"Burn, burn, my star..." by Yuliy Dunskoy, summary

The action takes place during the Civil War and depicts an attempt to create a "revolutionary" traveling theater in a provincial town, where power and morals change faster than the scenery can be replaced. The protagonist is actor and director Vladimir Pavlovich Iskremas, who stubbornly places "high" art before a random crowd and tries to keep people around him when life itself pushes them toward fear, cynicism, or violence. The year of creation is not indicated in the accompanying text.

The text is known as the basis for a screenplay for a story that has become widely known in cinema; in publications, it is linked to the film of the same name by Alexander Mitta.

Introduction: a fair and a troupe

Iskremas arrives at the market square with a pathetic "hut" and loudly announces a free performance of "Julius Caesar" in his own adaptation, instantly casting the crowd as "Romans" and becoming Antony himself. Almost immediately, he is interrupted by a magician, who beckons the audience to a cinematic film, "Drama on the Beach," and accompanies the performance with a barrel organ playing "Polovtsian Dances." The crowd, glancing sheepishly at posters featuring half-naked women, moves on to the "interesting" part. Iskremas breaks off his monologue and experiences the humiliating feeling of professional defeat: his theater has lost to a fairground entertainment.

Against this backdrop, Krysia, a young Ukrainian-speaking girl, stubborn and easily offended, but quickly becoming attached to the actor, appears at his side. Iskremas decides not to leave her alone and proposes a simple, "correct" plan, in his logic: go to the Revolutionary Committee in the morning and seek the opportunity to work "officially." Gradually, Iskremas’s small circle of friends forms: people from the fair world and local members of the new government appear nearby, and the theater itself begins to be not just an idea but also a mundane project — a space, props, rehearsals.

Power changes, but the theatre remains

Several forces and languages coexist in the city: the "red" institutions and commanders, the former "gentlemen" and officer habits, and the "greens" — armed men who are outright called bandits. Iskremas, speaking with government officials and local performers, constantly encounters the fact that administrative logic prevails over aesthetic logic: he is sometimes offered hope, sometimes demanded obedience, sometimes treated as a useful "agitator," sometimes as a suspicious outsider. At the same time, he persistently tries to speak to the audience in the language of tragedy and historical example, and during rehearsals, he irritably rejects "sentimental" numbers and demands from the actors and actresses a different truth — a "military" one, harsh, and unadorned.

Amidst this chaos, Iskremas bonds with his bohemian companions — the illusionist and artist Fedya (Fyodor Nikolaevich). Sharing drinks and singing "Burn, Burn, My Star" becomes a brief form of brotherhood and self-affirmation. However, war breaks into their circle with direct violence: armed "gentlemen" appear, threats are made, and humiliating "games" with death are played, where a person is offered the chance to test his fate at gunpoint. The artist Fedya is forcibly taken away, and the lyrics directly utter the terrifying phrase — "He was an artist, and you killed him," signifying that cultural value means nothing to armed power.

Krysia gradually transforms from a random girl driving a carriage into an actress in the troupe, acquiring a central stage role — Joan of Arc in a long white dress. Iskremas simultaneously patronizes her and maintains his distance, trying to speak to her patronizingly, but this is humiliating for Krysia: she demands recognition of adult love and cannot tolerate diminutive terms of address. On the troupe’s periphery, Okhrim becomes increasingly prominent: he debates art and power, asks Iskremas directly what the Red regime "gave" him, and steers the conversation toward the "greens," promising "freedom" and freedom for the theater in their presence.

Junction and road

The day of the performance brings the city’s "red heads" to the auditorium, turning the theater into a convenient trap for an armed attack. Okhrim brings armed "greens" onto the stage, orders the actors locked up, pulls out a machine gun, and announces that there will now be a "different" performance — a massacre of the audience. Iskremas is advised to hide, lest he be killed "in the chaos." Iskremas tries to stop the violence by shouting about women and children, and then acts as both a theater technician and a desperate man: he grabs a carpenter’s axe and hacks at the ropes holding the curtain.

The curtain falls, covering the machine gun and the attackers, turning the stage into a stifling mess of fabric, wood, and weapons, where people rush blindly and structures collapse. In this chaos, Okhrim tears through the fabric, takes aim, and fires at Iskremas, causing a red stain to spread across the artist’s shirt and he collapses near the footlights. The Reds return fire, Okhrim is killed, and the Greens are pulled from under the curtain as if caught in a net.

In the epilogue, Iskremas is laid on a table covered with red cloth in the sacristy. Krysya sits nearby, petrified with grief. Outside, a coffin is being made, and the everyday sounds of the victorious army can be heard. The soldier recounts to others a heroic, almost legendary version of events, in which the "artist" supposedly broke the gang with a single voice, and this mythologization of someone else’s death becomes part of Iskremas’s "posthumous fate." Krysya, unable to bear it, swears she will not live — and it is precisely her despair that proves the turning point: Iskremas suddenly stirs, rises, and it turns out he is not dead.

Afterwards, they find themselves on the road again: the carriage with the hut drives off into the fog, and a conversation unfolds between them, where Krysya demands love without condescension, and Iskremas admits that he loves her but is afraid of "ruining" her life with his unsettled state. With his back to the river, he recounts his own shame and failure aloud, speaking of the end of "childhood" and how dirty rags can be ground into white paper, ready to be written on again. Krysya returns, wet and shivering after her swim, Iskremas covers her with his jacket, and they continue on — into the white mist, where the future is invisible, but the journey continues.