SEEP Vol.6 No.1 February 1986

8/12/2019 SEEP Vol.6 No.1 February 1986

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VOLUME 6 NUM ERFEBRUARY 986

SovietandB a s t ~ u r o p e a n

Drama TheatreandPilm


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SovietandEast :Buropean

Drama TheatreandFilm

VOLUME 6, NUM ER 1FEBRU RY 1986

SEEDTF is a publication of the Institute forContemporary Eastern European Drama and Theatreunder the auspices of the Center for Advanced Studyin Theatre Arts, Graduate Center, City University ofNew York with support from the National Endowmentfor the Humanities and the Graduate School and theDepartment of Foreign Languages and Literatures ofGeorge Mason University. The Institute Office isRoom 801, City University Graduate Center, 33 West42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. All subscriptionrequests and submissions should be addressed to theEditor of SEEDTF: Leo Hecht, Department ofForeign Languages and Literatures, George MasonUniversity, Fairfax, V 22030 ProofreadingEditor: Prof. Rhonda Blair, Hampshire CollegeTheatre, Amherst, MA 01002. .


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George Mason UniversitySEEDTF has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journalsand newsletters which desire to reproduce articlesreviews and other materials which have appeared inSEEDTF may do so as long as the followingprovisions 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 befurnished to the Editor of SEEDTF immediatelyupon publication.


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T BLE OF CONTENTS

ditorial Policy 4nnouncements

Bibliography . 7Thaw at O Neill 8Lunin or the Anarchy of Reason 4On the Presence and Prescienceof StanislavskyA SeagullLeonid Zorin

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EDITORIAL POUCYManuscripts in the following categories are

solicited: articles of no m ~ r than Z,S words; bookreviews; performance reviews; and bibliographies. tmust be kept in mind that au of the above submissions must concern themselves either with contemporary materials concerned with Soviet or EastEuropean theatre and drama or with new approachesto older materials in recently published works and tonew performances. n other words we would welcome submissions rev iewing innovative performancesof Gogol or recently published books on Gogol forexample but we could not use original articles discussing Gogol as a playwright .

Although we welcome translations of articlesand reviews from foreign publications we do requirecopyright release statements.

We will also gladly publish announcements ofspecial events new book releases job opportunitiesand anything else which may be of interest to ourdiscipline. Of course all submissions are evaluated byblind readers on whose findings acceptance or rejection is based.

All submissions must be typed double-spacedand carefully proofread. Submit two copies of eachmanuscript and attach a stamped self-addressedenvelope. The MLA style should be followed. Transliterations should follow the Library of Congresssystem. Submissions will be evaluated and authorswill be notified after approximately four weeks.

All submissions inqUlrtes and subscriptionrequests should be directed to :Prof. Leo Hecht EditorDept. of Foreign Languages LiteraturesGeorge Mason UniversityFairfax VA ZZ030

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ANNOUNCEMENTSPLEASE DO NOT FORGET TO SEND IN YOURCONTRIBUTION TO HANDLING AND MAILING

CHARGES FOR SEEDTF FOR ACADEMIC YEAR1985-86 ATYOUR EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY.Children of the Sun, Maxim Gorky's pre-Revolution play, has had i ts American premiere at theTheater at St. Peter's Church in New York, where tis continuing in repertory. t opened to mixed reviews Although the star, Michael Moriarty, who portrays the scientist who cannot keep daily life at bay,seems to have put some thought into his role, the critics panned the Mirror Repertory Company for havingattempted do something which exceeded their abilities.It may have escaped some readers, but the director of the film Runaway Train, which has beennominated for three Golden Bear Awards, was Andrei

Konchalovsky.The annual convention of the Southeastern Theatre 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 Theatre.

Hungarian Studies, journal of the InternationalAssociation of Hungarian Studies, is now in publication. The journal provides a forum for originalpapers within all disciplines of the humanities andsocial sciences pertaining to any apsect of Hungarianpast and present. In addition, every issue will carryshort communications, book reviews, and miscellaneous information. The journal will be publishedtwice annually by the Akademiai Kiado PublishingHouse of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. A subscription is $30. To receive Volume I, No. 1, send acheck payable to Kultura, Budepaest ISSN Z6344 and mail it to KULTURA, Hungarian Foreign

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Trading Co., P.O. Box 149, H-1389 Budapes t,Hungary.

The 5th Balkan and South Slavic Conferencewill take place in Bloomington, IN, March 6-8, 1986,and will be jointly sponsored by the University ofChicago Center for Balkan and Slavic Studies and byIndiana University. Some 60 papers have been proposed. For further information contact Prof. HenryCooper, 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 thefollowing films for classroom rental:Autumn MarathonIncident at Map Grid 36-80JazzmanMoscow Does Not Believe in TearsOblomovOrphansPrivate LifeQue Viva MexicoRasputinRed Pomegranate (Armenian VersioJ.)SiberiadeA Slap in the Face (Armenian Version)To Remember or to ForgetVassaWaiting for LoveWithout Witness.These films are available in Anamorphic (Cinemascope) version only. Contact IFEX directly foradditional information.

Edvard Radzinsky s Lunin is most certainly oneof the finest plays written by one of the best playwrights of the Soviet period. The English translationby Alma Law is also superb. The play recently finished a successful nm in New York at the BouwerieLane Theatre, performed by the Jean Coctau Repertory Company. Its opening performance was attended by Radzinsky, who had received special per-

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mtsswn to come to the United States for this purpose. t was extremely well received by the critics.The review in the New York Times called i t stunning. On Theatre conducted a lengthy interviewwith Radzinsky during which his long-term cooperative arrangement with Alma Law was established.The Village Voice marvels at Radzinsky's courage.The Villager and The Christian Science Monitor alsoadd their' kudos for the play, the playwright and thetranslator.

BIBUOGRAPHYVladimir Ashkenazy. Beyond Frontiers New

York: Atheneum, 1985. This is the autobiography ofthe superb pianist who left the USSR for good in1963. His book gives great insight of the lot of theperforming artist in the Soviet Union during WorldWar ll and on the decade after the war at the MoscowConservatory of Music.The following videocassettes and films may bepurchased at Linguitronics, PO Box 9504, Arlington,V 22209:The Soviet Theatre

Anton ChekhovThe Moscow Conservatory50 min.30 min.30 min.

$109$59$59New Soviet books, in Russian, on the performingarts, which include the following, may be orderedfrom Viktor Kamkin Bookstore, Inc., 12224 ParklawnDrive, Rockville, MD 20852. Many are also availableat the New York City Branch of Kamkin:Artisty v pogonakh: Teatr Baltflota. Leningrad: 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.

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Sofronova, L.A. Polskaia teatralnaia kul tureepokhi prosveshcheniia. Moscow: Nauka, 198 5.

Alfeevskaia, G.S. et . al. (eds). Stravinskii - Stati, vospominaniia. Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor,1985.

Kaidalova, O.H. (ed). Folklornyi teatr narodovSSSR. Moscow: Nauka, 1985.

SPECIAL SECTION

The following significant and illustrative articleappeared in The Day in New London, CT, on September 1, 1985. It was written by Bethe Thomas, its ArtsEditor, and SEEDTF would like to thank both her andThe Day for letting us use this highly informative andwell-written piece:

THINGS STILL ICY OVER RUSSIAN MELODRAMA rn AT O NEILL

(How a misunderstanding over a play about Russia led to an . erosion of detente between the O'NeillTheater and a Soviet artists exchange program) .

I f love means never having to say you're sorry, areal life drama played out last month at Waterford'sEugene O'Neill Theater Center proves that the relationship between the Soviet Union and America has along way to go.

No one can argue that the dramatic high pointof this summer's National Playwrights Conferencetook place offstage, when a delegation sent by theSoviet Copyright Agency (VAAP) tried, and failed, toget an American play called Thaw: A Russian Melodrama pulled from the line up.

The Soviet delegation, after an English-speakingmember mis-translated Thaw as c P.picting the murder of Stalin by the head of the KuB, had cursorilylabeled the play a pack of lies.

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Written by Roger Cornish, Thaw premiered onJuly 31, two days after the Soviets commenced whathas become their annual visit. At the Soviets' insistence, O'Neill president George C. White and conference artistic director Lloyd Richards apologized, infront of the entire conference, for any perceived insult to their guests. But they refused to apologizefor the play.

Now, having reflected upon the affair, it isRichards who feels insulted over a Soviet accusation that the timing was a deliberate attempt tosabotage VAAP'_ two-year-old cultural exchangeagreement with the O'Neill.

No apology is anticipated from the Soviets, butWhite and Richards have been forced to re-examinethe future of a theatrical exchange program whichhas proved just as susceptible to political maneuvering as the Geneva Peace Talks.

Somewhow they had hoped that artists might dobetter .Intensifying the predicament is the fact thatthe O'Neill-VAAP agreement, signed two summersago amidst broad toasts of friendship at White's Wa

terford beach house, is the only formal culturalagreement in existence between the Soviet Union andthe United States. The Soviet government cancelledits exchange agreement with the U.S. in 1980, in retaliation for the American boycott of the MoscowOlympics.

Anything that is happening in this program ispractically the only thing that is happening on acultural exchange basis, said Richards, which meansthat a group such as this (the VAAP delegation) becomes much more special than it ought to be. NowRichards is insisting that if the exchange is tocontinue, the Americans are entitled to a better deal.

I want to see the same kind of engagement ofAmerican artists as we are providing here, saidRichards, who is also the dean of the Yale School of

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Drama and the artitstic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre.

That means allowing American theater personnel who visit the Soviet Union under the VAAP agreement to produce new American works in Soviet theaters, and more Soviet publication of new Americanplays.

VAAP delegates have twice produced a Sovietplay of their choosing in Waterford. This summer twas Sergei Kokovkin's If I Live, a drama about LeoTolstoy's family life, presented in English by American actors.

O'Neill delegations hosted by VAAP in theSoviet Union, on the other hand, have functioned onlyas observer:s.

Of this summer's five-member Soviet delegation, only two spoke English Genbrikh Borovik, acommentator on the Moscow evening news, and Grigori Neresyan, a VAAP employee. They read Thawand translated it for their playwright colleagues,including Kokovkin, Alexander Gelman and GrigoriGorin.

Not until the final day of the conference didWhite realize that Borovik had told the delegationthat there was a scene in Thaw during which a KGBagent murders the ailing Stalin by removing an intravenous tube from his nose. The character actuallycontemplates such a move, then decides against it.

White said this summer's crisis points out abasic difference in the way in which the Soviets andthe Americans perceive the VAAP-O'Neill agreement, and even beyond that, the way in which theyperceive the role of art.

To Borovik, said White, This is a forum forinternational exchange, for friendship. The fact thatwe can be used that way is wonderful, but that's notwhat we are about. We are a playwrights conerence.

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Thaw playwright Roger Cornish, contactedlast week in Philadelphia, said he thinks White andRichards acted on the whole, properly.

The play went on as scheduled, said Cornish,and ultimately the Soviets were told by LloydRichards (at an Aug. 3 gathering, the last of the conference) that they just had to learn to live with the

way things are done here. But it took a while to getthere. There were scores of people at the O'Neill who

bent over backwards to be polite to them while theykept yelling at us, Cornish said, and we probablyshould have stopped being polite sooner. I wentthrough one entire meeting where I didn't say a wordbecause I was afraid they would stage a walk-out.

White said he thought Cornish rather enjoyed allthe attention. But he had great sympathy for Sovietplaywright Sergei Kokovkin, who could only sit helplessly by while a real life drama stole his thunder.It was Kokovkin's first visit to America. Hemust have felt like a man watching his brand newhouse go up in flames, said White, a self-proclaimedfireman who personally recruited an audience forKokovkin's If I Live on the night t had to competeagainst Thaw at the box office.

White's assist nt, Gayle Ritchie, who escortedthe Soviets around New York following the conference, reported that the night before they returned toMoscow, all but Borovik the group's officialspokesman- expressed general sorrow over the upsetand praised the O'Neill for providing the artisiticexperience of their lives.

They are not captains of their fate, saidWhite. But most of those people, Borovik especially,know that we wouldn't overtly go out and insultthem. For them to take on so really offended Lloyd.

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Thaw was being presented. But since the Sovietsare notorious for last-minute changes in itinerary(three summers ago they didn't show up at all), andthe O'Neill schedule has to be worked out months inadvance, they saw no point in trying to head off aconflict.

Once the schedule was set, Richards saidchanging it would have been the equivalent of sayingthat there was something wrong with doing the play.

None of the Soviets actually saw Thaw. Asluck would have it , the morning after Borovik readthe play the Soviets were seated next to Cornish atthe breakfast table. Nersesyan asked Cornish whatbooks he had read to research his play about thetransfer of power from Stalin to Khrushchev.

Cornish says his admittedly flip reply that hehad only read a bunch of trashy novels was meantto be self-effacing. White calls it simply dumb.Trying to convince the Soviets that Cornishmeant no harm was like trying to tell a deaf person

what Mozart sounds like, said White. They don'thave the experience of being able to say what theywant and being able to mouth off. t has nothing todo with communism or ideology. It's a sense, likehearing or seeing or smelling, that they just don'thave.

Throughout the conference, the Soviets steadfastly maintained that Cornish had no businesswriting about the Soviet Union because he had neverbeen there and could not possibly know all the facts.All the characters were stereotypical monsters, according to Nersesyan.

The S Oviets were told that Thaw was only ametaphor for tyranny. But no Soviet playwrightwould presume to explore polith. al terror using realSoviet leaders as a metaphor, and the VAAP delegation was therefore doubly loathe to condone -much less pp l ud any such attempt by an American.


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They had to react strongly, said White.They just would not run out of gas, said

Cornish. They demanded, and got, one hearing afteranother.

On Aug. 3 the final day of the conference,Cornish says he replied forcefully to the Soviets forthe first and only time.

At that meeting they very clearly accused meof seeking to foment fear and distrust between the.U.S. and the Soviet Union, he said. Their positionwas that I, and by implication the O'Neill, had soughtto embarrass them . I told them they could criticizemy play, but not my intentions.

Last week Richards made it clear that politicalforums where official statements are read with greathoopla and positions are entrenched will not again betolerated at the O'Neill. They are not a conferenceactivity, he said, nor will they become one.

Even White, who is far more willing to acceptthe Soviets' idiosyncrasies, admits that theconference 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 thebiggest personal investment in its success,negotiating a genuine Thaw after this summer'scrisis may be the challenge of his career. But hepoints with satisfaction to a least one very subtleartisitc victory.

At the final conference forum, Kokovkin wassitting not with the Soviet delegation, but with hiscast.

The following article was written by BeateBennett, an extremely knowledgeable and astutetheatre person who, although she is not a specialiston Russian theatre, has done agreat deal of work inNew York and saw the Cocteau production of Lunintwice before writi g the article.

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LUNIN OR THE ANARCHY OF REASONIn 1839, a certain Marquis de Custine travelled

for three months through Russia's European provinc esjotting down irt his journal some rather acrimoniousobservations about what he saw. For example, onecan read the following sweeping comment about theRussian national Character:

t 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 singleman makes all the plays and the invisible adver-sary is humanity. One does not die, one does notbreathe here except by imperial permission ororder; therefore everything is gloomy and con-strained. Silence presides over life and paralyzesit. Officers, coachmen, Cossacks, serfs, cour-tiers, all are servants, of different rank, of thesame master and blindly obeying an idea they donot understand. t is a m c ~ t e r p i e c e of militarymechanics; but the sight o this beautiful orderdoes not satisfy me at all, as so much regularitycannot be obtained except through the completeabsence of independence. I seem to see a shadowof death hovering over this part of the globe.

The contemporary Soviet playwright, EdvardRadzinsky, whose work is being presented with someregularity at the Cocteau Repertory Theatre in NewYork City, might echo Hamlet and say, it needs noFrenchman from the grave to tell us that. His play,LUNIN OR THE DEATH OF JACQUES WRITTEN INTHE PRESENCE OF THE MASTER, presentedcurrently at the Cocteau Repertory Theatre in thetranslation of Alma Law, is one continuous tiradeagainst Russian slavishness and a self- mocking pleathat through imagination one might be redeemedfrom i ts onus. Writ ten in 1978, the play forms thecentre of what Radzinsky himself has termed a his-torical philosophical trilogy. n 1971, after a seriousbout with illness interrupted his already established

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success as a popular playwright of romanticcontemporary realistic plays, he apparently decidedto show another side of his concerns, his training as ahistorian and a philosophical bent. The first resultwas a play called CONVERS TIONS WITHSOCRATES which takes place during the last fewdays of Socrates s life. Much of t modelled insubstance and form after the famous Plato dialogues,the play is less the drama of a man convicted todeath and awaiting the famous hemlock than a seriesof staged reflections. The third play in the trilogy,performed last year at the Cocteau Rep under EveAdamson s direction, THEATRE IN THE TIME OFNERO ND SENECA, is of all three the mosttheatrical and dependent on immediate rather thanreflected action.

All three plays are philosophical conversationsemanating from a historical character in semi-historical circumstances. The central characterinvariably faces his hour of death. Socrates mustdrink the hemlock in 399 B.C.; Seneca finds himselfcornered into suicide by Nero in 65 A.D.; and Lunin,the former imperial guards officer and Decembrist,faces his execution by strangulation in a Siberianprison, twenty years after the uprising, in 1845. Theconversations are fictions, dialectical confectionsreally, between servant and master, between tutorand student, between the old master of the mind andthe young master of politics, between the master ofwit and the master of the whip. Of course theconversations also lay bare a profound irony whichperhaps only Socrates himself may have appreciatedand thus refused to be caught writing. The irony isthat in a scripted reality the Socratic questioneralways seems to win by controlling the kinds ofquestions asked and that thus the way for anotherkind of tyranny is prepared, a rhetorical tyrannywhere the questioner dictates the perimeter of vali-dation. The responders become his fools. Platoobviously felt no scruples and merrily enshrined forus the first dialectician: a Socrates, always elusive

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but always in control of the argument, who eventurns his death into a winning argument of freedom.Lunin probably knew of a Russian philosopher ofthe previous generation, Gregory Skovoroda, who was

called the Russian Socrates and who wrote histhoughts in dialogue form much like his contemporaryDenis Diderot. As his own e. Haph he wrote: "Theworld set a trap for me but it did not catch me." t isquestionable whether Radzinsky's Lunin with hisSocratic aspirations and his fatalistic- Diderothankerings was entirely able to avoid the trap.Radzinsky places a recurring refrain in his mouth:"Words spoken take flight, but those writtenremain." Lunin's words ended up crucifying him; theTsar said, "his tongue wagged too much." He was obviously not as amused by his servant's garrulity asDiderot's master who could not have existed withouthis servant's fatally logical renditions of reason. Buttherein lies perhaps a difference between the Russianand the French mentality. The Russians seem to seecrucifixion as the only way to salvation and embracei t wholeheartedly, albeit self-mocking at times.Radzinsky's Lunin again: "In Russia, a successfuldeath is more important than a successful life. Withus, death is the elixir of immortality ... t was forthis reason that Abel called to his brother Cain, 'Killme.' With blood you must strengthen my ideas Thatis my final secret. Let my blood flow Blood whichis crying out How I have fought for this death " Bycontrast, there is a rather significant interchangebetween Jacques the Fatalist and his master inDiderot's novel which served Radzinsky's Lunin assuch an inspiration. It is worth reproducing here, forthe difference n attitude towards freedom as apersonally felt good and the absurdity of so-calledfree actions brings into question Radzinsky's reverendreference to Diderot. Jacques and his master aretravelling along the highway from no particular pointto no particular point. As usual they spend their timebantering:

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THE MASTER: What are you thinkingabout?

JACQUES: I was thinking that while youwere talking to me and while Iwas answering, you were talkingto me without willing it and I wasreplying to you without willing t .

THE MASTER: And so?JACQUES: So? So we were two veri-table living, thinking machinesThere 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 canact without cause. My captainused to say: Postulate a causeand an effect will follow: from aweak cause, a weak effect; from amomentary cause, a momentaryeffect; from an intermittentcause, an i n ~ r m i t t n t effect;from a . restrained cause, a sloweffect; from a vanishing cause, noeffect at all.

THE MASTER: But t seems to me that Ifeel deep down within myself thatI am free, just as I feel that Ithink.

JACQUES: My captain used to say:Yes, now that you don't wish

anything; but can you will tothrow yourself from your horse?'

THE MASTER: That's simple. r throwmyself.

JACQUES: Gaily, without compunction,without effort ?THE MASTER: Well, not completely; butwhat does it matter so long as Ithrow myself off and prove that Iam free?

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JACQUES: My captain used to say:"What You can't even see thatwithout my challenge you wouldnever have taken it into your headto break your neck? So that i t is Iwho take you by the foot andthrow you out of your saddle. fyour fall proves anything, it 's notthat you are free, but that you aremad." My captain used to saythat the enjoying of a libertywhich could be produced withoutmotive would be the truecharacteristic of a maniac.

THE MASTER: It 's a little too much forme, but in spite of you and yourcaptain, I shall believe that I wishwhen I wish.

This novel which Denis Diderot experimentedwith in the years before and after his trip to Russiain 177Z inspired another Eastern European writerMilan Kundera wrote his only play, an homage toDiderot and a variation on the novel, shortly afterthe Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968. His JACQUESAND IDS MASTER is a very different work from thatof Radzinsky although both are primarily plays ofconversation. However, while Kundera by means ofvariation works at interweaving three differentnarrations of fundamentally the same "love" story,Radzinsky pursues a much more s i n g l ~ m i n e andegocentric path. While Kundera echoes and payshomage to a great many paradigmatic servant-masterdialogues, from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza toVladimir and Estragon, also reflecting all the whilethe ironic interdependence of the big and the little,Radzinsky insists on the pathos of the servant'sstruggle to attain and maintain his sense of innerfreedom or illusion of will in the face of intractableand, above all, cynical tyranny. While Radzinsky'sLunin, alias Jacques spends much of the play tryingto understand his fall from grace, i.e., his fall from

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the protective aureole of imperial love, and in theend accepts this fall as his salvation, Kundera understands the master-servant relationahip as one whichis best defined as without love. In his introduction tothe English editionof the play, which was performedunder Susan Sontag's direction at the AmericanRepertory Theatre in Cambridge in January 1985,Kundera makes a remarkably lucid comment about'the tyranny of feelings, above all love: he tells of anincident during the occupation in 1968 where he wasstopped by Russian soldiers for an inspection. Thefields and woods all around were larded with Russianartillery. After the search operation, a Russianofficer asks him: How do you feel? He continued,tells Kundera: It's all a big misunderstanding, but itwill straighten itself out. You must realize we lovethe Czechs. We love you " His analysis of this loveas the criterion for action in much of the Christianhistory of Europe until the arrival of Renaissanceskepticism bears quoting: Man cannot do withoutfeelings, but the moment they are considered valuesn themselves, criteria of truth, justifications forkinds of behavior, they become frightening. Thenoblest of national sentiments stand ready to justifythe greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swellingwith lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacredname of love. When feelings supplant rationalthought, they become the basis for an absence ofunderstanding, for intolerance; they become, as CarlJung put it, ' he superstructure of brutality.'Referring to S o : a ~ h e n i t s y n s ~ s s s m n t of Russia'shistory as one without the rationalizing effect of theRenaissance, Kundera sees in the Russian mentality avery different balance (or imbalance) between sentiment and rationality, one in which we find thefamous mystery of the Russian soul (its profundity aswell as its brutality). .

Radzinsky's play partakes very much in a reflection of this brutality. Not only is Lunin's fate abrutal one, his own character reflects a kind ofbrutality which seems to grow out of an absence of

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love. He identifies with those characters who sayNo but his refusal takes the form of negation, ofself-isolation. There is no viable alternative inLunin's book. He is very much composed in the tradition of the Romantic metaphysical rebel, the oneswho can be found in Mickiewicz, Krasinski, and ultimately Dostoevsky (an author who irritated Kunderawith his universe where everything turns intofeeling ). The historical Lunin must have providedRadzinsky with a certain amount of leeway to condense this via dolorosa through negation into amurky salvation by a vision of love. (Echo ofGoethe: Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan. ) Whowas this Lunin which attrac.ted the historian/playwright in Radzinsky? Why did he choose this generally lesser known of the Decem brists? Why notRyleev, the poet, or Pestel, the radical, orTrubetskoy, the failure, or Volkonsky, the curiousrecluse with his beautiful wife, Maria, the angel ofSiberia ? Lunin was an odd number in an alreadyrather motley lot of aristocratic reformists.Radzinsky's historical interest in Lunin seems to havebeen aroused by the anarchic side in the man whilehis interest as a playwright must have latched on toLunin's quixotic and garrulous personality, as well asthe pathos of his near total i 'olation even in themidst of social gregarity. n sho1 t, Lunin is a suitablyRomantic subject matter for a playwright whoseearlier successes were largely romances.

Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin could have been invented by Pushkin. He was a military officer whohad participated in most of the Napoleonic wars andmoved in the highest social circles of Petersburg,Paris, and Warsaw. As a character, he appeared diffident, fond of dueling, a desirable bachelor in andout of love. His involvement with the Decembristplot was more indirect and though he harbored likemany Western educated aristocrats of his generationreformist ideas, his contribution to the uprising wasmore that of a sardonic wit than actual insurrection. Nevertheless he had severely incriminated

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himself and had enough social n ~ m i s to draw theseverest punishment. He was convicted to a lifetimeof hard labor, along with the other Decembrists whohad not been executed, to be spent in the camps andmines of farthest Asian Siberia. While in Siberia hebecame an old eccentric who would proclaim thatthough he had only one tooth left in his mouth, eventhat one was directed against Nicholas. Or he would

send curious Buriat tribesmen scurrying in awe whenhe would tell them with a clear gesture to his neckthat he was accused of doing chik to the Tsar.These stories are told by Maria Volkonsky whose children he tutored in history and Greek, the languageof angels as he would call it. He was a loner whosurrounded himself with six dogs during the time ofrelative ease near Irkutsk where after ten years ofhard camp existence a semi-civilized existence couldbe established and where the Volkonsky householdbecame a cultural centre. He assessed his situationrather coolly: I am known as a resettled statecriminal. n England they would refer to me asLunin, a member of the opposition. For that in factis my political status. My weapon is my ability tothink. He did not lack in that ability nor in sarcasm,the whip which cuts as deeply as a headman'saxe. This ability and this whip landed him back inthe most notorious prison, Akatui, near the Chineseborder, a place which according to Lunin must havebeen built by an architect who must have inheritedDante's imagination. He lived there four more yearsand died from questionable circumstances. Yet hisautopsy, had he been able to able to observe it, wouldhave probably given him great occasion to exercisehis whip. Lacking proper tools, the prison doctorsplit open his head with an axe. The death hasremained a mystery to this day. Not in Radzinsky'sdrama, however.

Radzinsky's play unravels backward from aknown end and procedes forward from an arbitrarybeginning. The action is c'ondensed into the lastthree hours of Lunin's life, from midnight until 3 a.m.

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when the execution by strangulation has beenarranged. The play starts with the report of Lunin'sdeath, as presumably discovered by a fellow inmate,being dictated by the guard Grigoriev to the prisonscribe Then Grigoriev informs Lunin of his impending demise and from then on the play progressesnonlinearly through a flow of remembered scenes andreflections of the past as well as contemplation ofthe present situation. The conversations are totallyengendered within Lunin's mind and the party whichhe evokes in order to meet the characters of his pastand those who are still active behind the scenes in hispresent tense, all of that is entirely a product of hisimagination. Through his imagination he raises themand himself to figures of a mythical dimension whilehe keeps them occupied in the trivial activities ofhigh society, card plays, c a r r i a 7 ~ arrivals, dancing,and chatting. He talks, they at. He diminishestheir humanity while enlarging their function in hispanoply of masks who have, in his mind, devoured hislife. Through the conversations and through themythifications, he tries to put everything in order.Alyosha Orlov, a fellow member of the imperialguard and one who made career in the infamous ThirdSection (Security) becomes for him a latter-day Cain;Volkonsky, the co-conspirator, is another Abel; TsarAlexander, Grandduke Constantine, and Tsar Nicholas, the three brothers blend into one Caesar (andJacques's master); and Lunin, who would have liked tohave seen himself as a Brutus, becomes the scapegoatof the revolution. The uprising itself is mythifiedinto the equivalent of the French Revolution as heremembers Desmoulins' purported saying uponmounting the scaffolding to the ~ i l l o t i n e "Therevolution devours its children like Saturn Take careThe gods are thirsty " The most shadowy figure isthe female who remains darkly at the periphery as afaceless body who only now and then is given a distinct voice. This one female figure embodies all thewomen he has known and whose faces he has forgotten and who have melted into that kind ofanonymous notion of the Romantic feminine, mostly


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silent or at best pleading to be saved by either beingspared or taken. Radzinsky created a rather shapeless mask with this one female character. This is toobad for the mot ~ s at his disposal, Maria Potocka,and especially Maria Volkonsky were anything butwispy women.

Although the play relies on historical precepts,it is basically a very personal memory play with adream structure reminiscent of Mickiewicz's FOREFATHER'S EVE and Krasinski's UNDMNE COMEDY.However, there is also a rather conscious attempt atraising questions about historical validation. As aWestern reader or viewer one is placed in a peculiarsituation which lies in a conflict of perceptions, manyof which are hopelessly shackled by propagandaposing as information from a whole range of interested parties. This becomes particularly complicated when a writer from the Soviet Union addresses a part of his own history which has undergonecontinuous revision. How is one to understand the inherent ironies - with a Western eye to bolster one'sown prejudices which tend to be fueled by a mixtureof skepticism and sympathy? Radzinsky chooses as amodel the SocratiC dialogue but he creates a monomythic piece. His rhetorical dramaturgy would demand critical reason. Words are heaped upon words;the historical cannons are great but the words end upflying like buck-shot and elude any possibility ofserious impact.

The Russian production was apparently a rathergrand historical pageant. By contrast, what happenedin the small Bouwerie Lane theatre under Eve Adamson's direction and with Craig Smith's emotionallycharged Lunin was more a personal descent. In aprogram note, Alma Law sees the play and its companion pieces as treating the dilemma of the intellectual confronting authority. I am not so surewhether Lunin would wish to be reduced to this, because his intellect serves him to fabricate an alternative to real authority whereby he can escape ratherthan confront. This solution by imagination, in his

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case fueled by bits and pieces of historical prototypes, is so personally subversiv . that the perpetratorwill be branded a fool and a madman. Of course,poets have loved their madmen and fools and safelyplaced their critiques into these twisted mouths.Sophocles already knew into whose mouths he shouldplace words of reason so anarchic that politicalreason had to be shown for what it is, a convenientcommonplace. Those who rule are therefore alwaysvindicated on the surface of the commonplace andsafely put away those madmen who are safely lovedby the Population as the personae of its own anarchicdesires. Yet place these same critical words into themouth of a figure who refuses to play the madman orthe fool and the authorities will try to silence thosewords, see Beaumarchais' FIGARO and perhapsDiderot's JACQUES which was not published untilafter the author's death. Those two servants were nofools but their reason was truly anarchic and dangerously lucid and logical and, above all, independentof faith in and love of the master. Radzinsky's Lunintraps himself in his madness and playing of the fool.He tells us in the end, that "in all the days of humankind in times of outrage - and the cross - there isalways one who says: 'No' in that was themeaning." But he also tells us that he used thespeeches of Socrates to commit his crime of writingand he sees this as the u tim ate joke against theauthority - that he copied speeches and attached hisname. Yet Radzinsky undermines even this by havingthe scribe end the play, reading a list of the m aterialbelongings found on Lunin after his death, amongthese, thirty sheets of "unconnected words andindecipherable markings." On whom is the joke?Lunin? The authorities? The audience? Where doesthis leave Lunin's ecstatic last outburst, referring tothe woman's face, "I see My God After so manyyears I see your face again I see I see "? Is it aretreat into the privacy of feeling, of faith, of love?f so, where is the conflict now? After three

viewings and innumerable readings of the play, I fearI come away with less and less insight into the partie-

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ular conditions of a Soviet writer and historian who isbound to be sensitive to the constant material revisionism of Soviet historiography {who is in, who isout,- for what reasons?) and of a publi.c who viewedthings semiotically before i t became fashionable inthe West and of governments who insist on the flatunreflective materiality of "pravda." I am botheredby this retreat into the early 19th century form ofheroic madness and isolation, of this mystification ofnegation. However, bothered or not, it is very important to be given the opportunity to hear voicesfrom a spectrum too rarely heard, since we continueon t ~ s journey of Jacques and master where themaster orders but the servant chooses, where forwardmeans all directions and anywhere equally for masterand servant. t is cause for laughter and for melancholy, as Kundera would show and Radzinsky wouldindicate.

Works cited:Diderot, Denis. Jacques the Fatalist and HisMaster. 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 EdwardRadzinsky in Showbill, Jean Cocteau Repertory 1985-86. New York: Playbill Inc., 1985.

Radzinsky, Edvard. I, Mikhail SergeevichLunin. Trans . by Alma H. Law. New York:Humanities Institute for Contemporary EasternEuropean Drama and Theatre {CASTA), The GraduateSchool {CUNY), 198Z.

Sutherland, Christine. The Princess of Siberia. The Story of Maria Volkonsky and the DecembristExiles. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1984.{For anectdotal information about Lunin.)

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Vernadsky, George. Ed. A Source Book forRussian History from Early Times to 1917. Vol. nNew Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. (For thememoirs 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 RussianStanford University

O'Meara, Patrick. K. F. Ryleev. A PoliticalBiography of the Decembrist Poet. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1984.

Radzinsky, Edvard. Conversations withSocrates.

Radzinsky, Edvard. Theatre in the Time ofNero and Seneca.

Beate Hein Bennet

The following article by Spencer Golub,University of Virginia, is a revised and muchexpanded version of a paper which the author pre-sented at the AATSEEL Conference in Chicago inDecember, 1985.

ON THE PRESENCE AND PRESCIENCE OFSTANISLAVSKY: A POLEMICWith martial stalk hath he gone by our watch. (Hamlet, I.i.)

Konstantin Stanislavsky has been damned by thepraise which attends the evocation of his name as26


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much as by the questionable company his disembodiedspirit posthumously has been made to keep. Unlikemany of his contemporaries, Stanislavsky did not present himself to the world as an enigma to bepondered and unravelled. An experimentalist trappedin a moderates psyche, he was born too soon to be atrue revolutionist and had the future revealed to himbefore he could personally discover or invent it. Aunique confluence of personal and historical circumstances has made Stanislavsky in his own timeand in ours appear to be simultaneously avant-gardeand passe (he was in reality a progressive), and oftenmore right thinking than right doing. He could notgrasp all we have dreamed for him . f ever there wasan artist who consciously labored to see and knowmore than his fate would allow, it was he. Nevertheless, in the ongoing quest to create the theatre ofthe future, we must continue to love art, and notStanislavsky in art, especially when and where hispath and the future's diverge. To do less would bedoom the theatre to relive, that is, mimetically tor e p r o ~ u e the past.

Stanislavsky's example as much as his achievement is truly estimable. His career was informed bya spirit of generosity, tireless seeking and selfcriticism. He was an exemplary student of life andart. And yet, as many have begun to recognize,Stanislavsky's legacy to the modern theatre was notbold enough. So much of his thinking about theatre ingeneral and acting in particular was reactive, involved in what he had seen rather than with whatthere was yet to imagine that he left a number ofimportant questions unasked, let alone unanswered.His theory, born of an ethical and instructional impulse, was devised largely on demand. His theatre,he stated, was conceived not for the purpose ofdestroying the splendid old but, on the contrary, withthe idea of carrying i t on to the best of its ability. 1And yet his society's proximity to Russia's relativelyunenlightened (re. theory andstaging) theatrical pastwas very much with him. He feared that artistic rad-

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icalism would lead either to anarchy or else back tothe stale conventionalism, the i l ~ t t n t i s m pomposi ty and lassitude of the nineteenth- century stage. Hewas the primary agent for a new professionalism, anew code of conduct in the theatre. At the sametime, he astutely and at times automatically seemedto wrap himself and his own world view in the impenetrable mantle of the actor's truth and mastery, forwhich he so stoutly proselytized.

Stanislavsky called the Moscow Art-AccessibleTheatre, whose name was later shortened to theMoscow Art Theatre MAT), the "first rational,moral, public theatre." These creditable turn-ofthe-century biases in retrospect constitute a largepart of the problem with the Stanislavsky-MATlegacy to the modern theatre.

Stanislavsky, like Lev Tolstoy whose What IsArt? was published in 1898, the year of MAT'sfounding, believed that art has a great responsibilityto serve and better the people (although MAT was a"popular" and not a "people's" theatre). He positedthat "the theatre has neither the capacity nor theright to serve pure art alone," and he cringed whenhis Luciferian protege Vsevolod Meyerhold proclaimed his willingness "to laugh in he face of thecrowd when t fails to understand us."

Stanislavsky loved man's rational intelligence,his civilizing faculty, and the theatre as a civilizingforce. He took comfort in a fully integrated and reproducible reality made possible by cognition. Freudbegan writing The Interpretation of Dreams in theyear of MAT's founding, and Stanislavsky's work reveals a distinct affinity for the interiority of psychoanalytic theory culled from various sources whichhelped him to paint a composite picture of verifiablereality. As Michael Goldman suggests in his excellent essay, The Actor's Freedom, Stanislavsky'semphasis on the subtextual mechanics of performance was helped and actually occasioned by the

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dramatic text s concern with subtextual life whichantedated even F reud.4Stanislavsky s theatre o p e r t ~ d within a h istorical trad it ion of social advocacy. Activist manwas its hero - man the striver, man the builder.Stanislavsky was at home with Gorky s charactersmore so than with Chekhov s whose apparent indolence and non-participation in their fates seemed tohim to be strangely unproductive. Stanislavsky scelebrated differ ences with Gordon Craig in theirHamlet collaboration at MAT (1909-12) were the inevitable result of conflicting liberal humanist andsymbolic visionary conceptions of man s fate, statureand the scale of the world which he was eitherdestined or powerless to rule/move. Stanislavskyviewed actor-man and Craig the scenic world asbeing larger than life, respectively.

Characteristically, Stanislavsky empathized andeven identified with Craig, whom he professed tounderstand and feel comfortable with from the start(as opposed to Chekhov b whose presence he wasmade continually uneasy). However, Stanislavskycould not transform empathic understanding into anactive acceptance of what seemed to him to beCraig s confused t heatrical vision. His self-proclaimed role as the actor s spiritual guardian wouldnot have it so.

For all that has been written on the subject, theessential theoretical difference betweenStanislavskys realist position and that of the theatricalists was that the l atter considered theatre to besynonymous with theatricality. Stanislavsky viewedconventions and conventionalism as modes of performance detachable from the idea and essence oftheatre and capabl e of being conceived and practicedwith varying degrees of success according to howwell 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 ofCraig, Meyerhold, Evreinov, et al. as just so muchartistic egoism. More importantly, said t heatri-

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calism, in his estimation, tended in the direction ofsymbolist defeatism, a willed sacrifice of man's willto the authority of the artist who seeks to author theworld in his rather than in nature's or even the collective's image.

To the theatricalists, Stanislavsky's VJstonrevealed a l a ~ k of wit, spontaneity and imaginationand an inability to look back as far as theatre'ssources. Craig declared Stanislavsky to be withoutan engrained sense of theatricality and a littleinclined to think wten he is reflecting an image thathe is creating it. But then reflection was reallywhat Stanislavsky the director and acting theoristwas all about. While Craig and Evreinov in particularwere obsessed with the issue of originality,Stanislavsky was suited to and accepting of, if notcontent with, his role as a systematizer devoted tothe recreation of life in art. This systematization, hemaintained, was made necessary by the general lackof discipline endemic to the Russian actor and theRussian stage.

The recurring drama of the artist son killing hisprogenitor so as to give birth to himself was exacerbated in Stanislavsky's day by the emphasis placedupon the original, self-dramatizing artistic personality. The erect, prematurely gray figure ofStanislavsky soon became a symbol for a benign butoutmoded humanist patriarchy in the arts. For hispart, Stanislavsky perceived originality as constituting a mask of personality donned by those ofinferior talent and discipline to ~ j s g u i s e and evenjustify their inadequacies as artists. The efficacy ofStanislavsky's personal and world views was not predicated upon the issue of originality. Stanislavsky didnot, like the symbolists, believe in an indivisible,preexisting truth which only intuition could reveal.He did not objectify the present nor did he trulyimagine the future. He located truth not in form butn man the maker of forms. Stanislavsk)r was aromantic positivist, and yet he rejected the romanticism and in particular the staginess of the

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nineteenth-century theatre on the one hand and theromantically-derived theatricalism of t h ~ developingtwentieth-century stage on the other. He wasgenerally unable to capture the essence ofShakespeare, whom he excepted from the falseromantic tradition, nor could he fully master Moliereor Gogol. He was faulted frequently for reducingShakespeare's tragic ~ h r c t e r s to realistic, middleclass character roles.

Leonid Andreyev, whose mystical dramasStanislavsky produced at MAT, insightfully statedthat Shakespeare is a pose, an actor, acting in allthings, a brilliant pattem of self-sufficient words,theatrical magnificence. Of Moliere's TheImaginary invalid, Andreyev wrote that it is builtentirely on acting and merry pretense, on the mostthorough2oing and enchanting disdain for psyc h o l o g y . ~ O Both statements could be made withequal conviction regarding Gogol's theatrical world.Although Stanislavsky always loved the theatre, heunderstood it less when it lied, to employ hisimplicitly moral perspective. The problem is, ofcourse, that the theatre alwayslies. The artist is notgiven a choice. Thus, in Moliere's terminology,Stanislavsky loved the theatre in spite of itself, theawareness of which fact occasioned the alternativetheatricalist terminology .of his day - the theatre assuch, for its own sake and as/for itself.Stanislavsky's much-documented difficulties withacting in and producing Ibsen's plays may havederived in part from the fact that the central actionof these plays, a relentless seeking after truth, is. embodied in a form whose realism is an illusion.Ibsen was afterall the favorite playwright of theRussian symbolists and with good reason. He hadfound a way to contemporize the ancient Greekconcept of Ananke (necessity, implacable fate),internalizing it in character and interiorizing i t inenvironment. Stanislavsky's 1905 production ofIbsen's Ghosts, in one Soviet critic's estimation,succeeded only in lowering this symbolic drama to

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the pedestrian level of "a Norwegian Uncle Vanya."SThis remark is doubly ironic given Chekhov'sdismissal of Ibsen as a playwright and the accusationlevelled at Stanislav:;ky that he had reducedChekhov's dramas from the level of symbo1.12

These conceptual failures are remarkable whenone considers two facts: 1) Stanislavsky chronologically founded the director's theatre in Russia, -2despite his naturalistic methodology, Stanislavskywas enamored of the romantic, heroic gesture. Asregards the first point, the seminal anti-realisttheoretical c o m p i l a t i o ~ Theatre: A Book about theNew Theatre 1908), which contained articles byMeyerhold, Andrei Bely, Valery Bryusov andAlexandre Benois among others, was actuallydedicated to Stanislavsky. Here, as ~ manyinstances of MAT-baiting, Stanislavsky the artist wasdistinguished from MAT the institution, which Meyerhold likened to "a garish bazaar," Evreinov called"mercantile" and the futurif s labelled "that

, .espectable refuge of triviality."n his early days at MAT, Stanislavsky wasactually accused of being a d i r e c t o r - ~ e s p o t(necessary, he argued, given the inexperience of hisactors at the time), .a charge which would resurface

with the advent of his system of acting. 14 The criticAleksandr Kugel Homo Novus), Evreinov's contentious associate at the Crooked Mirror Theatre and anoted champion of actor's rights, spoke dismissivelyof "the carpentry and paperhanging" (i.e., themechanics) of both Stanislavsky's and Meyerhold'sproductions which smothered the actor's creativity.And Gordon Craig, whose theatrical idealism oftenwore the mask of actor-hating, said that hisexperience at MAT convinced him that Stanislavskyhad an even worse opinion of actors than he had.Stanislavsky "uses them," said Craig, "as one usesbookbinding tools or needles and thrergs he doomsthe actor to everlasting servitude." This is thevery same sort of criticism that Stanislavsky hadlevelled at Meyerhold when the lat ter ran MAT's

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Theatre-Studio and which would be encountered byMeyerhold more widely as artistic director of VeraKomissarzhevskaya's theatre and throughout hiscareer that followed.

In reference to the second point, Stanislavskyderived his sense of the heroic actor from life and art- from the inspirational Italian tragedians Rossi andSalvini, from Shakespeare's Brutus and from Molierewho starred in his own life's drama. Stanislavskyinsisted that Mikhail Bulgakov reconceive thebeleagured and diminished Moliere in his Stalinistallegory A Cabal of Hypocrites (1930) and inparticular that he add ~ scene in which the artist isseen engaged in the act of creation, th1Jtoariest andleast successful of theatrical cliches. While hefavored realistic depiction on a heroic scale,Stanislavsky rejected the real heroism that isavailable to the actor, the presentation of self madepossible by some measure of what Meyerhold called

freedom in subordination. While Stanislavskyconsidered this condition to be necessary and naturalin opera where the composer rules, thought it tobe inimical to the nonmusical theatre.

In eschewing the false show of theatre past andpresent, Stanislavsky evolved an image of the theatrethat was sensory, spatial, historical, linear andconcrete. He sought to create in the theatre thesensation of uninterrupted life, mimeticallyreproducing the essence of life which according tohim is a meeting point between great historicalevents and mundane activities. He employed as hispractical model the Maly Theatre company of thelate nineteenth-century where Russian stage realismwas born, where great character actors seemed toentef the stage not from the wings but directly fromlife.

8 This approach at times led to excessiveantiquarianism at the expense of lived experience,historicity which was more correct than actual andthe presentation of historical rather than theatricaltruth, a problem which Stanislavsky's critics and themaster himself readily acknowledged. Stanislavsky

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was even known on occasion to have correctedShakespeare's historical errors, a practice whichplaces him in the company of neoclassicists andsentimentalists of the ~ v n t n t h and eighteenthcenturies, respectively. I

The question of Stanislavsky's competingallegiances to the dramatic text as literature and thetext of performance is, as with his theatricalistcontemporaries, problematical. At the time in whichStanislavsky began his career, theatre and dramawere still legitimized as much as possible in relationto generalized concepts of Art and Literature, as thename of his first serious theatrical endeavor (theSociety of Art and Literature) indicates. SlavicistNicholas Rzhevsky sees Stanislavsky's dedication tobringing great l i terature to the stage as being moreintentional than conditioned by social values andnorms, a position which is difficult wholly to prove ordisprove.

\n any case, Stanislavsky's thinking aboutliterature as a discipline was not particularly

advanced for his time. One wishes that Stanislavskyha l had more to say about language apart fromliterature, as a source and level of theatricalunderstanding. Language for him was a supportsystem, a means of verifying the truth of the play-world, but his discussions of it were focused largelyon matters of style and not modes of performance.Language was seldom if ever considered as beingantecedent to the actor's interpretative skills. Hisunwillingness to break open the text as did Meyerholdis not so much indicative of his veneration for thewritten play text as for the unwritten text of theworld, life, which t depicted and reinforced. t wassimilarly Meyerhold who first put October (i.e., theRevolution) into the theatre and concomitantlydessicated i ts language.

While Stanislavsky did succeed eventually inconstructing environment psychologically rather thanarcheologically (e.g., his 193 production of Othello),34


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he never completely broke through the Renaissanceproscenium arch and his own fourth wall at theconceptual stage to affect a c t ~ f j ' a u d i e n c e coauthorship of the theatrical event. Stanislavskywas hindered in this by what he felt to be a necessarypaternalism directed at the audience. t had to becured of its bad habits, made to attend the actor andacknowledge the mastery of Art. While he spoke ofthere being a communion of feeling between stageand auditorium, said union was forged by an empathicleap on the spectator's part, mirroring the actor'semotional connection with the role. This confluenceof emotions creates mood in the theatre, but itoccurs long after the arcrJtectonics of the theatricalevent have been defined.

While Stanislavsky imagined an audience in thetheatre e.g., n his idea of the actor's publicsolitude ), he did not create the audience for eachparticular play as did Meyerhold through most of hisdirectorial career and Evreinov, especially in hismedieval and Spanish Golden Age productions at theAncient Theatre 1907-8, 1911-lZ), which included anonstage audience of actors. Furthermore,Stanislavsky's unprecedented decision to have hisactors tum their backs on the audience, which heclaimed was done largely to disguise the inadequaciesof inexperienced actors in climactic emotionalmoments in the early days of MAT, argued againsttrue co-creation. By reaffirming the voyeuristicrole of the spectator, i t reasserted the actor'sposition as being morally superior. This compromisedand directed the spectator's response to the stage. Incontinually asserting the actor's hegemony,Stanislavsky overlooked the role of criticalrespondent which when played by director, dramatist,spectator and the thinking actor objectifies theactor's function and makes i t truer, more real andmore beautiful. He feared oversimplification,reducing the actor to a symbol, stripping the stage toexpose in i ts nakedness its. otherness and lifting theveil of dram a tic language to reveal the silences

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which rest between, within and beyond words. AsTimothy 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 jthe play's end never occurred to Stanislavsky.Thus, did Stanislavsky miss the essence of Chekhov'sdrama, the being rather than becoming which, in thewords of m e ~ c a n critic Stark Young, flies awayfrom a center.

While Chekhov, as Wiles suggests, challengedStanislavsky's belief in the consistency and'natuzglism' of reality, the experience did not changehim. Stanislavsky seemed unwilling or else unableto confront the implications of modernity andmodernist absence. Or perhaps any incipientpessimism was quelled by his belief in the hopefulnessof art as an endeavor and a life. Stanislavskysentimentalized Chekhov and transformed the latter 'smodernist grace notes and prescient concretemystery into the incontrovertible presence of .visualand auditory effects - crickets and the like -beyond those expressly called for in the text. Hereplaced the abstract and what Andreyev referred toas panpsychic spiritual soundings of the inanimateand animate worlds with a fully materialized theatreof mood which was to Chekhov in large partirrelevant. Stanislavsky and MAT then applied thismethod to all manner of classic and contemporarydramas.

Stanislavsky believed that the various anti- realistic movements of his day represented onlyrealism in refined, ennobled and purified form. His

own largely unsuccessful experiments withalternative approaches were e s i ~ e to expand andreinorce the claims of realism. The theatre ingeneral and acting in particular, Stanislavsky argued,had not yet achieved the realism which he sawmanifested in the visual arts and so it would bepremature to seek to transcend it. The path to thesuperconscious passes through realism in any caserather than circumventing it. More importantly, he

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proclaimed, the actor was not ready for anti-realism. Admittedly, he wrote, some conventionsare inevitable, but then why create new ones? Oneshould think that the fewer conventions the freer andmore natural the acting. Conventions lead the artisttoward craft and artifice and away from art and life,toward a technically rendered verisimilitude ofscenic emotion and a trust in it and away from thegenuine emotional experiencing and embodiment oftruth. Conventions offer the artist and the audienceshort cuts which can lead only to the manufacturingof falsehoods in the guise of truth. No stageconventions however beautiful, nor the principle ofrepresentation itself will create anything live. Theycannot, that is, create the life of jh human spiritwhich is the theatres raison d'etre. Z

While acknowledging the presence . ofconventions in the theatre, Stanislavsky could not, inspite of periodic flirtations, accept their dominanceas expressed in the theatrical aesthetic of u s l o v n o ~which he likened to a cult of stage conventions.Convention, he wrote, is evidence of barbarity, of

impaired taste or spiritual deformity, whereas trutht nature reflects spiritual purity and, if you will, acloseness to God (note here the disapproving moraltone).Z9 Since, in Stanislavsky's words, everythingthat is poetic is symbolic per se, that which is called

~ y m b o l i s t or more generally, uslovny, is to his mindexcessive, showy, redundant, selfserving, one mighteven say, decadent. His one attempt to write asymbolist play (The Comet) was left incomplete andto talk of s ~ o l i s t acting was, in his estimation, animpossibility. Ironically, as Soviet theatre scholarKonstantin Rudnitsky has pointed out, Stanislavsky'sinability either to master or to reject categoricallythe symbolist theatre prolonged his obsession with itlong after Miyerhold and other theatricaliststranscended it.3

Stanislavsky was a chemical rather than analchemical man. For him, Truth arose from theacknowledgement and experiencing of the density of7


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matter not from i ts transfiguration into somethingother. Reality was for him compoundable but not

essentially transformable. As such, his interest wasin construction not in deconstruction ormystification. Nikolai Evreinov, whose own sensewas that reality's essence was precognitive and thetheatre's preaesthetic, parodied the celebratedStanislavskian genius for concreteness in twoCrooked Mirror plays. In The Inspector General1912.), a disciple of the master, whose doctoraldissertation, dedicated to Stanislavsky, was entitledThe Semipause and Pause for Mood, and whobelieved that everything on stage must happen not asin life but as in mood, . ransfol ms all of Gogol'smetaphors into l i t e r a l ~ . . archeologically researchedand constructed images.-'2 In The Fourth Wall 1915),Gounod's opera Faust devolves first into a musicaldrama, then into a drama with music, and finally intoan unseen but fully and fatally lived naturalistic,psychological drama. (The actor impersonating Faustin the interest of authenticity is made to drink realpoison and dies). The action transpires behindStanislavsky's theoretical fourth wall which actuallybas been constructed along the proscenium line thusblocking the audience's view of Faust completelyexcept for those occasions when he passes by thewall's only window.

Stanislavsky's own plans for staging the operaFaust (with himself cast against type in the role ofMephistopheles) were based upon a popular set ofGerman illustrations that were distinguished by theirdocumentary accuracy and absolute superficiality.Stanislavsky's three-dimensional, concretelynaturalistic cellar set, with i ts ambient lighting, i tsred-hot stove, steaming pot and scientificparaphernalia, was a reaction to the typically stageyFaustian dwelling with its patently unreal retorts andi ts red cloth quivering in feeble imitation of aflame. 33

Stanislavsky no doubt saw Faust as being aradical humanist like himself, the ever striving

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activist man flawed by pride but redeemed by love, aforce for inherent good in conflict with the innateevil incarnated in the artistic egoist Mephistopheles(perhaps a subconscious dialogue betweenStanislavsky's own conflicting intentions anddesires). But what could Stanislavsky make of Faustthe alchemist, the dangerous metaphysical scientistdesirous to master t i m ~ to capture immortality. Hislaboratory equipment was only the means to an endwhich lay far beyond the confines of his laboratorywalls. The interior Faust cannot be found in hisroom's exterior. His essence lies in his visions, in hisunreality, in the breach which he makes with societynot in the fulfillment of social norms via concretematter and means. Evreinov demonstrates via thecharacter devices of an onstage production staff anda performance-within-a-performance that no amountof historical and psychological justification andenvironmental detail can bring the alchemist Faust tolife and produce theatrical magic. This, Evreinovbelieved, could only be achieved via thedematerialization of the stage. Evreinov's targetswere overly zealous misapplications of theStanislavsky system in general and in particular tworecent productions of Faust: FyodorKomissarzhevsky's at Nezlobin's Theatre in Moscow191Z) which cast Goethe's eponymous hero and hisantagonist Mephistopheles as two sides of a singlecharacter and Iosif Lapitsky's Stanislavskiantreatment of Gounod's opera at the St. PetersburgTheatre of Musical Drama. Hof.iever, the master wasin both cases held accountable.

While many modern directors and actingtheorists credit Stanislavsky as being their teacher,he is more their spiritual godfather than he is theirblood relation. He did define, as William B. Worthenasserts in a recent essay, an art, an attitude anethos for the modern actor. He did set the actor onthe path to self-discovery, expressive freedom andreal immediacy on stage. He did create the modelfor a life in art. However, he did not, to my mind,

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consider directly as Worthen and others wouldsuggest, the actor s existential dilemma of wanting toexpress the self in the face of the frustratingnecessity of donning the mask of otherness, i e.,character.35 Nor could he forsee the underminingand even the destruction of character as a theatricalconcept which is being so heatedly discussed today.

Although his system is widely applicable due toi ts roots in basic human psychology and the flexibilitywhich its creator built into it, it does not embody nordoes it imply a poetics of performance.Stanislavsky s thinking on this score was notsufficiently developed. He was, as well, too highlysubjective, too incorrigably bourgeois realistic andtoo inhospitable to the notion of theatricality,believing it to be a taint upon reality. It was left tohis rebellious protegees and those whom they influenced to develop a theory of performance aestheticsand an objective system of notation for anti- andsuper-realistic acting. While acknowledging the roleof cognition in creation, these innovators achieved amore simplified, symbolic eloquence and demonstrativeness n acting. Their notations embodied agalvanized formal awareness of the actor s nervosity,the physical shape of his overall action as a signifierand that of the text. Vsevolod Meyerhold, EvgenyVakhtangov, Aleksandr Tairov, Michael Chekhov,Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Bertolt Brecht, AntoninArtaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin, PeterBrook, Richard Schechner and many others haveconsidered the actor as avatar and atavist, hiscognition applied to the awareness of the mask ofperformance. Pre-acting, constructivism ~ biomechanics, fantastic realism and synthetic theatre,the emotional and the psychological gesture, thetheatre of pure form, gestus and expressionistsignification, poor, holy and environmental theatreconstitute some milestones in the history ofperformance theory, the figure-grounding of theactor in theatrical time, space and self-referential

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history, the reverse side of Stanislavsky's mirror tonature.

A kind of neo-Stanislavskian notation has beencreated by contemporary Soviet director AnatolyEfros who deepens, extends and intensifies themaster's work, while framing it with Vakhtangov'ssense of the unique occasion. Stanislavsky 's oftencriticized rehearsal practice of repeating an actionendlessly has been transferred by Efros to the stage,where a hand may be shaken or a handkerchiefthrown half a dozen or a dozen times consecutively~ i t different physicalized attitudes and anescalating sense of urgency. The effect is primarilyvisceral, however, rather than intentional, while atthe same time being suggestive of a performancemode of consciousness. One can. state, as doesTimothy Wiles, that Stanislavsky was the first tosense (although not to specify) that what isessentially 'real about theatrical realism lies as muchin the reality of the performance itself as in thetrue-to-life quality of a play's details, but theconcrete truth here lies in what Wiles s t ~ t sparenthetically, i. e. , the absence of specification.

Stanislavsky the idealist was not quite avisionary and so had his ideas coopted and redefinedby historical necessity to a greater extent than theymight otherwise have been. n prerevolutionary Russia he effected the necessary passage fromactorish performance to simulated behaviorism. Thisnew contract between stage and auditorium wasrenewed and significantly rewritten by the Sovietstate which acutely reimagined and repackagedhumanism as proletarianism. The rational, moral andpublic biases that formed Stanislavsky's vision weremade to serve a redefined materialistic ideal and tojustify a reality in the process of being falsified.Having broken with the false truth of stage realismfrom the outset, the theatricalists remained free,theoretically (at least), to si gnify beyond any and allhistorical and social realities, returning the stage toan assertion and vindication of its staginess which

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Stanislavsky had rejected. As for the master, hefound himself imprisoned at Elsinore castle, hisliberation left to the progeny he had earlier cast outbut to his credit never abandoned e.g., Meyerhold).Needless to say, Stanislavsky has survived, unbowedand largely unchallenged, redolent of an authoritywhich we can now only nostalgically remember orguiltily imagine. Unfortunately, in spite of his manyreal talents and accomplishments, he is too oftenreconceived by us in our own image as a modern, asubtly egoistic conceit of which Stanislavsky wouldno doubt disapprove. Unsuited to play the rebelliousson Prince Hamlet, Stanislavsky is, as Meyerholdinferred in 1921, certainly well cast as his ~ t h e r sghost. As such he will continue to haunt the dreamsand determine the given circumstances of futuregenerations of theatre artists and theorists whomount the battlements to w t for the right to beand not to be upon the stage.

NoteslKonstantin Stanislavsky, Selected o r k s ~ ed.Oksana Korneva (Moscow. Raduga Publishers, 1984),p. 12.0.

2Elena Polyakova, Stanislavsky Moscow:Progress Publishers, 1982.), p. 164.

31bid., pp. 171 and 178.4Michael Goldman,

Toward a Theory of DramaPress, 1975), 103.

The Actor s Freedom .(New York: The Viking

Sstanislavsky, Selected Works, pp. 53, 209 and2.11.

6Laurence Senelick, Gordon Craig s MoscowHamlet . A Reconstruction (Westport,Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 90 and2.13, n. 31.

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7stanislavsky, Selected Works, p. tl lZ.8Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. 68., Laurence

Senelick, Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), inThe McGraw-Hill Encyclopaedia of World Drama, ed.Stanley Hochman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p.

5 ~9Joyce Vining Morgan, Stanislavski's Encounter

with Shakespeare. The Evolution of a Method AnnArbor, 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, inRussian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin t o theSymbolists, trans. and ed. Laurence Senelick (Austin,Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 2 43 and2.46.

11Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. 169.12stanislavsky, Selected Works, pp. 62 and 73.13vsevolod Meyerhold and Valery Bebutov, The

Solitude of Stanisiavsky 192.1), in Meyerhold onTheatre, trans. and ed. Edward Braun (New York:Hill and Wang, 1969), p. 175; Spencer Golub,Evreinov: The Theatre of Paradox andT r ansformation Ann Arbor, Michigan. UMI ResearchPress, 1984), p. 58; Vladim ir Markov, RussianFuturism. A History (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1968), p. 2.01.

14stanislavsky, Selected Works, p. 43.15Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. liZ; Konstantin

Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, ed. SydneySchultze Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1981), p. 115;Senelick, Gordon Craig's Moscow 'Hamlet.' AReconstruction, p. 11z

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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. ElizabethReynolds Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Book,1975), 81.

18Polyakova, Stanislavsky, pp. 50 and 114.19vining M o r g ~ Stanislavski's Encounter with

Shakespeare. The Evolution of a Method, pp. 51 and79.

201bid., P t3Z.Z1stanislavsky, 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: TheCritical Heritage (London, Boston and Henley:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. Z47.

Z5wues, The Theater Event, p. 40.Z6Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. 193-4.27Stanislavsky, Selected Works, pp. 17, 153,

164, Z37 and Z49.28Ibid. , p. Z03.Z9Polyakova, Stanislavsky, p. 195.301bid., pp. 183 and 193.

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always ready to shock and sometimes even to innovate for the sake of innovation.

Whenever we see Chekhov performed weexpect to see elaborately realistic country settings toinclude both the outside and the inside of genteelcountry homes. What Sellars and Tsypin give us isabout a dozen battered wooden chairs which arerearranged before a series of intentionally overlybright backdrops Instead of the turn-of-the-centuryclothes we expect we see the performers dressedalmost entirely in black and white which heightensthe effect of the birghtness behind them and of thefootlights which throw white lights up into the facesof the actors On many occasions the actors evencome right down to the footlights to talk directly tothe audience.

But there are more special effects. Sellars usesthe play-within-a-play sequence in the first act toput on a laser show filling the Eisenhower stage withdancing beams of green light and clouds of smoke.There is even an on-stage pianist who plays Scriabinto underscore a number of the more inflamedspeeches.

In general one must admit that the play is avisual feast and the acting often superb. t isexcellent Sellars but one comes away with the feelingthat t is not Chekhov and that the playwright wouldhave felt that both his characters and his plot hadbeen raped.

L H

LEONID ZORINThe following is the text of a short brochure

which was published by VAAP to introduce thisplaywright to a foreign public. t is reprinted herewith the permission of VAAP without commentary.

Leonid Zorin is a prominent Soviet playwright.Both Soviet and foreign audiences have admired his46


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many-faceted talent, subtle artistic feeling andimpeccable taste.

Zorin's plays have been produced in Poland,Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria,Czechoslovakia, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium and theFRG; they have been published in New York, Munichand Basel; his film script for Peace unto theNewcomer was awarded the Gran Prix at the FilmFestival in Venice in 1961; the film script The GrandMaster received the First Prize at the Film Festivalin Kran (Yugoslavia) in 1974.

Leonid Zorin was born in Baku in 1924. Hegraduated from the Azerbaijan University and laterfrom Gorky Literary Institute. He is a member ofthe Union of Soviet Writers.

Leonid Zorin develops the traditions of theRussian realist theatre, a theatre distinguished by astriving for maximum veracity, by it humanist message and 'psychological insight, without scorning a

.dynamic plot or soarings of fancy. Zorin leans to thestrict school shunning verbal experimentation andbizarre formal devices. At the same time he probesinto every genre including satirical comedy, lyricaldrama and historical tragedy.Fantastic Realism

Zorin achieved prominence as a playwrightafter The Kindly Folk was produced by the SovietArmy Theatre in 1958 . With his brilliant wit and hisunconstrained and elegant dialogue, Zorin is at homein the bubbling element of comedy. Urgent socialproblems in skilful combination with eternal humanones, a fast-moving plot with paradoxical twists -such is Zorin's comedy. Ridiculing ignorance,snobbery, vulgarity, the playwright asserts honesty,kindliness, justice ( The Encyclopedists, ATheatrical Fantasy ). Many of his characters tend toadorn their humdrum lives into the garb of beautifulfantasy. Such is the hero . of the play Serafim, or

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Three Chapters from the Life of Kramolnikov, whoperceives the events taking place in his little town aschapters from an absorbing detective story. Thesedreamer-heroes often land in strange and absurdsituations, and though 'the author laughs at them, heis also full of love and compassion.Love and Ti10e

Zorin's lyrical plays have a key theme of theirown - Love and Time. Fate brings people togetherfor a short stretch of time - a day's voyage on ariver steamer ( The Deck ), or a few hours of waitingfor the train at a small railway station ( Transit ) -only to separate them again, often forever. As oftenas not, the man and woman who meet by chance todiscover they are made for each other both havetheir own homes and families which place inescapabledemands on them. The tragic discrepancy betweenlife which has got into a rut and the emotionalopportunities opened in the chance meeting leavesthe spectator with a sad, nostalgic feeling. Thisclash between inexorable time and human emotionsunderlies the most famous of Zorin's plays, WarsawMelody. Two college students, Victor, a Russian,and Gelena, a Polish girl, D;leet and fall in love inMoscow, but the force of circumstances draws themapart, each settling in his respective country and intohis respective profession - he a wine-maker, she asinger. When they meet in Poland ten years later,they still love each other. But the two people whomeet in Moscow in another ten years are simply oldfriends, a famous singer weary of her nomadic life, .and even of applause, and irritated with the varioushitches in her tour, and a professor come to Moscowon business. Their love is gone, leaving behind asense of emptiness and frustration.History and Human Destinies

The variety of Zorin's intonations is particularlystriking in his historical plays. Dion is a comedyrather than an historical play proper. The author48


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himself indicates it by gtvtng the play a subtitle ARoman Comedy." Although the plot is based on afact of Roman history, the author does not bother tostrive after historical authenticity, the Romanemperor and his courtiers speaking a racy modernjargon. Despite the comical accoutrements, thepurport of the play is serious enough: it is concernedwith the mission of a poet, with honesty, incorruptibility and loyalty to an artistic calling. Other plays,such as "The Decembrists," "Bronze Granny" and "TheRoyal Hunt," are historical in the precise meaning ofthe word. "The Decembrists," which has an epigraph"Fantasy here is documentary, while the document isfantastic , is subtitlt d "A Tragedy." Participantsin the uprising are presented as heroes of a tragedy intheir unequal confrontation with Tsar Nicholas I. Allthey can oppose to his perfidy, hypocrisy and unscrupulousness is their defenceless nobility of heart andmind. Most of Zorin's historical plays are concernedwith the fate of talented, brilliant people. The heroof "Bronze Granny" is the great Russian poetAlexander Pushkin, and the play's tragic overtonesderive from the poet's sad fate . The heroine of "TheRoyal Hunt," the luckless pretender to the Russianthrone occupied by Catherine n, has a talent for self-less lavish love. There is no place for this kind oflove in the ruthless struggle for power, so it isbetrayed and destroyed.

Zorin takes more than plots from history. Healso seeks to achieve an authentic manner ofexpression. "The Decembrists" include almost wordfor-word quotations from documents pertaining tothe uprising. The documentality in "Bronze Granny"and "The Royal Hunt" is not so literal, but the spiritof the epoch is subtly conveyed through the slightlyarchaic turn of speech, which sounds both strange andenchanting to the modern ear. History appears in itsnatural guise, not embellished in any way, but vitallyimportant to us in the very homeliness of its tragedies. This approach has enabled the author tocope successfully wi th a t ask of formidable difficulty

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- that of portraying the living Pushkin. No amountof elevated verbiage could have recreated Pushkin asan inspired poet. Instead, Zorin showed him in hiseveryday pursuits - at home with his family, aroundthe table with his friends, making merry or tormented by financial problems. And yet, this everyday unexalted Pushkin gives us an intuitive understanding of Pushkin the poet.

Zorin's plays are immensely popular both withtheatre people and the theatre-goers by virtue oftheir intrinsic modern spirit. His dialogue is bothexpressive of the people's character and modern in itsidiom and intonation. And i t is always enriched withthe author's unfailing wit. Moreover, modernlanguage conveys modern world perception - aquality essential in a playwright. That is why theaudiences find themselves attuned to the problemswhich confront his characters, problems that arisefrom the complicated relationships between the innerworld of an individual and the reality of his socialbeing, the reality of history and statehood.Stage ProductionsZorin's plays are produced a lot both in theSoviet Union and abroad. For many years Zorin fruitfully cooperated with the stage director Boris LvovAnokhin, who produced The Kindly Fold (1958) and

The Encyclopedists (1965) at the Soviet ArmyTheatre and Serafim, or Three Chapters from theLife of Kramolnikov (1967) at the StanislavskyTheatre. Zorin can be said to have thrown in his lotwith the Vakhtangov Theatre. His plays Coronationand Dion saw limelight here; here, too, RubenSimonov produced the play which brought glory bothto the playwright and the theatre. This is the famousWarsaw Melody, which was also staged by the

Budapest National Theatre, the Lucia SturdzaTheatre in Bucharest and the Theatre-99 in Sofia.The role of Gelena was played by such outstandingactresses asMari Torocsik and Nevena Kokanova.

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The latest theatrical interpretations of Zorin'splays were made by the Soviet stage director RomanViktyuk, who produced The Royal Hunt at theMossoviet Theatre in Moscow and The Stranger atthe Leningrad Comedy Theatre. Viktyuk leanstowards sharp forms, sometimes bordering on thegrotesque, which lends a more strident note to Zorin'sessentially subdued plays.ain orks

Plays1949 Youth1954 Visitors1958 Bright May1958 The Kindly Folk1961 Friends and Years196Z The Encyclopedists1963 ..... The Deck1965 Dion1967 The Decembrists1967 Warsaw Melody1968 Serafim, or Three Chapters from the Life

of Kramolnikov1969 Coronation1969 Stress1970 Bronze Granny1974 Pokrovsky Gate1974 The Royal Hunt1976 The Stranger1977 Betrayalllm Scripts

1958 Man from Nowhere1961 Peace unto the Newcomer (together with

A. Alov and V. Naumov)197 A Stop-Watch1974 The Grand Master1978 Rescue1979 The Kindly Folk

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SEEP Vol.6 No.1 February 1986