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Why Love Radio Always Turns into Hate Radio

Alexander Plotnikov reflects on exile, memory theater, the victorious nature of art, and the uneasy passage from a radio of love to a politics of hatred.

Александр Плотников: «Мне бы хотелось превратить утрату корней в обоснование новой идентичности»
Театръ · By Алла Шендерова · 27 May 2026 · read the original in Russian →

Сегодня в Ереване открывается «Хронофест», организованный театральным режиссером Ильей Мощицким и продюсером Артемом Арсеняном. В программе – 17 спектаклей, два из них, «Радио любви» (Love Radio) и «Книга скорби» сделаны режиссером Александром Плотниковым («Книга скорби» – вместе с Шахеном Хандкаряном). Публикуем большую беседу с Плотниковым: о его книжке «Альфа Центавра», новых спектаклях и о том, почему Love Radio всегда превращается в Hate Radio.

Today in Yerevan, Chronofest opens, organized by theater director Ilya Moshchitsky and producer Artyom Arsenyan. The program includes seventeen productions; two of them, Love Radio and The Book of Sorrow, were created by director Alexander Plotnikov (The Book of Sorrow together with Shahen Khandkaryan). We are publishing an extended conversation with Plotnikov: about his book Alpha Centauri, his new productions, and why Love Radio always turns into Hate Radio.

Режиссеру и драматургу Александру Плотникову тридцать. До отъезда в Ереван летом 2024-го он успел заявить о себе как режиссер не для избранных, но с избранными темами (исключением был его спектакль «Анна Каренина», вышедший в Красноярском ТЮЗе и получивший в 2021-м «Золотую маску»).

The director and playwright Alexander Plotnikov is thirty. Before leaving for Yerevan in the summer of 2024, he had already made a name for himself as a director not for the chosen few, but with chosen themes (the exception was his production of Anna Karenina at the Krasnoyarsk Theater for Young Audiences, which won a Golden Mask in 2021).

At Moscow's Shalom Theater, Plotnikov staged The Red Book, about the valiant heroes of the Great Patriotic War whose names Soviet people were not supposed to know, because those names were not Russian but Jewish, and the great Soviet motherland could not have heroes like that. In Kazan he premiered Tärҗemä, an autofictional piece about how he, the descendant of a Turkmen great-grandmother and a mother from Kherson, learned Tatar in order to tell the people of Tatarstan about himself in their national language. The production was performed several times and then shut down.

With the company Daughters of Soso, Plotnikov staged Hiroshima, the book by the great reporter John Hersey, who gathered the testimonies of eyewitnesses who survived the blast (the production is performed at Moscow's Vnutri Space). Last autumn in Moscow, the publishing house Individuum brought out Plotnikov's essay-book Alpha Centauri, subtitled "a doc.poem about cosmonauts who never went into space." A solo performance with the same title was brought to the Voices.Berlin festival. In it, Plotnikov speaks about an obsession with the narrative of victory and about its "by-products": those who, for various reasons, never flew into space, but died or were cast into the refuse of the space community. He does this in the way usually associated with Zoomers: in a quiet voice, almost without intonation, his glasses glinting shyly. During Khrushchev's thaw, people like that were called "bespectacled intellectuals." Back then there were eccentrics (Smoktunovsky, for example) who believed that such people, too, could be heroes in every sense of the word. Today, Russian cinema does not cast people like that. Plays are not staged about them. And they are only grudgingly allowed to become directors. This is not their time. Nevertheless, the quiet Alpha Centauri is in demand: this season it has been performed twice in Berlin, in Frankfurt, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and at a festival in Basel.

"From the very beginning of your career, you have chosen strange material for your productions (perhaps with the sole exception of Anna Karenina, staged at the Krasnoyarsk Theater for Young Audiences and awarded a Golden Mask). In October 2025, at the Sens Interdits festival ("No Entry" — ed.) in Lyon, you made De-création, a production about the French philosopher Simone Weil, or more precisely about several actresses' attempt to investigate the performative nature of Weil's ethics."

"Since we have begun with Simone, I want to quote her: 'Only a person in an extreme state of degradation can speak the truth.' On the one hand, this has to do with the understanding that any word, any truth, once uttered in public, 'in the light,' say, in an interview, attracts interpretations, which drag behind them accusations (sometimes quite justified ones) of insincerity, dishonesty, self-interest, posturing, and so on."

"On the other hand, this is bound up with Christian metaphysics and with the voice, or rather with speech, with the logos of the defeated, the vanquished. With the idea that the truth about a given situation, or about the world in general, lies within the defeated, because they are the ones who have come to know that world and its iron logic in full. But as a rule they cannot say anything, because the extreme degree of degradation, whether social or physical, presupposes the absence of any place from which anything can be said."

"Well, a holy fool can say it."

"But I am not a holy fool. So, in beginning this interview, I want to draw attention to the fact that everything I say will be untrue."

"So then, dear reader. This material, produced and/or disseminated by us, is... untrue."

"Yes, of course, one can joke about it, but I can very clearly picture the people who cannot speak now, cannot give interviews, cannot be heard. And it seems to me that there is far more truth in their feelings and thoughts than in anything I will say here."

"Accepted. Though what is truth? That category was invented by human beings and exists only for human beings. The subject I myself proposed to you for this interview some time ago, 'to leave cannot stay,' has now bored me beyond words. Have you, by the way, decided where to put the comma?"

"No. I left Moscow after the verdict against Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk; it was not a wave of immigration, just a few isolated cases. And since then, soon it will be two years, I have been trying to understand why I did it."

"For the first two and a half years after February 24, 2022, I had the feeling that my place was there, at home, that I wanted and had to bear witness from inside. Then that feeling left me. While remaining in Russia, I was engaged in memorial theater: I made productions devoted to catastrophes of the past. A strange, ghostly work of clearing rubble, as if, by starting with the past, one could carry that work through to the present day."

"The productions we made then seemed to me a kind of Noah's ark, where people could gather in order to breathe the same air and understand that they were not alone. But gradually that ark turned into a bunker. And I realized that I was cultivating fear. In other words, I had completely forgotten why I was doing theater."

"By the way, why?"

"Let me try to answer that question a little later. For now I will return to 'to leave cannot stay.' There is one element people rarely talk about: the element of travel. It is rather shameful: in a world where people are fleeing explosions, fleeing the destruction of their homes, fleeing threats to their freedom, in this world of forced nomads, it is shameful to say that emigration may also be a journey. But after moving to Yerevan, I suddenly felt that I had not so much gone into emigration as returned from it: it was February 24 that had squeezed me into emigration. Here I returned to the feeling of some kind of normal life, to some inner homeland of my own, and began to remember that not all of our existence is defined by dialogue with unfreedom. That is, of course, a privilege of youth, though perhaps not only that. And probably I am not alone in feeling it. But in general, on this score, I would like to wish everyone, on both sides of the border: 'Homelands for everyone, free of charge, and let no one go away aggrieved.'"

"Do you miss Moscow in Yerevan?"

"No. Except once, when I stumbled on Katya Gordeeva's* interview with the psychologist Vita Kholmogorova. They were walking through Moscow, along Bolshaya Nikitskaya. I saw familiar railings, and suddenly something inside me said, 'Oh.' In general, during my time living in Yerevan, Moscow became a ghost for me. At any rate, that is what I thought until last summer, when I had to go there on paperwork business. That trip became a rather frightening encounter with myself: I realized that the ghost was not Moscow at all, but me. And that in fact I love my city very much. I walked through Moscow, and things I had not thought about for decades crowded around me from all sides, as if reaching out their hands and saying, 'Why did you leave us?' The whole of my past life: childhood, youth, my first institute, my second institute, all sorts of stories, friendships. I thought all of that had long since entered the realm of memories, but it turned out that memory does not exist at all. That all this is not memory, but living life, which continues to live itself on verandas, in metro underpasses, in bookshops, in all the places where something happened to me. That is, I understood that a large part of my soul is still alive, and I cut it off, abandoned it, and am calmly living somewhere else."

"All this common emigrant narrative, the shame that we left, the shame that we abandoned people, the shame that we are not fighting and not doing theater there: I do not really understand what that means. But this shame before my own life I now understand. Before my first kiss, my first walk along Tverskaya. Shame before my first trip to a shop that sells alcohol after 11 p.m. And that shame is with me now."

"Well, that is already a kind of poeticizing of shame. Where do you live now, and where do you plan to live?"

"For now, in Yerevan. But my working routes are connected with different countries. So I plan to live wherever I have to."

"In the time you have been away from Moscow, you have done a great deal. I heard about the wonderful Free Auction Named for Sergei Parajanov at the Ilkhom Theater in Tashkent, where the artist's story is revealed through the sale not only of objects (not his personal belongings, but things associatively connected with him), but also of metaphysical concepts: there is, for example, a lot called 'Silence.' Why Tashkent in particular?"

"Because that is where there was an opportunity to do it. And because Ilkhom is now my large family, whom I love very much. Last autumn, the artist Ksyusha Sorokina and I premiered there a production of Twenty Days Without War, loosely based on Alexei German's film. We plan never to part from Ilkhom."

"You and I ran into each other in autumn 2025 at a reading of Marius Ivaškevičius's play Totalitarian Romance, in which Soviet realities, for example Bulgakov's relationship with Stalin, are superimposed on the totalitarian realities of contemporary Tajikistan: the play grew out of Ivaškevičius's conversations with the well-known Tajik director Barzu Abdurazzakov. You said something interesting then: the more Barzu spoke about how, several years ago, he and three of his actors rehearsed Mankurt in Dushanbe, which would then have been seen, let's say, by three and a half people (but even before the premiere they were visited, and one of the actors was sentenced to ten years), the more you thought about the interconnection between those who are repressed and those who repress. That sounds fairly hopeless."

"It really is a hopeless and inseparable fusion. I often return to Judith Butler's book The Psychic Life of Power, where she says, very wisely, that the subject within any social or political relations is produced by political pressure as such. That is, if a person, no matter their gender or age, goes out onto any square in any totalitarian space and says 'no,' then their very voice and their desire to say 'no' have already been constructed by that space. As political units, we cannot be produced in any other way than through the experience of our political violence. Because violence sponsors our protest and our resistance. There are, of course, various exit strategies, Buddhist ones and the like. But if we are in the world and not in a monastery, then we are inevitably bound up with it. And all our most sincere feelings, words, and thoughts inevitably bear the stamp of the power, or the social order, against which we are speaking."

"Theatrical life continues inside Russia: premieres take place, theater conferences and laboratories happen. People with similar views are drawn to one another. True, denunciations then arrive against some people, others are fired, and still they try to do something, though now on chamber stages. At the end of an excellent small-form production, which you too probably managed to see, Chekhov's classic characters simply walk into the fire. In other words, this is about that 'last bunker' we spoke of earlier. Is this happening because people are being pressured? No. They are simply living here and now; they need to realize themselves and earn money. And they look for opportunities, not because they are 'in fusion with power.' In Alpha Centauri you write: 'Has the feeling that everything is lost become our new homeland?' That resembles a kind of narcissistic hymn to one's own loss."

"I mean something quite concrete: lately, when people ask me where I am from, I very much want to answer, 'From nowhere.' Because to say that I am from Moscow, or that my mother was born in Kherson, or that my great-grandmother was born in Bukhara, or that there were Roma in my family, or that I studied at a theater institute... all that is strange. I very much want, as it were, to try to reformulate this loss and absence of a root system as the basis for a new identity. Why should we not simply begin to think this negativity positively, to say to ourselves: 'We belong to a certain community of placelessness. A community of loss.' And literally begin to inhabit this metaphysical non-place?"

"You mean that one's own aura, one's own personality, is our home. Like snails?"

"You ask questions that require detached analysis. But in answering them, I understand that at the same time they are utterly individual. Take, say, the feeling of being originally torn away from everything: it has been with me since childhood, and it helps me in emigration. I, for instance, have always felt rather calm in a foreign place. In some sense even calmer than at home. And very calm on the road. That is, my early trauma, connected with homelessness and the absence of a root system, suddenly became a psychic privilege in this new world. But it seems to me that I am not alone in this, and that the potential for a new understanding of homeland remains here. This seems very important to me: to define anew what homeland is, without linking homeland to land, to ideology. Or to something one can solemnly die for."

"In the book you talk about the race for success and successfulness. But most art is precisely about the defeated. Apart from that 'healthy' art totalitarian regimes love so much. All this complex ('degenerative') art is about those who do not fit into the frame and, to use the images of your book, do not launch into space. Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, and on down the list of world literature. There are, true, also stories of ascent, for example The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. But there all the emphases are arranged so that every schoolchild understands what a scoundrel this successful Arturo is. So I can argue with you: life forces us to chase success and successfulness, but art does not."

"In the book and in the performance I am trying to articulate something else: culture cannot do without heroes. Culture may be interested in the defeated. But in taking an interest in the defeated, it turns them into heroes, and in that sense it always does so from the side of the victors. Aesthetics itself is highly victorious. As Andrei Platonov wrote, any music plays for the sake of victory, even if it is sad. The nature of music and, in general, the nature of culture is such that it always celebrates. Human super-effort, human capacities, human freedom. It 'celebrates' in a biblical sense, a very exalted one. And here I see a problem: a certain failure of reality and this exaltation to meet. One cannot fail to notice the strange divergence between a world collapsing into apocalypse and art, which handles this all too skillfully. It continues to develop, solve its own tasks, and produce its masterpieces, whatever point of catastrophe we may be in."

"Art in this sense is equal to nature: flowers push up through cracks in the asphalt. Not because they are so great, but because they are made to reach upward. Art, culture, is reflection, the thinking reed's meditation on how lousy it is to be a thinking reed. Or the opposite: on how wonderful it is to stand in the sun and wind and make sense of the process until the gardener comes with her scythe. In that sense I agree with Nabokov: culture should not be burdened with some special mission."

"If we really deprived culture of meaning, and the author of authorship, and looked from the point of view of evolution, from a position in which victims and executioners, pain and suffering are indistinguishable, then from that point of view war is beautiful, and so are art, violence, and love. But this optics is bodiless, inhuman. And in the face of all contemporary madness, I do not want to say that we will 'just grow through.'"

"The absolute majority of those we call artists, men and women, do exactly that."

"Yes, and so do I! It is inevitable. But other possibilities remain. Other ways of applying culture, for example reparation. But the question is that I feel (and I am not the only one) a certain obvious inappropriateness of any artistic practice in the face of everything happening in the world today. How can one preserve the place of art, while rewiring and reinventing it so that, looking at it and comparing it with the ugliness of the world, one does not feel shame and awkwardness? And why do more and more people distrust artists and everything they produce? What I do is connected with overcoming these questions. Because I have no answer."

"This season your production Alpha Centauri has traveled to fairly elite festivals. Are you sure you will not become the same sort of exotic little flower, displayed everywhere in the world except Russia as an example of another view?"

"I move from invitation to invitation. I try to establish emotional ties with every context in which I find myself. But I have no real strategy. Whether I will be exoticized or not, whether I will disappear inside all this entropy or not, I do not know. As my friend, the director Ilya Moshchitsky, says, quoting the Greek classics, there is a time called 'amechania,' a strange time within which truth is impossible. Truth generally likes to hide, but at such moments it hides especially deep. And then it is completely unclear, say, what our conversation with you means. If in five years life takes one shape, this conversation will mean one thing. If another, then another. It may be the beginning of something, or it may be the end. In this state of the absence of truth, or amechania, you understand nothing and can only get lost. And I like this strategy: to get lost as in a forest, blending with another country, another culture, other people. In this sense, longing for the homeland, any emigrant pain, always locks you inside a certain little cell. I very much do not want to build it around myself with my own hands. That is why, for example, I am learning Armenian, although I do not plan to stay in Yerevan forever. And that is why I try to work in the most varied contexts."

"Are you waiting for everything to change so that you can go back?"

"I do not know. Everyone has their own measure and their own judgment. For some, the Last Judgment; for others, the Facebook judgment. I am more worried about something else: that the light will never come on. That is, we are in a very dark space and are waiting for the light one day to come on, as at the end of a theatrical performance, and then we will see what meaning there was in this or that action, what our emigration or non-emigration meant, be able to calculate everything on a moral calculator and hand out awards. But that will never happen."

"After the Second World War, several generations believed that this would never happen again, at least on a global scale: people invented atomic weapons precisely so it would not happen again. It turned out to be nothing of the kind. It was simply a cycle that had to be passed through and begun anew. I remember perfectly how, in 2014, I began reading Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. And the more I read, the more clearly I saw that humanity had ripened enough to 'repeat': I suddenly felt that I was reading not about the past, but about the future. And that was the most frightening thing."

"When, more than eighty years ago, information from the concentration camps was only beginning to reach the world, people did not believe such a thing could be. But our entire 'new genocide' is happening in broad daylight. We are already genetically adapted to the knowledge of what can be done to human beings. All this has become a commonplace. The apocalypse is taking place quietly, daily, routinely. Although, for example, in the Christian paradigm, it ought to be the event in which everything is redefined and a new world is formed. In the present trivial apocalypse, there is no outcome and no way out. It is not very clear what 'to pass through the cycle and begin anew' means now. And that is frightening."

"Tell me, then, what kind of theater you will make now: in terms of ideas, methodology, work with actors, and so on."

"Well, here I would like to return to the answer to the question of why I do theater at all. I tried to answer it throughout my fifty-page book, which evidently suggests that I simply have no answer. Nor a methodology: everything, one way or another, revolves around postmemory theater, memorial theater. At the beginning I told you that I feel there is a certain problem in memoriality as such: a being seized by grief and death. Perhaps it is so comfortable for me to speak in the theater with the dead and with ghosts because this is the only company in which I feel safe. Perhaps now I will try to work with overcoming memoriality, that is, with letting the ghosts go home. On the other hand, returning to our conversation about victorious aesthetics, it seems important to me to suspend art within art: to renounce aesthetics for the sake of ethics."

"In the summer of 2022, a new festival appeared in Armenia: Chronofest. Tell me about it."

"It is a remarkable festival that Ilya Moshchitsky and Artyom Arsenyan began making after they found themselves in Yerevan. It has a quite definite task: in conditions of all the current fragmentation and forced desynchronization, Chronofest intends to create a certain shared time within which it is possible to discern one another, to learn who is living by what, who is thinking themselves how in the new reality. Figuratively speaking, to synchronize watches. It seems very cool to me that the guys managed to bring a production by Boris Nikitin from Switzerland, a production from Israel, a production from Russia, and many other things."

"In a few days, at Chronofest, your production Love Radio will premiere. Tell me about it."

"Milo Rau had a famous production, Hate Radio, and I wanted to enter into dialogue with that production: to make Love Radio. The question it poses is quite concrete: is it possible to overcome the ubiquitous propaganda of hatred through a sermon of love? This production is based on a documentary story. In the 1960s, Armenian radio began broadcasting in Kurdish for the Kurds of eastern Turkey. The Kurdish language was banned in Turkey at the time, and Kurdish identity had been almost erased. And this radio from Yerevan unexpectedly restored to millions of Kurds the feeling that they were a nation. It was a fairly radical and contradictory gesture, in which Soviet propaganda converged with an act of love (given that Kurds had participated in the Armenian genocide). But it turned out that Kurdish politicians who later founded the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers' Party) also listened to this radio; and this radio, and its ideology, as is obvious from the party's name, made an impression on them. Later the PKK carried out a series of terrorist attacks in which quite a number of civilians were harmed. Does it follow that Love Radio inevitably leads to Hate Radio, because any strengthening of identity leads to violence? We search for the answer in our production."

*According to the Russian Ministry of Justice, Katerina Vladimirovna Gordeeva is a foreign agent.

Y done · S save · G great · B bad · N not for me