RUSSIAN DRAMA OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD

RUSSIAN DRAMA OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD

By the Same Author VALENTIN KATAEV KLOP, by Vladimir Mayakovsky (editor)

Russian Dratna of the Revolutionary Period Robert Russell Lecturer in Russian University of Sheffield M MACMILLAN PRESS

Robert Russell 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1988 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Russell, Robert, 1946- Russian drama of the revolutionary period. 1. Russian drama - 20th century - History and criticism I. Title 891.72 '4209 PG3086 ISBN 978-1-349-09723-4 ISBN 978-1-349-09721-0 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09721-0

For My Mother and Father

Contents Preface 1 Russian Drama before the Revolution 2 Soviet Drama, 1917-21 3 The Civil War in Soviet Drama 4 Bulgakov's The White Guard and Flight 5 Satirical Comedy and Melodrama 6 The Plays of Nikolay Erdman 7 Mayakovsky's The Bedbug and The Bathhouse 8 Indirect Social Comment 9 Towards Socialist Realism Notes and References Bibliography Index ix 1 27 51 67 87 102 115 131 144 168 177 182 vii

Preface The years from about 1900 until approximately 1930 form one of the richest and most exciting periods in the history of the arts in Russia. Literature, painting, ballet, cinema and theatre all flourished at this time, and if the grey monotonousness of much of the art of the succeeding twenty years somewhat heightens our appreciation of the Russian artistic achievements of the first three decades of this century, those achievements are nonetheless genuine. Whereas in the nineteenth century the arts in Russia had been dominated by realism, in the early part of the twentieth century competing schools emerged in literature and the other arts, and much of the vigour of the period can be attributed to the rise of Russian modernism as represented by artists like the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the painter Kazimir Malevich and the theatrical director Vsevolod Meyerhold. On the other hand, many major artists, such as the writer Maxim Gorky and the director Konstantin Stanislavsky, continued to work in the realistic manner, so that a creative tension existed between tradition and innovation which enriched the arts. A further dimension was added to the artistic ferment in Russia by the two revolutions of 1917, particularly by the October Revolution which brought the Bolsheviks to power. To some, such as the leaders of the Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) movement, the Revolution represented an opportunity to replace existing art forms, which - they argued - had been developed by the bourgeoisie for their own exclusive consumption, by new 'proletarian' art. Some avant-garde artists, including Mayakovsky and Meyerhold, also sought to effect an artistic revolution which would parallel the social revolution of October 1917. For the first few years following the Revolution the strongest support for the Bolsheviks from among artists came from the avant-garde, particularly ix

X Preface the Futurist poets and painters, and so it is scarcely surprising that they should have received some official encouragement. The alliance between the Bolsheviks and the artistic avant-garde, however, was always an uneasy one; Lenin's taste in the arts inclined towards traditional realism, and he viewed with displeasure the anarchic iconoclasm of some members of the avantgarde who sought to destroy Russia's artistic heritage. By the middle of the 1920s the links between Bolshevism and avant-garde art had been destroyed, and in the second half of the decade the Party gave increasing support to the proletarian realists of the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) organisation. The period was distinguished from the succeeding decades, however, by the official toleration of differing artistic views, so that the diversity of the pre-revolutionary years continued until the 1930s, and was, if anything, enhanced rather than diminished by the political changes in the country. The major focus of this book is on Russian drama of the 1920s, but it has been necessary to go beyond those parameters in two respects. Firstly, although this is primarily a study of drama rather than theatre, the distinction between the two can not be rigidly maintained in the case of Russian plays of the early twentieth century, and so some space has been devoted to major productions, especially those at the Moscow Art Theatre and those by Meyerhold. Where appropriate, other notable productions have been mentioned, especially recent Western ones. Secondly the period covered by this study is greater than just the 1920s because the drama of that decade must be viewed against the background of the important trends of the pre-revolutionary years as well as the onset of Socialist Realism in the early 1930s. I have not attempted a systematic history of Russian drama in the years before the Revolution, but in Chapter 1 the two major trends in that drama are described and illustrated on the basis of the work of Maxim Gorky and Alexander Blok. Clearly, the work of other dramatists could have been chosen to illustrate the 'realistic' and 'conventionalist' platforms, and in the history of Russian drama as a whole other playwrights of this period (particularly Leonid Andreyev and Nikolay Evreinov) are of major importance. But the aim of Chapter 1 is the limited one of establishing the opposing tendencies of realism and conventionalism in Russian drama before 1917, and so Gorky and Blok have been chosen as representatives of each of these tendencies.

Preface xi My thanks are due to those colleagues in the University of Sheffield and elsewhere with whom I have had the benefit and pleasure of discussing Russian literature, and to Mrs I. Anderson, who has coped admirably with the task of producing a typescript from my manuscript.