S.Ch.: One day, the director Evgeniy Pisarev called Alexey Kortnev and me to tell us about his idea of staging Is He Dead? – the only play by Mark Twain recently translated into Russian. He asked us to think about songs for the theatre production. To create a distinctly French atmosphere we proposed to do a free adaptation of French songs from the1960's.  This was not an obvious solution as the play takes place in the 19th century. However, this idea worked very well! Naturally, I could not do without some of my original themes – adventure, crime story, lyricism, etc.