The Unknown Woman and the Man under the Bed

An evening street scene in St. Petersburg: a stately elderly gentleman wearing a racoon fur coat is talking confusedly to a young man of humble origin, who is waiting in front of an apartment building for his secret lover to appear. The elderly gentleman describes himself as a bachelor and “of unsound mind, almost insane.” He is indeed obsessed and no less humiliated by his suspicion that he is just about to catch his wife and her lover in flagrante . During his relentless pursuit of them, he finds himself in increasingly absurd situations.

Frank Castorf, who has just ended his 25-year tenure at Berlin’s Volksbühne  theatre, combines this vaudeville-esque novella about the demon of jealousy with another of Dostoyevsky’s stories: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man  discusses metaphysical themes ranging from “logical suicide” to rebellion against God, the Fall of Man, from brotherly love and humility to the crucifixion for which the first-person narrator so yearns.