Eduard Martynyuk

The story is about why people's destinies are intertwined, how they influence each other and how this changes the world around us.

A professional intelligence officer, Jan, who performed a special assignment at the Abwehr intelligence school during the Second World War, returns home. Along the way, he is ambushed by the "forest brothers", led by his fellow student at the intelligence school. He fabricates evidence, according to which Jan gets a "tower". Instead of executing the sentence, Yan is made a "doll" for NKVD cadets to practice their combat skills. Jan manages not only to survive in unequal battles, but also to escape. Run away to finally see his wife and daughter, to restore justice.

Can the darkest moments of life also lift our souls? Drawing on his own experience in a Siberian prison in the company of misfits, murderers and theives, Dostoevsky was inspired to write his novel Notes from a Dead House, telling his brother at the time: ‘Believe me, there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior.’ In Janáček’s hands, Dostoevsky’s inspiration and the raw material drawn from an appalling world of incarceration find an even more powerful form of expression in his last opera, From the House of the Dead. Unfettered by conventional story-telling, Janáček wrote his own libretto, freely weaving together a series of stories of everyday prison life and of the fates of individual convicts.

The story is about why people's destinies are intertwined, how they influence each other and how this changes the world around us.