Life and Fetters: Chéreau-Janáĉek-Dostoevsky

Janáček's opera was fashioned between 1926 and 1928 from passages in Dostoevsky's semi-autobiographical novel about his four years as a political prisoner at "katorga" (hard labor) in Omsk, Siberia. "We don't need to put the prisoners into orange uniforms to talk about Guantánamo…," said Chéreau. "Our job is to make it possible to think about all the prisons in the world at any time." This is, I suspect, a jab at director Peter Sellars, who can easily be imagined placing Dostoevsky's convicts in Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib—in case nobody knows of American misbehavior in them. Chéreau and his collaborators have more sophisticated ways. The costumes and Peduzzi's sets for House were grimly wise. Inmates wore dull garb of our own day, clothed as Everyman in detention. Imposing, sliding gray walls made up the penal complex, and shades of illumination combined with them and the costumes to make time and place unsure. This indeterminacy served to universalize agonies conceived originally in firm time and place, mid-nineteenth century Russia.