A Migrant on the Stage: Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky and the Virtue of Time
A Migrant on the Stage: Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky and the Virtue of Time

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses two “migration plays” written by the doctor-writer and dramatist Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky: Mediterranean Paradoxes (1998) and The Time Machine (1999), now available for the first time in English translation, in the volume From Russia for Good (2011). The Author reflects himself in the main characters, respectively the doctors Vesuvius Mediterranean and Musya Belochkin, presenting the steps of his conquest of freedom in the United States. On the stage, the audience discover the difficulty of his travel from Kharkov to Chicago, and the problems of his new life: the re-construction of another existence abroad, the use of a different language, the lack of the native land, the failure of the first marriage. Moreover, there is a balance of his personal experience as a migrant: “time” is the keyword to understand the past and the present, is the virtue necessary for the development of a better life.

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