Hungarian theater director Árpád Schilling's second production at the Youth Theater is based on the classic of modern literature, Nobel laureate John Maxwell Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians.
J. M. Coetzee (1940) from the Republic of South Africa is a prose author of exceptional talent, one of the most famous names in the world of contemporary literature, in 2003. winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. His distinctive voice, which does not conform to any modern literary trends, has attracted the attention of the world's readers since the writer's first novels. The realities and themes of Coetzee's work originate from the complex and harsh reality of his homeland, but transcends it and conveys a deep picture of a modern man in confrontation with a world hostile to him. In his books, Coetzee depicts the borderline situations of man, personal catastrophes when he remains alone against the world around him. It exposes a person, reveals his fragility and forces him to rethink his life, the norms of behavior formed by society. Coetzee's books summarize the existential questions of life through skillfully narrated individual experiences.
Most of J. M. Coetzee's books have been translated and published into Lithuanian: "The Life and Times of Maiko K.", "Fo", "Master of Petersburg", "Inglory", "Elizabeta Kostelo", "Slow Man", "Childhood of Jesus", The School Years of Jesus, The Death of Jesus.
In the novel "Waiting for the Barbarians" published in the 1980s (the novel was published in 2013 and transferred to "Baltos lankos" in 2021 - translated by Violeta Tauragienė) the story of Judge, an anonymous high civil servant of the Empire, is told in the first person. The aging man seeks to live a quiet life and does not interfere in the politics of the Empire. He administers justice in a small frontier town founded on land taken from peaceful steppe nomads known as "barbarians" and indulges his secret passions for women and archaeological research in his spare time. However, one day, the case of two "barbarians", a father and his underage daughter, captured by the soldiers, falls into the hands of the Judge. The father is killed by soldiers in front of his daughter, and she is brutally tortured. This throws the Judge out of his normal rut. Pity for the crippled girl turns into paternal care, awakening forgotten feelings. The judge decides to return the girl to her relatives. However, for this of his march, he receives the hatred and cruel revenge of the zealous servants of the Empire. After experiencing the general bullying and execution of the townspeople, the Judge turns into a vagabond, fighting for his life and bread. Finally, he sees the defeat of the Empire, when the army that went to the steppes to fight the "barbarians" does not return, and the city, left to the will of fate, is emptied...
The novel seems to measure the limits of humanity and asks who are the real barbarians: the local inhabitants of the steppes, nomadic farmers, fishermen and artisans are mercilessly persecuted and tortured, or are ordinary townspeople themselves and the Imperial army protecting them indifferent to their suffering?
Coetzee's novel "Waiting for the Barbarians", inspired by the poem of the same name by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, earned its author several prestigious literary awards, in 2005 In Germany, composer Philip Glass created an opera based on it, and in 2019 A feature film of the same name was made in Hollywood (dir. Ciro Guerra).
Árpád Schilling states that in the novel "Waiting for the Barbarians", as in many of his other books, J. M. Coetzee writes primarily about his experience in the Republic of South Africa, about the Western white empire and its relationship with the local black population of the country, about the colonial policy of the Western world in the Middle East , South America or North Africa. But today the Eastern Empire has risen to fight against the "barbarians", today they bomb houses and destroy people.
But whether it's the West or the East, on every front line there's some border town where ordinary, God-fearing people go about their daily lives, thinking that the horrors of war will pass them by because they're decent, upstanding citizens. But nothing can be done. Unless the children. A town, a community of townspeople is at the center of events, when a conflict erupts between a bloodthirsty Empire bent on conquering barbarians and an individual who resists its cruelty - a typical intellectual.
And who are the barbarians? I have two hypotheses: either barbarians don't exist at all and this whole conflict is just a sad joke laced with irony, or barbarians are all of us because we're all human.
