St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre stages Rodion Shchedrin's 1976 opera Dead Souls. This opera, one of the indisputable operatic masterpieces of the 20th century, is inspired by Nikolai Gogol's satirical 1842 novel of the same name. Shchedrin (*1932) premiered Dead Souls at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1977. More than 30 years after the opera's first run, a brand new, bright and expressive staged version sees its premiere at Saint Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre, conducted by Valery Gergiev and directed by Vasily Barkhatov.