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TOSKA
a melancholic maze of post-soviet childhood
TOCKA - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
Vladimir Nabokov
TOSKA is a multimedia fairytale based on the original text written by Anastasia Kruglyak and containing loose quotes from "Diary of a Loser" by Eduard Limonov and "Bury Me Behind the Baseboard" by Pavel Sanayev.
It brings together three souls
- musician Thomas Delpérié, visual artist Le Poisson and performer Anastasia Kruglyak -
in a quest for harmony at the intersection of their disciplines to reflect an emotional portrait of Moscow youth in the 2000s.
To do this, they delve into the fruits of the exchanges between different generations: that of the children of WW II, shaken by the loss of their all-powerful status, deprived and disoriented by the fall of the USSR, for whom the Soviet Union will forever embody their carefree youth, and the one that was born in the 1990s, selflessly and restlessly rushing towards a new chapter in history.
With the shadow of the Soviet Union still looming over our heads, how to emerge into sunlight?
Polina, a young street vendor at Kievsky train station in Moscow, rents out a tiny room in the Moscow suburbs. She lies there in the incessant greyness of winter; like a fish in a bowl, she paces around and tries to escape the turmoil that consumes her from within. How did she end up in this mess ?
Polina seeks refuge in colors of her oldest dearest memories, but they plunge her into deep and tumultuous waters of doubt and anxiety, revealing the shipwrecks that line the bottom: her entire childhood under the rule of a bitter and tyrannical grandmother, a model Soviet woman.
absent mother
non-existent father
imaginary lovers
patriotic education
religious mother
deceased father
betraying friends
mediocre lovers
staircase cages
Did she even stand a chance of getting out of it? Polina dwells on memories; her words are sharp, it's judgment day, everyone is guilty, yes, all to the gulag, in Siberia, everyone out, in the snow, everyone to the spring dump under melting drifts, air, emptiness, calm… But why is she so moved? What is this insidious tenderness?