As Shakespeare is to these native isles, so Pushkin is to Russia. And Eugene Onegin, Alexander Puskin’s enduring verse novel first published in serial form in 1825, is the most honoured and beloved of all Russian classics. Outside Russia, the story is, of course, most familiar to us through Tchaikovsky’s great opera. We also have John Cranko’s 1965 ballet, set to other music by Tchaikovsky, a production of which is currently selling out at the Royal Opera House. Now a rare spoken-word adaptation is setting the bar. 

All happy families are alike, Tolstoy declares at the start of Anna Karenina, but this adaptation of War and Peace stresses how the surviving Rostovs and Bolkonskys went through various hells to get to that enviable state. In this one respect consummate mover and shaper Timberlake Wertenbaker steals a march on her author. Isn’t there a feeling of flatness when we find Natasha and Pierre sunk in seemingly trivial domestic bliss towards the end of the novel?

Printed large in glorious colour is a row of photographs of Russian women wearing bobble hats (main picture and pictured below). There’s a fuzzy red one, a woolly brown one, one with red stripes against black and another with raised white stripes. Seen from behind, these hand-knitted globes look like a newly discovered breed of sea anemone or a display of exotic cacti.

Earlier this year two giant puppets, plus a bottom (lower case, human) on wheels, dominated Shakespeare’s dream play at the Barbican. Replace the bottom with an ever-present little dog and you might think we’re back more or less where we started nine months ago.

Bakst’s harem drapes and Roerich’s smoking, steaming Polovtsian camp may not have had the most lavish of recreations. But the rest of this homage to Diaghilev shone with an exuberance and even a precision one would not have thought possible from previous seasons of what had once seemed like Andris Liepa’s Ballets Russes vanity project.

“We are not politicians – we are artists.” It’s the familiar cry of creatives all around the world, but it came with an added, rather surprising accent when uttered by Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) president Nikita Mikhalkov at the event’s closing ceremony.

London has had its fair share recently of Chekhov productions from Russia, though none anywhere near as quietly truthful as these from Moscow's Mossovet State Academic Theatre. Veteran film and theatre director-designer Andrey Konchalovsky understands how lives may fall apart or hang in the balance while human beings sip a cup of tea, strum an out-of-tune piano or push a pram.

Dmitry Krymov (b 1954) is one of Russia’s most groundbreaking and celebrated contemporary theatre directors and set designers. Performances by his “Theatre Laboratory” are renowned for combining multimedia with art installation techniques to surprise and thrill audiences across Europe and as far afield as New York.

Had this Moscow production any serious ideas in its head until its suddenly effective epilogue, much might have been pertinently said about an opera in which an imperialistic campaign ends in disaster, and where the Polovtsian “enemy” shows far more signs of a civilized life and wartime courtesy than the corrupt, crumbling court at home.

“A cold coming we had of it,” grumble the three kings in T S Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” later set by Britten as his Canticle IV. “Just the worst time of year for a journey,” they complain, carried onwards by the ungulate bass notes of the piano. Barely 48 hours after having stepped foot on the harsh, wintry Russian soil my two travelling companions (Ian Bostridge and Peter Coleman-Wright) and I lined up on the stage of the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and delivered Britten’s five Canticles, weary eyed and journey worn.