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There's a manic, satiric, sardonic, surreal and subversive streak in Russian literature. Gogol's The Nose in the 19th century and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita in the 20th spring to mind. It may well have had origin in a need to navigate and circumvent censorship and repression in both czarist and Stalinist times. Mayakovsky's play (1929) on which the ballet of The Bedbug was based fits this tradition. It was the choreographer Jakobson who altered the plot to put the author on stage as cynical and cruel creator and puppet-master of the other players, even to the point of making his most sympathetic character, Zoya, commit suicide. Here the artist is portrayed as capricious and tyrannical, in keeping with the generally sour mood of the piece. There seems more hate than love in his relation to his characters.
 

The Storyteller in Possokhov's Cinderella is also the motor of the action, but a more benign one. The ballet opens with him sitting on top of his little moon, the lonely artist, lord of all the barren landscape he surveys, literally in a world of his own. (It is impossible to see this without recalling the image of St-Exupéry's Petit Prince sitting on his asteroid – an intentional resonance I assume.) He has a young housekeeper, Ptashka, who is intrigued by his writing and wants to participate. She passes through a door into the story-book world and takes the role of Cinderella. Thereafter the Storyteller leads her through the plot, and the real romance, if romance there is, is between him and Cinderella. There is an affectionate warmth in their relationship and he is a far more attractive character than the silly prince who, of course, has to get the girl. The Storyteller is left sadly alone inside his little planet, such being the way with artists when their creations go out into the wide world.

From their written comments the choreographer and director seem to identify the Storyteller not with Perrault but with Prokofiev, and Ptashka/Cinderella with Prokofiev's wife. In 1941 whilst starting to write the music Prokofiev was moved from Moscow to the Caucasus, artists of importance being dispersed for their own safety at this point in World War II. He left behind his wife of 14 years, Spanish-born singer Caroline Llubera (known as Lina or Ptashka) and two children. Accompanying him was Mira Mendelson, a writer, sometimes referred to as his second wife, who stayed with him till he died in 1953. His marriage to Lina was nullified in 1947 when it became illegal for Soviet citizens to marry foreigners and in 1948 Lina was charged with spying and sent to a labour camp where she remained for eight years. She eventually left Russia in 1972. A messy tale and it is hard to know what Prokofiev's feelings were for Lina in 1941, what his feelings were about leaving her and whether in any sense he wrote Cinderella for her or with her in mind.
 

Try as one might there seems no clear fit between the real events of Prokofiev's life (whatever they were) and this reworking of the Cinderella story. By introducing the author both ballets do however have something to say about the artist and his relation to the characters he creates and to the audience. This kind of extra dimension could be called a post-modern device were it not that Mayakovsky's scenario dates back to 1962. Whatever one may think of it, it does have a theatrical effectiveness.