Okay, I have wracked my brain and I am not going to come up with it right now: I don’t remember who I wrote the following text for. Was it for Doc? Was it for a conference in the UK? Was it ever published, read, seen, heard? It wasn’t that long ago, for God’s sake, but I just don’t recall. That said, this piece says some things that remain important even today. I felt from the very first time I saw this production of Two in Your House in December of 2011 that it had a finger on the Zeitgeist. My review of it in The Moscow Times talked about it being prescient, this remembrance of it written six years later confirms that it was. And I’m here to tell you in February 2022 that, yes, this production was, indeed, looking way into the future. And now, with Russia tanking as it rattles sabers at Ukraine, while running roughshod over Belarus, which still can’t get out from under “Governor Lukashenko” – Two in Your House just looks more and more like it peered deeply into a big Crystal Ball. Coincidentally, I received an email from Teatr.doc last evening reminding me that the theater’s 20th anniversary is coming upon us in a few days. For all the hell Doc has lived over these two decades, it still stands as best as it can. Hang tight, guys. Happy anniversary. For the record, playwright Maksym Kurochkin, who performed the lead in this show, is back in his home country of Ukraine and will have precious little to do with his former friends and colleagues in Russia. Director Lena Gremina, like her husband Misha Ugarov, founders of Teatr.doc, are long passed on to another world. Director Kirill Serebrennikov, who had nothing to do with this production, but whom I mention at the end of the text, finally got out from under the Russian “justice” system and, it would appear, has gone to live and work in Germany. I haven’t lived in Russia since the year this text was written. The photos above and below were taken by Tanya Slimberg.
By John Freedman 2018
I always saw Two in Your House as a missive to the future. Russia at that point had already suffered the second trumped-up trial against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and was in the middle of increased, and emboldened, protest activity on the part of Russian citizens. The sense of danger and hope made a strange mix in the air of the time. It was all the more acute because the 2012 Russian presidential elections were approaching fast. Everybody was talking about it. Would this bring a crack down? Would it bring about a brief thaw in some area?
Yelena Gremina decided to jump ahead of the game by going into the recent past. She offered us a play based on the aftermath of the December 2010 presidential election in Belarus. Working with texts gathered by Talgat Batalov, Yekaterina Bondarenko and Alexander Rodionov, she told the story of Belarusian poet and presidential candidate Vladimir Neklyaev who was not merely put under house arrest by victorious presidential candidate Alexander Lukashenko, he and his wife were forced to live with two KGB agents in the house at all times. It was a ludicrous, absurd form of persecution and, at least for a playwright and theater, it established a wonderfully asinine reflection of reality. Of course, Doc went the extra step by casting Maksym Kurochkin in the role of Neklyaev – so that a poet played a poet. How more authentic could that be?
But back to the play itself and what it said to me. I sat in the hall on Tryokhprudny and felt strongly that Lena was speaking to each and every one one of us in a personal, individual voice, “Beware! This is where we are headed! You think it’s impossible? No! Too ludicrous? Just wait!” Lukashenko, by actually inserting KGB officers into a citizen’s home, provided Gremina with a “real-life metaphor.” In Russia we were seeing the increasing presence of the special forces in our everyday life – they were omnipresent on the streets, in every other television show and seemingly in every newscast – while, in a reference to Belarus, Gremina could, with all authenticity, insert them into a family setting.
Sure enough, they were, indeed, on their way. The special forces – with some difficulty, it must be said – took over Moscow’s streets on the day of the Boltonaya protests and the subsequent Occupy Abai action. Despite the successful Writers and Artists Walks on the Garden Boulevard, before long, the protest movement was effectively squashed – at least for a time. And then came the next phase of Gremina’s warning – the insertion of the special forces into our daily life. Teatr.doc found itself “living” with policemen and OMON officers for days on end as it rehearsed and performed TheBolotnaya Case in 2015. Journalists and activists feel the very real press of the government using its special forces as extra-judicial punitive forces. In 2017 Kirill Serebrennikov was placed under what increasingly looks like an open-ended house arrest as punishment for – who knows what?
The ludicrous reality that Lena Gremina offered up in Two in Your House, indeed, emerged as a surprisingly accurate picture of the future that was waiting for us even as the calendar turned from 2011 to 2012. I remember laughing with a deep sense of reservation and foreboding as I watched the performance unfold at the end of 2011. When I look back to it now from the end of 2018, it makes me want to weep.
I fell into this maelstrom utterly and entirely by accident, knowingnothing, expecting nothing. It was early in 1987, and I was a grad student at Harvard, beginning work on my dissertation about the playwright Nikolai Erdman. I knew Yury Lyubimov was in town to do a production of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita at the American Repertory Theatre. And I knew that Lyubimov had been a good friend of Erdman’s, so I wanted to talk to him while he was nearby. I reached back to a common acquaintance, Vasily Aksyonov, to set up a meeting, and Aksyonov was kind enough to run interference for me. Lyubimov and his young wife Katalina greeted me warmly at the door of their Cambridge apartment and invited me in for tea and cookies. After some small talk and pleasantries, Katalin and her four year-old son Pyotr ran out to do some errands. I thought that Lyubimov and I would now settle into what I expected to be a fascinating talk about Erdman. Instead, Lyubimov launched into a tirade against the ART. At first I had no idea what he was talking about. But it turned out that I happened to visit Lyubimov just as his planned production of Master and Margarita was falling apart. He was angry and bitter and, always true to himself as he was his entire life, he did not hold back making his complaints known. I sat there for at least an hour listening with burning ears. I was a huge fan of the ART and everything they did. It was painful to hear Lyubimov’s accusations. On the other hand, I was perfectly aware that history was in the making and I had been thrown into a front-row seat. I contacted The Boston Globe to say I had a story they might be interested in, and they were. Knowing they were interested in the topic, I contacted the ART, telling then-Managing Director Robert Orchard why I wanted to speak with artistic director Robert Brustein. I was a huge fan of Brustein’s, admiring his work and having audited one of the classes he taught at Harvard. But I was coming in with some hard questions. When I arrived at the theater I mentioned all this and apologized to Robert Orchard for playing a role they surely would find unpleasant. Orchard’s wonderfully admirable response has stayed with me ever since: “Don’t worry about it. You have a story, run with it.” My interview with Brustein, Orchard sitting in, probably lasted 15 minutes, maybe a half an hour. By the time I went home to write up the interviews, it was pretty clear that Lyubimov and the ART were not merely on different pages, not even in different books, they were universes apart in their understanding of things. In actual fact, it was a disaster waiting to happen. And happen, it did, thus cancelling what could have been, should have been a landmark Russian theater production in the United States. The ART made some bad, angry moves, one of them being to send out a flier to subscribers suggesting that Lyubimov had caught some sexually transmitted disease or something – this document never reached the broad public, but I did receive a copy in my mailbox as a subscriber. The ART has always muffled over this chapter in its history. Shortly after my article appeared in the Globe, the popular artsy paper The Phoenix, ran a huge, hyper-thorough panegyric to the technical prowess of the ART. It was clearly a worked-up response to Lyubimov’s ill-taken accusations that the ART was hardly even professional. In The American Repertory Theatre Reference Book: The Brustein Years, by Marilyn Plotkins, the cancellation of The Master and Margarita is tersely put down to “scheduling problems.” I never had a bone to pick in this story. As I have said, I wished this cup had passed me by. But I was too much of a historian at heart to walk away from a piece of history when it landed in my lap. Let me say it here: I have retained ever since nothing but the utmost respect for everyone involved here – Lyubimov, Brustein, Orchard and the ART. I no longer have a hard copy of the article that ran in the Globe sometime around mid-to-late April 1987. And I don’t seem to be able to find a copy of it on the net. So here is the story I actually wrote and sent to the editor at the Globe. He switched some things around (naturally throwing the scandal of Lyubimov’s accusations up into the lede), cut it some and banged it into a good professional article that came out literally a few days later. But here is my original piece, for what it is worth. Note that the spelling of “Yuri Liubimov” follows the Globe’s transliteration standards. The photo above, taken from the internet, shows Lyubimov approximately as he looked in the late 1980s.
Yury Lyubimov Breaks with the American Repertory Theater, 1987 By John Freedman Pre-edit version of article written for The Boston Globe
The expatriate Russian director Yuri Liubimov, whose long-awaited production of “The Master and Margarita” at American Repertory Theater was recently postponed, has made it clear that feelings among the principle parties about the events leading to this decision were less friendly than originally thought. Speaking out for the first time since the postponement became public knowledge, Liubimov indicated that he and other guest artists at the theater concluded that the production was beyond the capabilities of ART, and that he decided it was best to withdraw the play rather than to proceed, and risk doing it poorly. Topping the list of his complaints against the theater were what he termed an unsuitable rehearsal location in Somerville, lack of good planning and preparation on the part of the theater, and a lack of technical capability suitable to his needs. Coming as they do from an artist who is generally recognized as one of the great directors of our time, such allegations are bound to stir controversy.
Speaking at his temporary Cambridge home on Wednesday, Liubimov said, “When I came here to begin work, they couldn’t organize a work plan. The cast still wasn’t selected at the first reading. They were carrying on negotiations with various people. It was absurd. At one point they said they would get the actor who played Salieri in Forman’s “Amadeus.” Then they talked about another, a third, a fourth. Instead of three weeks, I spent a month here trying to clear all this up.”
When contacted for comment ART Artistic Director Robert Brustein replied that indeed the theater’s first choice for the role of Woland was F. Murray Abrahams, but that he was unavailable due to a previous engagement. After several aborted attempts to fill the role, an offer was finally accepted by Richard Kavanaugh.
“That’s called casting in this country,” said Brustein. “You can’t offer a part to more than one person at a time.”
Liubimov directed some of his severest criticism at what he felt was ART’s inability to provide suitable technical support. He planned to employ a large, complex set which incorporated a swinging pendulum that “people could swing on as they do on time.” He also planned to employ a mobile curtain which could move in any direction. According to Liubimov, when he left for Bonn in late January it was agreed that there would be a set in working order upon his return to begin rehearsals.
“But when I returned,” continued Liubimov, “I found that nothing was ready. They had built the set, but nothing worked. Their pendulum could have killed somebody. It turned out they don’t have a professional workshop. I couldn’t believe that a set which we made so easily in two weeks’ time in Moscow couldn’t be done in all that time here in America. They told me they didn’t have the money. Well, they shouldn’t have signed the contract then. From the point of view of preparation and of technical capability, they handled themselves very badly. The theater showed itself to be incompetent on both accounts.”
ART Managing Director Robert Orchard, responding to the question of the stage unit’s integrity, said, “It was not unsafe to use.”
Related to the problem of the set was the matter of a rehearsal space. Brustein indicated that because of the complexity of the stage unit which was highly precarious and required five tons of steel reinforcement, ART was hard-pressed to find a location with a large enough open area to accomodate it.
Liubimov, however, was adamant about the unsuitability of the Somerville warehouse which was finally selected as a rehearsal site. “It was entirely unusable,” he explained, “just an old abandoned garage. Any inspector would have shut it down immediately. Inside, the street noise was very bad. It was dusty, and the rumble from the subway was constantly audible. There was such an echo that you couldn’t hear anybody.” Liubimov indicated that several times he requested to see the rehearsal hall when he was here in January, but the theater was not able to show it to him. When asked whether after his return he had requested the rehearsals be moved, Liubimov replied, “They said they had no other place and that’s it.”
In reference to Liubimov’s dissatisfaction with the rehearsal site, Brustein responded that, “by American standards, the rehearsal space was perfectly adequate. The actors were all happy with it. Obviously it’s not a space that one who is accustomed to working in a state-subsidized theater is used to having, but we are used to improvizing. Liubimov is a man with strong opinions. Remember that he has also been critical of the Paris Opera.”
Another point of contention was that Liubimov felt he needed more time to pursue rehearsals on the main stage, but that he could not get it. He also was upset that rehearsal schedules for the Somerville location were often chaotic, and in effect, did not allow him the full eight weeks of rehearsals he had contracted for. He took particular exception to comments made by ART spokesperson Jan Geidt as reported in the Friday, April 10 Globe. Referring to a Russian translation clipped to the original article, Liubimov said, “This simply isn’t serious. As though they didn’t know when they signed the contract. Geidt says, ‘We have a tight schedule, with student productions and other mainstage offerings. Yuri knew about that at least in January.'” Said Liubimov, “I told them this was impossible. Geidt says it didn’t seem to be a major problem until quite recently, but I told them immediately it was a major problem. I told them this would all end in a catastrophe. George Tsypin [the set designer working on the production] told them four times it wouldn’t do.” The director added that he felt the theater expected him to adapt to their limitations, while failing to make good on promises made to him at the time of contract negotiations.
Brustein responded that ART tried to accomodate Liubimov’s needs by offering to clear the stage each night after one of the student productions and then replace the student set the following morning. In reference to further attempts to arrange more rehearsal time at the Brattle Street location Brustein noted, “Yuri requested an extra amount of stage time in terms of hours, and we found him the time, but it did not satisfy him because it covered a period of five days, and he felt he needed seven.” Brustein also pointed out that Liubimov was ill for the first week of scheduled rehearsals and was unable to work.
The misunderstanding between the theater and Liubimov may have arisen in part due to cultural differences and the expectations which are incumbent as a result. Since Liubimov did not know American actors well, preliminary efforts at assembling a cast were conducted with the help of Liubimov’s translator Alexander Gelman. Brustein indicated that casting problems similar to those which occurred with “The Master and Margarita” had occurred last year when ART hoped that the Polish director Andrzej Wajda would bring his work to Cambridge.
Liubimov, however, did not feel that cultural differences were the issue. Referring to his prior experience in Europe, he said, “I’ve done operas all over the world. Staging an opera is extremely expensive and you have to be extremely careful about meeting deadlines. I have always come in under deadlines. I know how to work.”
As Liubimov saw it, ART reneged on its promises to present him with viable conditions under which to work. He felt that the theater had misrepresented its capabilities and its commitment to a production of “The Master and Margarita.” Speaking of the preliminary negotiations which took place primarily in 1986 Liubimov said, “We negotiated for a whole year. It was very complicated. At first they suggested I do four weeks of rehearsals, I said, ‘impossible.’ Then they offered six weeks. I kept telling them, ‘no.’ I said, ‘how can you possibly do a large musical production like this, every ten centimeters of which must be measured out?’ And if you don’t take that kind of care, there can be accidents. Elements of my production are like a circus act. Finally they agreed and we signed a contract giving me eight weeks. And then the surprises began.”
Orchard responded that according to the contract Liubimov agreed to spend September 30 through October 5 of last year in Cambridge making preliminary arrangements. Liubimov, however, did not make the trip, which necessitated the postponement of some preparations until his first arrival here in January. Orchard’s position was that much of the confusion which ensued might have been avoided had Liubimov been here to make more of his requirements known.
Liubimov insisted that he had told ART exactly what he needed. “Why did they invite me?” he continued. “After all, they came to see me at the Arena Stage. I came here and showed them a film done in London for the express purpose of indicating the level of acting I expect. They have a couple good actors here. And they bring in some actors from outside. But the theater isn’t capable of doing ‘The Master and Margarita.’ They don’t have the proper technical or acting skills to do it.”
When asked to compare his experience at ART with Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. where he recently staged his adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Liubimov said, “You can’t call Arena a good theater, although they are more professional than ART. This theater here is an amateur theater.”
“The Master and Margarita” was officially cancelled March 30, although letters from ART informing the public of the decision were not mailed until April 8. Liubimov expressed concern that the theater was seriously misleading the public by continuing to sell tickets long after there was no longer any possibility of the production reaching the stage. Members of the Russian emigre community from all over the United States were making plans to come to Cambridge to see the play whose production in Moscow in 1977 was one of the most significant cultural events in the USSR of recent decades. The interest generated by Liubimov’s arrival in the United States has also been enormous among American enthusiasts of the theater. Brustein acknowledged that the delay in informing the public was unfortunate, but added that an official pronouncement could not be made until a certain replacement could be found. Brustein further denied that the theater continued to sell tickets after the cancellation had taken place.
Whle Orchard indicated ART would still like to see Liubimov bring his production of “The Master and Margarita” to Cambridge, it is clear the likelihood of this happening is now remote. “We would like to preserve this project,” said Orchard. “We respect Yuri Liubimov enormously as an artist. You can’t write off an artist who knows what he needs in order to create.”
Brustein was less encouraging. “I’m surprised at Liubimov’s displeasure,” he said. “When we realized that we couldn’t go on with the production, we thought we made a mutual and amicable decision. Our official release was put together with his participation. It has been very difficult. The staff was buckling at the knees physically and psychologically. We have done everything in our power to accomodate him. Some of the most demanding artists have worked happily in our theater. But it became clear we couldn’t satisfy him.”
For his part, Liubimov is apparently not interested in returning to ART. When asked whether he would come back if he could find time in his schedule, he replied, “If I had the time? No. I wouldn’t come back. I am very upset at losing so much time. I don’t consider that they are capable of putting on this production. It is too complex for them. There is something very strange about this theater. I have entirely different aesthetics, a different style of work. I needed normal working conditions, but they couldn’t give them to me.”
Ironically, Bertolt Brecht’s “The Good Woman of Szechuan,” the play that ART has selected to replace “The Master and Margarita” in repertory, was Liubimov’s first production as Director at the famous Taganka Theater in Moscow in 1964.
John Freedman is a graduate student in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
Yuri Liubimov was named Director of the Taganka Theater in Moscow in 1964, and his unorthodox and challenging productions of classic and modern plays soon began attracting international attention. Much of the director’s work does not originate in traditional dramatic texts, but in prose and poetic works which he adapts for the stage. As a result his Taganka Theater came to be known as a “poet’s theater.” One of the most famous examples was his 1977 production of “The Master and Margarita,” adapted from the satiric novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. After some controversial comments made while guest-directing in England in 1983, Liubimov was fired from his position at the Taganka Theater. In 1984 he was deprived of his Soviet citizenship. Liubimov came to the Boston area this year at the invitation of ART to stage the Western premiere of “The Master and Margarita.”
This is a semi-lost little piece I wrote about Ken Reynolds almost 20 years ago. It was for the ARTicles newspaper put out by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA, which was then premiering both a production by Kama Ginkas (Lady with a Lapdog), and an exhibit of Ken’s photographs. I happened to be rummaging around in an old hard disk this morning and found a link to this piece, the text of which I had lost. I followed the link, which is now dead, but that took me to the ART site which, I’m pleased to say, still has this piece posted (along with a small gallery of four of Ken’s photographs). So, go ahead, confuse a webmaster, follow this new link and give an old blurb some clicks. My single paragraph is boilerplate stuff, but Ken was not, this exhibit was not, and nothing that brings the attention of the world to the work of Ken Reynolds, photographer extraordinaire, is lacking in value. If nothing else, I chose an appropriate title. ___________________________________
“Ken Reynolds, Photographer Extraordinaire” ARTicles vol. 2 i.1 By John Freedman
To accompany the A.R.T.’s production of Lady with a Lapdog, we are delighted to be mounting an exhibition at the Theatre of photographs by Ken Reynolds, who has been following the work of Kama Ginkas for two decades. The exhibition is made possible by the kind support of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.
Ken Reynolds is one of the most important photographers to record the riches of Eastern European theater in the last decade. A lifelong resident of England, he had already established an international reputation in the 1980s as a visionary photographer of naturally-occurring color patterns in rusting metals–what he called Secret Landscapes–when, in London in the early 1990s, he came into contact with Lev Dodin’s Maly Drama Theatre from St. Petersburg, Russia. As Ken sat transfixed, he imagined the moving images of actors in light as a series of black-and-white photos. His life as an artist changed. This encounter, plus subsequent ones with theaters from Lithuania, Georgia, and Poland, encouraged him to begin photographing theater, specifically from Eastern Europe. A trip to Russia in 1995 brought him into contact with Kama Ginkas and Henrietta Yanovskaya at Moscow’s New Generation Theatre and provided him with his greatest inspiration and most fertile source for material. Ken’s photos of their work–he records their productions not only during rehearsals but also as they grow and change while playing in repertory and on foreign tours–have appeared in publications all over the world, and have been featured in exhibitions in Moscow, Teheran, Tbilisi (Georgia), Bunde (Germany), Gdansk (Poland), and at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Ken’s theater photographs–usually, though not exclusively, in black-and-white–are marked by an extraordinary sense of movement and space. His ability to see content in the unusual forms of a blurred hand or a shaded eye do not merely provide representations of dramatic scenes but reveal the underlying meaning that directors and actors impart to their work. His photos hang permanently in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the British Council in Glasgow, the Finnish Opera in Helsinki, the Andrei Tarkovsky Museum and the New Generation Theatre in Moscow.
Georg Genoux was one of the true pleasures and bright spots of all the time I spent in Moscow (1988-2018). I remember first encountering just his name when editing the weekly events calendar for The Moscow Times. “Who is this guy with the French name? He’s always doing weird things.” Georg seemed to be everywhere something was happening, and he always had a beautiful, even angelic smile. I eventually learned Georg was German and had come to study directing under Mark Zakharov at GITIS. It did not take him long to break away from the traditional style of his teacher and set out on his own path. Over the years we became relatively good friends although I never felt that I broke through a certain protective layer that Georg maintained. We could sit and shoot the breeze for hours (as we did from time to time at Teatr.doc, the Sakharov Center or other places), but, despite his open, friendly, welcoming manner, he always reserved significant space for himself. That was his essence as a director, I suppose. It was fine to be a good person and a good friend, but that authority that a director must command (even when never insisting on it) had to remain in force. I don’t know. Or maybe it was my caution, as a critic, my belief that I could not, should not, get too close to the people I wrote about… Who knows where the truth lies? These are stray thoughts offered up a decade later. Georg was very active at Teatr.doc, especially in the theater’s early years. And so, when I was asked in 2014 to write a substantive essay on the theater, I wanted to benefit from his insights. In early February, I sent Georg four questions that I hoped would prompt him to say something of interest. Our exchanges were conducted from Feb. 4 to 7, 2014. The questions were:
How was Teatr.doc important, 1) for you as a director, 2) for theater in Moscow and Russia, 3) for audiences, 4) for the political situation in Russia?
I only had room for a few short quotes in the essay, so a large part of Georg’s pithy answers have just laid around pointlessly in my Facebook Messenger inbox for the last seven years. For the sake of Teatr.doc, and for the sake of Georg’s taking the time to answer my questions so carefully and thoughtfully, it’s time to pull them out and make them public. I should point out that I sent Georg edits of the answers I thought I might use in the piece, and he was adamant about having some control over what I did.
“Dear John!” he wrote early on, “Speaking about Teatr.doc is a very specific situation. So it if there will be any cuts, could you run them by me?” After I sent the first excerpt I was thinking of using, Georg replied, “ok) but I think also the sentence about an anti-manipulation theater is very important…maybe put it in at the end: This idea of NOT MANIPULATING PEOPLE was for me the most important thing in the theater’s aesthetic and in how we made our performances… This is for me very important!”
To my surprise now, I realize that I did not include that phrase when I quoted Georg in “Teatr.doc and the Struggle for Authenticity and Relevance in Contemporary Russian Drama and Theatre,” published in Staging Postcommunism: Alternative Theatre in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989, ed. by Vessela S. Warner and Diana Manole (2020).All the more reason I’m happy to publish everything George wrote to me about Doc way back when:
______________________________
Georg Genoux on Teatr.doc, Feb. 4, 2014.
1) Teatr.doc is the place where I was born as a director and curator. For a long time it was the only place for me in Russia, a place where I had the feeling that we were speaking the truth with our theatre. We made this place with our own hands, without any money at the beginning. For me it was my home, my family in Russia.
2) Teatr.doc revolutionized Russian theatre. Teatr.doc did not copy a foreign aesthetic, but created his own theatre language, which is the only way to make good theatre, as has been shown throughout theatre history. Teatr.doc influenced theatre and cinema throughout all of Russia, it was the founder of a new movement, a new understanding of art in all of Russia. It says a lot about our theatre when a very famous and conservative Russian director says to his actor during rehearsals: “Please do it in an honest and true way, as in Teatr.doc.” Maybe he wasn’t fully aware of what he was saying. It was important especially in the work of actors. A theatre in which nobody acts. A theatre that helps actors not to hide their personality, but finds different ways to discover and reveal an actor’s personality. Nothing is more beautiful than to see an individual’s personality appear before you.
3) For the audience, Teatr.doc is a place that also belongs to them. Through thousands of discussions with audiences about the projects and the concept of the theatre, a very concrete and important partner arose to help build the theatre. Teatr.doc’s idea of building performances by permanent works-in-progress and by involving the audience in discussing the projects as they develop is for me the sign of a special, new genre of theater art. Also Teatr.doc’s audience loves the atmosphere in the theatre. I often heard people from the audience say that, for them, it wasn’t important what they came to watch, they just wanted to be at Teatr.doc.
4) In contemporary Russia, where almost all media are manipulative, lie, and bear no responsibility before the people, theatre acquires a new task: It must have responsibility before people, must not lie to them, and must not manipulate them. This idea of NOT MANIPULATING PEOPLE was for me the most important thing in Teatr.doc’s aesthetic and in the way we created our performances. For me Teatr.doc today is more than just a theatre. It is for me now one of the most important cultural and political institutions in Russia. So in the specific situation of political and society issues, Teatr.doc stands alone as a “Kunstwerk” (object of art), in the way that it exists. As long as Teatr.doc exists in Russia, you can be sure that theater is a place where people think and speak the truth.
Many years ago, eons ago, I was asked to write an article about Teatr.doc for a forthcoming collection on the topic of freedom in theater in Eastern Europe. I did so and then the American academic publishing machine set into motion – or, more properly, did not… Six years passed between the time I wrote the piece and when it was finally published in Staging Postcommunism: Alternative Theatre in Eastern And Central Europe after 1989, ed. by Vessela S. Warner and Diana Manole. That was nearly the half-life of Doc’s finest years as an innovative Moscow theater space! When the book finally entered the publishing stage, I had to ask the editors to include the following graph: “Since this essay was written, time has added several chapters, most of them tragic, to the tale of Teatr.doc. This piece does not reflect the passing of Mikhail Ugarov and Yelena Gremina in 2018 or the theater’s forced removal from three different spaces and the efforts of the Teatr.doc community to keep it alive.” I wanted the piece to reflect not only my views and observations about the feisty, influential venue, but also the voices of those who had made it what it was. I asked numerous colleagues to comment on their experience at the theater, and I included as many of these observations as I could. Over time I will pull together several of the email interviews I did for this piece, but I begin with comments from director Varvara Faer. I don’t know why I stated in the published article (“Teatr.doc and the Struggle for Authenticity and Relevance in Contemporary Russian Drama and Theatre”) that the short interview was conducted on Feb. 5, 2014, but I did. In fact, going back to my records, I sent out my questions to Varvara on Facebook Messenger in the early afternoon of Feb. 4, and she replied shortly after 8 p.m. that evening. Most of the first answer made it into my essay, the other three answers did not. The text below includes both Varvara’s original Russian answers, as well as my English translation of them. I took all the photos here on January 9, 2013, at Teatr.doc during an evening organized by Faer in support of the members of Pussy Riot, who were in prison at that time.
Questions sent to Varvara Faer Feb. 4, 2014, answers received the same day.
The significance of Teatr.doc –
1) For you:
VF: When you come to Doc, you experience the miracle of normalcy. Suddenly everything around you becomes normal. You don’t have to bluff, grovel, or humor anyone in order to have the right to express yourself. That is precisely what Doc wants – your freely offered, creative self-expression. They are happy to see it and it elicits no envy and intrigue, but rather brings about your colleagues’ sincere support. Only in that atmosphere can true creativity flourish and produce unexpected unprecedented results. It is very important for a young aspiring creative person to be believed in. When I appealed to Gremina and Ugarov with a request to try my hand, I was immediately told: “Yes! Do!” That is how the productions Crimes of Passion, Third Grade Alyosha, and BerlusPutin came about.
2) For theater in Moscow and Russia in general:
VF: Many famous theater people have gone through Teatr.doc in one way or another: Maksym Kurochkin, Natalia Vorozhbyt, Yekaterina Narshi, Ivan Vyrypaev, Alexander Rodionov, Marat Gatsalov, Irina Keruchenko, Vasily Senin, Maxim Kalsin. Similar independent venues are emerging in other Russian cities. The sprouts of an independent theater began growing in a soil that seemed unsuitable for this kind of initiative. [Such theaters] began growing everywhere and began attracting an audience. Because every spectator is interested in a lively and spontaneous art, not in a producer’s template or cheap mainstream mass production.
3) For the public:
VF: For the public Doc is an island of theatrical grace, novelty, and experiment. An opportunity to immerse oneself in the flow of real life in its numerous manifestations, to learn about the worlds of other people living nearby. For the spectator, it is a sign that everything is not dead yet, not all is lost. Here you can find lively, young (and not so young) people with fire in their eyes. People who interest you and fascinate you.
4) For the political situation in the country:
VF: Doc opposes the dumbing-down of the population. Doc speaks the truth and it enlightens. It may seem that this is a drop in the ocean, but word gets around. People are interested in Doc, they want to have something similar in the regions [where they live]. So the wave of enlightenment and oppositional impertinence spreads further. More and more people pick it up. As a result of these diverging waves, the influence of this small theater on people’s minds is not so insignificant.
___________________________
Значение Театра.doc:
1) для тебя,
Когда попадаешь в Док, с тобой случается чудо нормальности. Вдруг все вокруг тебя начинает становиться нормальным. Не нужно хитрить, приспосабливаться, унижаться, чтобы получить право на самовыражение. В Доке ждут именно этого – твоего свободного творческого самовыражения, ему рады, оно не вызывает зависти и интриг, а вызывает искреннюю поддержку коллег. Только в такой атмосфере может расцвести подлинное творчество и дать неожиданные невиданные результаты. Молодому начинающему творческому человеку очень важно, чтобы в него верили. Когда я обратилась к Греминой и Угарову с просьбой попробовать свои силы, мне тут же было сказано: “Да! Давайте!” Так родились спектакли “Преступления страсти”, “Третьеклассник Алёша”, “БерлусПутин”.
2) для московского-российского театра
Многие известные театральные люди так или иначе прошли через Театр.doc. Максим Курочкин, Наталья Ворожбит, Екатерина Нарши, Иван Вырыпаев, Александр Родионов, Марат Гацалов, Ирина Керученко, Василий Сенин, Максим Кальсин. В городах России возникают аналогичные независимые площадки. Ростки независимого театра стали произрастать на почве, казалось бы, непригодной для подобного рода инициатив. Они стали произрастать повсюду и стали обращать на себя внимание зрителей. Потому что любому зрителю интересно живое и непосредственное искусство, а не продюсерский шаблон и убогая конъюнктура.
3) для публики
Для публики Док – это островок театральной благодати, новизны, эксперимента, возможность погрузиться в поток подлинной жизни в разных ее проявлениях, узнать миры других, рядом живущих людей. Для зрителя – это знак того, что не все еще мертво, не все потеряно, вот они живые, молодые (и уже не очень) люди с горящими глазами. С которыми интересно, которые увлекают собой.
4) для политической ситуации в стране
Док – против оболванивания населения. Поэтому Док говорит правду и просвещает. Кажется, что это капля в море, но идет молва. Народ интересуется Доком, хочет у себя в регионах иметь что-то подобное. И так волна просвещения и оппозиционной задиристости распространяется дальше. Ее подхватывают новые и новые люди. И в результате этих расходящихся волн влияние маленького театрика на умы становится не таким уж и маленьким.
I wrote this little piece about Konstantin Raikin, the great actor, director and theater manager, on the occasion of his 70th birthday on July 8, 2020. It was a post on Facebook and I just happened to run across it recently. The text is certainly no great shakes, but Raikin is, and I’m happy to restate that with this reposting here. The photo above was taken by the great Ken Reynolds, who was a huge fan of Raikin’s. It features Raikin (beige jacket) in the role of Richard III in the production of Yury Butusov at Raikin’s Satirikon Theater. Thanks to Ken’s great record keeping, we can also state that the photo was taken June 17, 2007.
I spent 30 years in Russia. I met and followed the work of many great artists. One of the greatest, and one of the most honorable, was Konstantin Raikin, who turns 70 today. I watched Konstantin grow as an actor, a director and a theater manager, from a talented beginner to one of the greats of his time. I had the great good fortune of seeing Arkady Raikin, Konstantin’s father, perform in Leningrad in 1979 (thank you, Volodya Ferkelman, for sneaking me in the service entrance). It was an astonishing one-night experience, seeing one of the Soviet Union’s greatest and most beloved performers at work for an entire evening. Imagine the impact of watching Konstantin for more than half his career. I hear Konstantin hates to be called Konstantin Arkadyevich, it’s too formal for him – he prefers Kostya. I never called him that. I loved calling him “Konstantin Arkadyevich,” because for me I gоt to put him and his father together in a single unit. That said, “Raikin” for me means Konstantin. The ultimate actor. A brilliant director, undervalued because of his greatness as an actor. An unsurpassed teacher – his students are astonishing, they all have the Raikin fire. As a theater manager, he created one of the most POPULAR and ARTISTICALLY CREATIVE theaters in Moscow. Just you try to do that sometime! In the city of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold and Lyubimov and a few other demigods, just try to be as successful on a popular scale as on an artistic scale! My hat is off to Konstantin Raikin, my heart is open to him. Almost from the very beginning of my Moscow sojourn he was a symbol of excellence. Over the next three decades the respect I carried for him only grew and deepened. I told my wife Oksana the other day, “I regret almost nothing about leaving Moscow. One of the few things I do regret is that I will never see Konstantin Raikin on stage again.”
Here is the last of my forays into Polish literary history. Like the pieces previously posted in this space (on Wisława Szymborska and Biernat of Lublin), and published in The Polish Review, this was written as a course work for my Harvard professor in Polish language and literature, Stanisław Barańczak. (An interview I did with Barańczakon his work as a poetis also posted in this blog space.) If I did succeed in saying anything of value here, it is surely due to Barańczak’s tutelage. If I did not, he is obviously not to blame. Surely any deep context I provide originated in Barańczak’s lectures or personal comments to me. That does not mean I invested nothing in the piece – I did. I thoroughly enjoyed my work on Polish literature, and, in all my papers (Szymborska was still a long way from her Nobel Prize at that time), I purposefully sought to shine light on figures of some interest who are most often left in the shadows.That’s kind of a professional hobby I have had my entire life.
JOHN FREEDMAN
A PERIOD OF TRANSITION: BAROQUE HUMOR IN THE FRASZKI OF DANIEL NABOROWSKI1
Daniel Naborowski, who lived from 1573 to 1640, belonged to one of the first generations of Polish poets to feel the complete weight of Jan Kochanowski’s influence. At the same time, the years of his maturity belonged to an age in which Poland had already entered a political decline. This development was reflected in an increasingly disharmonious poetic style which is known loosely in the history of Polish literature as the period of the Baroque. Like Kochanowski before him, Naborowski was the product of a liberal European education: he studied philology, medicine and law in such cities as Strasbourg, Heidelberg, Paris, and London, to name just a few, and for a short while, he was a student of Galileo in Padua. In Latin he published two articles on medicine in 1593 and 1594, and his first poetic work appears to have been an ode in Latin written for the benefit of an early benefactor, Rafał Leszczyński. Throughout his adult life, however, Naborowski was employed in the service of the Radziwiłł brothers, Janusz and Krzysztof, who were well-known political figures during the period of the counter-reformation. Naborowski’s poetry reflects the different atmospheres which reigned in these two court households. Janusz Radziwiłł, who died in 1620, presided over a court which was more colorful than that of his brother Krzysztof, who was something of an aesthete and religious fanatic. While the Polish scholar Jan Dürr-Durski held that Naborowski followed a logical path of evolution from a relatively care free, humorous writer in his younger days to a more philosophically oriented writer in his middle and late years, one might argue justifiably that Naborowski’s poetry was also influenced by more practical concerns. His work appears to have taken on the personality of his benefactor of the moment, perhaps revealing a man who, not entirely unlike the proverbial Chinese wise man, was a Taoist in his youth and a Confucian in his waning years. This is not to say that the change which occurred in Naborowski’s style as he developed over the years was insincere, for it was indeed also a poetic response to the worsening fate of the Calvinists, of whom he was an outspoken and devoted member late in his life.
Naborowski’s humorous verses tend to answer to the common definition of a baroque poem in that they are, to use Dürr-Durski’s words, dynamic, painterly, and sensual. It is not until his later poetry that a sense of moralism mixed with metaphysical dissonance reminiscent of that found in the poetry of Mikołaj Sęp-Szarzyński becomes predominant. It is this latter element which prompted Dürr-Durski to call Naborowski the consummate mannerist and which caused him to place Naborowski as a transitional figure between the Renaissance and the Baroque. It is, however, the poetry primarily from the earlier period which will concern us here.2
Naborowski published almost nothing during his lifetime, and it was not until the 19th century that isolated verses began to appear in collections and anthologies. The literary scholar Józef Plebański had plans to do a collection of his poetry in the late 1880s, but died before he could begin the project. The first large-scale collection of his poems appeared in 1910 and 1911 during the period which came to be known as the “era of manuscripts” when Aleksander Brückner edited the two volumes of Wirydarz poetycki (A Garden of Poetry). This book largely duplicated a personał manuscript which had been compiled by Jakub Trembecki in the mid-1600s and which was maintained for many years after that in personal libraries.vWith a few exceptions, critical attention paid to Naborowski’s verse has been slight. It would appear that the first published critical reference to him was that of H. Klimaszewski in Noworocznik Litewski (Lithuanian New Year Publication) in 1831, after which his name began to show up occasionally in anthologies, and encyclopedic and bibliographical entries. The publication of Wirydarz poetycki in 1910-11 apparently did not stir any great interest in his work, and it was not until Wiktor Weintraub discussed him in two articles published in the 1930s that his work began to be considered in serious scholarly studies.3 Dürr-Durski published the first complete collection of his verse in 1961, and in 1966 he published a book entitled, Daniel Naborowski: Monografia z dziejów manieryzmu i baroku w Polsce (Daniel Naborowski: A Monograph on the History of Mannerism and the Baroque in Poland).4 Aside from this, Jarosław Rymkiewicz devoted a chapter to Naborowski in his work, Czym jest klasycyzm? (What is Classicism?),5 and Czesław Hernas devotes four pages to him in his book Barok (The Baroque).6 Most other studies either give Naborowski a token nod, or ignore him altogether. Of those few critics who have tackled Naborowski’s work, the primary focus has usually been on his letters, his translations, or his “serious” poetry, while little has been said about his short, humorous fraszki (occasionally referred to in English as “trifles”), some of which were clever and pithy enough to enter the common stock of Polish folklore.7
Much of the humor in Naborowski’s fraszki is of an erotic nature, although Dürr-Durski reminds us that the mores of the society in which they were written were such that the verses were certainly not viewed as obscene or pornographic either by Naborowski or by his courtly audience, and that such poetry had not yet been classified as unaesthetic or sinful. This was not the case with succeeding generations, during which unknown prudish hands saw fit to destroy several of his fraszki over the years. Some of this censorship was probably also due to Arian hostility for the works of a Calvinist author. Even Aleksander Brckner felt compelled to edit him when preparing Wirydarz poetycki for print.8 Naborowski tends to rely on a limited range of themes and situations to achieve his comic effects. Love and sex—both explicit and implicit—drinking bouts and haggard old women are popular starting points. There are occasional barbs poked at friends or rivals, and poetry itself is an infrequent theme of his humor. Naborowski expressed his attitude on the nature of fraszki in the short epigrammatic poem appropriately entitled “O fraszkach” (On Fraszki):
Właśnie jakby też chciał mieć kto bez dusze ciało, Kto chce, by się nic złego w wiersze nie pisało.9
(A man who thinks that rhymes should never smart is like the man who wants a body with no heart.)
In fact, Naborowski’s humor—not unlike Mikołaj Rej’s, whose sensibilities were firmly rooted in the medieval tradition—is frequently homespun andrough-hewn, both thematically and structurally. Naborowski’s fraszki, like Kochanowski’s, are situational, but his work nonetheless differs from that of the great renaissance poet in that it is more rooted in the reality of the immediate present and it is more overtly self-conscious. We find an example of this in the poem “Żart dworski” (A Court Joke). The punch line of this “joke,” to use Naborowski’s wording, relies on a rather clumsy, forced pun which arises in the interchangeability of a female character’s last name, Pieczonka, with a diminutive of the Polish word for roast meat. When a guest invited to a feast arrives late, he is asked what he’d like to have. Without hesitating, he replies, “I’d be happy to take that pieczonka there,” and then quickly takes a piece of meat from the serving dish. This poem is typical of Naborowski’s output for several reasons. First, the humor depends on word play. Second, the play on words involves a proper noun which doubles as a significant word at some crucial point in the poem. This device can be observed frequently in other of Naborowski’s poems, such as “Droga z Litwy do Prus” (The Road from Lithuania to Prussia), “Data” (which in the Polish language of the 17th century could have meant either “The Date” or “The Bribe”), “Na pana Sledzia” (about Mr. Herring) and others. Third, as in many of his fraszki, the milieu is nearly always recognizable as that of the petty Polish gentry. Themes are almost always earthy, not necessarily in an erotic sense, but in the sense that there is usually no effort made to touch on transcendent themes. While this is not true in a few isolated cases,10 the exceptions form a distinct minority in the bulk of Naborowski’s humorous verse. On the other hand, the poetry which was written later during Naborowski’s tenure at the court of Krzysztof Radziwiłł, is frequently moralistic and judgmental of mundane, everyday concerns. His humorousfraszki tend, in large part, to be celebrations of common human concerns and earthly pleasures.
There is in this vein a delightful series of epigrams about the simple pleasures of the bathhouse. The humor here derives from a sort of absurd obviousness in the poet’s observations which reminds one of the repetitive epigrams by the Russian composite author Koz’ma Prutkov in the 19th century. The series consists of a single quatrain entitled “Na nagie obrazy w łaźni” (On Naked Figures in a Steam Bath), followed by four couplets entitled “Item,” all of which elaborate on the original point. In these epigrams the poet stubbornly defends his right to lie about naked in his own bathhouse, regardless of what this may cause others to think of him. At one point a guest is shocked to happen upon the nude poet, who responds in the following way:
Gościu, chciej mi powiedzieć, proszę, swoje zdanie, Co byś wolał, czy żyw, czy to malowanie?
(So tell me, guest, your thinking on this matter: Do you prefer the real thing or something in a picture?)
We find in such poems elements of an emerging archetype of the simple and conservative mentality which would come to flourish during the Sarmatian Baroque, and which was so colorfully expressed in Jan Pasek’s Pamiętniki (Memoirs). We can easily picture many of the boisterous scenes from Naborowski’s verse as episodes in Pasek’s account of Polish life in the 17th century.
Some poems, such as “Smaczny kąsek” (A Tasty Morsel) or “Na kucharkę” (About a Cook), are merely descriptive of a mood or scene, while others, such as “Sąd Parysów” (The Trial of the Parises), describe ribald situations. This latter poem describes an evening of revelry among soldiers who spend a night at a tavern. When the tavern-keeper learns the next morning that the soldiers have seduced his wife with drink and have taken advantage of her, he demands that justice be done. But one of the soldiers steps forward and pleads his comrades’ case before their superior, using his quick wit to absolve them of guilt. Following is this advocate’s dubious, but successful, defense:
Ja powiem, kto był winien, a kogo nie winić. Przyszedł Szmuklerz, dał złoty, nie mógł nic uczynić. Dziurdzi dał pół złotego, raz seremak sprawił, Peter Dyjak nic nie dał, a siedmkroć odprawił. Czy Peter Dyjak winien, rozsądźcie to sami. Prosim, panie rachmistru, daj dekret za nami.
(I’ll tell you who is guilty and who is not: One soldier, Szmuklarz, gave a złoty; got for naught. Another, Dziurdzi, paid her less but took her more; Peter Dyjak gave her nil for seven rolls across the floor. There’s the story, captain, tell us true, Can you say that Peter’s broken any rules?)
It is ultimately decided that the soldiers have taken nothing that wasn’t offered them, that the wife has suffered nothing from this crime, and that the only thing to do is add three notches to the cuckolded husband’ s horns. The enduring value of this verse, and others similar to it, is not be found in the stereotyped plot, but in the intellectual gymnastics performed by the poet. The plot here, such as it is, merely provides Naborowski with an opportunity to engage in sophistry and the manipulation of words to create a clever turn of phrase. In such poems Naborowski gives a greater significance to the telling of the tale than to the actual tale itself.
The poem “About a Cook” is little more than a clever joke in which a group of men at table debate which is better, a male or a female cook. It is shortly resolved that a female cook is best, since after she has served the food, she still has something to offer. The poem “A Tasty Morsel” is perhaps more interesting in that it maintains a certain poetic tension by attempting to express something which the poet does not want to address openly: that is, the beauty of a certain element of a young woman’s body. Although young women hide this “tasty morsel,” as he calls it, the poet states that he has “seen the one that Anna has.” He then goes on to say:
Żeby był czarką, piłbym pewnie z niego, Był towarzyszem, nie puszczałbym się go.
(And if it were a goblet, I’d drink it to the lees, And if it were a comrade, I’d never let him leave.)
Naborowski’s erotic poetry is notable for its natural acceptance of themes which would come to be considered uncouth by subsequent generations. “A Tasty Morsel,” in fact, was blackened out in the manuscript of Wirydarz poetycki, though fortunately, in such a way that it could be restored. One senses the same earth-bound sensibility in these erotic poems that is present in the senes about the bathhouse: that is, these are common, acceptable elements of everyday life which require no false modesty.
Not all of Naborowski’s erotic poems repeat a traditional male-oriented point of view and in such cases the poet displays the same tolerance for several themes that is evident in his other work. The short poem “Pani” (A Lady) describes the aftermath of an interrupted love tryst between a society woman and her servant. The servant, who has been condemned to be drowned, calls out for his lover’s help, but she calmly refuses him:
Pani: “Już idź, boć moja łaska nie poradzi. Po smacznym kąsku wody napić się nie wadzi.”
(Go on your way, my favor is no help to you. You’ve had your treat, now have a drink of water, too.)
It is telling that Wacław Potocki later reworked and expanded this theme in a poem entitled “Smaczny kęsek” (A Tasty Morsel—not to be confused with Naborowski’s fraszka of the same name) in the collection Jovialities, where he exploited the opportunity to provide a moral lesson. Naborowski, however, avoids moralizing. The sexual act is not encumbered by thoughts of morality, and the woman’ s detachment from the role she has played in her lover’s demise is presented without comment on the part of the poet. It should not be forgotten, of course, that her behavior may well have been presented differently had her partner also been a member of the gentry.
Another poem with a similar point of view is a reworking of an epigram by the English poet, John Owen, whose work Naborowski plumbed for material on more than one occasion. Entitled “O paniej” (About a Lady), the poem describes a woman’s visit to the doctor:
Jedna pani a młoda pytała doktora, Kiedyby … z rana czy z wieczora? Doktor niewiele myślc tak paniej odpowie: Z wieczora miłość—radość, a po ranu—zdrowie.
(A certain young lady once queried her doctor: “When is the best time, is it morning or after?” The doctor replied after thinking a spell: “At night for pleasure and love; and morning for health.”)
Naborowski’s tolerance does not preclude his also exercising a sharp satirical tongue. His long poem “Do złej baby” (To an Evil Old Woman) chooses a common object of scorn, and reads much like the school-yard insults of the type, “May a thousand bees nest in your bonnet.” It is a rambling piece consisting of 429 words in 66 lines of insults which ends by ironically stating, “Straighten up old woman, or I’ll write 1000 evil words about you.” Though hardly a great work of poetic art, the poem is interesting for its self-conscious nature: The lines consist almost exclusively of lists of insults, more than half of which begin repetitively with the words “old woman.” Naborowski employs a similar technique of word repetition in the service of creating irony in a far shorter poem entitled “Zła żona” (Evil Wife). He would continue to use this poetic device of lists and repetitions in his later, more sophisticated, poetry as wel1.11 One of the finest and best-known examples of Naborowski’s poetry which is based on such poetic conceits is “Na oczy królewny angielskiej…” (On the Eyes of the English Queen), in which Naborowski stacks up descriptions of brilliant objects before concluding that the queen’s eyes are the most brilliant of them all. While this poem does not belong to his series of fraszki, there is a structural cross-current here which acts as a link between the different genres represented in Naborowski’s poetry. Words in such poems as these are often used more for achieving a visceral impact than for conveying real meaning. This kind of an attempt at word-play—that is, the elevation of words themselves to a primary role in the poem—will be brought to a much finer level of perfection in Jan Andrzej Morsztyn’s poetry.
The two poems about old women notwithstanding, Naborowski’s well-developed sense of fair play could extend even to this common object of scorn in his poetry. One delightful poem entitled “Odpowiedź baby” (Old Woman’s Reply) tells of a man in church who has finished his prayers and is preparing to kiss the earth, but is unable to because an old woman is standing so close to him. At his request to give him some room, the old woman pulls her dress over her back-side and says, “Tu mię całuj… i to ziemia, panie” (“Kiss me there, young man, this is earth, too”).
The poem “Łowy” (The Hunt), which has been described by Dürr-Durski as a love elegy, is one of the finest examples of Naborowski’s poetry. In terms of style and execution, it serves as a transition point in Naborowski’s work; it is not so much humorous as it is light-hearted. The poem derives its strength from the poet’s sense of irony and from the naïveté of the poem’s character which allow the verse to achieve a subtlety rarely present in Naborowski’s humorous poetry. Pastoral in nature, the tale recounts the adventures of a young man on a hunt in the woods with Cupid, the god of love. The hunters stalk their game until the young man finally tells Cupid to let fly his arrow. But rather than shoot the wild beast they are after, Cupid shoots his hunting partner instead. Although the poem is obviously about a young man falling in love, there is never any mention of the object of his affections, or even of love, save the symbolic role played by Cupid. The poem’s vocabulary consists almost exclusively of hunting terms and words describing the beauty of nature. As is the case in the best of Naborowski’s poems, the poetic tension is created by a turn of phrase, and by leaving the most important observations unspoken. When the poet returns home, he laments:
Jaz łowu, łowczy ubogi, W sercu niosę postrzał srogi.
(I return from hunting, my game-bag bare, And carry in my heart a wound severe.)
Though not in agreement about the ultimate significance of Naborowski’s work, Wiktor Weintraub and Jan Dürr-Durski showed that in his “serious” poetry, Naborowski relied heavily on models which had been created by Rabelais, Jan Kochanowski, Maciej Sarbiewski, and others. Jarosław Rymkiewicz, writing about Naborowski’s poem “On the Eyes of the English Queen,” pointed out that Naborowski “repeated” the poems of Honorat Laugier de Porchres, but he also went on to say that “repetition is not the same thing as imitation. Repetition is conscious in the 17th century, and Naborowski doesn’t hide the model because this is not what interests him.”12 Such a statement may also be applied to Naborowski’s humorous verse, for his place in the history of Polish literature is not determined by his thematic or structural innovations. Dürr-Durski has shown that Naborowski not only relied heavily on Kochanowski for his themes, but that his poetic execution was frequently derivative as well.11 Naborowski’s individuality—at least in his fraszki—is to be found in his slightly cruder tone of voice and poetic sensibility. It is here in his unassuming approach to common themes and homespun poetic style—referring back to the medieval tradition—and his penchant for word play, that fledgling elements of the Baroque can be discerned. As Poland’s international stature declined, its poets, Naborowski included, began to turn their poetic eye to more immediate, more enduring, elements of everyday life, whether it be the simple pleasure of enjoying one’s own bathhouse, or the self-conscious pursuit of manipulating words to create a pun. In the context of the development of Polish poetry over the course of the next century, we can see that Naborowski’ s poetry carried the seeds of a literature that would emerge later with a style of its own. In his fraszki Naborowski created a solid handful of cleverly constructed verses whose ability to capture vignettes of universal experience and whose importance in serving as a link between literary traditions has allowed them to withstand the test of time. Despite total neglect by readers and scholars for nearly three centuries, one now must recognize that Naborowski’s contribution to Polish literature was a valuable and permanent one.
_________________
1 This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the AAASS convention in New Orleans, November 22, 1986. I would like to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Patricia Perrault for her valuable critical commentary of an early draft.
2 For a brief look at Dürr-Durski’s definition of mannerism, see his posthumously published “Od manieryzmu do baroku,” Przeglqd Humanistyczny, z. 1 (1917) 1-17.
3“Z dziejów Rabelais’go w Polsce” in Prace historyczno-literackie. Księga zbiorowa ku czci 1. Chrzanowskiego (Cracow 1936); and “Naborowski; przekłady z Petrarki i z Du Bartasa,” Sprawozdanie Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności, nr. 5 (1933).
4 (Łódzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe: 1966) nr. 63. Any student of Naborowski’s poetry must acknowledge the importance of Dürr-Durski’s pioneering work. Despite the scholar’s occasional exaggeration of Naborowski’s importance, his study will remain the most fundamental of its kind for some time to come.
5 (Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy: 1967). The chapter is entitled “Naborowski.”
6 (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1973).
7 Cf. Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of California, 1983) 134.
8 Dürr-Durski notes in his monograph that while Bruckner apparently gathered together some of Naborowski’s previously uncollected verses and added them to his published text of Wirydarz poetycki, he also felt compelled to cut several of the verses which he perceived to be pornographic.
9 This and subsequent quotations from Naborowski’s poetry may be found in Daniel Naborowski: Poezje (Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy: 1961) ed. Jan Dürr-Durski. All translations are my own.
10 One exception of note is the epigram “Mądrość i rozkosz” (Wisdom and Pleasure) which draws parallels between pleasure and the pale light of the moon, and wisdom and the brightness of the sun.
11 See for example “Krótkość żywota” (The Shortness of Life), “Cnota grunt wszytkiemu” (Virtue: The Foundation for Everything) and others.
12Rymkiewicz, pp. 27, 29.
13The final chapter of Dürr-Durski’s monograph is devoted in large part to discussing the parallels between Kochanowski’s and Naborowski’s fraszki.
A couple of details before moving on to what is important here. I wrote this text in Russian a few days ago thanks to a note I received from Milena Chovrebova, an actress of the Chelovek Theater in Moscow. The company was preparing to gather to honor the memory of its founder Lyudmila Romanovna Roshkovan on the first anniversary of her death. I was invited to attend. Unable to do that because I no longer live in Moscow, I put some of my thoughts down in electronic form, and Milena was kind enough to have my little remembrance read to the assembled audience. I was writing for an audience that needed no explanations, so I offered none. A few are in order here for an audience that might not know Roshkovan and her Chelovek Theater as those of us in Moscow did. First, the Chelovek (Human) theater-studio was founded in the mid-1970s, a breath of fresh air in the so-called “era of stagnation.” It had no home at that time and the KGB chased the actors and their director around the city, trying, but usually failing, to stop their performances. The friendlier Perestroika Era brought stability and official success to the theater – it now had an actual building and stage it could call its own. Second: I mention the “kitchen and restaurant” neighborhood of Moscow, which everyone there knows – a few blocks west of the city center with streets bearing names such as Bread Lane, Cook Street, Tablecloth Lane, etc. Roshkovan’s Chelovek (Human) Theater was, and still is, located on Skatertny Pereulok (Tablecloth Lane). Third: Lyudmila Roshkovan suffered a catastrophic accident somewhere between 1990 and 1992. I never knew the exact date, and I cannot find it now. It is not mentioned at all in any of the online biographies – Wikipedia, the Chelovek website, etc. I don’t even know how many people today know what happened because she virtually never spoke about it. She did tell me, though, so I know she was flagging down a cab outside the Mossoviet Theater when a car ploughed into her at full speed. As she put it, there wasn’t an unbroken bone in her body, including in her face. She “should have” died, but she was a tough person, and she survived. She rarely showed herself in public again for the next 30 years of her life. When I first interviewed her in 1993, her face was a checkerboard of scars and patches. I have never written this before, I would never have done so during her life. It was clearly her belief that this incident and its aftermath were no one’s damn business, something I have always respected. I do feel differently now that she is gone. Not because we now get to revel in what caused her so much pain, but because we can now honor the strength and courage she showed in pulling herself from death’s teeth and going on to live a full, creative life “after death.” Lyudmila Roshkovan died at the age of 81 on May 20, 2020. I pulled the above photo, probably taken a year or two before the accident, from a Wiki-data site. The 1993 interview that I did with her for The Moscow Times is reprinted in my book, Moscow Performances: The New Russian Theater 1991-1996 (1997): pp. 221-222.
May 19, 2021 By John Freedman
When I first appeared in Moscow – this was in 1988 – the Chelovek (Human) theater-studio was not merely successful, it was highly respected. You wanted to know what was happening in Moscow theater? Go to the Chelovek. You wanted to know who the next famous director or actor would be? Head for the Chelovek. This was where I saw the wonderful work of the then still-young Roma Kazakov, Misha Mokeev, Sasha Feklistov… I saw Sergei Zhenovach’s debut productions there. I saw the amazing Sergei Taramaev there for the first time… Lyudmila Roshkovan’s productions were unlike anything else in town. She had a very special style. She loved experimental European drama. Her productions were exquisite, with a distinct sense of humor, and a deep understanding of life and art. She managed to move back and forth between them easily – between life and art. I always expected something unusual and new when I headed for the Chelovek theater-studio. And if today’s production was staged by Roshkovan, I knew well that today I would come away from it richer than when I had arrived.
I don’t know why, but Lyudmila and I developed a warm, friendly relationship. After her terrible accident, she did not speak to the press at all, did not appear in public. Yet she agreed to talk with me. When I arrived she was waiting for me in her office, a little nervous, as it seemed to me, but she was open, lively and strong. We talked for an hour or an hour and a half. It was a simple conversation, warm, fast-moving, back and forth. She spoke about her theater’s early fame, when “Suddenly, we went from being hounded to being the talk of Moscow. I sat here and wondered: “Is this really possible?”
At that time (this was the summer of 1993), Roshkovan still harbored some resentment towards those young artists that she had nursed to the status of stars, and who, in her opinion, had abandoned her.
“I find it terrifying how people can transform so quickly,” she told me.
But in fact, she wasn’t really so offended any more. I remember listening to her and thinking: “This is going to pass for you. It is already passing.” And, then, a few years later, for the theater’s 25th anniversary, all her former “students” returned, restored their old productions, resumed their old roles and played like gods! A whole week straight. It was a festival of love: of students for their teacher, and vice versa. It was a true love-fest in the middle of Moscow.
Back in 1993, I asked what she thought about the role of Chelovek in the formation of the Moscow’s studio movement. Her answer, as always, was simple and direct: “As always in Russia, that was just an attempt by some to create another mass movement. There was a lot of bad theater around, and we simply wanted to do something professionally and well.”
I can’t say that Lyudmila Romanovna and I went on to be friends. That would be improper, too loudly spoken. I kept my professional distance from her, as I did with everyone in Moscow. And she, after her accident, was not inclined to frequent communication – “They scooped me up and put me back together piece by piece,” she said about the terrible day of the accident, which changed her life forever. I received calls from her from time to time, sometimes she sent me greetings, thanks or an invitation to a premiere. Always accompanied by a kind, personal greeting. As for me, an outing to the Chelovek Theater always involved a journey to a warm, comfortable, familiar place, where art and human feelings invariably stood side by side. And any time I would take a walk in that region of town, passing all those “kitchen and restaurant” lanes and streets, it was something special for me. I knew Lyudmila was there, on Skatertny Pereulok, that her productions were in performance there somewhere nearby…
Following her death, the Chelovek Theater remained on Moscow’s map as one of the city’s most wonderful islands. I now live very far from Moscow, but this island remains in my heart. My memories of Lyudmila, of her work, of her distinctive theater, of her personal stamp on the city, all this warms me, supports me, makes me happy to this day.
Happiness! I remember and feel happiness when I think about Lyudmila Roshkovan. She gave a lot to Moscow and Muscovites. She gave me eternal happiness too.
I received a letter from Eyad Houssami, whom I did not know, on July 1, 2013. He ID’d himself as a theater director who held down a day job as an editor of a literary publication. Two pretty good jobs, when you think about it. He and a group of editors were looking for stories to translate into English and then Arabic, and then they would publish them in the journal, Portal 9. The issue, which would be No. 3 (Autumn 2013) and would be dedicated to “Fiction: Contemporary Arab and Russian pursuits.” The publication itself declared its territory as “Stories and Critical Writing about the City.” They wanted me to do a sample translation to see if they liked the stories I was being offered, and if my translation fit their needs. They sent me excerpts from two stories by Irina Bogatyryova, “Exit” and “Clear Light,” and I dashed off test translations in a couple of days. The editors ended up selecting “Exit” for publication and I sent off a full translation on August 3. I was impressed and pleased when I received a copy of the “journal” sometime later. It was actually a box set of individually published stories in chapbook form. They had done a beautiful job of editing, printing and publishing. I don’t remember now how many booklets there were in the set – all I have left now is the edition of Bogatyryova’s “Exit.” As Fadi Tofeili writes in the Editorial introduction, “‘Let the free be free,’ writes Irina Bogatyreva, and she repeats this sentence as a refrain in her short story. In “Exit,” a staid tour guide tries to perform his job, without any personal or emotional investment in the tourist groups he shuttles between Russia and Scandinavia. The freedom to do as we please, as Bogatyreva’s story reveals, might sometimes include voluntary, eternal disappearance, even suicide.” Tofeili added, “…we sought at the very least to knock on a door often neglected not only by those who read and write in Arabic, but also by many American and European publishers, among others. A kind of historical amnesia has perpetuated the hegemony of international Russian classics by the likes of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, and this is at the expense of the new, post-Soviet Russia.” According to Russian Wikipedia, Irina Bogatyryova was born in Kazan and grew up in Ulyanovsk. After graduating from the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, she moved to the town of Lyubertsy, southeast of Moscow. Her work has been published in such journals as Oktyabr, Novy Mir, Druzhba Narodov, Koltso, Day and Night and others. She was the chief editor of Berega (Shores), a journal for young writers in the Volga region. She has been translated into English, French, Chinese, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Arabic and Marathi. She is an afficianado of ethnic music and plays on the vargan, an instrument like a Jew’s harp, in a musical duet ensemble called Olkhon Gates. She is a member of the Writers’ Union of Moscow, and of PEN Moscow. Bogatyryova has published over a dozen books, including an instructional book on how to play the vargan.
Exit Irina Bogatyreva
1
As they set out, these were the thoughts running through his head: the usual excursion, three countries, three nights, twenty people, no kids (he checked the list). “No kids,” he thought again. You couldn’t have kids in this weather: it was early March, there would be rain in Copenhagen and snow still on the ground in Helsinki. The wind would blow the whole way, and the sky would be overcast. But they knew nothing about that. “Twenty people, and I’m in my fifteenth year of doing this.” That’s what he was thinking as the bus glided out of illuminated St. Petersburg into the pitch black of the road to Vyborg. The inside of the bus behind him was still teeming with people as it settled into its small, cramped, temporary domesticity. He checked his papers, picked up the microphone, and described the trip they were about to make, the border and customs. He didn’t listen to himself, just took note that the microphone was working and that his voice was confident, loud, and calm, just as it should be. “All’s fine. Just as it should be.” That’s what he thought as they set out. Now he didn’t know what to think. When Alla Demidovna (the boisterous old B4 lady) asked if he ever got into trouble for forgetting and leaving someone behind, he naturally laughed. “You can’t imagine how many I’ve left behind in my fifteen years! Now he recalled and thought: Yes, but had he actually gone and forgotten someone?
He noticed those girls immediately. Eighteen to twenty. One plump, the other not. One sassy, the other not. One knew English better, the other worse. That’s how he sometimes distinguished among his tourists. He rarely remembered names. For him, they were all an assortment of attributes and the seat they occupied. The letter designated the row lengthwise (counting back from the driver). The number designated the crosswise row (counting from the window). He had a passenger list. Checking it, he perused each individual the way one peruses a murky bottle to figure out how the wine will taste. A1 was a mother: not young, not old, not thin, not fat. Not stupid. Would buy clothes for her husband and teenage son, but at one point would purchase a knickknack that she’d show everyone for awhile, but wouldn’t pull it out right away when she got home because she was ashamed of it. With her was her family: A2, her lanky, hunched-over son, and A3, her husband, much older than she, smoothly bald, which made his head too big and seem as if it were screwed onto his body. B4 was a sassy old broad resembling a rotten peach with a wrinkled little face and rosy rouge on her cheeks. “Last summer, I toured Europe by bus. Sixteen days, eight countries. It was fabulous! What did you say your name was?” She was talking to her neighbor. “Raya. You sat by the window. Aren’t you afraid of the draft?” Did I grab a scarf? Yes. I only hope she doesn’t forget to look in on Lyusya. What if she does? There’s chicken in the fridge and no candy. I told her, “No candy.” What if she forgets? She promised she’d walk her in the evening, what about morning? Can she hold out all day long? She’s getting old… “If there’s a draft, I’ll move. Don’t worry. There are lots of empty seats, not many people I’ll tell you. You know, when I went to Prague … ” So strange. We could have gone any time earlier. Why now and not earlier? Why specifically now? What do you think, Savva? That’s C1, a woman with big eyes. Over thirty, getting plump although she still hasn’t lost the fine, youthful features of her melancholy face. No smile. Looks at her husband, C2. He’s husky, fair-haired and severe. The guide would remember his Old Testament name forever. C2: … The guide was surprised. He looked into the murky glass again and saw nothing, shrugged his shoulders and headed further on back the bus. “What are you doing? Can’t you put that up top?” Jesus, why did I come with her? It’s going to be like this the whole way! That was D4, a grown daughter, tall and fat, with a strong voice and hands. D3, her mother, was getting on in years. They looked just like each other. “It’s not bothering anybody. Let it be!” He looked at C2 again. All was quiet there. And then there were those girls. E4: I’ll write Mom later, like two weeks after. There won’t be anything she can do about it then. It’s easy, as long as Sveta doesn’t chicken out at the last minute. She tossed a quick glance at her friend… Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed. She said, “No problem, nobody’s going to…” Nobody? What if he already knows? Look at him looking, what’s he looking at? He could send us back at the border. He could. But we haven’t done anything yet! Jesus, they’ll stamp something in our passports, and we’ll never be able to travel again. It’s awful! He made note of them. Simply made note, differentiating them from the rest. He saw right through them and was pleased with himself. He wouldn’t do anything though. Let the free be free. He just liked knowing in advance what to expect of whom. C2 again. Emptiness. The glass wasn’t just murky it was impenetrably dense. A light disturbance quivered in the bottom of his belly. But let the free be free. He counted them all. Nineteen. Who else? There. Over by the far window lay a skinny, shabby man. His hat was under his head, and he hugged an empty bag. Usually, no one sat in those seats, which is why he called them “Z,” because it was as though they came last. Z was Mr. Kornev. He’d remember that name too. It would become an entertainment of sorts, observing how he lugged around that ragged bag, on the bottom of which (as he now knew) jostled an old Soviet electric razor and a packet with a toothbrush and toothpaste. He would always be the last one on the bus, would forget all the place names and have to ask again, and would get lost in every hotel (even though he would go out every night for evening walks). He would lose the key to his stateroom on the ferry (finding it later in his bag), and in Elsinore he would walk so far down the beach that someone would have to go after him to bring him back. Tourists are just like sheep. Even if the boldest among them strikes out on his own, he’ll still keep glancing back at the others. They have discretion about them. Not this man, though. Every time he got on the bus, he would take a different seat – many were free – so no one letter ever became associated with him. He was just Kornev. Initials: V. A.
2
A ferry is an enormous structure. You can appreciate its size only from the shore. But it’s still bigger than it seems – part of it is under water. It’s an iceberg-like building. Caught up in the crush of tourists, they mounted the opulent main deck by way of tight gangways. They were greeted by red carpets, a sparkling registration desk, a glass-doored restaurant, and a fountain. They all came together there, the Russian-speaking island, and the guide handed out key cards before they descended to their assigned deck. Their baggage on wheels clattered behind them on the narrow metal stair as they went further and further down. “Is this it? No? Further?” “Mom, look. We’re going to be below the engine!” “Why do you say that?” “Because here’s the auto storage!” The guide peered down the stairwell and listened as if it were a well. They already know, he thought – must be their second time. He wouldn’t need to explain anything; not how to insert the key or where to go for dinner. Today I rest. All’s ending well. That’s what he thought before going to his own berth.
Their deck consisted of a confusing system of corridors so narrow you couldn’t walk them hand-in-hand. With their identical berth doors, they all looked the same. The Russians quickly scattered to their own berths and lost contact with one another. Savva opened the berth door, and they found themselves inside a white cubicle with metallic, painted walls. Immediately by the door was a cramped cubbyhole – that was the shower and toilet. Two bunks stood opposite each other. They were so close two people could not pass between them. Above them were two more, folded up and pinned to the walls. A tiny table and a large mirror in a heavy, lacquered frame provided a semblance of comfort. There was no porthole. “I don’t like this,” Mila said tentatively and sat on the edge of the bunk. “Ladies and gentlemen,” a disembodied voice said in English over the radio, “our ferry is departing. We wish you a pleasant journey.” The walls shook and groaned. Then something close by and quite metallic loudly kicked into motion. The entire structure lurched, softly but perceptibly. Mila dug her fingers into the edge of her bed and stared at Savva. He was listening. A short while later the rumbling and banging died down and all that remained was the steady creaking of the entire cubicle. “You hear that?” she whispered. Water splashed. Not lightly as it would against a boat hull, but with a deeply sacral, uterine sensation. Water enveloped the structure, squeezing their white cubicle, chunked ice rubbing against the skin of the ferry, which dove into the waves. The water foamed. It bubbled. It was black, wintry, and icy. Nocturnal water on the opposite side of the wall. “I’m going to shower,” Savva said and disappeared into the cubbyhole. It would be so simple and horrible. And there would be no way out. She looked at her cell phone, it had no connection. Young people cavorted in the corridor. Finns, judging by their voices. A door slammed. Then it opened and loud music was heard. Another slammed. Somewhere one group of drunken kids met another. Their voices thundered in the labyrinthine corridors. “You can hear everything!” a voice said in Russian as a door opened. That was Mother Varlamov taking a look-see. “It’s the same mayhem here, I see.” Alla Demidovna spoke as she walked down the corridor. Raya scurried along behind her. “You think you have it bad? You should see where we are! We are right next to them! I’ve never seen anything like it. But what can you say to them? I wouldn’t know where to start. They wouldn’t understand anyway. I’m going to tell the guide.” They shuffled off to the elevator. Before the neighboring berth door shut, Mila heard: “Mom, are we going to go eat?” The water in a shower flowed smoothly. At least I’ll be with Mom, but what about him? All alone?
3
Three countries, three nights, 600 kilometers, two ferries (there and back). In Finland, a general excursion, a museum, and a cathedral; in Sweden, a general excursion, a museum, and free time; in Denmark, a general excursion, the mermaid, and Elsinore. And, oh yes, must not forget to say that Copenhagen sounds completely different in Danish. He knew everything that lay ahead. And what to expect from everyone. Any aspect of personal curiosity was utterly excluded. That was any busload’s common lot (twenty people, no children). They are timid or, on the contrary, grow brazen as soon as they cross the border. For him, it was all a trip to a museum. Addresses and names were merely an impulse to speak into the microphone. Cyclists, young couples with twin baby carriages, retired people with skis out for a brisk, cross-country jaunt and the old hippies from Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiana – these were all things his tourists would give a lively response, and they would arise in the same places as always. He knew perfectly well that they would freeze like wax figures as soon as the bus turned onto another street. Nothing about this museum would change unless it was the weather. But even this he had learned to anticipate. Everything outside the bus was stage scenery. For him, the only reality was inside the bus. Twenty people with their own interests and needs, spiritual, consumer and physiological. For them, he was the creator of that which awaited them. Each had to receive exactly what was desired. He liked the fact that each of the twenty behind him was different, although he knew every one of them in advance. “In advance?” he now thought on the way back, fingering someone else’s toothbrush in his pocket.
It was a kind of entertainment. He watched how each time they would lag behind, purposefully walking slowly and chatting. He never called out to them but always made sure that they saw that he saw. Never did he make them uncomfortable about it. The fatter woman might speak forever with store clerks as she chose clothes, souvenirs, or just killed time. The skinnier one would stand off to the side and carry the shopping bags. The plump one asked once how to make a local call from the hotel (this was in Stockholm). He told her and asked no questions. They had free time in Copenhagen. A lot of free time, almost a whole evening. The last time he saw them was in one of the stores on Andersen Boulevard, and they didn’t show up for the bus back to the hotel on the outskirts of town, almost in the suburbs. He registered them anyway and got them keys. They showed up at 12:30 a.m. Got there themselves, by way of city transport, the plump one said. She thanked him for warning them that Copenhagen sounded totally different in Danish. It was then, the very next morning, that Alla Demidovna, B4, asked if people often miss the bus. “All the time!” the guide said optimistically into the microphone. “Sometimes, they catch up with it. I had this lady once who trailed us all the way through Sweden. Sometimes people call and I tell them where to find us. But there are those who want to miss it, you know?” and here he paused. “I’m all for it. The Soviet Union is long gone, and I’m not your nursemaid. The only thing is, I would prefer it if you’d come to me beforehand and let me know what’s up. Don’t think I’m going to hold anybody by the hand. But I guess people are afraid of me.” He laughed into the microphone as if to say, “What’s to fear in us?” Right. What’s to fear, he thought now as he fiddled in his pocket with that toothbrush. It was a faded kind of red with all the writing worn off.
4
Off the bow of the ferry, through the huge semicircular windows, a series of gargantuan, towering islands appeared as if from an unreal fantasy. They seemed to swim alongside, surfacing and diving out of sight again. They were covered in fir trees, patches of snow, wet sand and large, almost round, rocks. Black birds soared, severe, above the mast-like pines. The water was black in a white brew of chunked ice. Another ferry approached and passed them; it, too, was heading for an island and left an ebony streak in its wake. The Russians lost their bearings in the large restaurant. The place was packed, it was the weekend. Families, kids, the elderly, and young people. All were polite and talkative. They lacked national distinctions. They were just people with plates wandering among tables with the food they had been served. But when the Russians sat down, it was evident that they sat in a single row at the biggest table in order to face the window although they at least didn’t keep the order of their seating on the bus. Only the guide and the driver were absent. And there was no seat for Kornev. He ended up at a small, round table with eight others. He had taken every herring dish there was, a piece of the blackest bread, and he kept getting up to pour himself more red wine. “Eh,” the older Varlamov thought as he watched him and sipped the white wine his wife had poured him. She shook her head. Why is he always silent? Hasn’t said a word the whole trip. You live with someone like that and think you know him, but in fact you don’t. Isn’t that right, Savva? Mila raised her gaze from her plate to her husband. He was eyeing the islands as they floated by. “People, we’d better go tell the guide or there will be an international scandal,” said Alla Demidovna. “Look at him knocking them back!” She rose. “Oh, leave him alone,” said the usually timid Raya, quietly. “What did you say?” Alla Demidovna asked in amazement. “Leave him alone. Maybe he’s drowning his sorrows. You don’t know him.” “Well, I’ll be,” the offended Alla Demidovna huffed. But she sat back down. He says nothing. I don’t understand him. If we’re getting divorced, why this trip? Dusk is falling, I can hardly see a thing. Why this trip if we’re getting divorced? We are the strangest couple here. Kornev got up again, came back, sat down, and tossed a gloomy glance at his neighbors. “Russia?” a fat man asked as he grabbed his elbow for some reason. He smiled so widely that his cheeks fairly shone. “Russia,” Kornev nodded, not taking offense. He didn’t even free his elbow. “What of it?” “All right, all right,” the man cocked his head in a friendly manner and patted Kornev on the arm. “Suomi?” Kornev asked. “No,” all eight of the smiling, nodding people at the table said in unison. “No matter,” Kornev said. “I hope you don’t mind me here,” he asked and gestured at his wine glasses and plate full of herring. “All right, all right,” they all nodded and smiled again. “I wonder what you really think about me,” Kornev said thoughtfully and stared at the fat man. “No answer? All right. I’ll just say this. Think” – he burped – “about it. Why would a Russian go abroad? Huh? You think for this?” – he nodded at his glass and everyone again nodded in return. “Hell no.” His expression melted into a warm smile as he put his face right into that of the fat man and said, “We come here to feel heartache. Heartache.” The eight people around him amenably nodded and lifted their glasses as if Kornev had raised a toast. He clinked glasses with every one of them, drank up, pulled his sack out from under the table and left. “Have you had enough?” Savva asked Mila. “Let’s go and sleep.” The radio announced that there would be a discotheque on the upper deck. Alongside the registration desk Kornev sat on the edge of the fountain and splashed the water with his flattened hand. Further along, beyond the elevator shaft, there was a corridor and a glass door leading to the deck outside. It was a small one, for employees only. It wasn’t locked and the teenagers poured out the door to smoke. They were cold and cheerful. “Exit” was printed in English in green letters above the door along with the image of a running man. “Exit,” Kornev and Savva both read simultaneously in Russian. Each to themselves. But they each heard each other and turned around to acknowledge it.
5
The weather in Elsinore that day was … But what’s to say about it other than there was weather? In his memory, it was always like this – cloudy, muggy, and with high winds off the sea. Cold. Women wore hats, men pulled up their collars. Elsinore is a castle with thick, defensive walls. Cannons on the side facing the shore are habitually aimed at Sweden. Right there, you can see it, just three kilometers across. He’d already told them about that. The sand was wet. Along the water’s edge stood huge gray-green boulders. He saw how one of the women in his group climbed over to the water and disappeared from sight. They were admitted into the castle although they had no appointment. A large female caretaker in a dark blue uniform with a heavy gaze, a heavy jaw, and a keychain that weighed a half a kilo smiled at them with the amiability of a horse. In Danish, he said, “These are tourists from Russia. You would be so kind to allow us to see the castle on the inside.” The horse was so kind. The guide took note that the Russians were as disarmed by her smile as they were by the local ambiance. They got their history, Shakespeare, and fifteen minutes of free time to walk and photograph. “You know where the bus is,” he told them and slowly proceeded down the rampart toward the wall. He wanted to touch its stones. The stones were damp, the earth was covered in moss. In places, the wall had been restored with fresh brick. Huge sea gulls shrieked in the sky. He saw that almost everyone was heading for the bus, hurried along by gusts of wind from the Baltic Sea hitting them in the back. He saw Savva returning to the castle grounds. Later he saw him on the wall. Savva looked out to sea over one of the cannons lowered in the direction of Sweden. His wife stood below and shouted something at him. She laughed and wiped a wind-induced tear from her eye with the back of her hand. He saw Kornev head off to the right along the shore. Later he would send the teenager, A2, in that direction to tell Kornev it was time to leave. He didn’t see the girls the entire time of the excursion. Inside his mind, he had already written them off. He was somewhat surprised when he discovered them smoking and huddled from the cold by the bus.
6
If these walls could jump, they would jump. Mila listened to the thump of the discotheque as if it were her heart. She lay in the dark with her eyes closed. It was so dark it didn’t matter if her eyes were open or closed. The music from the disco seeped down the walls into their cubicle from the top deck. She herself had become the walls. But he’s not sleeping either. “Do you mind if I read?” Savva asked. “Go ahead.” He turned on the bedside light. A white ceiling appeared above Mila. Teenagers ran up and down the corridor shrieking and stomping. Three doors slammed in a row. Somebody next door slipped and fell. Young girls squealed behind the door. Boys in the corridor laughed and shouted something. Mila thought it must be warm in the jungle. “Are you cold? I’ll turn on the heater.” He got up and turned the dial on the air conditioner to plus. He lay down. A few moments later, it grew warmer. Mila relaxed and removed her hand from beneath the blanket. I remember – was it a graduation ball? Or just a regular dance? In the study hall for … Russian … yes. Music was playing, and it was pitch black in the corridor. No one was in the school but our class. There was an echo, and our steps in the corridor were louder than the music. Swish, swish. By the mirror. There were flowers there, too – I had stripped all the leaves off. Kostya, who has two children with Natasha now, he said, “Let’s go, there’s more room in there.” We waltzed. God, how funny that sounds! Sveta later said, “Were you guys kissing?” But we were just waltzing… The music suddenly went distant and you could hear the sea gurgling, hissing, and splashing on the other side of the wall. She listened to it as she sailed forward. It was soft and quiet. Foamy. For a long time. Suddenly she realized Savva was gone because the door appeared to slam shut, and she opened her eyes.
7
“What would I tell them if I return to the bus with the bag?” the guide thought. Nobody stays behind without their things. It was always the first sign that someone had flown the coop. On their own. If their things were gone. But they knew nothing about that. And he didn’t know what to do now. He was calm in the first moment after counting heads, when the passengers said not everyone was there. Hadn’t he expected this? He walked down the aisle counting heads feeling as though he was observing a formality. He wouldn’t even hunt for them. He’d go behind a building, have a smoke, catch his breath, come back to the bus, and say that no one on the ferry knew anything. And that would be true. What could they know? The fugitives were young, they’d be fine. Let the free be free. But he reached the back of the bus, spoke the word “nineteen” aloud, and stopped, staring at the girls. It was an optical illusion. They were stage props. Wax figures. They looked at him quizzically. “Who are we missing?” he asked the busload. “Kornev,” he heard in answer. He became alarmed. He thought: No problem that it’s Kornev. Kornev will show up. But the girls are in place. He realized that he now did not know what to expect. What could you expect from these people? And he thought he had pegged everyone immediately. He went back to the driver, bent over, and said, “You look around here. I’ll go check the ferry.” To the passengers he said, “Please stay close by. We won’t be delayed long.”
8
Savva left dressed as he was, in his robe. He didn’t change so as not to wake her. He wouldn’t have left if she wasn’t sleeping. He knew that. He just wouldn’t have wanted to. He took the elevator to the upper deck. The hall by the registration desk was empty. The discotheque thundered above. Savva went around the fountain and turned left into a narrow corridor where he had seen the word “Exit.” Kornev stood by the glass door, probing the frame and picking at the rubber lining-strip. He turned and was not surprised to see Savva. “You see this? They locked it,” he said and wrenched the door handle as proof. “Nighttime,” he said. “They lock it to keep the drunks in.” Savva approached Kornev, and together they pushed their foreheads against the glass and looked. Out there, they saw a metallic, grayish, wet deck, and, beyond it, utter nocturnal gloom. “You can’t see a thing, look at that,” Kornev said. “Even if there’s something there, you can’t see it.” Light from the ferry cut through about a half meter of air beyond the hull, wet, toxic white chunks glistening in the pitch black as they flew from left to right. That’s how they determined it was windy on the other side of the glass. They only sensed that the ferry was moving because of the vibrations. “You know what I think of every day here?” Kornev asked abruptly, holding his gaze on the yawning darkness. “How my grandfather taught me to use a scythe. He would take me with him, and we would work from morning until the midday meal. I remember that, moving forward with the scythe in hand, not a thought in my head, making sure not to lose sight of my grandfather ahead of me and to the right out of the corner of my eye. All the while focusing on the scythe.” “You’ve got to move smooth, straight and rhythmically. Whish. Whish. Whish. Gently, like cutting butter. Keeping the blade just above the ground,” Savva continued the tale. They turned towards each other. Kornev was sober. Savva made a note of that. “Then we’d go into the shade,” Kornev said. “And drink kvass. He would lie in the burdock beneath a birch.” “We ate sandwiches and green onions.” “Fried chicken and boiled potatoes. Cold and slick.” “Salted.” “Then we’d lie down. We wouldn’t talk, just stare at the sky.” “My body ached. I dreamed about the river.” “That’s very seductive, what you’re talking about,” they heard a woman’s voice say in English by the fountain. Two young men came out of the elevator with the two girls from the bus. “But I’m afraid we’ll be in a different country tomorrow. But we’ll think about it, won’t we, Sveta?” “Yes, definitely,” Sveta said, and they both laughed. They went up the stairs and disappeared beyond the door into the discotheque. Savva absentmindedly slapped at the pockets in his robe. Kornev touched him on the shoulder and held out a pack of cigarettes. They smoked silently, not looking at each other. “It really is locked, Savva. Or maybe it’s not the exit we were looking for.” “It is, though.” “Then it’s not right for us,” Kornev snickered for some reason. He flicked his cigarette butt into the ashcan five steps away. And hit it. “Go back to your wife. Everything will work out.” Getting into the elevator, Savva had the thought that things still might work out differently.
9
He was told if someone has disappeared it was best to go to the police. If those were his things. The guide looked at the electric razor, the pale, reddish toothbrush, and the toothpaste. There wasn’t a word in Russian on either the toothbrush or the toothpaste. Only the old razor, it was immediately evident, was from Soviet times. But how could they know that? “I am not certain these are his things,” he said. “All right, then keep in mind that they’ll be here in the Lost and Found in the event that he shows up, and you confirm that these are his.” He said “All right” in Finnish and left feeling absolutely certain he would never see Kornev again. He had a suspicion that he had not merely been late for the bus. That he had disappeared on the ferry. That it was premeditated. Only why, and why such complexity? The human heart is a mystery, the guide thought. At least he could have taken his things with him. To keep things clean. Although why would a man need his razor in the next life? It was when he was disembarking from the ferry that he put his hand in his pocket and discovered the toothbrush there. The one with no Russian words on it. The one with no writing on it at all.
10
“Did you go out? I must have dozed off,” Mila said. Savva was silent. He was sitting on his bunk in his canary-colored robe. They had bought it last year, it came down just over his knees. Very funnylooking. The music kept playing. Only it was quieter and slower now. We called this a slow-burner. You’d embrace and dance ever so slowly. If somebody asked you. Most of them were too shy to ask. The sounds of the sea mixed in, too. Music and sea. With the crunching ice and foam against the hull. Music in the depths of the gloom. Let’s dance. Maybe he actually said that aloud, but she was falling asleep and heard it differently as if inside her own head. She came to. He was extending his hand to her. They stood together, her palm on his shoulder, his on her waist. They rocked back and forth, from foot to foot, and began turning in the tight space between the bunks. He was in his slippers and his canary-colored robe that hung below the knees. She was barefoot on the coarse, scratchy, gray carpet, and her white body shone through her long nightshirt. Her face was buried in the nook over his shoulder. How long, how long it’s been … I can’t remember when. “Are you crying?” “Me? No. That’s water on your robe. Where is that from?” The cold sea heaved nearby, unseen, but in rhythm with their movements.
11
The tourists approached him one by one to say goodbye. The guide responded and smiled at each of them. They arrived in St. Petersburg right on time, at 4:30 a.m., despite the hour-and-a-half delay after the ferry. Pale and exhausted after the night’s trip, they gathered their belongings and slowly disappeared into the darkness, the swampy yellow light of streetlamps, amidst the taxi drivers swarming around. Others crossed the street to the Moskovsky train station. He saw how they made their way there one after the other the same as they had done while abroad. It was habitual. It would pass. “Goodbye,” Mila approached him and said. “Thank you.” “Good luck,” Savva shook his hand. “It was a great trip. It was everything we wanted.” Fine, empty words. A complete formality. The guide smiled, said thank you and thought, Naturally, it was all arranged just for you. Precisely what I thought, Savva answered with his eyes alone.
It will have been a long goodbye by the time my break-up with Russia fully comes to pass. But the process has been in motion some time now, and one of the major signposts of that enormous change in my life is printed below. The death of Mikhail Ugarov on April 1, 2018, was a door-slammer for me and for Russian theater and culture. And if the door, having been slammed, was still chaotically banging back and forth a bit, the death just six weeks later of Ugarov’s wife and Teatr.doc co-founder Yelena Gremina pretty much hammered the door to the frame for good. Another time will come for stepping back to take serious stock of what Ugarov and Gremina accomplished. The Calvert Journal, who commissioned the piece that follows, made a natural choice in writing their headline, echoing words in my piece and calling Ugarov the “father” of Russia’s radical new drama movement. That surely was on everyone’s lips and mind at the time. I do believe that if Misha was the father, then Lena was not only the mother, but the godmother of the movement. And we need to be careful about lumping all praise and credit in one place when there were many individuals who shared it. That said, I stand behind everything I wrote below, still existing in a state of unbelieving shock over the death of a man, in whose orbit I had spent most of my life in Russia. Today marks the third anniversary of Misha’s death. The changes that have happened in Russian culture, art, theater, life, drama, politics and society are so enormous that it seems like 30 years have passed since we received the horrible news. Here are some words written when it was all still quite fresh.
“A revolutionary road: remembering Mikhail Ugarov, the father of Russia’s radical new drama movement” The Calvert Journal 7 April 2018 John Freedman
Theatre director, writer and teacher Mikhail Ugarov, who died in Moscow this week, set up and led the revolutionary Teatr.doc, wrote beautiful plays, inspired hundreds of young artists and changed the fabric of Russian theatre. Critic and writer John Freedman, who knew Ugarov for over 20 years, reflects on his life and legacy
This Thursday was a day of deep contemplation for anyone involved in Russian theatre. We lay playwright, director and teacher Mikhail Ugarov to rest. Misha, who died of heart problems four days earlier, was 62, a too-young escapee from the increasingly harsh realities of life in Russia.
Along with hundreds of friends and colleagues, my wife and I went from the morning church service to the civil service, burial at Troekurovsky Cemetery and a memorial dinner at Teatr.doc, the tiny but internationally-renowned theatre founded by Ugarov and his wife Yelena Gremina. In all, it was 12 hours of standing, weeping, laughing, waiting and thinking. Increasingly, my thoughts took me back 17 years to a brief, seemingly chance conversation I have never forgotten.
It was mid-December 2001, and a press conference announcing the coming year’s Golden Mask award nominees had just ended at the Marriott Hotel in the centre of Moscow. I stuffed my things in my briefcase and prepared to leave. Then I saw two figures walking toward me. There was nothing surprising in that, they were two longtime friends, the wife and husband playwright team of Gremina and Ugarov. Why wouldn’t they come say hello? But there was something different this time, and I recognised it immediately. They were coming at me with purpose. Misha especially.
Misha immediately launched into a spiel that felt prepared. Actors on Russian stages cannot speak in real Russian because playwrights invariably employ an artificial language that has long not existed in daily life, he told me. It’s all literature and lace, not natural speech. If theatre and drama are going to continue to have meaning, we must get rid of the perfume in our plays. Our goal, Ugarov continued as Gremina stood beside him, was to bring real, contemporary, spoken Russian to the stage.
The conversation struck me as incredibly strange. It was prefaced with barely a cursory “Hello,” and Ugarov rattled off his thoughts as though running through the outline of a speech in his head. I was fascinated and got his point. But this isn’t the way casual conversations happen. It felt much bigger than that.
The “A-ha!” moment was not long in coming. In February 2002, a small group of writers led by Gremina and Ugarov, joined by Olga Mikhailova and Maksym Kurochkin, announced the opening of a new theatre. It had the somewhat jarring, even confusing, name of Teatr.doc. How do you actually say this when speaking? Teatr-tochka-doc (theater-dot-doc in English), or just Teatr-doc (theater-doc)? People fumbled with it for a while, but before long it was just Doc. That was more than enough to identify the phenomenon. And what a phenomenon it became.
Someday, Ugarov’s biography will be written. He packed an enormous number of accomplishments into his life and many of them changed Russian culture forever. The founding of Teatr.doc was, of course, the most famous. But he was also a teacher, director and playwright. His dozen or so plays are among the most beautiful to be written in Russian in recent decades. Several of his productions as a director were landmarks of their time — the first being Oblom-Off, an adaptation of Ivan Goncharov’s great 19th-century novel Oblomov, which premiered in 2000.
His impact as a teacher of writing, acting, directing and film-making was also enormous, and many of his students are making significant impacts in their chosen fields. The depth of feeling he inspired in people was revealed earlier this week when an appeal from Teatr.doc for funds for his funeral raised almost a million rubles in under 24 hours. Whether Ugarov liked it or not, he is recognised as the father of a new drama movement, a far-reaching trend with the declared purpose of nothing less than the reformation of Russian theatre. As a leader, with Gremina, of the increasingly important Lyubimovka Young Russian Playwrights Festival, he helped give birth to hundreds of new writers.
But it will be up to Ugarov’s biographer to tell those stories. I want to look more closely at Teatr.doc, which I saw spring from Ugarov’s head as an almost fully formed idea one winter’s day.
Teatr.doc was not the first playwrights theatre in Russia. It was preceded by an influential little place called the Playwright and Director Centre. But Doc was different right from the beginning. Its name telegraphed its purpose — it intended to focus on documentary work as the basis for a new kind of theatre. This also meant that the theatre’s work would be socially-oriented. In time it would become political, which, of course, would bring problems with the Russian authorities.
Ugarov and Gremina sent young writers out into the field, rather like the Narodniki, the Russian populists, did in the late 19th century. Suddenly, in a major city dominated for decades by Chekhov, Ostrovsky and Shakespeare, a whole array of plays about miners, mothers in prison, factory workers, homeless people, and alienated teenagers began to appear. Traditionalists were horrified. Miners and prisoners don’t speak a gentile form of Russian, and many believed that only gentile Russian should be spoken on stage.
Moreover, Ugarov and his compatriots at Doc sought to introduce a whole new manner of acting. The theatre took as its slogan, “the theatre where no one performs,” or, “the theatre where no one acts.” Doc, fuelled by Ugarov’s vision, believed in documentary veracity, both in language and in stage presence. While this brash attitude infuriated the more conservative members of the Russian theatre community, it attracted young people in droves. It also had an effect on Russia’s established theatres. We began seeing “documentary” plays staged in places that previously would never have done anything of the sort.
Teatr.doc was located in a small basement near Pushkin Square and, at first, the stated capacity was just 50. That became 70, then whatever number could be squeezed in. I once witnessed a reading of a new play attended by 138 people, plus three more peering in through a window from outside. Spectators — young and old — came to Doc because, regardless of the specific success or failure of any given production, one could always expect an honest, unvarnished look at the world. Doc was a breath of fresh air. It was a place where sincerity reigned.
The socially-oriented productions of the early years morphed into openly political productions as the Putin era advanced. One of Doc’s most famous productions, One Hour, Eighteen Minutes, took on the murder in prison of the muckraking attorney Sergei Magnitsky. It was written by Gremina and staged by Ugarov in 2010, just six months after Magnitsky’s death. By now, Doc was an international phenomenon. Theatre pilgrims from all over the world came to touch the walls, join the crowds, see the productions, and to meet Ugarov and Gremina. The pair were invited to share their work and ideas at festivals, seminars and symposiums all over the world. They were championed not only as innovators, but as important political activists.
All of this, ultimately, could not fail to attract the attention of the authorities. The Moscow city government drove Doc out of their famed basement space near Pushkin Square in late 2014. Doc defiantly reopened six weeks later in another space. Five months later, in the summer of 2015, on the basis of a production about the protestors jailed after demonstrations on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Sqaure that turned violent on May 6, 2012, the authorities drove them out of their second home. This time, Gremina and Ugarov reopened Teatr.doc just one week later.
At Ugarov’s funeral, different thoughts were shared about Doc’s future. They ran from one extreme to another: “Doc is dead without Ugarov,” and “Ugarov’s legacy must be continued.” Time will tell what the history of Teatr.doc will be after the death of Ugarov. But the history of Ugarov and Doc from 2002 to 2018 is already written. It changed Russian theatre.
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