The Russian Playwright, or the Quiet Back Room – Valeria Vela

May 28, 2025

The pain now was unbearable. 

Beneath the heavy glare of lights and the weight of Russia’s attention, the playwright tried for several moments to introduce his work and found that he couldn’t. Finally he let go of the paper in his hands and admitted that his play was altogether inadequate, that it humbled him greatly to present it, and if it pleased the viewer, could he be so kind as to spare a moment to watch it? 

Then the playwright left the stage and eased himself into his seat above the Moscow Art Theatre.

All his life, the legendary playwright had felt as if there was a secret room inside himself he could not reach. Like an endlessly deferred orgasm.

He had always known he would not be able to be around the people he loved for very long. From the first meeting, he felt acutely the moment he would cease to know another, and he understood an existence without the other person was one he was condemned to from the onset.

And all his life, people had feared the playwright and the hatchet he had taken to life, this strange, quiet man, unsparing.

Now as the play ended, he walked onstage one final time and asked, “Is my fellow man not from the same place that I, too, am from? Does he not come from the same palace of beauty?”

He said, “My business is that of men’s souls.” 

Afterward, in the reception room, among the gilded portraits and heavy velvet drapes, the playwright leaned against the red couch and contemplated becoming merely another ornament. Pain was now a bright point in his chest, metastasizing outward. The room began wobbling, filling with people. And trays floated above the crowd, as servers endlessly offered the city’s finest. For a moment, the playwright let himself imagine that he had done what he had long set out to do, though he knew, in his core, that he hadn’t.

“My humble offering?” he kept saying in soft surprise, whenever somebody expounded on the beauty of his work, told him that their very soul had been touched. And the person left, believing the entire time that they had been mocked.

More people entered, clamoring, swirling around him, like a flood water rising, so that he thought it would never end, and the whole time the terrible pain persisted and demanded his attention.

When the flood subsided, no one was left but the playwright and his young lover, Nadya, who had said nothing to him in the course of the evening. The two were alone in the great room, and he turned to her now.

No one had ever quite understood why Nadya, the general’s daughter, had taken the timid playwright as her lover. 

Nadya, flower among the oligarchs. She was as unreachable as any of the men of war among whom she had been raised. Everybody knew her family, and her lovely face bare, searching. She had spent her youth riding among the army, and now she never left the theater. There was but one unsettling thing about her: her eyes, with their dark circles. 

The playwright said, “You’re upset.”

Her delicate cheeks colored.

“I’m sorry, love,” he pleaded. “You know I try.”

A terrible silence, then Nadya asked, “Oh, but why must you never include the full force of passion? You always stop short. Why do you not live within your work? Why must you be so exacting, cold and cruel?”

She fell to her knees before him. He brought a hand to her red hair and stroked it, suggesting, maybe asking for, intimacy.

“And why,” she cried, “must you not love me? All that I have done in secret and felt truly ashamed of, all my twisted perversions, I do not see them accounted for. All my life, everything that I have wrongly wanted! I always thought: if anyone knew, if anyone could do it, it would be you.”

“But my love–” and now the playwright was really confused, “–that’s not what the play’s for.”

She couldn’t bear the softness in his voice. She put on her cloak and went out into the night.

Her mother called her too hard, exigent; maybe it was true.

As Nadya wound down the city streets, footsteps echoing among the gray stone and buildings, a strange feeling overtook her. She felt increasingly unsettled, that the roads she had known her whole life were empty, joyless. And she understood now that something had indeed changed, that she stood at the other end of a great chasm she had long been crossing, and the first part of her life was small and distant, past. Where before had been the lightness of youth, she now felt nothing but the recalcitrant weight of her personhood. And, always, in her every waking moment, in everything she could see, something waited, just beyond the horizon—

–

Really, with Nadya, the playwright often felt more like her teacher than her lover.

He wondered, from his position of repose, the pain sending him under, why they had ended up so intimately intertwined, when surely they could just as easily have related to each other in another way.

From the unremarkable, formless mists of their first acquaintance, why had she turned out to be a mystery to him? A force that left him undone? A fog he could not think of without opening up, disappearing into.

When he met her, he had no reason to suspect how she would come to consume his waking hours, and the thought of her naked and white before him would not be mechanical or burdensome but instead light a fire.

He thought again now of her words to him. How funny that she, the diamond of Moscow, thought herself a freak. 

Heavy must be the head, he supposed.

Poor Nadya! Isolated among the beautiful ladies and dashing gentlemen of society, the most shining star of all. She had loved his ugliness, had submitted to it. Even now, the thought of pure, glimmering Nadya spread beneath him made him shiver in arousal. 

Not just in him, but in her entire outward life, what Nadya wanted most was to see all of it manifested, every forbidden thought, all she could not say. 

Yes, he thought now, that’s what the play is, but it’s not what it’s for.

Still fussing over Nadya, on the red couch, in the quiet back room, the playwright lay down and died.