A lost voice ... Anna Yablonskaya. Photograph: Royal Court theatrePlaywright Anna Yablonskaya: a tribute
The promising Ukrainian playwright was among those killed yesterday in Moscow's Domodedovo airport. It's tragic to think what more she might have achieved
Among the 35 people killed in the bomb attack on Moscow's Domodedovo airport yesterday was the young playwright Anna Yablonskaya. She was travelling to Moscow from her home town, Odessa, to receive a prize for her most recent play, Pagans.
Anna was one of the leading playwrights of her generation. Born in 1981 in Odessa, she was recognised as one of the new voices of Russian drama: her plays have been performed in theatres across Russia, and she has been nominated for a number of Russian writing prizes. Anna's work was particularly appreciated in Russia. Like other young Ukrainian writers, she seemed destined to be a prophet without honour, unlikely to see any of her own work performed in Ukraine itself, where the literary managers "cross themselves at the mention of new writing", as she wrote in a theatre journal last autumn. Odessa was a town full of theatre, she added. "Is it worth," she asked, "getting upset because we will never manage to force this real-life theatre up on to the actual stage?"
Despite being Ukrainian, Anna wrote in Russian and had her first successes in Moscow, as a young member of the circle of playwrights and directors who surround the teatr.doc theatre, a small basement theatre founded by a group of experimental playwrights. But she never took this success for granted: she was a humble person who curled up when praised by the audiences at her readings, and seemed almost embarrassed by her reception in Moscow. Unlike other writers, she never moved there – she was too firmly rooted in her native Odessa, and she took inspiration from the people and the language around her.
Pagans was widely considered to be her best play, and the award she was travelling to pick up from Iskusstvo Kino, the most revered film magazine in Russia, was for a screenplay adaptation of the script: an indication that her talents weren't in theatre alone. The critic Pavel Rudnev wrote of her work that her main quality was her ability to turn whatever situation the desperate, dehumanised world offered into a "falling cat that always landed square on its paws". She had a rare and benign wisdom, and her plays were compassionate and redemptive. Unlike much new Russian writing, Anna's plays were genuinely full of belief that things might just work out. She wrote with warm understanding of the world, and this was precisely how she was in life: a joyous woman, committed and enthusiastic. It is tragic to think where her dramatic gifts would have taken her in time.
Last summer, she came to London to take part in the international residency at the Royal Court theatre. She spent nearly a month working on her writing and won the hearts of all those around her. Elyse Dodgson, the head of the international department at the theatre, described her as "one of the most brilliant, promising writers we have ever worked with. She was a true friend to her friends. Thank God we have her work to remember her by."
• A public reading of Anna Yablonskaya's play Pagans is due to take place at the Royal Court on 7 April
(Kaynak: guardian.co.uk)
