MEDIATHEK

... Along the shore, there was a low cliff: some four or five metres high. It rose almost vertically from the sea and it could hold about three hundred people at one time. In the distance, in the darkness - it was dark, it was after all six in the morning -you could see the city of Vladivostok, which I never saw during the day. Its lights shone into the distance. Big lights, small lights ... And I thought: To have a small house there, like a fairytale house, a tiny one, and everything here would go miraculously - I would not wish for anything else in my whole life. Well, we ran: two thousand men. Then, strictly on order, three hundred men lined up at the edge of the cliff, on order they all pulled down their boxing shorts and they pissed into the sea! Under strict surveillance .... when the last drip fell ... the order came, we pulled up our shorts and did a kind of drill ... then the next three hundred lined up ... And as this was going on, an ocean-going vessel was passing, all shining and with three decks. And in all this there was a true power and a kind of comforting beauty ... oh, mum ... oh, mum ... I knew why no enemy attacked us. We pissed into the sea, dawn after dawn, and that was why they did not attack. It was nothing to do with nuclear submarines and missiles ... they could not get us...
(by Yevgeny Grishkovets: How I Wolfed Down a Dog)

Reviews:
"Yevgeny Grishkovets spent three years on compulsory military service in the Pacific Navy, and it is this experience that the deals with in his performance "How I Wolfed a Down a Dog". This base is intermingled with reminiscences of a childhood in the Siberian town of Khemerovo and the return to that town after military service. However, the play is not made up of a series of stories but it tries to distill, from rather indirect designations, an extract of life experience that is closely connected to specific historic and local parts of a "horrible" Russian reality. The word "horrible" or "horribly" is the most frequent one but it is always delivered with humour and with precise, laconic intonation."
(by Zuzana Augustová, Mladá fronta Dnes daily)

"There is a delicate irony that connects separate situations with many branch lines creating the original author's commentary on everything what the hero of this biographic monodrama lived thorugh as a sailor. "What he felt and what he thought", Grishkovets submits to the audience in a seemingly humorous way, but in fact the key themes of Russian society are contrained here, from thoughts on native country and homeland through ethnic problems to a sense of dispossession in contemporary world which is losing its meaning. Old values have been put down, order has vanished and only modern civilization is left, a society full of conflicts and uncertainties. The author is able to embody this - in fact existential - problem in the scheme of humorous anecdotes of military service. In this way, he raises these stories to a higher rank of outstanding literary evidence. However, Yevgeny Grishkovets is a fundamental theatre man, too, in spite of the fact that he uses minimalistic scenic means."
(by Jana Paterová, Lidové noviny daily)

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10th International Festival Theatre Pilsen Booklet (Printed Edition)