it's okay to decay.

Absolutely! When you google literary analysis of Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri in Russian, the authors dedicate paragraphs to Amadeus and treat it like the same story, as if they don't realise that the different author wrote it. I wonder if they are even capable of analysing Pushkin's text without invoking Amadeus. The same happened with the fan video of the boomer rock star Valery Kipelov's song about Salieri's conversation with the devil - Pushkin-based text, but the video consists of bits and pieces from Amadeus. I saw a Russian review of the film Io Don Giovanni which was mostly about Amadeus and the author wrote that "it was more interesting to watch the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri than Lorenzo da Ponte's inner turmoil".

I skimmed through two Russian books about Salieri the murderer, one is by Gennady Smolin of the KGB, the second by Lev Gunin (likely of the KGB too), and in the absence of proof they both use Amadeus as evidence of Salieri's guilt because "artistic intuition".

I found out about Amadeus in university at the English class, watching that film was our homework. Never heard of the stage play before someone mentioned it in the review of the Amadeus 2025.