American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage: Tairov, Vakhtangov, Okhlopkov by Nick WorrallReview by: Marjorie L. HooverThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 112-114Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/309325 .

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112 Slavic and East European Journal

significant parallel developments in modern Russian poetry. Ultimately, however, one wishes to focus attention on the achievement of Harris's Osip

Mandelstam, which for the first time manages, in a balanced and economical fashion, to present all of the poet to a Western audience. For this Professor Harris has the gratitude of the profession and the satisfaction of having produced an extremely useful and thoughtful volume.

David M. Bethea, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Nick Worrall. Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage: Tairov, Vakhtangov, Okhlopkov. Cambridge, U.K. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989. 30 illus. xviii + 238 pp. $49.50.

Professor Worrall does both more and less than his title suggests. He neither discusses the moot terms "modernism" and "realism," nor limits himself to the Soviet period or to the stage alone. Rather he treats in chronological and factual detail three undeservedly little-known Russians who have both acted and directed, two before as well as in the Soviet era, the third in film and on stage. He sets off his three heroes against the background of Russian theater history during some fifty years of this century (1914-64).

A prefatory chronology includes even a hundred years. The "historical events" column begins with the births, a year apart, of Aleksandr Nemirovi&-Dandenko (1859) and Cexov (1860) and continues until the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution and Oxlopkov's death (1967). The "theatrical events" column, starting with the "Repeal of Imperial Theatre monopoly" (1882), concludes with "Soviet premiere of Look Back in Anger at the Sovremennik" (1965). No eluci- dation of these "events" is provided for the non-initiate. Disregarding these prefatory facts- for-facts-sake, the introduction begins, as usual in twentieth-century Russian theater history, with the opening of the Moscow Art Theater (MAT) in 1898, though this fact too is not explained as a significant turning point.

Rather Worrall emphasizes not so much change as continuity in his broad introduction to the general background. Though he sketches in the two principal innovators of theater change at the turn of the century, Stanislavskij and Mejerxol'd, instead of insisting on their contribu- tion to the rich context of theater around 1900, he takes up traditions both far and near which they too favored in the general renewal: ancient Greek theater, commedia dell'arte, Russian folk theater, though without mentioning the contribution of Abramcevo and native handcrafts. Worrall even looks beyond the lifetime of his triumvirate, relating them to post-Stalin succes- sors such as Efremov, Ljubimov, and Tovstonogov.

Some of the many notes to the introduction seem unnecessary, e.g., Note 1, which explains why the October Revolution really took place in November, or Note 2, which gives the meaning of the words "malyj" and "bol'?oj" without mentioning the perhaps relevant fact that the Maly Theater is the dramatic, the Bolshoi, the opera and ballet theater of Moscow. Since the notes are not included in the index, some bibliographical references are buried there; they would have been more easily retrievable if listed alphabetically in the bibliography, which is all too "select." Some notes are British-slanted, one inexactly when Worrall remarks the pre- revolutionary theaters' dependence not on Imperial, but on "royal" patronage as if in Britain, and another is relevant only to gossip of the British theater, as when Worrall adds to Vera Komissarlevskaja's biography the fact that her brother Fedor "was married for a short time to the British actress Peggy Ashcroft" (198). On the whole, however, the notes are a rich mine of facts and well proofread; one exception proves the rule with a sentence left unfinished: "For Tairov's production of The Thunderstorm" (Note 63, 204).

Worrall applies his thorough knowledge of Russian theater and film-abetted by a recent research year in the USSR-to the three title directors, analyzing their productions in chrono- logical order. He devotes Chapter 1 to Tairov, doubtless because he, first of the three, opened

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Reviews 113

his own theater, the Kamerny, in 1914. He mentions Tairov's still earlier appearance as an actor in minor roles under Mejerxol'd's directorship (1906-1907) in Komissarievskaja's theater and implies that the younger man rejected the older director's ideas this early. Actually Tairov echoes many notions the symbolist Mejerxol'd published in his book On Theater (1913). Tairov then staged at the Kamerny a repertory which confirms their similar interests, Schnitzler's Veil of Pierrette, Wilde's Salome' and E.T.A. Hoffmann's Princess Brambilla. One project in com- mon predictably failed, Tairov's invitation that they co-direct Claudel's The Exchange. When, however, the post-revolutionary Mejerxol'd turned frankly left, his tendentious production of Verhaeren's Dawns drew Tairov's criticism, and Mejerxol'd in turn attacked Tairov in a review of the latter's book, Notes of a Director (1921). Worrall merely mentions their feud without assessing it one way or the other. Ironically it was not Mejerxol'd, the older proponent of their ideas, who pioneered "theatrical" theater in the West, but Tairov with the German translation of his book (1923) and the enthusiastically received Kamerny tour that same year to Berlin and Paris.

Worrall gives due credit to Tairov's actress wife, Alcia Koonen, who was first trained in Stanislavsky's psychological realism at MAT. The Kamerny's sensationally successful opening production, Kalidasa's fourth-century Indian fairy tale Shakuntala, owed as much to Tairov's research and Konstantin Bal'mont's verse translation as to Koonen's beauty and talent. Repeatedly, too, Tairov chose gifted designers, among them Larionov, Goncarova, and Alek- sandra Ekster. Tairov staged international classics, thus Racine's Phaedra, and foreign con- temporaries. His text revisions of two plays by Eugene O'Neill quite altered their meaning. Worrall does not mention that Tairov's gloomy production of The Threepenny Opera, devoid of satiric bite, so incensed Anna Lacis when she took Brecht to see it on his first Moscow trip (1932) that he had to calm her; better that his opera be staged badly than not at all (Bernhard Reich, Im Wettlaufmit der Zeit. Berlin: Henschel, 1970, 369). For all its international repertory, the Kamerny remains most memorable for staging the Soviet Communist play, Vsevolod Vis- nevskij's An Optimistic Tragedy (1933), in which Koonen, as the commissar assigned to the all-male crew of a Soviet ship, died melodramatically for the cause.

Worrall refutes the overworked commonplace that his second director, Vaxtangov, combined the two artistic extremes of Stanislavskian realism and. Meyerholdian conventional theater. Instead, he sees Vaxtangov as moving from one to the other as on "a journey away from Stanislavsky towards Meyerhold" (76-77). Vaxtangov taught the Method and practiced it in his early production for the Third Studio of MAT (Henning Berger's The Deluge) with such "excessive naturalism" that Stanislavskij himself was "dismayed" (94). Though quite impervious to politics, Vaxtangov receptively sensed artistic trends on all sides. So for a time he enforced monastic life in his studio, as advocated by Jacques Copeau. He staged The Dybbuk with the Habimah theater. Several of his productions were notable for his work with the actor Mixail Cexov, who played the title role in Strindberg's Erik XIV. Vaxtangov died young of cancer even before the opening of his landmark production of Gozzi's commedia dell'arte play, Prin- cess Turandot, which realized his mature ideas of improvisation and folk theater. The perfor- mance began with a "parade" of characters, and stage servants were used to provide the actors with properties and change the set during the action. Though the former Third Studio became in name the Vaxtangov Theater, Worrall finds that Vaxtangov's legacy passed least altered to his former fellow-student at MAT, Aleksej Popov.

The director Nikolaj Oxlopkov had, according to Worrall, "the greatest claim to be consid- ered the true heir of Meyerhold" (140). He completed Mejerxol'd's course in directing at the Moscow drama school GITIS, to which, though, he was recommended after already directing a May Day mass celebration in his native Irkutsk. Trained to direct, he then acted instead in several Mejerxol'd productions, unforgettably in the Master's wildly constructivist Death of Tarelkin by Suxovo-Kobylin. Thereafter, as Worrall quotes Ejzenitejn, Oxlopkov "fell out of the theater into the cinema" (147), but again directed, in the 1930s at the head of his own Realistic Theater, where he staged revolutionary plays in an altogether unrealistic manner.

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114 Slavic and East European Journal

With a theatricalism comparable to Brecht's he directed Gor'kij's Mother on a bare circular wooden platform in a 320-seat arena in which the heroine could hardly avoid consulting the audience. Again in Pogodin's Aristocrats the masked Kabuki-style servants of the stage threw confetti for snow on actors and audience alike in the scene of the prisoners traversing the forest on skis.

Altogether Worrall offers a rich plenty of historical fact about a half-century of innovative Russian theater history, whereby, in an age of demolishing once worshipped figures, he restores three exemplary directors to high place.

Marjorie L. Hoover, New York City

From Furmanov to Sholokhov: An Anthology of the Classics of Socialist Realism. Ed. by Nicholas Luker. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988. 508 pp., $39.50; $14.95 (paper).

The collection From Furmanov to Sholokhov: An Anthology of the Classics of Socialist Realism, is one of the latest entries in Ardis' growing series of anthologies devoted to providing surveys of the major periods of Soviet and Russian literature (the other recent addition being Russian Literature of the Twenties). From Furmanov to Sholokhov contains precisely what the title states-five of the "classic texts" of Socialist Realism: Furmanov's Capaev, Serafimovic's The Iron Flood, Gladkov's Cement, Fadeev's The Route, Ostrovskij's How the Steel was Tempered, and, finally, Soloxov's bestseller of the fifties, The Fate of Man.

One must note, however, that if the reader wants the complete translated texts of these works, the Ardis collection is not where to find them. Although he has preserved chapter and section numbering from the originals, editor and translator Nicholas Luker has abridged the longer works "for reasons of space," an understandable concern given their length. Neverthe- less, these deletions detract neither from the texts nor from the collection.

As for the audience this volume would serve, Luker states in the preface that: "This anthol- ogy arose from the need often felt by both students and teachers of Soviet Russian literature to have conveniently available in one volume the classic prose works of Socialist Realism" (9). Anyone who has tried to include a work of Socialist Realism in a survey course knows how difficult it often is to find a well-translated, readable edition. Thanks to this volume, we will have to search no longer for current, readable translations of some "classics" of Socrealism. Even non-specialists, who, perhaps surprisingly, might be interested in reading these works, will find useful information in this collection.

In addition to the texts themselves, Luker includes a well-written and rather comprehensive Introduction which traces the political and literary development of Socrealism from the Revo- lution to the present. He has relied on traditionally solid sources including C. Vaughn James' study Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory, Rufus Mathewson's The Positive Hero in Russian Literature and Robert Maguire's Red Virgin Soil. In fact, the notes to the Introduction provide a useful bibliography of critical works on Socialist Realism which is especially helpful to students whose interest might be piqued by the offerings in the collection.

In introducing the works, Luker presents the case for the development of Socrealism as a method which the writers themselves created, a method which, ironically, completely coincided with Stalin's political aims. Luker succeeds in clearly presenting the main tenets of the method-partijnost', narodnost', and klassovost'-in addition to mentioning, where appro- priate, other works of Socrealism which illustrate his point.

In reading the Introduction, however, one desires a bit more information. For example, as Vaughn James argues, the roots of Socialist Realism can be traced as far back as 1860s radical utilitarianism, a phenomenon Luker does not fully discuss. Though he mentions this fact, one might have hoped he would have included a tad more in spite of the "limitations of space." In addition, on a minor note, Luker fleetingly mentions "factography" without defining what it

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