Parautopia

The book of dialogues — A.V./Z.A. — «Parautopia» grew out of interviews and conversations between the outstanding Russian director and theater theorist Anatoly Vasiliev and film scholar and critic Zara Abdullaeva. Part of it consists of articles jointly prepared and published in the magazine «Art of Cinema». The other part consists of the authorial texts of Anatoly Vasiliev and Zara Abdullaeva. This publication is a unique event for the entire Russian reading public, in some sense it is a «portrait of the artist in the frame of the era»: the book includes theoretical experiments, biographical sketches, articles on theater and cinema, archival records of rehearsals, artistic, poetic fragments... Parautopia — as a striving for a distant, knowingly unattainable ideal, as a way to communicate with this ideal, as a technique for structuring it in theater, cinema, and literature. Even in Vasiliev's purely theoretical constructions, one can always feel the real thrill of creative effort and artistic passion. The range of names and problems is remarkably wide, taking us from Pirandello and Chekhov — through Lars von Trier and Fellini — to Grotowski and Stanislavsky.
The book is addressed not only to theater critics or to the theater audience, which never tires of loving Vasiliev, but it will also be important for philosophers and cultural scholars, theorists of cinematic art, and analysts of humanitarian knowledge.