Literary Festival “Project: POET”

“Project: POET”: words beyond time, beyond silence.

There are events that do not begin with fanfare. They begin with grass. With people who come to a clearing and sit wherever they can. With a book in hand. With a voice reading aloud — not for judgment, not for the camera. Simply because the word asks to be spoken.

Two days. The big stage, the small stage, master classes, discussions, street theatre, a string quartet. All of this could have remained just a programme — a schedule with items to follow. It became something else. Because people came to every reading. They listened. They were silent. They applauded softly. They stayed until the end.

On the small stage, theatre and film actress Agnia Kuznetsova read poems by twentieth-century poets — Anna Akhmatova and Boris Ryzhy. A voice that knows what it speaks of. People’s Artist of Russia Evgeny Knyazev read Mayakovsky’s “Anniversary” and an excerpt from Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades.” In his reading, Pushkin and Mayakovsky are not monuments. They are living people who argue, love, make mistakes.

The duo “Kai and Hetaera” — Elizaveta Bardash and Pavel Kalatsey — played their songs. Indie pop, retro pop, singer-songwriter. A warm voice, honest words, minimalist arrangements in which every word is heard. Their songs are also poems. Simply with music.

On the big stage, the Triumph production centre presented the fairy-tale musical “Lukomorye.” Children watched with open mouths. Adults too. In the evening, the duo SOCRAT & LERA lifted the audience — they danced, sang along, forgot they were standing on grass in a museum reserve. And the festival ended with a free open-air screening of “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” directed by S. Andreasyan. A screen, the stars, children on their fathers' shoulders.

There was also a master class, “Audiobooks as a Trend — Techniques of Reading Aloud, ” from the Litres Chtets service. Guests learned the basics of book narration together with the reader Ekaterina Permyakova. It turned out that reading aloud is not just technique. It is the ability to hear a text and trust it.

Throughout the day there were master classes, performers of the street theatre “Sosferas, ” the Aristocratic Cat walking about the clearing, the string quartet “QUATTROSOUND, ” and DJ Nova Disco Club playing music between the stages. No one was in a hurry to leave.

More than eight thousand people visited the festival. Not a record. Not an achievement. Eight thousand people who, on one of the first days of summer, chose to be here. Together. To hear one another.

Pushkin was born on 6 June. More than two hundred years later, people still gather to speak with his words and their own. Not by order. Not by schedule. Simply because the word lives longer than everything else. Longer than wars, borders, news. Longer than us.