VOLUME 6, NUMBER 1

FEBRUARY, 1986
Soviet
and
'
Drama, Theatre
and
:Pilm
Soviet
and
East-:Buropean
Drama, Theatre
and
Film
VOLUME 6, NUMBER 1
FEBRUARY 1986
SEEDTF is a publication of the Institute for
Contemporary Eastern European Drama and Theatre
under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Study
in Theatre Arts, Graduate Center, City University of
New York with support from the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the Graduate School and the
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of
George Mason University. The Institute Office is
Room 801, City University Graduate Center, 33 West
42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. All subscription
requests and submissions should be addressed to the
Editor of SEEDTF: Leo Hecht, Department of
Foreign Languages and Literatures, George Mason
University, Fairfax, VA 22030. (Proofreading
Editor: Prof. Rhonda Blair, Hampshire College
Theatre, Amherst, MA 01002. ) .
George Mason University
SEEDTF has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals
and newsletters which desire to reproduce articles,
reviews and other materials which have appeared in
SEEDTF may do so, as long as the following
provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint must be requested from
SEEDTF in writing before the fact.
b. Credit to SEEDTF must be given in the reprint.
c. Two copies of the publication in which the
reprinted material has appeared must be
furnished to the Editor of SEEDTF immediately
upon publication.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial Policy ........................ 4
Announcements .. 5
Bibliography . ....... .. ................... 7
"Thaw" at O'Neill ......................... 8
"Lunin or the Anarchy of Reason" 14
"On the Presence and Prescience
of Stanislavsky
"A Seagull" ..........................
"Leonid Zorin" ..........................
26
45
46
Subscription Blank 52
3
EDITORIAL POUCY
Manuscripts in the following categories are
solicited: articles of no m ~ r than Z, SOO words; book
reviews; performance reviews; and bibliographies. It
must be kept in mind that au of the above sub-
missions must concern themselves either with con-
temporary materials concerned with Soviet or East
European theatre and drama, or with new approaches
to older materials in recently published works and to
new performances. In other words, we would wel-
come submissions reviewing innovative performances
of Gogol or recently published books on Gogol, for
example, but we could not use original articles dis-
cussing Gogol as a playwright .
Although we welcome translations of articles
and reviews from foreign publications, we do require
copyright release statements.
We will also gladly publish announcements of
special events, new book releases, job opportunities
and anything else which may be of interest to our
discipline. Of course all submissions are evaluated by
blind readers on whose findings acceptance or re-
jection is based.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced
and carefully proofread. Submit two copies of each
manuscript and attach a stamped, self-addressed
envelope. The MLA style should be followed. Trans-
literations should follow the Library of Congress
system. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors
will be notified after approximately four weeks.
All submissions, inqUlrtes and subscription
requests should be directed to:
Prof. Leo Hecht, Editor
Dept. of Foreign Languages & Literatures
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA ZZ030
4
ANNOUNCEMENTS
PLEASE DO NOT FORGET TO SEND IN YOUR
CONTRIBUTION TO HANDLING AND MAILING
CHARGES FOR SEEDTF FOR ACADEMIC YEAR
1985-86 AT YOUR EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY.
Children of the Sun, Maxim Gorky's pre-Revo-
lution play, has had its American premiere at the
Theater at St. Peter's Church in New York, where it
is continuing in repertory. It opened to mixed re-
views. Although the star, Michael Moriarty, who por-
trays the scientist who cannot keep daily life at bay,
seems to have put some thought into his role, the cri-
tics panned the Mirror Repertory Company for having
attempted do something which exceeded their abili-
ties.
It may have escaped some readers, but the di-
rector of the film Runaway Train, which has been
nominated for three Golden Bear Awards, was Andrei
Konchalovsky.
The annual convention of the Southeastern The-
atre Conference, which will take place in Charlotte,
NC, March 6-9, 1986, will include a panel on "Stanis-
lavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre" and a short
panel on "Contemporary Developments in Soviet The-
atre."
Hungarian Studies, journal of the International
Association of Hungarian Studies, is now in publi-
cation. The journal provides a forum for original
papers within all disciplines of the humanities and
social sciences pertaining to any apsect of Hungarian
past and present. In addition, every issue will carry
short communications, book reviews, and miscella-
neous information. The journal will be published
twice annually by the Akademiai Kiado Publishing
House of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. A sub-
scription is $30. To receive Volume I, No. 1, send a
check payable to "Kultura, Budepaest ISSN OOOZ-
6344" and mail it to KULTURA, Hungarian Foreign
5
Trading Co., P.O. Box 149, H-1389 Budapest,
Hungary.
The 5th Balkan and South Slavic Conference
will take place in Bloomington, IN, March 6-8, 1986,
and will be jointly sponsored by the University of
Chicago Center for Balkan and Slavic Studies and by
Indiana University. Some 60 papers have been pro-
posed. For further information contact Prof. Henry
Cooper, Slavics, Ballentine 502, Indiana University,
Bloomington, IN 47405 or call (812)335-2889 or -2608.
IFEX Films, 201 West 52nd Street, New York,
NY 10019, Tel. (212)582-4318, is offering the
following films for classroom rental:
Autumn Marathon
Incident at Map Grid 36-80
Jazzman
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
Oblomov
Orphans
Private Life
Que Viva Mexico
Rasputin
Red Pomegranate (Armenian VersioJ.)
Siberiade
A Slap in the Face (Armenian Version)
To Remember or to Forget
Vassa
Waiting for Love
Without Witness.
These films are available in Anamorphic (Cinema-
scope) version only. Contact IFEX directly for
additional information.
Edvard Radzinsky's Lunin is most certainly one
of the finest plays written by one of the best play-
wrights of the Soviet period. The English translation
by Alma Law is also superb. The play recently fin-
ished a successful nm in New York at the Bouwerie
Lane Theatre, performed by the Jean Coctau Reper-
tory Company. Its opening performance was at-
tended by Radzinsky, who had received special per-
6
mtsswn to come to the United States for this pur-
pose. It was extremely well received by the critics.
The review in the New York Times called it "stun-
ning." On Theatre conducted a lengthy interview
with Radzinsky during which his long-term coopera-
tive arrangement with Alma Law was established.
The Village Voice marvels at Radzinsky's "courage."
The Villager and The Christian Science Monitor also
add their' kudos for the play, the playwright and the
translator.
BIBUOGRAPHY
Vladimir Ashkenazy. Beyond Frontiers. New
York: Atheneum, 1985. This is the autobiography of
the superb pianist who left the USSR for good in
1963. His book gives great insight of the lot of the
performing artist in the Soviet Union during World
War ll and on the decade after the war at the Moscow
Conservatory of Music.
The following videocassettes and films may be
purchased at Linguitronics, P.O. Box 9504, Arlington,
VA 22209:
The Soviet Theatre
Anton Chekhov
The Moscow Conservatory
50 min.
30 min.
30 min.
$109
$59
$59
New Soviet books, in Russian, on the performing
arts, which include the following, may be ordered
from Viktor Kamkin Bookstore, Inc., 12224 Parklawn
Drive, Rockville, MD 20852. Many are also available
at the New York City Branch of Kamkin:
Artisty v pogonakh: Teatr Baltflota. Lenin-
grad: Lenizdat, 1985.
Baskakov, N.A. Narodnyi teatr khorezma: Rus-
skie kukly, marionetki i maskarabozy. Tashkent:
Akademica nauk, 1984.
Vakhtangov, Evgenii. Cbornik, posviashch,
tvorchestvu rezhissera i pedagoga. Moscow: 1984.
7
Sofronova, L.A. Polskaia teatralnaia kul ture
epokhi prosveshcheniia. Moscow: N auk a, 198 5.
Alfeevskaia, G.S. et. al. (eds). Stravinskii - -
Stati, vospominaniia. Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor,
1985.
Kaidalova, O.H. (ed). Folklornyi teatr narodov
SSSR. Moscow: Nauka, 1985.
SPECIAL SECTION
The following significant and illustrative article
appeared in The Day in New London, CT, on Septem-
ber 1, 1985. It was written by Bethe Thomas, its Arts
Editor, and SEEDTF would like to thank both her and
The Day for letting us use this highly informative and
well-written piece:
THINGS STILL ICY OVER RUSSIAN MELODRAMA
rnA w AT O'NEILL
(How a misunderstanding over a play about Rus-
sia led to an. erosion of detente between the O'Neill
Theater and a Soviet artists exchange program).
If love means never having to say you're sorry, a
real life drama played out last month at Waterford's
Eugene O'Neill Theater Center proves that the rela-
tionship between the Soviet Union and America has a
long way to go.
No one can argue that the dramatic high point
of this summer's National Playwrights Conference
took place offstage, when a delegation sent by the
Soviet Copyright Agency (VAAP) tried, and failed, to
get an American play called "Thaw: A Russian Melo-
drama" pulled from the line up.
The Soviet delegation, after an English-speaking
member mis-translated "Thaw" as c'P.picting the mur-
der of Stalin by the head of the KuB, had cursorily
labeled the play "a pack of lies."
8
Written by Roger Cornish, "Thaw" premiered on
July 31, two days after the Soviets commenced what
has become their annual visit. At the Soviets' insis-
tence, O'Neill president George C. White and confer-
ence artistic director Lloyd Richards apologized, in
front of the entire conference, for any perceived in-
sult to their guests. But they refused to apologize
for the play.
Now, having reflected upon the affair, it is
Richards who feels insulted - over a Soviet accu-
sation that the timing was a deliberate attempt to
sabotage VAAP'_ two-year-old cultural exchange
agreement with the O'Neill.
No apology is anticipated from the Soviets, but
White and Richards have been forced to re-examine
the future of a theatrical exchange program which
has proved just as susceptible to political maneu-
vering as the Geneva Peace Talks.
Somewhow they had hoped that artists might do
better.
Intensifying the predicament is the fact that
the O'Neill-VAAP agreement, signed two summers
ago amidst broad toasts of friendship at White's Wa-
terford beach house, is the only formal cultural
agreement in existence between the Soviet Union and
the United States. The Soviet government cancelled
its exchange agreement with the U.S. in 1980, in re-
taliation for the American boycott of the Moscow
Olympics.
"Anything that is happening in this program is
practically the only thing that is happening on a
cultural exchange basis," said Richards, "which means
that a group such as this (the V AAP delegation) be-
comes much more special than it ought to be." Now
Richards is insisting that if the exchange is to
continue, the Americans are entitled to a better deal.
"I want to see the same kind of engagement of
American artists as we are providing here," said
Richards, who is also the dean of the Yale School of
9
Drama and the artitstic director of the Yale Reper-
tory Theatre.
That means allowing American theater person-
nel who visit the Soviet Union under the V AAP agree-
ment to produce new American works in Soviet thea-
ters, and more Soviet publication of new American
plays.
V AAP delegates have twice produced a Soviet
play of their choosing in Waterford. This summer it
was Sergei Kokovkin's "If I Live," a drama about Leo
Tolstoy's family life, presented in English by Ameri-
can actors.
O'Neill delegations hosted by VAAP in the
Soviet Union, on the other hand, have functioned only
as observer:s.
Of this summer's five-member Soviet delega-
tion, only two spoke English - Genbrikh Borovik, a
commentator on the Moscow evening news, and Gri-
gori Neresyan, a VAAP employee. They read "Thaw"
and translated it for their playwright colleagues,
including Kokovkin, Alexander Gelman and Grigori
Gorin.
Not until the final day of the conference did
White realize that Borovik had told the delegation
that there was a scene in "Thaw" during which a KGB
agent murders the ailing Stalin by removing an intra-
venous tube from his nose. The character actually
contemplates such a move, then decides against it.
White said this summer's crisis points out a
basic difference in the way in which the Soviets and
the Americans perceive the VAAP-O'Neill agree-
ment, and even beyond that, the way in which they
perceive the role of art.
"To Borovik," said White, "This is a forum for
international exchange, for friendship. The fact that
we can be used that way is wonderful, but that's not
what we are about. We are a playwrights con er-
ence."
10
"Thaw" playwright Roger Cornish, contacted
last week in Philadelphia, said he thinks White and
Richards acted "on the whole, properly."
"The play went on as scheduled," said Cornish,
"and ultimately the Soviets were told by Lloyd
Richards (at an Aug. 3 gathering, the last of the con-
ference) that they just had to learn to live with the
way things are done here. But it took a while to get
there."
"There were scores of people at the O'Neill who
bent over backwards to be polite to them while they
kept yelling at us," Cornish said, "and we probably
should have stopped being polite sooner. I went
through one entire meeting where I didn't say a word
because I was afraid they would stage a walk-out."
White said he thought Cornish rather enjoyed all
the attention. But he had great sympathy for Soviet
playwright Sergei Kokovkin, who could only sit help-
lessly by while a real life drama stole his thunder.
It was Kokovkin's first visit to America. "He
must have felt like a man watching his brand new
house go up in flames," said White, a self-proclaimed
"fireman" who personally recruited an audience for
Kokovkin's "If I Live" on the night it had to compete
against "Thaw" at the box office.
White's assist nt, Gayle Ritchie, who escorted
the Soviets around New York following the confer-
ence, reported that the night before they returned to
Moscow, all but Borovik - the group's official
spokesman- expressed general sorrow over the upset
and praised the O'Neill for providing the artisitic
experience of their lives.
"They are not captains of their fate," said
White. "But most of those people, Borovik especially,
know that we wouldn't overtly go out and insult
them. For them to take on so really off ended Lloyd."
White and Richards had anticipated trouble if
the Soviets were to arrive the same week that
11
"Thaw" was being presented. But since the Soviets
are notorious for last-minute changes in itinerary
(three summers ago they didn't show up at all), and
the O'Neill schedule has to be worked out months in
advance, they saw no point in trying to head off a
conflict.
Once the schedule was set, Richards said
changing it would have been the equivalent of saying
that there was something wrong with doing the play.
None of the Soviets actually saw "Thaw." As
luck would have it, the morning after Borovik read
the play the Soviets were seated next to Cornish at
the breakfast table. Nersesyan asked Cornish what
books he had read to research his play about the
transfer of power from Stalin to Khrushchev.
Cornish says his admittedly flip reply that he
had only read "a bunch of trashy novels" was meant
to be self-effacing. White calls it simply "dumb."
Trying to convince the Soviets that Cornish
meant no harm was "like trying to tell a deaf person
what Mozart sounds like," said White. "They don't
have the experience of being able to say what they
want and being able to mouth off. It has nothing to
do with communism or ideology. It's a sense, like
hearing or seeing or smelling, that they just don't
have."
Throughout the conference, the Soviets stead-
fastly maintained that Cornish had no business
writing about the Soviet Union because he had never
been there and could not possibly know all the facts.
All the characters were stereotypical "monsters," ac-
cording to N ersesyan.
The S'Oviets were told that "Thaw" was only a
metaphor for tyranny. But no Soviet playwright
would presume to explore polith. al terror using real
Soviet leaders as a metaphor, and the VAAP dele-
gation was therefore doubly loathe to condone --
much less applaud- any such attempt by an Ameri-
can.
"They had to react strongly," said White.
"They just would not run out of gas," said
Cornish. "They demanded, and got, one hearing after
another."
On Aug. 3, the final day of the conference,
Cornish says he replied forcefully to the Soviets for
the first and only time.
"At that meeting they very clearly accused me
of seeking to foment fear and distrust between the
. U.S. and the Soviet Union," he said. "Their position
was that I, and by implication the O'Neill, had sought
to embarrass them. I told them they could criticize
my play, but not my intentions."
Last week Richards made it clear that political
forums where official statements are read with great
hoopla and positions are entrenched will not again be
tolerated at the O'Neill. "They are not a conference
activity," he said, "nor will they become one."
Even White, who is far more willing to accept
the Soviets' idiosyncrasies, admits that the
conference "got to be like the bloody U.N."
For White, who is the author of the VAAP-
O'Neill exchange and the one who has made the
biggest personal investment in its success,
negotiating a genuine "Thaw" after this summer's
crisis may be the challenge of his career. But he
points with satisfaction to a least one very subtle
artisitc victory.
At the final conference forum, Kokovkin was
sitting not with the Soviet delegation, but with his
cast.
The following article was written by Beate
Bennett, an extremely knowledgeable and astute
theatre person who, although she is not a specialist
on Russian theatre, has done a great deal of work in
New York and saw the Cocteau production of Lunin
twice before writi g the article. ---
13
LUNIN OR THE ANARCHY OF REASON
In 1839, a certain Marquis de Custine travelled
for three months through Russia's European provinc es
jotting down irt his journal some rather acrimonious
observations about what he saw. For example, one
can read the following sweeping comment about the
Russian national Character:
It can be said of the Russians, great and small
- they are intoxicated with slavery. This popu-
lation is like half a game of checkers, for a single
man makes all the plays and the invisible adver-
sary is humanity. One does not die, one does not
breathe here except by imperial permission or
order; therefore everything is gloomy and con-
strained. Silence presides over life and paralyzes
it. Officers, coachmen, Cossacks, serfs, cour-
tiers, all are servants, of different rank, of the
same master and blindly obeying an idea they do
not understand. It is a of military
mechanics; but the sight o1 this beautiful order
does not satisfy me at all, as so much regularity
cannot be obtained except through the complete
absence of independence. I seem to see a shadow
of death hovering over this part of the globe.
The contemporary Soviet playwright, Edvard
Radzinsky, whose work is being presented with some
regularity at the Cocteau Repertory Theatre in New
York City, might echo Hamlet and say, it needs no
Frenchman from the grave to tell us that. His play,
LUNIN OR THE DEATH OF JACQUES WRITTEN IN
THE PRESENCE OF THE MASTER, presented
currently at the Cocteau Repertory Theatre in the
translation of Alma Law, is one continuous tirade
against Russian slavishness and a self- mocking plea
that through imagination one might be redeemed
from its onus. Written in 1978, the play forms the
centre of what Radzinsky himself has termed a "his-
tori cal philosophical trilogy. " In 1971, after a serious
bout with illness interrupted his already established
14
success as a popular playwright of romantic
contemporary realistic plays, he apparently decided
to show another side of his concerns, his training as a
historian and a philosophical bent. The first result
was a play called CONVERSATIONS WITH
SOCRATES which takes place during the last few
days of Socrates's life. Much of it modelled in
substance and form after the famous Plato dialogues,
the play is less the drama of a man convicted to
death and awaiting the famous hemlock than a series
of staged reflections. The third play in the trilogy,
performed last year at the Cocteau Rep under Eve
Adamson's direction, THEATRE IN THE TIME OF
NERO AND SENECA, is of all three the most
theatrical and dependent on immediate rather than
reflected action.
All three plays are philosophical conversations
emanating from a historical character in semi-
historical circumstances. The central character
invariably faces his hour of death. Socrates must
drink the hemlock in 399 B.C.; Seneca finds himself
cornered into suicide by Nero in 65 A.D.; and Lunin,
the former imperial guards officer and Decembrist,
faces his execution by strangulation in a Siberian
prison, twenty years after the uprising, in 1845. The
conversations are fictions, dialectical confections
really, between servant and master, between tutor
and student, between the old master of the mind and
the young master of politics, between the master of
wit and the master of the whip. Of course the
conversations also lay bare a profound irony which
perhaps only Socrates himself may have appreciated
and thus refused to be caught writing. The irony is
that in a scripted reality the Socratic questioner
always seems to win by controlling the kinds of
questions asked and that thus the way for another
kind of tyranny is prepared, a rhetorical tyranny
where the questioner dictates the perimeter of vali-
dation. The responders become his fools. Plato
obviously felt no scruples and merrily enshrined for
us the first dialectician: a Socrates, always elusive
15
but always in control of the argument, who even
turns his death into a winning argument of freedom.
Lunin probably knew of a Russian philosopher of
the previous generation, Gregory Skovoroda, who was
called the Russian Socrates and who wrote his
thoughts in dialogue form much like his contemporary
Denis Diderot. As his own e. Haph he wrote: "The
world set a trap for me but it did not catch me." It is
questionable whether Radzinsky's Lunin with his
Socratic aspirations and his fatalistic- Diderot
hankerings was entirely able to avoid the trap.
Radzinsky places a recurring refrain in his mouth:
"Words spoken take flight, but those written
remain." Lunin's words ended up crucifying him; the
Tsar said, "his tongue wagged too much." He was ob-
viously not as amused by his servant's garrulity as
Diderot's master who could not have existed without
his servant's fatally logical renditions of reason. "But
therein lies perhaps a difference between the Russian
and the French mentality. The Russians seem to see
crucifixion as the only way to salvation and embrace
it wholeheartedly, albeit self-mocking at times.
Radzinsky's Lunin again: "In Russia, a successful
death is more important than a successful life. With
us, death is the elixir of immortality!... It was for
this reason that Abel called to his brother Cain, 'Kill
me.' With blood you must strengthen my ideas! That
is my final secret. Let my blood flow! Blood which
is crying out! How I have fought for this death!" By
contrast, there is a rather significant interchange
between Jacques the Fatalist and his master in
Diderot's novel which served Radzinsky's Lunin as
such an inspiration. It is worth reproducing here, for
the difference in attitude towards freedom as a
personally felt good and the absurdity of so-called
free actions brings into question Radzinsky's reverend
reference to Diderot. Jacques and his master are
travelling along the highway from no particular point
to no particular point. As usual they spend their time
bantering:
16
THE MASTER: What are you thinking
about?
JACQUES: I was thinking that while you
were talking to me and while I
was answering, you were talking
to me without willing it and I was
replying to you without willing it.
THE MASTER: And so?
JACQUES: So? So we were two veri-
table living, thinking machines
There is in the machines only one
more force involved.
THE MASTER: And what additional
f ,lrce is that?
JACQUES: May the devil take me if I
can conceive how that force can
act without cause. My captain
used to say: "Postulate a cause
and an effect will follow: from a
weak cause, a weak effect; from a
momentary cause, a momentary
effect; from an intermittent
cause, an i n ~ r m i t t n t effect;
from a . restrained cause, a slow
effect; from a vanishing cause, no
effect at all."
THE MASTER: But it seems to me that I
feel deep down within myself that
I am free, just as I feel that I
think.
JACQUES: My captain used to say:
"Yes, now that you don't wish
anything; but can you will to
throw yourself from your horse?'
THE MASTER: That's simple. rn throw
myself.
JACQUES: Gaily, without compunction,
without effort ?
THE MASTER: Well, not completely; but
what does it matter so long as I
throw myself off and prove that I
am free?
17
JACQUES: My captain used to say:
"What! You can't even see that
without my challenge you would
never have taken it into your head
to break your neck? So that it is I
who take you by the foot and
throw you out of your saddle. If
your fall proves anything, it's not
that you are free, but that you are
mad." My captain used to say
that the enjoying of a liberty
which could be produced without
motive would be the true
characteristic of a maniac.
THE MASTER: It's a little too much for
me, but in spite of you and your
captain, I shall believe that I wish
when I wish.
This novel which Denis Diderot experimented
with in the years before and after his trip to Russia
in 177Z inspired another Eastern European writer.
Milan Kundera wrote his only play, an homage to
Diderot and a variation on the novel, shortly after
the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968. His JACQUES
AND IDS MASTER is a very different work from that
of Radzinsky although both are primarily plays of
conversation. However, while Kundera by means of
variation works at interweaving three different
narrations of fundamentally the same "love" story,
Radzinsky pursues a much more and
egocentric path. While Kundera echoes and pays
homage to a great many paradigmatic servant-master
dialogues, from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to
Vladimir and Estragon, also reflecting all the while
the ironic interdependence of the big and the little,
Radzinsky insists on the pathos of the servant's
struggle to attain and maintain his sense of inner
freedom or illusion of will in the face of intractable
and, above all, cynical tyranny. While Radzinsky's
Lunin, alias Jacques spends much of the play trying
to understand his fall from grace, i.e., his fall from
18
the protective aureole of imperial "love," and in the
end accepts this fall as his salvation, Kundera under-
stands the master-servant relationahip as one which
is best defined as without love. In his introduction to
the English edition of the play, which was performed
under Susan Sontag's direction at the American
Repertory Theatre in Cambridge in January 1985,
Kundera makes a remarkably lucid comment about
'the tyranny of feelings, above all love: he tells of an
incident during the occupation in 1968 where he was
stopped by Russian soldiers for an inspection. The
fields and woods all around were larded with Russian
artillery. After the search operation, a Russian
officer asks him: "How do you feel?" He continued,
tells Kundera: "It's all a big misunderstanding, but it
will straighten itself out. You must realize we love
the Czechs. We love you!" His analysis of this love
as the criterion for action in much of the Christian
history of Europe until the arrival of Renaissance
skepticism bears quoting: "Man cannot do without
feelings, but the moment they are considered values
in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for
kinds of behavior, they become frightening. The
noblest of national sentiments stand ready to justify
the greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swelling
with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred
name of love. When feelings supplant rational
thought, they become the basis for an absence of
understanding, for intolerance; they become, as Carl
Jung put it, ' "' he superstructure of brutality.'"
Referring to of Russia's
history as one without the rationalizing effect of the
Renaissance, Kundera sees in the Russian mentality a
very different balance (or imbalance) between senti-
ment and rationality, one in which "we find the
famous mystery of the Russian soul (its profundity as
well as its brutality)." .
Radzinsky's play partakes very much in a re-
flection of this brutality. Not only is Lunin's fate a
brutal one, his own character reflects a kind of
brutality which seems to grow out of an absence of
19
love. He identifies with those characters who say
"No" but his refusal takes the form of negation, of
self-isolation. There is no viable alternative in
Lunin's book. He is very much composed in the tra-
dition of the Romantic metaphysical rebel, the ones
who can be found in Mickiewicz, Krasinski, and ulti-
mately Dostoevsky (an author who irritated Kundera
with his "universe where everything turns into
feeling"). The historical Lunin must have provided
Radzinsky with a certain amount of leeway to con-
dense this "via dolorosa" through negation into a
murky salvation by a vision of love. (Echo of
Goethe: "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan. ") Who
was this Lunin which attrac.ted the historian/play-
wright in Radzinsky? Why did he choose this gen-
erally lesser known of the Decem brists? Why not
Ryleev, the poet, or Pestel, the radical, or
Trubetskoy, the failure, or Volkonsky, the curious
recluse with his beautiful wife, Maria, the "angel of
Siberia"? Lunin was an odd number in an already
rather motley lot of aristocratic reformists.
Radzinsky's historical interest in Lunin seems to have
been aroused by the anarchic side in the man while
his interest as a playwright must have latched on to
Lunin's quixotic and garrulous personality, as well as
the pathos of his near total i"'olation even in the
midst of social gregarity. In sho1 t, Lunin is a suitably
Romantic subject matter for a playwright whose
earlier successes were largely romances.
Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin could have been in-
vented by Pushkin. He was a military officer who
had participated in most of the Napoleonic wars and
moved in the highest social circles of Petersburg,
Paris, and Warsaw. As a character, he appeared dif-
fident, fond of dueling, a desirable bachelor in and
out of love. His involvement with the Decembrist
plot was more indirect and though he harbored like
many Western educated aristocrats of his generation
reformist ideas, his contribution to the uprising was
more that of a sardonic wit than actual insur-
rection. Nevertheless he had severely incriminated
20
himself and had enough social n ~ m i s to draw the
severest punishment. He was convicted to a lifetime
of hard labor, along with the other Decembrists who
had not been executed, to be spent in the camps and
mines of farthest Asian Siberia. While in Siberia he
became an old eccentric who would proclaim that
"though he had only one tooth left in his mouth, even
that one was directed against Nicholas." Or he would
send curious Buriat tribesmen scurrying in awe when
he would tell them with a clear gesture to his neck
that he was accused of doing "chik" to the Tsar.
These stories are told by Maria Volkonsky whose chil-
dren he tutored in history and Greek, "the language
of angels" as he would call it. He was a loner who
surrounded himself with six dogs during the time of
relative ease near Irkutsk where after ten years of
hard camp existence a semi-civilized existence could
be established and where the Volkonsky household
became a cultural centre. He assessed his situation
rather coolly: "I am known as a resettled state
criminal. In England they would refer to me as
Lunin, a member of the opposition. For that in fact
is my political status. My weapon is my ability to
think." He did not lack in that ability nor in sarcasm,
"the whip which cuts as deeply as a headman's
axe." This ability and this "whip" landed him back in
the most notorious prison, Akatui, near the Chinese
border, a place which according to Lunin must have
been built by "an architect who must have inherited
Dante's imagination." He lived there four more years
and died from questionable circumstances. Yet his
autopsy, had he been able to able to observe it, would
have probably given him great occasion to exercise
his "whip." Lacking proper tools, the prison doctor
split open his head with an axe. The death has
remained a mystery to this day. Not in Radzinsky's
drama, however.
Radzinsky's play unravels backward from a
known end and procedes forward from an arbitrary
beginning. The action is c'ondensed into the last
three hours of Lunin's life, from midnight until 3 a.m.
21
when the execution by strangulation has been
arranged. The play starts with the report of Lunin's
death, as presumably discovered by a fellow inmate,
being dictated by the guard Grigoriev to the prison
scribe. Then Grigoriev informs Lunin of his im-
pending demise and from then on the play progresses
nonlinearly through a flow of remembered scenes and
reflections of the past as well as contemplation of
the present situation. The conversations are totally
engendered within Lunin's mind and the party which
he evokes in order to meet the characters of his past
and those who are still active behind the scenes in his
present tense, all of that is entirely a product of his
imagination. Through his imagination he raises them
and himself to figures of a mythical dimension while
he keeps them occupied in the trivial activities of
high society, card plays, arrivals, dancing,
and chatting. He talks, they c1.at. He diminishes
their humanity while enlarging their function in his
panoply of masks who have, in his mind, devoured his
life. Through the conversations and through the
mythifications, he tries to put everything in order.
Alyosha Orlov, a fellow member of the imperial
guard and one who made career in the infamous Third
Section (Security) becomes for him a latter-day Cain;
Volkonsky, the co-conspirator, is another Abel; Tsar
Alexander, Grandduke Constantine, and Tsar Nicho-
las, the three brothers blend into one Caesar (and
Jacques's master); and Lunin, who would have liked to
have seen himself as a Brutus, becomes the scapegoat
of the revolution. The uprising itself is mythified
into the equivalent of the French Revolution as he
remembers Desmoulins' purported saying upon
mounting the scaffolding to the "The
revolution devours its children like Saturn! Take care!
The gods are thirsty!" The most shadowy figure is
the female who remains darkly at the periphery as a
faceless body who only now and then is given a dis-
tinct voice. This one female figure embodies all the
women he has known and whose faces he has for-
gotten and who have melted into that kind of
anonymous notion of the Romantic feminine, mostly
zz
silent or at best pleading to be saved by either being
spared or taken. Radzinsky created a rather shape-
less mask with this one female character. This is too
bad for the mot ~ s at his disposal, Maria Potocka,
and especially Maria Volkonsky, were anything but
wispy women.
Although the play relies on historical precepts,
it is basically a very personal memory play with a
dream structure reminiscent of Mickiewicz's FORE-
FATHER'S EVE and Krasinski's UNDMNE COMEDY.
However, there is also a rather conscious attempt at
raising questions about historical validation. As a
Western reader or viewer one is placed in a peculiar
situation which lies in a conflict of perceptions, many
of which are hopelessly shackled by propaganda
posing as information from a whole range of in-
terested parties. This becomes particularly com-
plicated when a writer from the Soviet Union ad-
dresses a part of his own history which has undergone
continuous revision. How is one to understand the in-
herent ironies - with a Western eye to bolster one's
own prejudices which tend to be fueled by a mixture
of skepticism and sympathy? Radzinsky chooses as a
model the SocratiC dialogue but he creates a mono-
mythic piece. His rhetorical dramaturgy would de-
mand critical reason. Words are heaped upon words;
the historical cannons are great but the words end up
flying like buck-shot and elude any possibility of
serious impact.
The Russian production was apparently a rather
grand historical pageant. By contrast, what happened
in the small Bouwerie Lane theatre under Eve Adam-
son's direction and with Craig Smith's emotionally
charged Lunin was more a personal descent. In a
program note, Alma Law sees the play and its com-
panion pieces as treating "the dilemma of the intel-
lectual confronting authority." I am not so sure
whether Lunin would wish to be reduced to this, be-
cause his intellect serves him to fabricate an alterna-
tive to real authority whereby he can escape rather
than confront. This solution by imagination, in his
Z3
case fueled by bits and pieces of historical proto-
types, is so personally subversiv." that the perpetrator
will be branded a fool and a madman. Of course,
poets have loved their madmen and fools and safely
placed their critiques into these twisted mouths.
Sophocles already knew into whose mouths he should
place words of reason so anarchic that political
reason had to be shown for what it is, a convenient
commonplace. Those who rule are therefore always
vindicated on the surface of the commonplace and
safely put away those madmen who are safely loved
by the Population as the personae of its own anarchic
desires. Yet place these same critical words into the
mouth of a figure who refuses to play the madman or
the fool and the authorities will try to silence those
words, see Beaumarchais' FIGARO and perhaps
Diderot's JACQUES which was not published until
after the author's death. Those two servants were no
fools but their reason was truly anarchic and dan-
gerously lucid and logical and, above all, independent
of faith in and love of the master. Radzinsky's Lunin
traps himself in his madness and playing of the fool.
He tells us in the end, that "in all the days of human-
kind in times of outrage - and the cross - there is
always one who says: 'No' in that was the
meaning." But he also tells us that he used the
speeches of Socrates to commit his crime of writing
and he sees this as the u1 tim ate joke against the
authority - that he copied speeches and attached his
name. Yet Radzinsky undermines even this by having
the scribe end the play, reading a list of the material
belongings found on Lunin after his death, among
these, thirty sheets of "unconnected words and
indecipherable markings." On whom is the joke?
Lunin? The authorities? The audience? Where does
this leave Lunin's ecstatic last outburst, referring to
the woman's face, "I see! My God! After so many
years I see your face again! I see! I see!"? Is it a
retreat into the privacy of feeling, of faith, of love?
If so, where is the conflict now? After three
viewings and innumerable readings of the play, I fear
I come away with less and less insight into the partie-
Z4
ular conditions of a Soviet writer and historian who is
bound to be sensitive to the constant material revi-
sionism of Soviet historiography {who is in, who is
out,- for what reasons?) and of a publi.c who viewed
things semiotically before it became fashionable in
the West and of governments who insist on the flat
unreflective materiality of "pravda." I am bothered
by this retreat into the early 19th century form of
heroic madness and isolation, of this mystification of
negation. However, bothered or not, it is very im-
portant to be given the opportunity to hear voices
from a spectrum too rarely heard, since we continue
on t ~ s journey of Jacques and master where the
master orders but the servant chooses, where forward
means all directions and anywhere equally for master
and servant. It is cause for laughter and for melan-
choly, as Kundera would show and Radzinsky would
indicate.
Works cited:
Diderot, Denis. Jacques the Fatalist and His
Master. Transl. J. Robert J...oy. New York: Norton,
1978 (1959).
Kundera, Milan. Jacques and His Master.
Transl. from the French by Michael Henry Heim.
New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Law, Alma. Program Note on Edward
Radzinsky in Showbill, Jean Cocteau Repertory 1985-
86. New York: Playbill Inc., 1985.
Radzinsky, Edvard. I, Mikhail Sergeevich
Lunin. Trans!. by Alma H. Law. New York:
Humanities Institute for Contemporary Eastern
European Drama and Theatre {CAST A), The Graduate
School {CUNY), 198Z.
Sutherland, Christine. The Princess of Siberia.
The Story of Maria Volkonsky and the Decembrist
Exiles. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1984.
{For anectdotal information about Lunin.)
Z5
Vernadsky, George. Ed. A Source Book for
Russian History from Early Times to 1917. Vol. n.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. (For the
memoirs excerpt of ~ q u i s de Custine.)
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 7 & 8.
Ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
Works consulted:
Mazour, Anatole G.
Revolution. 1825. Stanford:
Press, 1961 (1937).
The First Russian
Stanford University
O'Meara, Patrick. K. F. Ryleev. A Political
Biography of the Decembrist Poet. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984.
Radzinsky, Edvard. Conversations with
Socrates.
Radzinsky, Edvard. Theatre in the Time of
Nero and Seneca.
Beate Hein Bennet
The following article by Spencer Golub,
University of Virginia, is a revised and much
expanded version of a paper which the author pre-
sented at the AATSEEL Conference in Chicago in
December, 1985.
ON THE PRESENCE AND PRESCIENCE OF
STANISLAVSKY: A POLEMIC
"With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch."
(Hamlet, I.i.)
Konstantin Stanislavsky has been damned by the
praise which attends the evocation of his name as
26
much as by the questionable company his disembodied
spirit posthumously has been made to keep. Unlike
many of his contemporaries, Stanislavsky did not pre-
sent himself to the world as an enigma to be
pondered and unravelled. An experimentalist trapped
in a moderate's psyche, he was born too soon to be a
true revolutionist and had the future revealed to him
before he could personally discover or invent it. A
unique confluence of personal and historical cir-
cumstances has made Stanislavsky in his own time
and in ours appear to be simultaneously avant-garde
and passe (he was in reality a progressive), and often
more right thinking than right doing. He could not
grasp all we have dreamed for him . If ever there was
an artist who consciously labored to see and know
more than his fate would allow, it was he. Never-
theless, in the ongoing quest to create the theatre of
the future, we must continue to love art, and not
Stanislavsky in art, especially when and where his
path and the future's diverge. To do less would be
doom the theatre to relive, that is, mimetically to
r e p r o ~ u e the past.
Stanislavsky's example as much as his achieve-
ment is truly estimable. His career was informed by
a spirit of generosity, tireless seeking and self-
criticism. He was an exemplary student of life and
art. And yet, as many have begun to recognize,
Stanislavsky's legacy to the modern theatre was not
bold enough. So much of his thinking about theatre in
general and acting in particular was reactive, in-
volved in what he had seen rather than with what
there was yet to imagine that he left a number of
important questions unasked, let alone unanswered.
His theory, born of an ethical and instructional im-
pulse, was devised largely on demand. His theatre,
he stated, "was conceived not for the purpose of
destroying the splendid old but, on the contrary, with
the idea of carrying it on to the best of its ability."
1
And yet his society's proximity to Russia's relatively
unenlightened (re. theory and staging) theatrical past
was very much with him. He feared that artistic rad-
2.7
icalism would lead either to anarchy or else back to
the stale conventionalism, the

pompos-
ity and lassitude of the nineteenth- century stage. He
was the primary agent for a new professionalism, a
new code of conduct in the theatre. At the same
time, he astutely and at times automatically seemed
to wrap himself and his own world view in the impen-
etrable mantle of the actor's truth and mastery, for
which he so stoutly proselytized.
Stanislavsky called the Moscow Art-Accessible
Theatre, whose name was later shortened to the
Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), the "first rational,
moral, public theatre." z These creditable turn-of-
the-century biases in retrospect constitute a large
part of the problem with the Stanislavsky-MAT
legacy to the modern theatre.
Stanislavsky, like Lev Tolstoy whose What Is
Art? was published in 1898, the year of MAT's
founding, believed that art has a great responsibility
to serve and better the people (although MAT was a
"popular" and not a "people's" theatre). He posited
that "the theatre has neither the capacity nor the
right to serve pure art alone," and he cringed when
his Luciferian protege Vsevolod Meyerhold pro-
claimed his willingness "to laugh in !he face of the
crowd when it fails to understand us."
Stanislavsky loved man's rational intelligence,
his civilizing faculty, and the theatre as a civilizing
force. He took comfort in a fully integrated and re-
producible reality made possible by cognition. Freud
began writing The Interpretation of Dreams in the
year of MAT's founding, and Stanislavsky's work re-
veals a distinct affinity for the interiority of psycho-
analytic theory culled from various sources which
helped him to paint a composite picture of verifiable
reality. As Michael Goldman suggests in his excel-
lent essay, The Actor's Freedom, Stanislavsky's
emphasis on the subtextual mechanics of perfor-
mance was helped and actually occasioned by the
Z8
dramatic text' s concern with subtextual life which
antedated even F reud.
4
Stanislavsky's theatre within a his-
torical tradit ion of social advocacy. Activist man
was its hero - man the striver, man the builder.
Stanislavsky was at home with Gorky' s characters
more so than with Chekhov's whose apparent indo-
lence and non-participation in their fates seemed to
him to be strangely unproductive. Stanislavsky's
celebrated differ ences with Gordon Craig in their
Hamlet collaboration at MAT (1909-12) were the in-
evitable result of conflicting liberal humanist and
symbolic visionary conceptions of man's fate, stature
and the scale of the world which he was either
destined or powerless to rule/move. Stanislavsky
viewed actor-man and Craig the scenic world as
being larger than life, respectively.
Characteristically, Stanislavsky empathized and
even identified with Craig, whom he professed to
understand and feel comfortable with from the start
(as opposed to Chekhov bK whose presence he was
made continually uneasy). However, Stanislavsky
could not transform empathic understanding into an
active acceptance of what seemed to him to be
Craig's confused t heatrical vision. His self-pro-
claimed role as the actor's spiritual guardian would
not have it so.
For all that has been written on the subject, the
essential theoretical difference between
Stanislavsky' s realist position and that of the theatri-
calists was that the l atter considered theatre to be
synonymous with theatricality. Stanislavsky viewed
conventions and conventionalism as modes of perfor-
mance detachable from the idea and essence of
theatre and capabl e of being conceived and practiced
with varying degrees of success according to how
well they serve artisti c truth. In practice, however,
and in spite of his best efforts to think ot herwise,
Stanislavsky r egarded much of the theatricalism of
Craig, Meyerhold, Evreinov, et al. as just so much
artistic egoism. More importantly, said t heatri-
29
calism, in his estimation, tended in the direction of
symbolist defeatism, a willed sacrifice of man's will
to the authority of the artist who seeks to author the
world in his rather than in nature's or even the col-
lective's image.
To the theatricalists, Stanislavsky's VJston
revealed a of wit, spontaneity and imagination
and an inability to look back as far as theatre's
sources. Craig declared Stanislavsky to be "without
an engrained sense of theatricality" and "a little
inclined to think wten he is reflecting an image that
he is creating it." But then reflection was really
what Stanislavsky the director and acting theorist
was all about. While Craig and Evreinov in particular
were obsessed with the issue of originality,
Stanislavsky was suited to and accepting of, if not
content with, his role as a systematizer devoted to
the recreation of life in art. This systematization, he
maintained, was made necessary by the general lack
of discipline endemic to the Russian actor and the
Russian stage.
The recurring drama of the artist son killing his
progenitor so as to give birth to himself was exacer-
bated in Stanislavsky's day by the emphasis placed
upon the original, self-dramatizing artistic person-
ality. The erect, prematurely gray figure of
Stanislavsky soon became a symbol for a benign but
outmoded humanist patriarchy in the arts. For his
part, Stanislavsky perceived originality as consti-
tuting a mask of personality donned by those of
inferior talent and discipline to and even
justify their inadequacies as artists. The efficacy of
Stanislavsky's personal and world views was not pred-
icated upon the issue of originality. Stanislavsky did
not, like the symbolists, believe in an indivisible,
preexisting truth which only intuition could reveal.
He did not objectify the present nor did ' he truly
imagine the future. He located truth not in form but
in man the maker of forms. Stanislavsk)r was a
romantic positivist, and yet he rejected the romanti-
cism and in particular the "staginess" of the
30
nineteenth-century theatre on the one hand and the
romantically-derived theatricalism of developing
twentieth-century stage on the other. He was
generally unable to capture the essence of
Shakespeare, whom he excepted from the false
romantic tradition, nor could he fully master Moliere
or Gogol. He was faulted frequently for reducing
Shakespeare's tragic to realistic, middle-
class character roles.
Leonid Andreyev, whose mystical dramas
Stanislavsky produced at MAT, insightfully stated
that "Shakespeare is a pose, an actor, acting in all
things, a brilliant pattem of self-sufficient words,
theatrical magnificence. " Of Moliere's The
Imaginary invalid, Andreyev wrote that it is "built
entirely on acting and merry pretense, on the most
thorough2oing and enchanting disdain for psy-
Both statements could be made with
equal conviction regarding Gogol's theatrical world.
Although Stanislavsky always loved the theatre, he
understood it less when it lied, to employ his
implicitly moral perspective. The problem is, of
course, that the theatre alwayslies. The artist is not
given a choice. Thus, in Moliere's terminology,
Stanislavsky loved the theatre "in spite of itself," the
awareness of which fact occasioned the alternative
theatricalist terminology. of his day - the theatre "as
such," "for its own sake" and "as/for itself."
Stanislavsky's much-documented difficulties with
acting in and producing Ibsen's plays may have
derived in part from the fact that the central action
of these plays, a relentless seeking after truth, is
. embodied in a form whose realism is an illusion.
Ibsen was afterall the favorite playwright of the
Russian symbolists and with good reason. He had
found a way to contemporize the ancient Greek
concept of Ananke (necessity, implacable fate),
internalizing it in character and interiorizing it in
environment. Stanislavsky's 1905 production of
Ibsen's Ghosts, in one Soviet critic's estimation,
succeeded only in lowering this symbolic drama to
31
the pedestrian level of "a Norwegian Uncle Vanya."S
This remark is doubly ironic given Chekhov's
dismissal of Ibsen as a playwright and the accusation
levelled at Stanislav:;ky that he had reduced
Chekhov's dramas from the level of symbo1.
12
These conceptual failures are remarkable when
one considers two facts: 1) Stanislavsky chronologi-
cally founded the director's theatre in Russia, -2)
despite his naturalistic methodology, Stanislavsky
was enamored of the romantic, heroic gesture. As
regards the first point, the seminal anti-realist
theoretical Theatre: A Book about the
New Theatre (1908), which contained articles by
Meyerhold, Andrei Bely, Valery Bryusov and
Alexandre Benois among others, was actually
dedicated to Stanislavsky. Here, as many
instances of MAT-baiting, Stanislavsky the artist was
distinguished from MAT the institution, which Meyer-
hold likened to "a garish bazaar," Evreinov called
"mercantile" and the futurif!s labelled "that
,.espectable refuge of triviality."
In his early days at MAT, Stanislavsky was
actually accused of being a
(necessary, he argued, given the inexperience of his
actors at the time), .a charge which would resurface
with the advent of his system of acting.
14
The critic
Aleksandr Kugel (Homo Novus), Evreinov's conten-
tious associate at the Crooked Mirror Theatre and a
noted champion of actor's rights, spoke dismissively
of "the carpentry and paperhanging" (i.e., the
mechanics) of both Stanislavsky's and Meyerhold's
productions which smothered the actor's creativity.
And Gordon Craig, whose theatrical idealism often
wore the mask of actor-hating, said that his
experience at MAT convinced him that Stanislavsky
had an even worse opinion of actors than he had.
Stanislavsky "uses them," said Craig, "as one uses
bookbinding tools or needles and thrergs he dooms
the actor to everlasting servitude." This is the
very same sort of criticism that Stanislavsky had
levelled at Meyerhold when the latter ran MAT's
3Z
Theatre-Studio and which would be encountered by
Meyerhold more widely as artistic director of Vera
Komissarzhevskaya's theatre and throughout his
career that followed.
In reference to the second point, Stanislavsky
derived his sense of the heroic actor from life and art
- from the inspirational Italian tragedians Rossi and
Salvini, from Shakespeare's Brutus and from Moliere
who starred in his own life's drama. Stanislavsky
insisted that Mikhail Bulgakov reconceive the
beleagured and diminished Moliere in his Stalinist
allegory A Cabal of Hypocrites (1930) and in
particular that he add ~ scene in which the artist is
seen engaged in the act of creation, th1Jtoariest and
least successful of theatrical cliches. While he
favored realistic depiction on a heroic scale,
Stanislavsky rejected the real heroism that is
available to the actor, the presentation of self made
possible by some measure of what Meyerhold called
"freedom in subordination." While Stanislavsky
considered this condition to be necessary and natural
in opera where the composer rules, h

~ thought it to
be inimical to the nonmusical theatre.
In eschewing the false show of theatre past and
present, Stanislavsky evolved an image of the theatre
that was sensory, spatial, historical, linear and
concrete. He sought to create in the theatre "the
sensation of uninterrupted life," mimetically
reproducing the essence of life which according to
him is "a meeting point between great historical
events and mundane activities." He employed as his
practical model the Maly Theatre company of the
late nineteenth-century where Russian stage realism
was born, where great character actors seemed to
entef the stage not from the wings but directly from
life.
8
This approach at times led to excessive
antiquarianism at the expense of lived experience,
historicity which was more correct than actual and
the presentation of historical ' rather than theatrical
truth, a problem which Stanislavsky's critics and the
master himself readily acknowledged. Stanislavsky
33
was even known on occasion to have corrected
Shakespeare's historical errors, a practice which
places him in the company of neoclassicists and
sentimentalists of the ~ v n t n t h and eighteenth
centuries, respectively. I
The question of Stanislavsky's competing
allegiances to the dramatic text as literature and the
text of performance is, as with his theatricalist
contemporaries, problematical. At the time in which
Stanislavsky began his career, theatre and drama
were still legitimized as much as possible in relation
to generalized concepts of Art and Literature, as the
name of his first serious theatrical endeavor (the
Society of Art and Literature) indicates. Slavicist
Nicholas Rzhevsky sees Stanislavsky's dedication to
bringing great literature to the stage as being more
intentional than conditioned by social values and
norms, a position which is difficult wholly to prove or
disprove.
\
In any case, Stanislavsky's thinking about
literature as a discipline was not particularly
advanced for his time. One wishes that Stanislavsky
ha<l had more to say about language apart from
literature, as a source and level of theatrical
understanding. Language for him was a support
system, a means of verifying the truth of the play-
world, but his discussions of it were focused largely
on matters of style and not modes of performance.
Language was seldom if ever considered as being
antecedent to the actor's interpretative skills. His
unwillingness to break open the text as did Meyerhold
is not so much indicative of his veneration for the
written play text as for the unwritten text of the
world, life, which it depicted and reinforced. It was
similarly Meyerhold who first "put October (i.e., the
Revolution) into the theatre" and concomitantly
dessicated its language.
While Stanislavsky did succeed eventually in
constructing environment psychologically rather than
archeologically (e.g., his 1930 production of Othello),
34
he never completely broke through the Renaissance
proscenium arch and his own fourth wall at the
conceptual stage to affect co-
authorship of the theatrical event. Stanislavsky
was hindered in this by what he felt to be a necessary
paternalism directed at the audience. It had to be
cured of its bad habits, made to attend the actor and
acknowledge the mastery of Art. While he spoke of
there being a communion of feeling between stage
and auditorium, said union was forged by an empathic
leap on the spectator's part, mirroring the actor's
emotional connection with the role. This confluence
of emotions creates mood in the theatre, but it
occurs long after the arcrJtectonics of the theatrical
event have been defined.
While Stanislavsky imagined an audience in the
theatre (e.g., in his idea of the actor's "public
solitude"), he did not create the audience for each
particular play as did Meyerhold through most of his
directorial career and Evreinov, especially in his
medieval and Spanish Golden Age productions at the
Ancient Theatre (1907-8, 1911-lZ), which included an
onstage "audience" of actors. Furthermore,
Stanislavsky's unprecedented decision to have his
actors tum their backs on the audience, which he
claimed was done largely to disguise the inadequacies
of inexperienced actors in climactic emotional
moments in the early days of MAT, argued against
true co-creation. ZZ By reaffirming the voyeuristic
role of the spectator, it reasserted the actor's
position as being morally superior. This compromised
and directed the spectator's response to the stage. In
continually asserting the actor's hegemony,
Stanislavsky overlooked the role of critical
respondent which when played by director, dramatist,
spectator and the thinking actor objectifies the
actor's function and makes it truer, more real and
more beautiful. He feared oversimplification,
reducing the actor to a symbol, stripping the stage to
expose in its nakedness its. otherness and lifting the
veil of dram a tic language to reveal the silences
35
which rest between, within and beyond words. As
Timothy J. Wiles states in The Thea. er Event (1980),
"the thought that Chekhov's pauses might be empty,
his tears motiveless, and his characters unchanged [j
the play's end never occurred to Stanislavsky."
Thus, did Stanislavsky miss the essence of Chekhov's
drama, the being rather than becoming which, in the
words of critic Stark Young, "flies away
from a center."
While "Chekhov," as Wiles suggests, "challenged
Stanislavsky's belief in the consistency and
'natuzglism' of reality," the experience did not change
him. Stanislavsky seemed unwilling or else unable
to confront the implications of modernity and
modernist absence. Or perhaps any incipient
pessimism was quelled by his belief in the hopefulness
of art as an endeavor and a life. Stanislavsky
sentimentalized Chekhov and transformed the latter's
modernist grace notes and prescient concrete
mystery into the incontrovertible presence of . visual
and auditory effects - crickets and the like -
beyond those expressly called for in the text. He
replaced the abstract and what Andreyev referred to
as "panpsychic" spiritual soundings of the inanimate
and animate worlds with a fully materialized "theatre
of mood" which was to Chekhov in large part
irrelevant. Stanislavsky and MAT then applied this
method to all manner of classic and contemporary
dramas.
Stanislavsky believed that the various anti-
realistic movements of his day represented only
"realism in refined, ennobled and purified form." His
own largely unsuccessful experiments with
alternative approaches were to expand and
rein orce the claims of realism. The theatre in
general and acting in particular, Stanislavsky argued,
had not yet achieved the realism which he saw
manifested in the visual arts and so it would be
premature to seek to transcend it. The path to the
"superconscious" passes through realism in any case
rather than circumventing it. More importantly, he
36
proclaimed, the actor was not ready for anti-
realism. "Admittedly," he wrote, "some conventions
are inevitable, but then why create new ones? One
should think that the fewer conventions the freer and
more natural the acting." Conventions lead the artist
toward craft and artifice and away from art and life,
toward a technically rendered "verisimilitude of
scenic emotion and a trust in it" and away from the
genuine emotional experiencing and embodiment of
truth. Conventions offer the artist and the audience
short cuts which can lead only to the manufacturing
of falsehoods in the guise of truth. "No stage
conventions however beautiful, nor the principle of
representation itself will create anything live." They
cannot, that is, create the life of jhe human spirit
which is the theatre' s raison d'etre. Z
While acknowledging the presence . of
conventions in the theatre, Stanislavsky could not, in
spite of periodic flirtations, accept their dominance
as expressed in the theatrical aesthetic of
which he likened to a "cult of stage conventions."
"Convention," he wrote, "is evidence of barbarity, of
impaired taste or spiritual deformity," whereas truth
to nature reflects spiritual purity and, if you will, a
closeness to God (note here the disapproving moral
tone). Z9 Since, in Stanislavsky's words, "everything
that is poetic is symbolic per se," that which is called
or more generally, uslovny, is to his mind
excessive, showy, redundant, selfserving, one might
even say, decadent. His one attempt to write a
symbolist play (The Comet) was left incomplete and
to talk of acting was, in his estimation, an
impossibility. Ironically, as Soviet theatre scholar
Konstantin Rudnitsky has pointed out, Stanislavsky's
inability either to master or to reject categorically
the symbolist theatre prolonged his obsession with it
long after Miyerhold and other theatricalists
transcended it. 3
Stanislavsky was a chemical rather than an
alchemical man. For him, Truth arose from the
acknowledgement and experiencing of the density of
37
matter not from its transfiguration into something
"other." Reality was for him compoundable but not
essentially transformable. As such, his interest was
in construction not in deconstruction or
mystification. Nikolai Evreinov, whose own sense
was that reality's essence was precognitive and the
theatre's preaesthetic, parodied the celebrated
Stanislavskian genius for concreteness in two
Crooked Mirror plays. In The Inspector General
(1912.), a disciple of the master, whose doctoral
dissertation, dedicated to Stanislavsky, was entitled
"The Semipause and Pause for Mood," and who
believed that everything on stage must happen not as
in life but as in "mood," . transfol"ms all of Gogol's
metaphors into archeologically researched
and constructed images.-'
2
In The Fourth Wall (1915),
Gounod's opera Faust devolves first into a musical
drama, then into a drama with music, and finally into
an unseen but fully and fatally lived naturalistic,
psychological drama. (The actor impersonating Faust
in the interest of authenticity is made to drink real
poison and dies). The action transpires behind
Stanislavsky's theoretical fourth wall which actually
bas been constructed along the proscenium line thus
blocking the audience's view of Faust completely
except for those occasions when he passes by the
wall's only window.
Stanislavsky's own plans for staging the opera
Faust (with himself cast against type in the role of
Mephistopheles) were based upon "a popular set of
German illustrations that were distinguished by their
documentary accuracy and absolute superficiality."
Stanislavsky's three-dimensional, concretely
naturalistic cellar set, with its ambient lighting, its
red-hot stove, steaming pot and scientific
paraphernalia, was a reaction to "the typically stagey
Faustian dwelling with its patently unreal retorts and
its red cloth quivering in feeble imitation of a
flame."
33
Stanislavsky no doubt saw Faust as being a
radical humanist like himself, the ever striving
38
activist man flawed by pride but redeemed by love, a
force for inherent good in conflict with the innate
evil incarnated in the artistic egoist Mephistopheles
(perhaps a subconscious dialogue between
Stanislavsky's own conflicting intentions and
desires). But what could Stanislavsky make of Faust
the alchemist, the dangerous metaphysical scientist
desirous to master t i m ~ to capture immortality. His
laboratory equipment was only the means to an end
which lay far beyond the confines of his laboratory
walls. The interior Faust cannot be found in his
room's exterior. His essence lies in his visions, in his
unreality, in the breach which he makes with society
not in the fulfillment of social norms via concrete
matter and means. Evreinov demonstrates via the
character devices of an onstage production staff and
a performance-within-a-performance that no amount
of historical and psychological justification and
environmental detail can bring the alchemist Faust to
life and produce theatrical magic. This, Evreinov
believed, could only be achieved via the
dematerialization of the stage. Evreinov's targets
were overly zealous misapplications of the
Stanislavsky system in general and in particular two
recent productions of Faust: Fyodor
Komissarzhevsky's at Nezlobin's Theatre in Moscow
(191Z) which cast Goethe's eponymous hero and his
antagonist Mephistopheles as two sides of a single
character and Iosif Lapitsky's Stanislavskian
treatment of Gounod's opera at the St. Petersburg
Theatre of Musical Drama. Hof.iever, the master was
in both cases held accountable.
While many modern directors and acting
theorists credit Stanislavsky as being their teacher,
he is more their spiritual godfather than he is their
blood relation. He did define, as William B. Worthen
asserts in a recent essay, "an art, an attitude an
ethos for the modern actor." He did set the actor on
the path to "self-discovery, expressive freedom and
real immediacy on stage. He did create the model
for a life in art. However, he did not, to my mind,
39
consider directly as Worthen and others would
suggest, the actor's existential dilemma of wanting to
express the self in the face of the frustrating
necessity of donning the mask of otherness, i. e.,
character.
35
Nor could he forsee the undermining
and even the destruction of character as a theatrical
concept which is being so heatedly discussed today.
Although his system is widely applicable due to
its roots in basic human psychology and the flexibility
which its creator built into it, it does not embody nor
does it imply a poetics of performance.
Stanislavsky's thinking on this score was not
sufficiently developed. He was, as well, too highly
subjective, too incorrigably bourgeois realistic and
too inhospitable to the notion of theatricality,
believing it to be a taint upon reality. It was left to
his rebellious protegees and those whom they influ-
enced to develop a theory of performance aesthetics
and an objective system of notation for anti- and
super-realistic acting. While acknowledging the role
of cognition in creation, these innovators achieved a
more simplified, symbolic eloquence and demonstra-
tiveness in acting. Their notations embodied a
galvanized formal awareness of the actor's nervosity,
the physical shape of his overall action as a signifier
and that of the text. Vsevolod Meyerhold, Evgeny
Vakhtangov, Aleksandr Tairov, Michael Chekhov,
Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin
Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin, Peter
Brook, Richard Schechner and many others have
considered the actor as avatar and atavist, his
cognition applied to the awareness of the mask of
performance. Pre-acting, constructivism ~ bio-
mechanics, fantastic realism and synthetic theatre,
the emotional and the psychological gesture, the
theatre of pure form, gestus and expressionist
signification, poor, holy and environmental theatre
constitute some milestones in the history of
performance theory, the figure-grounding of the
actor in theatrical time, space and self-referential
40
history, the reverse side of Stanislavsky's mirror to
nature.
A kind of neo-Stanislavskian notation has been
created by contemporary Soviet director Anatoly
Efros who deepens, extends and intensifies the
master's work, while framing it with Vakhtangov's
sense of the unique occasion. Stanislavsky's often
criticized rehearsal practice of repeating an action
endlessly has been transferred by Efros to the stage,
where a hand may be shaken or a handkerchief
thrown half a dozen or a dozen times consecutively
~ i t h different physicalized attitudes and an
escalating sense of urgency. The effect is primarily
visceral, however, rather than intentional, while at
the same time being suggestive of a performance
mode of consciousness. One can. state, as does
Timothy Wiles, that "Stanislavsky was the first to
sense (although not to specify) that what is
essentially 'real' about theatrical realism lies as much
in the reality of the performance itself as in the
true-to-life quality of a play's details," but the
concrete truth here lies in what Wiles s t ~ t s
parenthetically, i. e., the absence of specification.
Stanislavsky the idealist was not quite a
visionary and so had his ideas coopted and redefined I
by historical necessity to a greater extent than they
might otherwise have been. In prerevolutionary
Russia he effected the necessary passage from
actorish performance to simulated behaviorism. This
new contract between stage and auditorium was
renewed and significantly rewritten by the Soviet
state which acutely reimagined and repackaged
humanism as proletarianism. The rational, moral and
public biases that formed Stanislavsky's vision were
made to serve a redefined materialistic ideal and to
j ustify a reality in the process of being falsified.
Having broken with the false truth of stage realism
from the outset, the theatricalists remained free,
theoretically (at least), to si'gnify beyond any and all
historical and social realities, returning the stage to
an assertion and vindication of its "staginess" which
41
Stanislavsky had rejected. As for the master, he
found himself imprisoned at Elsinore castle, his
liberation left to the progeny he had earlier cast out
but to his credit never abandoned (e.g., Meyerhold).
Needless to say, Stanislavsky has survived, unbowed
and largely unchallenged, redolent of an authority
which we can now only nostalgically remember or
guiltily imagine. Unfortunately, in spite of his many
real talents and accomplishments, he is too often
reconceived by us in our own image as a modern, a
subtly egoistic conceit of which Stanislavsky would
no doubt disapprove. Unsuited to play the rebellious
son Prince Hamlet, Stanislavsky is, as Meyerhold
inferred in 1921, certainly well cast as his
ghost. As such he will continue to haunt the dreams
and determine the given circumstances of future
generations of theatre artists and theorists who
mount the battlements to fwt for the right to be
and not to be upon the stage.
Notes
lKonstantin Stanislavsky, Selected ed.
Oksana Korneva (Moscow. Raduga Publishers, 1984),
p. 12.0.
2
Elena Polyakova, Stanislavsky (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1982.), p. 164.
3
1bid., pp. 171 and 178.
4Michael Goldman,
Toward a Theory of Drama
Press, 1975), P 103.
The Actor's Freedom.
(New York: The Viking
Sstanislavsky, Selected Works, pp. 53, 209 and
2.11.
6Laurence Senelick, Gordon Craig's Moscow
'Hamlet'. A Reconstruction (Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 90 and
2.13, n. 31.
42
7
stanislavsky, Selected Works, p. tllZ.
8Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. 68., Laurence
Senelick, "Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938)," in
The McGraw-Hill Encyclopaedia of World Drama, ed.
Stanley Hochman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p.
5 ~
9 Joyce Vining Morgan, Stanislavski's Encounter
with Shakespeare. The Evoluti on of a Method (Ann
Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1984), p. xix;
Theodore Komisarjevsky, Myself and the Theatre
(New York. E. P. Dutton and Co., 1930), p. 73.
10Leonid Andreev, "Letters on the Theatre," in
Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin t o the
Symbolists, trans. and ed. Laurence Senelick (Austin,
Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 2.43 and
2.46.
11Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. 169.
12
stanislavsky, Selected Works, pp. 62. and 73.
13vsevolod Meyerhold and Valery Bebutov, "The
Solitude of Stanisiavsky" (192.1), in Meyerhold on
Theatre, trans. and ed. Edward Braun (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1969), p. 175; Spencer Golub,
Evreinov: The Theatre of Paradox and
Tr ansformation (Ann Arbor, Michigan. UMI Research
Press, 1984), p. 58; Vladimir Markov, Russian
Futurism. A History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968), p. 2.01.
14
stanislavsky, Selected Works, p. 43.
15
Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. liZ; Konstantin
Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, ed. Sydney
Schultze (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1981), p. 115;
Senelick, Gordon Craig's Moscow 'Hamlet.' A
Reconstructi on, p. 11 z.
43
16Ellendea Proffer , Bulgakov, Life and Work
(Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1984), p. 4ZZ.
17Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director , p. 204;
Constantin Stanislavski and Pavel Rumyantsev,
Stanislavski on Opera, trans. and ed. Elizabeth
Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Book,
1975), P 81.
18Polyakova, Stanislavsky, pp. 50 and 114.
1
9vining M o r g ~ Stanislavski's Encounter with
Shakespeare. The Evolution of a Method, pp. 51 and
79.
20
1bid., P t3Z.
Z
1
stanislavsky, Selected Works, pp. 39, 179-80.
zzlbid., P n .
Z3Timothy B. Wiles, The Theatre Event
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 31.
24stark Young, "Many Gods, " in North
American Review 217 (March 1923), 343-52.
Reprinted in Victor Emeljanow, ed., Chekhov: The
Critical Heritage (London, Boston and Henley:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. Z47.
Z5wues, The Theater Event, p. 40.
Z6Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. 193-4.
27
Stanislavsky, Selected Works, pp. 17, 153,
164, Z37 and Z49.
28
Ibid. , p. Z03.
Z9Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. 195.
301bid., pp. 183 and 193.
44
3
1
Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 129.
32Golub, Nikolai Evreinov: The Theatre of
Paradox and Transformation, p. 165.
33Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. 65.
3
4
Golub, Evreinov: The Theatre of Paradox and
Transformation, pp. 171-Z, Z68 n. 58.
35William B. Worthen, "Stanislavsky and the
Ethos of Acting," in Theatre Journal 35 (March 1983):
33, 36-7 and 40.
36wnes, The Theater Event, p. 14.
3
7
Meyerhold and Bebutov, "The Solitude of
Stanislavsky," in Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 175.
A Seagull- A Review
On January 11, 1986, this play completed a one-
month run at the Eisenhower Theater of the Kennedy
Center in Washington, D.C. It was directed by Peter
Sellars with sets by George Tsypin. The cast included
Colleen Dewhurst, Henderson Forsythe, Kelly McGil-
lis, Kathleen Nolan, Priscilla Smith, Kevin Spacey,
David Strathaim, Paul Winfield, and Tony Mockus.
The translation used was that of Maria M. Markof-
Belaeff.
At first glance, one may think that such a
performance must perforce be successful. An
outstanding play, a notorious director, a superb cast
and a great house should contribute to a hit. At
second glance, however, one realizes that the title of
the play is not "The" but "A" Seagull. As soon as the
curtain goes up, one realizes why this is the case. We
are shown a vision of the play through the eyes of
Peter not through Stanislavsky's eyes, and certainly
not through those of Chekliov himself. Sellars is
45
always ready to shock and sometimes even to in-
novate for the sake of innovation.
Whenever we see Chekhov performed, we
expect to see elaborately realistic country settings to
include both the outside and the inside of genteel
country homes. What Sellars and Tsypin give us is
about a dozen battered wooden chairs which are
rearranged before a series of intentionally overly
bright backdrops. Instead of the turn-of-the-century
clothes we expect, we see the performers dressed
almost entirely in black and white which heightens
the effect of the birghtness behind them and of the
footlights which throw white lights up into the faces
of the actors. On many occasions, the actors even
come right down to the footlights to talk directly to
the audience.
But there are more special effects. Sellars uses
the play-within-a-play sequence in the first act to
put on a laser show, filling the Eisenhower stage with
dancing beams of green light and clouds of smoke.
There is even an on-stage pianist who plays Scriabin
to underscore a number of the more inflamed
speeches.
In general one must admit that the play is a
visual feast and the acting often superb. It is
excellent Sellars but one comes away with the feeling
that it is not Chekhov, and that the playwright would
have felt that both his characters and his plot had
been raped.
L. H.
LEONID ZORIN
The following is the text of a short brochure
which was published by V AAP to introduce this
playwright to a foreign public. It is reprinted here
with the permission of VAAP, without commentary.
Leonid Zorin is a prominent Soviet playwright.
Both Soviet and foreign audiences have admired his
46
many-faceted talent, subtle artistic feeling and
impeccable taste.
Zorin's plays have been produced in Poland,
Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and the
FRG; they have been published in New York, Munich
and Basel; his film script for "Peace unto the
Newcomer" was awarded the Gran Prix at the Film
Festival in Venice in 1961; the film script "The Grand
Master" received the First Prize at the Film Festival
in Kran (Yugoslavia) in 1974.
Leonid Zorin was born in Baku in 1924. He
graduated from the Azerbaijan University and later
from Gorky Literary Institute. He is a member of
the Union of Soviet Writers.
Leonid Zorin develops the traditions of the
Russian realist theatre, a theatre distinguished by a
striving for maximum veracity, by it humanist mes-
sage and 'psychological insight, without scorning a
. dynamic plot or soarings of fancy. Zorin leans to the
"strict" school shunning verbal experimentation and
bizarre formal devices. At the same time he probes
into every genre including satirical comedy, lyrical
drama and historical tragedy.
Fantastic Realism
Zorin achieved prominence as a playwright
after "The Kindly Folk" was produced by the Soviet
Army Theatre in 1958 . With his brilliant wit and his
unconstrained and elegant dialogue, Zorin is at home
in the bubbling element of comedy. Urgent social
problems in skilful combination with eternal human
ones, a fast-moving plot with paradoxical twists -
such is Zorin's comedy. Ridiculing ignorance,
snobbery, vulgarity, the playwright asserts honesty,
kindliness, justice ("The Encyclopedists," "A
Theatrical Fantasy"). Many of his characters tend to
adorn their humdrum lives into the garb of beautiful
fantasy. Such is the hero. of the play "Serafim, or
47
Three Chapters from the Life of Kramolnikov," who
perceives the events taking place in his little town as
chapters from an absorbing detective story. These
dreamer-heroes often land in strange and absurd
situations, and though 'the author laughs at them, he
is also full of love and compassion.
Love and Ti10e
Zorin's lyrical plays have a key theme of their
own - Love and Time. Fate brings people together
for a short stretch of time - a day's voyage on a
river steamer ("The Deck"), or a few hours of waiting
for the train at a small railway station ("Transit") -
only to separate them again, often forever. As often
as not, the man and woman who meet by chance to
discover they are "made for each other" both have
their own homes and families which place inescapable
demands on them. The tragic discrepancy between
life which has got into a rut and the emotional
opportunities opened in the chance meeting leaves
the spectator with a sad, nostalgic feeling. This
clash between inexorable time and human emotions
underlies the most famous of Zorin's plays, "Warsaw
Melody." Two college students, Victor, a Russian,
and Gelena, a Polish girl, D;leet and fall in love in
Moscow, but the force of circumstances draws them
apart, each settling in his respective country and into
his respective profession - he a wine-maker, she a
singer. When they meet in Poland ten years later,
they still love each other. But the two people who
meet in Moscow in another ten years are simply old
friends, a famous singer weary of her nomadic life, .
and even of applause, and irritated with the various
hitches in her tour, and a professor come to Moscow
on business. Their love is gone, leaving behind a
sense of emptiness and frustration.
History and Human Destinies
The variety of Zorin's intonations is particularly
striking in his historical plays. "Dion" is a comedy
rather than an historical play proper. The author
48
himself indicates it by gtvtng the play a subtitle "A
Roman Comedy." Although the plot is based on a
fact of Roman history, the author does not bother to
strive after historical authenticity, the Roman
emperor and his courtiers speaking a racy modern
jargon. Despite the comical accoutrements, the
purport of the play is serious enough: it is concerned
with the mission of a poet, with honesty, incorrupti-
bility and loyalty to an artistic calling. Other plays,
such as "The Decembrists," "Bronze Granny" and "The
Royal Hunt," are historical in the precise meaning of
the word. "The Decembrists," which has an epigraph
"Fantasy here is documentary, while the document is
fantastic ," is subtitlt!d "A Tragedy." Participants
in the uprising are presented as heroes of a tragedy in
their unequal confrontation with Tsar Nicholas I. All
they can oppose to his perfidy, hypocrisy and unscru-
pulousness is their defenceless nobility of heart and
mind. Most of Zorin's historical plays are concerned
with the fate of talented, brilliant people. The hero
of "Bronze Granny" is the great Russian poet
Alexander Pushkin, and the play's tragic overtones
derive from the poet's sad fate. The heroine of "The
Royal Hunt," the luckless pretender to the Russian
throne occupied by Catherine n, has a talent for self-
less lavish love. There is no place for this kind of
love in the ruthless struggle for power, so it is
betrayed and destroyed.
Zorin takes more than plots from history. He
also seeks to achieve an authentic manner of
expression. "The Decembrists" include almost word-
for-word quotations from documents pertaining to
the uprising. The documentality in "Bronze Granny"
and "The Royal Hunt" is not so literal, but the spirit
of the epoch is subtly conveyed through the slightly
archaic turn of speech, which sounds both strange and
enchanting to the modern ear. History appears in its
natural guise, not embellished i n any way, but vitally
important to us in the very homeliness of its
tragedies. This approach has enabled the author to
cope successfully wi th a t ask of formidable difficulty
49
- that of portraying the living Pushkin. No amount
of elevated verbiage could have recreated Pushkin as
an inspired poet. Instead, Zorin showed him in his
everyday pursuits - at home with his family, around
the table with his friends, making merry or tor-
mented by financial problems. And yet, this every-
day unexalted Pushkin gives us an intuitive under-
standing of Pushkin the poet.
Zorin's plays are immensely popular both with
theatre people and the theatre-goers by virtue of
their intrinsic modern spirit. His dialogue is both
expressive of the people's character and modern in its
idiom and intonation. And i t is always enriched with
the author's unfailing wit. Moreover, modern
language conveys modern world perception - a
quality essential in a playwright. That is why the
audiences find themselves attuned to the problems
which confront his characters, problems that arise
from the complicated relationships between the inner
world of an individual and the reality of his social
being, the reality of history and statehood.
Stage Productions
Zorin's plays are produced a lot both in the
Soviet Union and abroad. For many years Zorin fruit-
fully cooperated with the stage director Boris Lvov-
Anokhin, who produced "The Kindly Fold" (1958) and
"The Encyclopedists" (1965) at the Soviet Army
Theatre and "Serafim, or Three Chapters from the
Life of Kramolnikov" (1967) at the Stanislavsky
Theatre. Zorin can be said to have thrown in his lot
with the Vakhtangov Theatre. His plays "Cor onation"
and "Dion" saw limelight here; here, too, Ruben
Simonov produced the play which brought glory both
to the playwright and the theatre. This is the famous
"Warsaw Melody," which was also staged by the
Budapest National Theatre, the Lucia Sturdza
Theatre in Bucharest and the Theatre-99 in Sofia.
The role of Gelena was played by such outstanding
actresses asMari Torocsik and Nevena Kokanova.
50
The latest theatrical interpretations of Zorin's
plays were made by the Soviet stage director Roman
Viktyuk, who produced "The Royal Hunt" at the
Mossoviet Theatre in Moscow and "The Stranger" at
the Leningrad Comedy Theatre. Viktyuk leans
towards sharp forms, sometimes bordering on the
grotesque, which lends a more strident note to Zorin's
essentially "subdued" plays.
Main Works
Plays
1949- Youth
1954 - Visitors
1958- Bright May
1958- The Kindly Folk
1961 - Friends and Years
196Z - The Encyclopedists
1963 !..... The Deck
1965- Dion
1967- The Decembrists
1967- Warsaw Melody
1968 - Serafim, or Three Chapters from the Life
of Kramolnikov
1969 - Coronation
1969- Stress
1970 - Bronze Granny
1974- Pokrovsky Gate
1974- The Royal Hunt
1976 - The Stranger
1977 - Betrayal
Fllm Scripts
1958- Man from Nowhere
1961- Peace unto the Newcomer (together with
A. Alov and V. Naumov)
1970- A Stop-Watch
1974- The Grand Master
1978 - Rescue
1979- The Kindly Folk
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Please duplicate the slip below when you send in your
contribution for postage and handling. Make your
check for $3.00 payable to "George .tJason
University" and mail to Prof. Leo Hecht, Chairman,
Russian Studies, George Mason University, Fairfax,
VA 22030.
Contribution to SEEDTF, Academic Year 1985/1986
NAME:
ADDRESS:
AFFll..IA TION:
(If not included in address above)
52