Asya Voloshina’s "The chorus perishes" : on the impossibility and necessity of dialogue between the intelligentsia and the people

Asya Voloshina’s drama The Chorus Perishes (Гибнет хор) was prompted by her disillusionment with the ineffectiveness of the mass anti‑regime protests in Russia in 2011‑2012. Although the play is set during the First World War, this article seeks to interpret the play as a commentary on Russian society in 2014. The author sees one of the main reasons for political stagnation in the disconnection of the intelligentsia from the less educated majority of the nation. This rupture prevents the transformation of the metropolitan protests into a broad social movement. In her drama, Voloshina constructs a complex array of voices, formed by characters’ speech (Doctor Mikhail and a Chorus composed of the documentary testimonies of soldiers) and intertextual references, to consider the causes and consequences of this fatal lack of dialogue between the intellectual elite and ‘ordinary people’.