What are these words?
Those words, Which we love Let's keep silent
. Elena Ivanyushanka

...a caring person who is able to feel
the nerve of time and live with this pulsation inside yourself.
Kristina Banduryna

          We corresponded in Russian and Belarusian. They could also speak English, so as not to have my modest level compared to the interlocutor. Coming from the first post-Soviet generation, for whom school fell in the 1990s, we already understood the prospects of active use of this language and that, what was in the air and abaznachalasya as “cosmopolitanism” – the citizenship of the world, the impression of its boundlessness, geopolitical, professional, intellectual. To remain oneself in this diversity, to preserve interest in foreign cultures and the foundation of “one's own”, built at the crossroads of various influences, is not a task, but a talent. Its owner was, in my understanding, Alexey Strelnikov, a man who paradoxically combined the trajectories of different destinies – an outstanding scientist, philosopher, itinerant an actor, an intellectual of a concrete metropolis, a sensitive son and father. Mediator, a parabola, a desperate comet that fell on someone else's earth in order to germinate, take root, be filled with its energy and give its own. Seed. And the more the thought of his departure and the premature circumstances that contributed to it cuts the consciousness. To sink to the bottom – and already, it would seem, to get to the surface, having confirmed the hope of life, and to be silent. What does this mean for a person with experience of resistance to circumstances, who has managed to teach this to others in time with a spoken word, attention, support? I have no answer to this question. Another thing is obvious: there are rigid “vice” in which a person with a heightened social sense and stable ethos has almost no chance of living to forty. And what is it – a cross or a curse – of the brightest representatives of the generation, I do not know. The idea of this text arose immediately after Alexey's passing away. It was an impulse, exploratory and emotional, although it seemed impossible to break into the information space, electrified by assumptions about the circumstances of his death, the memories of friends and colleagues, which clearly did not fit into the social network feed, which could be flipped endlessly on Strelnikova's page. Finally, we must not forget about the shock mixed with a feeling of “nausea” from a sense of social hopelessness (especially indicative in this regard are the words of the Russian critic Pavel Rudnev, bitter for perception and at the same time shchyry1). At the same time, the feeling of exclusivity of the moment, which goes beyond the experience of grief, individual and joint, did not leave. Over time, doubts disappeared: those days became an important page in the history of Belarusian culture. Fixing them seems very important to me. Realizing that the pathos of the message goes against the perception of the world of Alexei himself, with his ironic smile and calm voice, I will venture to define the “bad luck” of my text. I would like to: – outline the range of Strelnikova's creative searches; – give an idea of what theater and drama (more broadly, culture) could become without him and what they got thanks to him; – to look at what Alexey has done as a single aesthetic system, important for the development of the experimental vector of Belarusian art. The latter requires clarification: there is reason to believe that Strelnikov was the leader of the Belarusian theatrical underground. How weighty – this text will show, the “super task” and “outline" of which I have defined. Unfortunately, it is not as ironic as we would like and how Alexey could do it. Strelnikov's entry into criticism in the early 2000s was distinguished by discussions about the prospects for the development of the then theatrical and dramatic art in Belarus. Alexey has already studied at the Faculty of Journalism of BSU, and ahead – postgraduate studies at the Belarusian Academy of Arts in the specialty “theater studies”, in which he defended his PhD thesis “The use of artistic means of the epic theater of B. Brecht on the Belarusian stage” (Minsk, 2010). All this, of course, does not guarantee the position of the actor (Latin acter) of the cultural process. Nevertheless, being in the scientific context of “centraval” Strelnikov's diverse nature, gave his search a single vector. And it is all the more noticeable that they were carried out in the “adsturkhoyvannya” mode from the mainstream of Belarusian theater studies, with a consistent increase in the critical attitude of the conjunctural flow to it. It seems to me that Strelnikov overcame this attitude over time, creating an original concept of theatrical art in the course of not a dispute, but a dialogue with the experience of his predecessors and the national tradition. It has always amazed me why a person who was a native of Novosibirsk (after all, the current was not genetically related to the space of Belarusian culture), became its researcher and popularizer. At the same time, Alexey's interest was not felt by the neophyte's Palymianism, nor by the ethnic layalism inherent in the apologist of the national idea in its radical version. Meanwhile, time was pushing for that. The beginning of the 2000s – the further development of the post-Soviet “new literary situation”, which was associated by V. One of them, and T. Kislitsyna with the acquisition of national sovereignty, the growth of national consciousness, interest in the phenomenon of national being (V. Akudovich, I. Bobkov, S. Dubovets, etc.), the emergence of creative associations “Tuteishya”, “Societies of Free Writers“, "Boom-Bam-Lit" [1; 5]. In addition, these years were marked by bold experiments in the field of poetics, the diffusion of drama and epic, drama and lyrics, the reactualization of the experience of modernism (in particular, the Western European “drama of the absurd” of the 1950s and 1960s in the plays of representatives of the “Boom-Bam-Lit” generation of the 1990s, and in the 2000s - in the plays of A. Karelin, M. Rudkovsky, etc.), an appeal to the aesthetics of postmodernism of the performance groups “Theater of Mental Instability", “Special Brigade of African Brothers", as well as S. Kovalev, the author of p'esremeykay. All this has formed two problem areas in the scientific-critical discourse. The first of them is the ways and prospects of the development of Belarusian drama and theater, which were discussed on the pages of the leading magazines “Actual problems of culture and Art”, “Theatrical Belarus”, “Literature and Art”, “Art”. Some scientists (p. Vasyuchenko, S. Kovalev, S. Layshuk, D. Mazura) considered the turn of the XX-XXI centuries a “crisis” caused by “socio-political uncertainty and social apathy” [6, p. 320], “commercialization, <...> market conditions of existence” [8, p. 2]), as well as aesthetic reasons: the use of “alien” genre means (journalism, journalism), the inability to create “original, bright, large-scale characters” [6, p. 319]. Others (A. Belsky, E. Leonova, G. Nefagina, I. Shablovsky) – a surge of creative activity, which led to an intensive updating of the genre and style palette. However, the academic discourse was dominated by the opinion about the secondary, aesthetic inferiority of these experiments, priority was given to the “traditional” vector of Belarusian drama, associated with the realistic tradition (and in some cases with the revenge of socialist realism, for example, in the plays “Such a long thunderstorm ...” by S. Bartohavai, “Singing 1941" by G.. Marchuk), which led to the steady dominance of the historical (“The Sword of Ragvalod” (2003) by A. Petrashkevich, “Prince Vitovt”, “Polochanka” (both – 1998) by A. Dudarev, etc.), historical and biographical (“The Poet and the Girl" (2007) by P. Vasyuchenko, the collection “Francis Skorina and Modernity” (Minsk, 2017), etc.). dramas. In addition, an organic part of the theatrical and dramaturgical process of the turn of the 1990s-2000s was the proto-problematization of the national factor, the sharp differentiation of the literary field by language and philosophical and aesthetic orientation. On the one hand, a layer of experimental texts created in the Belarusian language stood out in dramaturgy (S. Kaval?in, A. Astashonok, M. Arakhoyski, I. Sidoruk, etc.), on the other hand, is a Russian–language vector represented by A. Popova, A. Dzyalendzikam, S. Bartohavai, M. Rudkoyskim, A. Kureychik, etc. This accumulated a rather acute controversy about the status of Russian-language texts in the space of national culture, the legality of their accession to it, taking into account the weakened national-cultural component, the manifestations of which were often considered at the language level. Russian Russian and Belarusian Literature at the Turn of the XX – XXI Centuries (Minsk, 2010) was ahead of the conference at the BSU Faculty of Philology, the international (actual, not nominal) status of which seems to have influenced the study of the “national” in policultural practices, collections of scientific papers “Russian and Belarusian literature at the turn of the XX – XXI centuries" (Minsk, 2010), "Views on the specificity of "small" literatures: Belarusian and Ukrainian literature" (Minsk, 2012), a six-volume anthology of Belarusian drama, issued by the Polish literary critic and theater critic A. Maskvin (it consists exclusively of plays by Russian-speaking authors in Polish translation, and two separate volumes are dedicated to P. Pryazhko and D. Bagaslayskam2), monographs by S. Goncharova–Grabovskaya “Russian-language dramaturgy of Belarus at the turn of the XX - XXI centuries (problems, genre strategy” (Minsk, 2015), collective work of S. Kovalev, I. Lappo, N. Rusetskai “RU generation of Belarusian drama: context – trends – individuality” (Lublin, 2020). All this contributed to the entry of the term “Russian-language literature of Belarus” into the scientific and thesaurus the main thing is to take a look at this phenomenon from the meta–phase – “nadempatychnai”, taking into account linguistic and socio-cultural factors. Another thing is that in practice, the differentiation of positions “on the sidelines” did not always have the character of a dichotomy. It is noteworthy that the dissertational study by A. Strelnikova was created under the guidance of Professor R. Smolsky,