The new Italian performance focuses on the last days in the life of Vladimir Lenin’s autopsy doctor, Ales Mishin. Abandoned by his wife, Mishin faces a major identity crisis and is plunged into depression. Heavy doses of beer and vodka don’t help the scientist recover – only his daily job routine helps distract his attention. The Soviet scientist is working on the conservation of Lenin’s body, and decides to experiment with a new substance. Much to his surprise, it destroys Lenin’s body piece by piece. In the long run, Mishin realizes that the only way out is to substitute Lenin’s body with his own…

Lenin’s name is very familiar in Italy, as he visited Italy’s Island of Capri several times in the early 1920s.

Composer Georgio Battistelli says the grotesque opera “The Embalmer” has particularly wide appeal.

“I was immediately carried away by the power of imagination and significance of Renzo Rosso’s play, The Embalmer – by its human and political meaning: The ritual of the conservation of a body, the act of its religious worshiping, the conviction that ‘ideas are immortal’, which in the long run proves wrong… Eventually, the ideas get destroyed just like Lenin’s body. And as the embalmer Mishin takes Lenin’s place, it means that, instead of idolizing the body of a leader, people soon begin to worship an ordinary person.”

In reality, Lenin's embalmed body has been kept in a special glass case in the Mausoleum on Red Square since 1924. Put on public display after his death, its presence in the heart of Moscow has long driven a wedge between those who say it’s a part of the Soviet legacy, and others, according to whom Lenin should be buried in the traditional way along with this legacy.