![]() ![]() When I was writing this column, I asked what had stuck with them, and Yolka texted back, “I remember it seemed a little too related to how it was in Moscow at the time.” Back then, this response would have sounded hyperbolic. For years afterward, Yolka, who was ten or eleven when she first watched them, would return to the one about Brodsky. “Why didn’t you study that at an institution of higher learning?” I am certain that every word I’ve written will benefit many generations of people.” In the play, a judge demands of Brodsky, “What did you ever do to benefit the motherland?” (The play was staged at Memorial, a human-rights and history organization that was shut down by the government last year.) Brodsky was found guilty of “malicious parasitism” and sentenced to internal exile and mandatory labor. Soviet citizens were required by law to be engaged in productive work. I had also seen one of the first plays that Berkovich directed, “The Man Who Didn’t Work,” which was based on an activist’s notes of the courtroom proceedings in the trial of the poet Joseph Brodsky. ![]() The play was staged at the Sakharov Center, which was shuttered by the government last week. ![]() We met perhaps a decade ago, when I was still living in Moscow, and Berkovich, freshly graduated from the famed Moscow Art Theatre School, was involved in the production of a play based on interviews with people whose grandparents had been Stalin’s henchmen. ![]()
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