Theater "Antrepriza": The Play “The Gospel According to Pilate” from 24 to 26 September 2025

- No, philosopher, I disagree with you. That is the worst vice! - Pontius Pilate whispers to his imaginary interlocutor in his dream.

He is talking about cowardice.

That there is nothing in the world worse than cowardice. It is cowardice that makes human vices so easy to carry out, and if it were not so, the world would be immeasurably purer, brighter, friendlier.

Among other things, Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a novel about it. About cowardice, including his own. Many know that in a telephone conversation with Stalin, Bulgakov wanted to ask the Führer to let him move to Europe, but in those crazy times, such a request often meant signing himself. And Bulgakov was afraid, regretting his cowardice for the rest of his life, and confessed to his wife that he did not dare to ask the almighty ruler to let him leave the land of "victorious happiness", muttering instead that "a Russian writer should live in Russia".

The Christian tradition, as Western European civilization is called today, essentially springs from precisely this key moment in the history of Homo sapiens - the crucifixion of Christ.

All our suffering and all our happiness - there.

But the foundation of our life today, its order, according to Bulgakov, is based precisely on this: the cowardice of the procurator of Judea, who could not overcome himself and acted as it was absolutely clear to him, as his conscience told him: to release the innocent philosopher.

And it doesn't matter: whether this key moment actually existed or not and whether it is the fantasy of some authors.

No matter.

Our consciousness, our sense of the world among all European and American people without exception, even among those who do not believe in God - is mixed up with the murder of an innocent man who was executed on a cross.

This is very important for people in the 21st century to at least try to understand:

Who are you and where do your problems come from?

Come to our theater for a literary-theatrical reading of the Gospel chapters of the great work of Russian classicism, the novel "Master and Margarita" by M. Bulgakov, which called itself "Gospel according to Pilate".