"Resurrection" is Nikita Kobelev's first premiere at the Alexandrinsky Theater in the status of chief director. In 2022, Kobelev made his debut at the Alexandrinsky Theater with the play "The Creature" by Valery Semyonovsky (based on the novel "The Petty Devil" by F. K. Sologub). The work was recognized with the "Star of Theater" award in the nomination "Best Performance. Small Form" (2022), was shown at the Days of Alexandrinsky Theater in Moscow and Yerevan, Armenia. 

Leo Tolstoy is one of those authors to whose works the Alexandrinsky Theater repeatedly turned at different stages of its history.
In 1891 the play "The Fruits of Enlightenment" (1890) was staged here for the first time on the professional stage, to which the theater subsequently returned (including in 1907 Evtikhiy Karpov staged it for the 55th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy's literary activity). In 1895, immediately after the lifting of the censorship ban, the play The Power of Darkness (1886) was presented. The outstanding director and theater reformer Vsevolod Meyerhold twice staged Tolstoy at the Alexandrinsky: in 1911 - "The Living Corpse", in 1918 - the drama "Peter Khlebnik". 

In the 2000s, Valery Fokin returned Tolstoy to the theater's repertoire, first staging The Living Corpse in 2006 and then staging a second version of the play in 2015 with People's Artist of Russia Pyotr Semak in the title role. 

Tolstoy's last novel "Resurrection" (the writer worked on it intermittently from 1889 to 1899) It was first staged in Alexandrinka, in January 2024 the premiere took place on the New Vs. Meyerhold Stage, in May of the same year the play was transferred to the Main Stage. The stage adaptation, on which Nikita Kobelev is worked together with playwright Dmitry Bogoslavsky, includes motifs and individual scenes from other works of the classic, including the novels "Kreutzer Sonata" and "Father Sergius" and the unfinished story "Notes of a Madman". However, Tolstoy himself at the initial stage of work on the novel, thought about "to combine in it all his ideas," among others, mentioning these works. 

Nikita Kobelev's approach to classical texts is characterized by close attention to the meaning of the work, the director is not looking for an illustrative, but a meaningful correspondence to the author's thoughts and ideas. For Kobelev, the actual sound of the text is always important, the way it resonates with the audience here and now. In Tolstoy's novel, which recreates a broad panorama of Russian life at the end of the 19th century, the director is primarily interested in the private story of the protagonist Dmitry Nekhludov: 

"It was important for me in the novel to see, to "uncover" the internal plot, not the external one. I was interested in how the protagonist changes, what path he travels, trying to atone for the evil he has done to another person, to see if it can be undone at all. Nekhludoff tries to ease the plight of the girl he once dishonored. He meets her by chance at the trial. He has an epiphany and changes little by little. He finds himself in a life that was unfamiliar to him, a life he did not know. Resurrection - to put it simply, it is a rising out of the body. A man from the horizontal life in which he was in wealth and satiety, awakens and opens up to a different life, looking for meaning for himself, something to live for. He gets acquainted with another Russia, which he did not know, did not see. He tries to understand where he is, who he is with, who he is. To understand what is right, what is wrong." 

Premiere at the New Vs.E. Meyerhold Stage - January 26, 2024

The first show on the Main Stage is on May 17, 2024