The Novgorod Spaceship

On the bank of Volkhov River, only a mile away from the walls of the ancient Novgorod Kremlin stands the modernist building of Dostoevsky’s Drama Theatre. This architectural mutant produced in the last decades of Soviet Era is the main hero of the film.

The setting is Veliky Novgorod or Novgorod the Great, a small Russian provincial city with its river beaches, disco-boat rides, ancient history and the dilapidated Khrushchev tenements. For the non-Russian audience the shorthand, “Lonely Planet“ guide into Novgorod Life becomes the context in which the spaceship-like building and its persistent problems will be seen and measured.