Maternal Heart I BDT Theatre Tour

The Open Arts Festival «Cherry Forest», together with the concert agency «Moscow Region Evenings», presented the Moscow tour of the Bolshoi Drama Theatre named after G.A. Tovstonogov (St. Petersburg). The performances took place at the Moscow Art Theatre named after A.P. Chekhov from April 12 to 14, 2026.

The tour was opened by the production «Maternal Heart», created based on the stories of Vasily Shukshin. At the center of the plot is Avdotya Gromova (People's Artist of Russia Nina Usatova), who sets out on a long journey across the vast expanses of boundless Russia to save her hapless son Vitka. Shukshin's eponymous story ends there, but for the performance, Avdotya's journey is only the beginning, an occasion for conversation. The ravines and gullies through which Avdotya travels become a broad space of Russian philosophy and literature, where one can find echoes and resonances of its great authors, from Dostoevsky and Gogol to Pelevin and Mamleev. Into the story of a mother seeking salvation, Shukshin's characters of varying degrees of eccentricity burst time and again, lending the village passions the sweep of a fairy-tale, eternal epic.

Andrei Moguchy, stage director: «Bringing the story to an epic level, the level of a parable, a fairy tale seemed an appropriate and interesting task. That is why the performance paradoxically features poems by the chief Russian absurdist of the 19th century Kozma Prutkov, fragments of works by Nikolai and Elena Roerich, in particular from «The Ethics of the Heart». Shukshin, too, has epic quality and breadth — both in many of his stories and, of course, in his novels. The problem of the Russian character that tormented Shukshin, the path of the Russian person and the fate of the Russian land — is a drama that Shukshin ached to his core with. Every line in Shukshin is permeated with pain, a thirst for truth, and love for the simple person, hope for his happy future».

The production involves several generations of BDT artists: Nina Usatova, Andrei Feskov, Viktor Knyazhev, Pavel Yurinov, Grigory Chaban, Yulia Deynega, Dmitry Vorobyov, Anatoly Petrov, Sergei Losev, Evgeny Chudakov, Valery Degtyar, Varvara Pavlova, Maria Lavrova, Alexander Ronis, Olga Vankova, Gennady Blinov, Maryana Karpova, Nikita Vasiliev (student of A. Moguchy's workshop), and others.