"In Moscow, the rails start here. Put your ear to it! If you listen carefully, you can hear the Pacific Ocean roaring at the far end. Come on, get on! We're going to roar through eighty-seven cities, cross sixteen great rivers, gallop through seven time zones, and as we go, the steppe, the taiga, the swamps, the marshes, the globe rumbles by, the globe turns beneath us..."

In May 2017, we boarded the Trans-Siberian Express with Hungarian-German theatre foreign legionnaires. The whole thing was Viktor Bodó's idea and obsession, but after we returned home he gave us free rein to write the play. The premiere was in Frankfurt. I stole a scene and a half from Vennegyikt Yerofeyev's Moscow-Petushkiy, but apart from that, every single word was spoken on the train and everything happened - everything but the way it happened. Somewhere between Novosibirsk and Lake Baikal, one's nerves rattle and one's imagination runs wild. The genre of the play: documentary absurd.

It was five years ago that I made this journey, not knowing then that I was recording the last seconds of a bygone world. But the image is contradictory: the sky-blue canvas of peacetime is scorched by dark energy.

Péter Kárpáti