The basis of the performance "Kozintsev. Gogoliad" is based on the unrealised idea of Grigory Mikhailovich Kozintsev (1905 - 1973), Soviet film and theatre director, and on the sketches of his script with the working title "Gogoliad" based on Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol's "Petersburg Novels". 

Gogol's plot in Kozintsev's creative biography emerged in the 1920s, when in 1922, together with Leonid Trauberg, he staged the play "Marriage" for FEX (Factory of Eccentric Actor). In 1926, in tandem with Trauberg, he also directed the film "The Overcoat". The author of the script was Yuri Tynyanov, who combined in it two stories by Gogol - the actual "The Overcoat" and "Nevsky Prospekt". More than forty years later, Kozintsev again turned to Gogol and his "Petersburg Novels" and from 1969 to 1973, until his death, worked on the idea of "Gogoliad". These notes of the director, as well as his correspondence with his associates and contemporaries, memoirs related to Kozintsev and other biographical materials became the starting point for the work on the play. 

At the same time, "Kozintsev. Gogoliad" is not a biopic, but a study, an immersion into the director's creative process, into his inner world, where he conducts a dialogue, and sometimes a fierce dispute with himself, with the past, with his departed colleagues, with the whole epoch. The play relies heavily on Kozintsev's phrase: "There are three genres here: sermon, confession and anecdote".

In the 270th anniversary season, the premiere brings back Grigory Kozintsev's name, which is significant in the history of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. Here he worked as a theatre director and produced two productions based on Shakespeare's plays - “Othello” (1944) with Y.M. Yuryev in the title role and “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” (1954) with B.A. Freindlich as Hamlet.  

The premiere is 23 November 2025