platon Ilyich Garin, sets out for a remote village to vaccinate residents against an epidemic of Bolivian “chernukha,” a disease that turns people into zombies. At the station there are no free horses or carts, but he persuades a bread delivery driver, Kozma, nicknamed Perkhusha, to take him in self-propelled sleighs drawn by fifty horses no larger than partridges.
By all calculations, the trip should have taken about an hour and a half, but a sudden blizzard interrupts the journey. The travelers’ first stop is the house of the Miller’s Wife, Taisia Markovna.
The role is performed by Varvara Shmykova, whose slight figure is enclosed in a foam costume reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf, often described as the earliest artistic image of a woman in history. In her portrayal, the Miller’s Wife becomes a composite archetype of the Russian woman: coarse and tender at once, domineering yet submissive, desperately searching for love in a harsh fate.
“Have some more vodka. I’ll put you upstairs, and Kozma on the stove.”
In the production, this line sounds like a new version of a familiar cultural code, while the heroine herself combines vulnerability, hidden strength, and an inner duality that neither the exhausted doctor nor the blizzard can overcome.