Ceremony

Little novels from the life of the Leningrad poet Oleg Grigoriev. His fate, like his poems, is a flip-flop, where good and evil exist under the masks of each other.

Shelemishevo, a small village in the Ryazan Oblast. Two girls live together with their grandmother as they have lost their parents – the mother is dead, the father has a new family. One of the sisters is very sick, the other, Natasha, will turn 18 soon. She revisits her old diary and comments on the journaled stories with ease.

Once upon a time, a stage director with German surname Dell read from Saltykov-Shchedrin that «Skopin is such city where any person has no reason to dwell». So he decided to create a real theatre there, in Ryazan region, in a small provincial town, «where any person has no reason to dwell».

Tatyana came from Moldova to the Ryazan region in search of a better life. She has four sons whom she raises without a husband. And somewhere in the world live a few dozen more of her children. “God forbid that everything is fine with them!” reflects the heroine, who is again in position.

This is a story about the complex relationship between a mother and her terminally ill teenage daughter. The girl is immersed in the fictional world of her drawings and plays Juliet on stage, but is absolutely helpless in real life. They live together in a tiny apartment on the outskirts of the megapolis. And one day a man appears in their life.

On New Year's Eve, the ambulance service and the trauma department of the Torzhok hospital have a lot of work to do. Someone fried cutlets for the festive table and burned himself, someone broke his leg, someone had a sixth birth, and someone just got drunk and fell right under the wheels of a passing car, the daughter beat the old mother, and the man has all the signs of a heart attack, but he refuses to be hospitalized, hoping for a Russian " maybe»... People argue, shout, cry, resist. And only under anesthesia they calm down and fall silent. Anesthesia as a metaphor of modern life, it is as if scattered and in the air. We hear it in the president's congratulatory New Year's speech, and we also calm down... And only the ambulance starts the engine and rushes to the next call.