Alexander Gershkovich (+Herbert Marshall) on Nikolai Erdman

I hadn’t seen this text in ages. It was jotted down – horrors! – 31 years ago. Its origin is this: Herbert Marshall, the American theater historian who knew Vsevolod Meyerhold, came to Harvard to give a one-off lecture. Alexander Gershkovich, who wrote a couple of books about the Taganka Theater and a book about Bulgarian theater, was there in the audience. Did I know Gershkovich already at this time? I’m not sure. Judging by the date, I doubt it. This was two years before his book on the Taganka came out in English (The Theater of Yuri Lyubimov), for which, at his request, I wrote the foreword. The way I remember Gershkovich finding me is that I published a book review of his Taganka book in Russian in a professional journal and he reached out to me after seeing that. But that doesn’t quite fit with the date here – because that review ran in Slavic Review No. 3/4 (1987), i.e., he couldn’t have seen it yet when I talked to him at Harvard. Did I then first cross paths with him at this lecture? Kinda looks like it. Most likely is that he gave me a copy of his Russian Taganka book at that meeting and I wrote about it shortly thereafter. Whatever the case, I now reread his comments about Erdman with interest. I’ve never used any of these quotes directly in my work, but his memories of Erdman’s importance at the Taganka corroborate what I’ve heard from many sources, even if, perhaps, a comment like “Erdman controlled Lyubimov” (“Erdman rukovodil Liubimovym“) is a clear exaggeration, the kind one is inclined to make in loose conversation to make a point. Tacked on at the bottom is a note from my conversation with Marshall, not of any importance, but there for the record. The portrait of Erdman above, from New Spectator (Novy zritel’) magazine, 1927, is a curious little thing. It is labeled “our playwrights,” at that time meaning “one of the communist playwrights, one of ‘ours’ in the battle with those nasty ‘other’ playwrights. Of course, Erdman was never an insider among any such group. Proof of that is in the photo itself – look at that bow tie! This is a dandy. This ain’t no “proletarian” writer! In fact, the axe was just about to come down on Erdman. He would start sharing early drafts of The Suicide in the next few months and all hell broke loose. 

Excerpted comments from a chat with Aleksandr Abramovich Gershkovich prior to lecture by Herbert Marshall at the Carpenter Center, Harvard University.  2.26.87

Erdman was a person who attracted artistic and talented people to him.  He served as a sort of magnet around which they gathered.

He was a key ingredient of the Taganka Theater.  In fact, were it not for Erdman, the Taganka probably would never have happened.  He was a driving force behind what went on at the Taganka.  (“Erdman rukovodil Liubimovym.”)

Erdman acted not only as a benefactor and teacher for Liubimov, but for Vysotsky as well. Erdman was a sort of father figure, protector, encourager to both.

Erdman was a living link to the ’20s and ’30s not only physically, but intellectually and spiritually as well.  We knew him as a dark (temnyi) leftover from the 20s.  He was one of those without which Russian theater and culture could not have survived.  There were many who recognized that Russian theater and art could not survive without a “conventional” (uslovnyi) wing.  The roots of this — from Meyerhold — were buried deeply in a few men, Erdman was one of the most important.  Stanislavsky, of course, was an important branch, but he was only one.  Russian culture needs an avant-garde.  It is an integral part of the very concept of Russian art and culture.  Another was Leonid Varpakhovsky whose daughter lives here in Boston.  

Erdman was highly respected by everyone who knew him or knew of him.  Of course he was not one of the visible figures whose pronouncements get repeated over and over publicly.  He was known basically only to a small circle of important, influential, and talented people.  But his influence proved to be far greater and far more important than almost any “popular” figure could have had.  

I did not know him, per sé, but I used to see him around quite frequently.  I would see him in and out of the Taganka, and I attended lectures and talks which he gave.  

Erdman was never destroyed, but rather was squeezed (ego smyali).

—————

Chat with Herbert Marshall:  I should have known Erdman, since we were both moving in the same circles for several decades, but I didn’t.  I did see a performance of The Warrant at Meyerhold’s theater.  I saw every play done there from 1930 onward, when I arrived in Russia.  All I recall of it is in my book A Pictorial History of Russian Theater.

Yury Lyubimov, 1917-2014

By the time American Theater magazine asked me to write about Yury Lyubimov following his death, I had written so much I was going to have trouble pulling anything new out of the hat. So I resorted to something I did only rarely – I cobbled together a new piece out of two others I had written for The Moscow Times and NITEnews, adding in a few new things as the opportunities arose. The photo above ran with the piece in AT. The original web publication can be accessed here. 

American Theater magazine
Fall 2014
By John Freedman

Yury Lyubimov, Russian director of 117 productions, the founder of the world-renowned Taganka Theater, died in his sleep October 5, 2014, in Moscow. 

Lyubimov was born September 30, 1917, a week before the Russian Revolution began. He died five days after his 97th birthday. Early on he was a successful actor, playing key leads at the Vakhtangov Theater, including Cyrano, Romeo, Treplev and Mozart (Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri). But he took his first steps toward greatness in 1964, when, at age 46, he was named artistic director of the moribund Theater of Comedy and Drama on Taganka Square. He reinvented it as the Taganka Theater, bringing along a whole course of young actors who had studied under him at the Vakhtangov Theater’s Shchukin Institute. 

Two hands won’t count Lyubimov’s productions that changed Russian theater history. An abbreviated list surely begins with the first, Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan (1964) and might continue with John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1965), Listen! (1967) after the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1971), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1976), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1979), Yury Trifonov’s The House on the Embankment (1980), and Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (1982, revived in 1988).

Lyubimov’s team gained legendary status almost immediately. His lead actor Vladimir Vysotsky, was not only a performer of great power, he was a great singer and songwriter whose songs Lyubimov incorporated into his work. Other Taganka actors gaining national fame were Alla Demidova, Zinaida Slavina, Veniamin Smekhov, Felix Antipov, Alexander Trofimov and Valery Zolotukhin. Lyubimov’s designer David Borovsky (1934-2006) was one of the greatest of the age. Borovsky created the famous ragged curtain that swept across the stage in Hamlet, a metaphor for history sweeping people away. 

Lyubimov’s productions spoke truths that spellbound audiences could not hear publicly anywhere else. Influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s theatricality and radical politics, Lyubimov transformed the Taganka into what many called the “conscience of the Soviet Union.” Arthur Miller said the Taganka “renewed his faith” in theater.

Taganka actors stepped to the edge of the stage, looked spectators in the eyes, and pronounced their lines in a personal, though declarative way. This gave otherwise innocuous phrases the power of sedition. It shattered the “fourth wall” and encouraged audiences to become accomplices in the sometimes risky business of Lyubimov’s shows.

The brash style and challenging content of Lyubimov’s productions caused frequent problems with Soviet authorities. Alive (1968) and Vladimir Vysotsky (1981) were banned. Several shows were subjected to withering criticism before opening. Eventually, the authorities tired of Lyubimov’s fierce independence. Following his production of Crime and Punishment at London’s Lyric Hammersmith in 1983, one Soviet official famously said Lyubimov had “committed his crime” and it was now time to come home “for his punishment.” 

With the death of Soviet General Secretary of the Communist Party Yury Andropov in February 1984, Lyubimov lost a closet defender. Andropov, head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, had maintained a long acquaintanceship with the director. Within a month of Andropov’s death Lyubimov was fired from the Taganka and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. 

For four years Lyubimov worked all over the world, frequently staging operas in Italy – he staged four at La Scala – but also working in Paris, London, Stuttgart, Vienna and, in the United States, in Washington, D.C. at Arena Stage (Crime and Punishment), and in Chicago at Lyric Opera (Lulu). Both U.S. shows, mounted in 1987, were critical and commercial hits. 

Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika policy, Lyubimov returned to Moscow in the 1988/1989 season. Over the next two decades he staged 30 productions at the Taganka alone. Some critics suggested he had lost something since the great early decades. Others, perhaps more insightfully, saw him spiritually grow younger and more ironic in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1997), Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (2000), and Alexander Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (2007). Still, the period following Lyubimov’s return was marked by almost constant strife among the company. In 1993 the Taganka split in two, the breakaway venue calling itself the Commonwealth of Taganka Actors. A rancorous conflict between Lyubimov and his actors in 2011 caused the director to leave the Taganka and never return. 

Yury Lyubimov was a man of contrasts, great instincts, tremendous insight and prodigious talent. He was a walking theater in and of himself. He turned the simplest of human exchanges into theatrical performances. He loved a controversy; he never feared a scandal. To him it was all theater, something to be played, something to be given form and enhanced meaning. 

Memorial services were held October 8 at the Vakhtangov Theater, where Lyubimov staged his first production in 1959, Alexander Galich’s Does a Man Need Much, and his last dramatic production, Dostoevsky’s The Devils, in 2012.

Yury Lyubimov, for whom History was a Home (2014)

Wrote this for the defunct NITEnews site the day that Yury Lyubimov died. I was a never a friend of Lyubimov’s, but our paths crossed time and time again for nearly 30 years. We had numerous intimate talks, none as long and intimate as our first, when I interviewed him on two topics – his relationship with Nikolai Erdman, and what caused the cancellation of his production of The Master and Margarita at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA, in the late 1980s. He was as expansive and generous on the former topic as he was furious about the second. A huge barn door of Russian culture slammed shut when this man left us. 

NITEnews
October 5, 2014
by John Freedman

The death of Yury Lyubimov in Moscow on Sunday morning, October 5, 2014, at the age of 97, puts “paid” to an enormous number of accounts in Russian theater history. Forget “theater” history – in Russian history, plain and simple.

For a man who didn’t really begin his life as a director until he was 46, he had an astonishingly fruitful career. Between 1964, when he founded what would become the world-famous Taganka Theater with Bertolt Brecht’s “The Good Person of Setzuan,” until 2013, when he staged Alexander Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor” at the Bolshoi Theater, Lyubimov directed 117 shows. Add one more for his first show, staged at the Vakhtangov Theater in 1959, Alexander Galich’s “Does a Man Need Much?”

Lyubimov was a horn of plenty, overflowing with energy, work, controversy, opinion, intrigue and accomplishments for the better part of a century. We will be making sense of everything he touched, created and influenced for years and decades to come.

Lyubimov was a master director. As I wrote earlier today in a piece for The Moscow Times, two hands aren’t enough on which to count the Lyubimov productions that changed Russian theater history. An abbreviated list begins with “The Good Person of Setzuan” and continues with John Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World” (1965), “Listen!” (1967) after the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (1971), Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” (1976), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” (1979), Yury Trifonov’s “The House on the Embankment” (1980), and Alexander Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov” (1982, revived in 1988).

When Lyubimov was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1984, he gained world renown in ways theater directors rarely do. That notoriety was backed by quality work. The Taganka prompted Arthur Miller to say that his faith in theater had been renewed. Even before the enforced break with the Taganka and Russia, Lyubimov staged hugely successful operas at numerous opera houses in Italy, not the least of which was La Scala in Milan. Newspapers the world over responded when Lyubimov returned to Moscow and the Taganka in 1989.

The facts; you can stack them until you’re blue in the face, and you still won’t come close to putting in everything that needs to be there. And what I want to do is to come up with a personal picture of a man that history fated me to live alongside for over a quarter of a century. I’m not after something sentimental with lots of pastels. I want something real that does not avoid the darkness that was an element of every production Lyubimov ever created.

I first met Lyubimov at a touchy moment. It was the spring of 1987 and he was in Cambridge to restage his famous Bulgakov dramatization, “The Master and Margarita” at the American Repertory Theater. I was, at the time, a grad student at Harvard in the Slavic Department, preparing to write a dissertation about the playwright, Nikolai Erdman. Knowing Lyubimov and Erdman had been close for decades, I arranged, through exiled Soviet novelist Vasily Aksyonov, to meet with Lyubimov to talk about his friend.

What I didn’t know beyond a few vague rumblings is that something had gone haywire at ART. Lyubimov was furious with the theater and Robert Brustein was livid with Lyubimov. I showed up on the doorstep of Lyubimov’s rented apartment in Cambridge just as that meltdown, not quite yet public, was peaking.

Lyubimov, who did not speak English, felt isolated in Cambridge. He had no one to talk to, no press to perform for. And, by now, he had become a past master at playing controversy into extra-curricular theatrics. His battles with the Soviet authorities over two decades, and his handling of the press in 1984 when he was stripped of his citizenship in London, had honed his talent and his appetite for verbal gymnastics.

In short, I walked into a hornet’s nest. Lyubimov began our chat by unloading a barrage at Brustein and the ART. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing at first, but it didn’t take long for me to put two and two together. “The Master and Margarita,” which I was dying to see as a subscriber to the ART, was not going to happen. And Lyubimov wanted to talk about it. I was too dumbfounded and too fascinated to remind my host that I was there to talk about Nikolai Erdman.

Now it is crucial to this story to point out that Lyubimov and his young Hungarian wife Katalin were as gracious as they could be. I was received in their home with tremendous warmth and kindness. Lyubimov made sure Katalin had a cup of tea and a plate of cookies in front of me almost before I sat down. Lyubimov’s extraordinarily charming, even impish, smile, something that remained with him to the end of his life, shined on me like a sun. I could not pull my eyes off the spectacle of his graceful, gentle hands, which I would see him employ many years later with devastating success when he came out of retirement as an actor and played Joseph Stalin in his own production of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gang of Swindlers” at the Taganka in 1998.

I had not yet warmed my seat and I felt as though I had been accepted as an honored guest, if not a family member, into the Lyubimov household. Katalin went off to walk with their toddler son, and I settled in, happily anticipating a wonderful chat about Nikolai Erdman. Then it began – the harrowing story of the break with the ART.

These details are necessary to make the following point: I was initiated into the extremes of the extraordinary world of Yury Lyubimov in a matter of minutes. From kindness to killer instinct in 30 seconds flat. This was an education with a capital E. It’s the kind that comes only when you don’t expect it and you don’t yet know what to do with it. It was my first encounter with an individual who comfortably lived a life that was bigger than life. This was a man for whom history was home. And he was entirely at ease there.

Fate, once again doing what it does, put me in Moscow when Lyubimov returned to the Taganka Theater during the 1988/89 season. Thus I had the opportunity to continue observing him at relatively short distance. I sat in on rehearsals when he restaged his majestic production of “Boris Godunov.” I sat in on a table reading of Erdman’s “The Suicide” in the upstairs foyer of the Taganka. This would have been sometime in 1990. It was only nominally a rehearsal, for Lyubimov, who always loved an audience, used it as an opportunity to pontificate on his life, Erdman’s life, Soviet history, the story of the Taganka, his young son’s funny habits, the crimes of the Communist Party, and his own personal beef with certain actors.

He could be quite insulting to actors. I know many of his actors, past and present, who will never forgive him for his harsh tongue. The final conflict between Lyubimov and his troupe in 2011, which ended with the director walking out of the theater he created, was one I had seen coming for twenty years.

I was there to watch the second honeymoon between Lyubimov and his company shatter like glass in 1992. Actors were furious with what they perceived to be their director’s imperious behavior. I interviewed Lyubimov again as, in 1993, he fought his former lead actor Nikolai Gubenko in the continuation of the civil war that finally broke the Taganka into two separate entities. I remember the accusations that Lyubimov had abandoned his theater again in the mid-1990s, while he mounted a whole series of shows in Germany, Greece and Finland.

I occasionally attended the seemingly unending stream of press conferences that Lyubimov would call in order to make his position known on these and other pressing issues facing the Taganka.

Perhaps more than anything of this sort, I recall attending an anniversary celebration at the Taganka. I believe it was the 40th in 2004. Throughout the evening foreign guests and dignitaries came on stage, gave speeches and delivered gifts and bouquets. It was as though the actors of the Taganka itself – and there were still plenty there who had been with Lyubimov in the 1960s or the 1970s – did not exist. As the celebration reached its culmination Alla Demidova, one of Lyubimov’s leading actresses from 1964 through the early 1990s, took up a modest position at the corner of the stage, virtually unnoticed by anyone, Lyubimov included. Just then someone told Lyubimov that an actress he worked once with in Greece was in the hall. Making much of the news he called the actress on stage, embraced her, forced flowers into her hands, and praised her highly, then pushed her forward to receive the thunderous applause from the packed house.

Demidova, an icon of her era, stood 15 feet away with a carefully controlled, expressionless look on her face. She did not make a move, remaining on stage until everyone left together.

Now, let me point out the following for those who may misunderstand me. I am not casting stones. I am attempting to paint, if not a portrait, then at least a sketch of a complex man who was a great artist. Lyubimov possessed all the human virtues and vices in exaggerated form and amounts. He could spend the last 34 years of his life restating the love and respect he held for his great actor, his great Hamlet, Vladimir Vysotsky. And he could publicly ignore Hamlet’s Gertrude, standing just steps away.

But you’ll remember what I said earlier about epiphanies and educating moments. Demidova, when Lyubimov died on Sunday, provided another of those. Writing on the blog page of the popular Moscow radio station Echo Moskvy, she offered up a few brief sentences steeped with nothing but love, respect and understanding.

“When a genius passes,” Demidova wrote, “it is a great loss for an entire era, not only for family and for those who worked with him. The Taganka, Lyubimov – this page will be studied, dissertations will be written, books will be written, because in the 1960s he turned theater in a completely new theatrical direction. It was a time of dead, academic form. All theaters looked alike. And suddenly there was this festive explosion at the Taganka. There was always something new. There are directors who find themselves. And then they take this discovery, this directorial gesture, and they use it their entire life. Although you can always recognize Lyubimov by any mise en scene in a show, every time was always a discovery. Because for him time was always what was important, and time changes every day. […] The Taganka is now being renovated. I would now name the Taganka not the Taganka, but the Yury Lyubimov Theater. He deserves that.”

Sometimes before premieres at the Taganka I would join a few other invited guests for tea and cookies with Lyubimov in his office. It always reminded me of our very first meeting. Lyubimov would hold court, as he did with me that day in 1987, reviling the gathered masses with barbed stories and great memories.

From the office upstairs we would go down to the foyer where Lyubimov, bestowing his radiant smile on everyone in attendance, welcomed all to his theater as they showered his appearance and his final introductory words with ovations. The doors to the auditorium would swing open, we would fill the hall to the brim, and Lyubimov would take his traditional seat at a desk with a green lamp, a script, and a weak flashlight that he would shake at the actors when he felt the tempo of their performance was flagging.

Yury Lyubimov was so much more than anything I can tell. His world was so big you could only see small parts of it at any one time. This is a man who was born a week before the Russian Revolution took place. He shook Meyerhold’s hand when he was a student at the Shchukin Institute. He claimed he once nearly killed Boris Pasternak, when a piece of the dagger, with which Lyubimov-Romeo killed Tybalt, flew into the hall at the Vakhtangov Theater and embedded itself in the chair by Pasternak’s shoulder. This is a man who stood up to the KGB and the Communist Party when they attacked his art at the Taganka. But he was also a man who maintained a relationship with Yury Andropov, the head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, and the General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1982 to 1984.

Lyubimov was a man of great contrasts, great instincts, tremendous insight and prodigious talent. He lived for theater. He was a walking theater in and of himself. He turned even the simplest of human exchanges into theatrical performances. He loved a controversy, he never feared a scandal. If it cost him a friend or two along the way, so be it. To him it was all theater. It was something to be played, something to be given form and enhanced meaning.

Yury Lyubimov had a way of imparting great meaning to everything he said or did. He knew better than anyone how hard it is to make good – no, great – theater. The kind of theater that rewrites history. As Alla Demidova suggested, the history books will have plenty to say about Lyubimov’s art. They will debate it, interpret it, misinterpret it, and came back around to it for another look another time. That process begins today.

What ends today for me is that period in my life when I, an interested, a fascinated, observer, cease to walk alongside Yury Lyubimov. It was a dumb stroke of fate that occasionally put me in that position. And to that dumb stroke of fate I feel a deep, agitating sense of gratitude.

I learned some valuable lessons from Lyubimov. I learned that an artist is a world unto him or herself, and that you judge them only on their own terms. I learned that theater and fairness have nothing to do with one another. I learned that talk and deed may wound, but art can heal. I learned that beauty is enhanced by clumsiness and flaws.

Yury Lyubimov is gone. Pardon the cliche after all these words, but an era has ended. It’s no less true because people are saying that all over the world today.

P.S. As briefly as possible, one lesson I obviously didn’t learn well enough.

That day in 1987 Lyubimov was so kind and so welcoming that it never occurred to me I might be an imposition. Finally, after more than two hours had passed, he stopped and in his gentle voice said, “Oh, we talk so much. We talk and talk and talk.” There suddenly was a personal sadness and a weight in his words. I was suddenly no longer a welcome guest, I was an intruder. But Lyubimov informed me of that in such a subtle way I didn’t realize it until much later. That is, I did get up almost immediately. I turned off my tape recorder, thanked him for the talk and the tea, and I went home right then. But I did not know why I was doing it. I simply did it instinctively, as an actor might responding to direction from a master director.

Every time I ever spoke to Lyubimov after that I tried to say as little as possible. I’ve used too many words here. But I hope some have meaning. Today, after all, is special. Yury Lyubimov left us today. May he rest in peace. We’ll never again know his likes.

Unpublished Nikolai Erdman for MERSH

This piece on Nikolai Erdman never appeared in Modern Encyclopedia for Russian and Soviet History. My editor commissioned it from me and I happily wrote it. But just before I was about to send it to him, he wrote me again to say he’d made a terrible blunder – he had mistakenly commissioned two articles on Erdman. The other author was a grad student writing one of her first, if not her very first, professional article. He hated to tell her he couldn’t publish her even though my commission had come first, and he asked if I would mind withdrawing my piece in her favor. It might be an exaggeration to say I didn’t mind, because I minded. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to cross the path of a young scholar taking her first steps in publishing. So I said, No problem, let her piece run. I will say this, however, I never wrote for MERSH again. The caricature above is from around 1922/23 and was done by Nikolai’s brother Boris. The manuscript below is from the first page of two extant versions of Nikolai’s last, unfinished, play The Hypnotist. It’s a good example of Erdman’s calligraphic handwriting. The play was abandoned around 1940 or 1941. I’m guessing that the manuscript was done a little before that, but that’s just conjecture. 

An unpublished text written for Modern Encyclopedia for Russian and Soviet History
By John Freedman

ERDMAN, NIKOLAI ROBERTOVICH (1900-1970). Playwright and screenwriter, a seminal figure in the comic tradition in Russian and Soviet theater and cinema. 

Erdman was the second of two sons born in Moscow to a Russian mother and a father of Germanic lineage from the Latvian city of Mitava. His father Robert Karlovich Erdman (1860-1950), a factory bookkeeper, spoke Russian fluently but with a thick German accent, likely attuning his son’s ear to the nuances of language. Erdman began writing poetry at age thirteen and through his brother Boris Erdman (1899-1960), who would become a distinguished stage designer, entered the literary and theatrical world in 1918. See also Erdman, Boris Robertovich, SMERSH, Vol. 8. Following service in the Red Army in 1919-1920, Erdman joined the Imagist group of poets, fronted by Sergei Aleksandrovich Yesenin (1895-1925), publishing poetry in their publications and taking part in their public appearances. In 1922 he debuted as the author of topical comic sketches, parodies, satires and librettos, writing scripts for over two dozen shows at various Moscow clubs and small theaters. Most noteworthy were his comic interludes for Dmitry Lensky’s nineteenth-century backstage vaudeville Lev Gurych Sinichkin (1924) at the Vakhtangov Theater and the scenes he contributed to the committee-written Moscow from a Point of View (Moskva s tochki zreniia) which inaugurated the Satire Theater in 1924. 

These witty works caught the eye of Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold (1874-1940), who commissioned a full-length work from Erdman. This play, The Warrant (Mandat), premiered at the Meyerhold Theater on 20 April 1925 and was a turning point for Soviet drama. The Warrant was acknowledged as the first play of the new era to deal with recognizably contemporary characters and problems and Erdman was hailed as a spiritual descendant of the great satirists Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852) and Aleksandr Vasilievich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903). His characterizations and settings owed a debt to the comedies of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovsky (1823-1886). Others found intriguing, though less obvious, echoes of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) in the lyricism of Erdman’s characters. 

The Warrant, also known as The Mandate in English, explores a constellation of people cut adrift after the Revolution: the Guliachkins, an impoverished merchant family; and the aristocratic Smetaniches. The former seek to shore up their finances by establishing a liaison-by-marriage, while the latter see a marriage match with commoners as the means to placating the communist authorities. Centered on Pavel Guliachkin, who backs his claim of being a communist commissar by writing out a nonsensical warrant that he, in fact, lives where he lives, the story is structured around mistaken identities, witting and unwitting impostors, three weddings arranged among three people in the course of two days, some harmless political subterfuge and much slapstick humor. Erdman’s innovative, poetic use of language was characterized by intricate sound play, repetition, rhyme, and puns in which multiple punch lines rolled off one another like strings of firecrackers. In the Russian tradition of so-called serious comedy or laughter through tears, The Warrant revealed Erdman’s preoccupation with themes of consequence: the individual’s tragic vulnerability in a social context; the corrupting nature of power; the delusive nature of mass culture; the hidden dangers of language itself, which provide ample opportunities for frauds to subvert the meanings of words. 

Erdman’s next play, The Suicide (Samoubiitsa), was one of the great accomplishments of Russian and Soviet comedy. It signified the end of one socio-political era–the relatively free period of the New Economic Policy, or NEP, 1921-1928–and the beginning of another–the consolidation of power by Stalin and other hard-line Communists that occurred approximately from 1928 to 1934. The first draft of The Suicide, a tragi-farce about the simple Semen Podsekalnikov, who is nearly pushed to suicide by a horde of unscrupulous people seeking to exploit his despair for their own purposes, was completed in 1928. For four years Meyerhold and Konstantin Alekseevich Stanislavsky (1863-1938) struggled against the Party faithful to produce the play at their theaters. This conflict attracted unprecedented public debate for a work that was neither published nor produced. Direct appeals to Stalin by Stanislavsky and Maksim Gorky (1868-1936) were to no avail; the play was banned a third and final time in 1932. Honing the stylistic and thematic concerns of The Warrant to near-perfection, Erdman through The Suicide metaphorically isolated the paradox of the writer in Soviet times and provided a paradigm for the age: one could be destroyed or one could destroy oneself. Indeed, dozens of Soviet writers over the next decade committed suicide, were exterminated, or simply ceased writing. 

Erdman was arrested in 1933 with his co-author Vladimir Zakharovich Mass (1896-1979) while working on the screenplay of Jolly Fellows (Veselye rebiata, 1934), the first Hollywood-style Soviet musical comedy. The official reason was a series of satirical fables the duo had written, although the scandal surrounding The Suicide was also an undoubted influence. Erdman was sentenced to free exile in Siberia until 1936. After his return he and the country had changed so drastically that he never wrote another full-length play. The world of cinema, in which he had debuted in 1927, became his refuge. From 1938 until his death, he scripted over fifty feature, short, and animated films, some of which, such as Volga-Volga (1938), The Actress (Aktrisa, 1943) and Fire, Water and Brass Trumpets (Ogon, voda i mednye truby, 1968) are acknowledged classics. In 1951 he was awarded the Stalin Prize (second class) for his script for Courageous People (Smelye liudi, 1950). In 1964 Yury Petrovich Liubimov (b. 1917) enlisted Erdman as an unofficial advisor at his new Taganka Theater. Erdman helped Liubimov dramatize Mikhail Lermontov’s novella A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni, 1964) for the theater’s second production. The world premiere of The Suicide took place 28 March 1969 in Goteborg, Sweden, after it was smuggled to the West through Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring in 1968. The discovery of this lost play engendered a worldwide boom in productions of The Suicide and The Warrant which ran unabated for over a decade. The Suicide was first produced in the Soviet Union at the Satire Theater in 1982 but was banned after six performances. It reopened in 1986, one of the signs that perestroika would bring unprecedented change to the Soviet Union. 

Works: The major writings in Russian and English are published in Aleksandr Svobodin, ed. and intr., Nikolai Erdman, P’esy, intermedii, pis’ma, dokumenty, vospominaniia sovremennikov (M., 1990), Vitalii Vul’f, intr. and commentary, Nikolai Erdman, Samoubiitsa, (Ekaterinburg, 2000), which includes the plays, interludes and the complete correspondence with the actress Angelina Stepanova during Erdman’s Siberian exile, John Freedman, trans. and ed., The Major Plays of Nikolai Erdman. The Warrant and The Suicide (Amsterdam, 1995), and A Meeting about Laughter. Sketches, Interludes and Theatrical Parodies by Nikolai Erdman with Vladimir Mass and Others (Amsterdam, 1995).

References: Comprehensive studies include John Freedman, “The Dramaturgy of Nikolaj Erdman, An Artistic and Cultural Analysis” (PhD. diss., Harvard University, 1990), and Silence’s Roar. The Life and Drama of Nikolai Erdman (Oakville, Ontario, 1992), Joseph Brandesky, “Nikolai Erdman’s ‘The Mandate’ and ‘The Suicide.’ Critical Analyses” (PhD. diss., University of Kansas, 1991), Anatolii Guterts, ed., complete issue of Teatralnaia zhizn (No. 5, 1991) devoted to Erdman’s life and work, Yurii Zaiats, “Ia prishol k tiagostnomu ubezhdeniiu, chto ne nuzhen,” in Aleksandr Sherel’, et al., eds, Meierkhold’ovskii sbornik, Vypusk pervyi (M., 1992), Vol. II, 111-126, Elena Strel’tsova, “Velikoe unizhenie” in Strel’tsova, ed., Paradoks o drame (M., 1993), 307-345, Andrea Gotzes, Der Beitrag Nikolaj Ërdmans zur russishchen Komödie (Mainz, 1994), and Stanislav Rassadin, “Samoubiitsa Erdman” in Rassadin, Samoubiitsy. Povest’ o tom, kak my zhili i chto chitali (M., 2002), 11-32.

Andrei Goncharov in MERSH

This one about director Andrei Goncharov for the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History was an eye-opener. I arrived in Moscow (1988) at the end of Goncharov’s career. He was not doing his best work anymore. In fact, it was worse than that. As such, I never really understood why so many spoke with such reverence about him. I chalked it up to de gustibus non est disputandum and left it at that. But then the opportunity to write this small piece for MERSH came along and I decided to do it. And, in doing the research, I was fascinated to come to the realization that much of I knew about Goncharov from my own experience was wrong – or, at least, deeply inadequate. One thing that did remain was Goncharov’s place in the tradition of the Russian “tyrant director.” It’s a fascinating topic that says much about Russian theater and society, but doesn’t get much attention. 

Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History
By John Freedman

GONCHAROV, ANDREI ALEKSANDROVICH (1918-2001). Director whose strong hand and total commitment to his art made him one of the quintessential autocrats of Russian theater in the second half of the twentieth century. 

Goncharov was born in the village of Sinitsa in Moscow province. His father Aleksandr Ivanovich Goncharov graduated from the Moscow Conservatory after studying piano with Sergei Ivanovich Taneev (1856-1915). His mother Liudmila Rudolfovna Goncharova was an actress. Goncharov graduated from the State Institute of Theater Arts (GITIS) in 1941 and volunteered for the Red Army when World War II began. He commanded an equestrian intelligence battalion until 1942 when he was seriously wounded. He subsequently was appointed chief director of a traveling military theater that entertained troops at the front. From 1944 to 1949 he was staff director at Moscow’s Satire Theater where he mounted his first professional production, Belugin’s Wedding (Zhenitba Belugina, 1945) by Aleksander Ostrovsky and Nikolai Soloviev. From 1949 to 1954 he was staff director at the Ermolova Theater under his former teacher Andrei Mikhailovich Lobanov (1900-1959) and ran the Film Actors (Kinoaktera) Theater from 1954 to 1956. In 1959 he was hired as chief director at the small Moscow Theater of Drama (known as the Theater on Malaia Bronnaia after it moved to a new location in 1962), building it into a popular venue before leaving in 1965. He was chosen chief director at the Maiakovsky Theater in 1967 and remained there until his death, assuming the responsibilities of artistic director in 1987. Here he staged forty-one of the sixty-five productions he directed during his career. 

Goncharov staged numerous plays by the Soviet playwrights Aleksei Nikolaevich Arbuzov (1908-1986), Aleksandr Arkadievich Galich (1919-1977), Afanasy Dmitrievich Salynsky (1920-1993), Vladimir Nikolaevich Voinovich (1932- ), Eduard Stanislavovich Radzinsky (1936- ), Yuly Filippovich Edlis (1929- ) and Genrikh Averianovich Borovik (1929- ), but some of his most memorable productions were of foreign writers. His interpretations of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1959) and Friederich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1965) were among the first of these authors in the Soviet Union. He had a special affinity for Mikhail Bulgakov’s Flight (Beg), a play he staged four times – in 1967 at the Ermolova Theater, 1976 in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, 1977 in Sofia, Bulgaria, and 1978 at the Maiakovsky. He staged Sergei Naidionov’s early twentieth-century family drama Vaniushin’s Children (Deti Vaniushina) three times – in 1969 and 2000 at the Maiakovsky, and 1974 in Ljubljana. 

He reached the peak of his powers between 1970 and 1985, staging many of the most important productions in Russia. These included two productions of Tennessee Williams that were definitive for Russian theater (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1970, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1981), and two searing productions of intellectual dramas by Radzinsky (Conversations with Socrates [Besedy s Sokratom], 1975, and Theater in the Time of Nero and Seneca [Teatr vremen Nerona i Seneki], 1985). He famously softened the finale of Streetcar by having Mitch carry Blanche up the stairs rather than surrender her to the orderlies from the insane asylum. His production of The Man of La Mancha (1972) was the first full-scale musical on the Russian stage, while his handling of Maksim Gorky’s The Life of Klim Samgin (Zhizn Klima Samgina, 1981) was famous for its epic qualities and multilayered psychology. One of his greatest creations was Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Ledi Makbet mtsenskogo uezda, 1979) after the story by Nikolai Leskov. In it he revealed fully his view of the contradictory Russian personality, with its tremendous capacity for love, compassion and cruelty. Unlike directors at other popular venues of the era such as the Taganka Theater and the Sovremennik, Goncharov typically focused on the human element rather than on social pathos. He rarely clashed with the Soviet authorities, but even more rarely allowed them to exploit him.

Goncharov was renowned as an authoritarian, a dictator as a director who was more apt to berate his actors impatiently in rehearsal than to coax them on. This was due in part to his training under Lobanov, whose students numbered several domineering directors, including Georgy Aleksandrovich Tovstonogov (1913-1989) and Mark Anatolievich Zakharov (1933- ). It was also due to his own intense temperament, which freely informed his bold, colorful, rough-cut productions, that they occasionally were characterized as Rabelaisian. Thanks to his talent and impeccable craftsmanship, Goncharov paradoxically commanded respect even among those who carried a grudge against him. He collected a troupe of stars including, at various times, Evgeny Pavlovich Leonov (1926-1994), Tatiana Vasilievna Doronina (1933- ), Armen Borisovich Dzhigarkhanian (1935- ), Aleksandr Sergeevich Lazarev (1938- ), Svetlana Vladimirovna Nemoliaeva (1937- ), Natalia Georgievna Gundareva (1948-2005), and many more. In the early 1990s he encouraged the celebrated actress Olga Mikhailovna Yakovleva (1941- ) to return to work in Russia after she spent several years in self-imposed exile in France following the death of her favorite director Anatoly Vasilievich Efros (1925-1987). Goncharov supported talented young directors more readily than other acknowledged dictators among the directors, who were mindful of the competition. At one time or another in the beginning of their careers, he hired, among others, Zakharov, Kama Mironovich Ginkas (1941- ), Genrietta Naumovna Yanovskaia (1940- ), Boris Afanasievich Morozov (1944- ) and Sergei Nikolaevich Artsibashev (1951- ), who succeeded him as artistic director at the Maiakovsky Theater when he died. He taught at GITIS from 1945 until 2001 and counted among his graduates two of Europe’s best directors at the end of the 20th century, Petr Naumovich Fomenko (1932- ) and the Lithuanian Eimuntas Nekrosius (1952- ). 

Works: Poiski vyrazitel’nosti v spektakle (M., 1959), Rezhisserskie tetradi (M., 1980), and Moi teatral’nye pristrastiia, 2 vols. (M., 1998).

References: Viktor Dubrovskii and Tamara Braslavskaia, comps., Ves’ teatr za 75 let (M. 1999), an encyclopedia of actors and directors at the Maiakovsky Theater, including many who worked with Goncharov, Neistovyi Andrei Goncharov (M., 2003), a collection of reminiscences about Goncharov, Teatr im. Maiakovskogo. 80 let. Spektakli (M. 2004), an encyclopedia of productions at the Maiakovsky Theater, including most by Goncharov.

Cultural Battle Goes on, Gogol Center Under Attack (2014)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 271 (approximate). Is Russia Europe, is Russia not Europe? Are there shared values? Are there common methods of approach to culture? I was asked to participate in a EU-organized forum about these questions in July 2014, and I must say I found myself in an awkward position when my co-speaker Inna Prilezhayeva began spouting platitudes. I had to be the grump in the pack. And at the time of the forum I didn’t even know some of the latest developments that were going down. My photo above shows Inna Prilezhayeva speaking to a panel of European Union Cultural attaches in Moscow in July 2014. 

• By John Freedman
• July 06 2014 00:00

As a law took effect last week banning obscenities in works of art, and as Russian parliamentarian Yelena Mizulina — the author of the so-called anti-Magnitsky law banning adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens — pushed creating a law that would require individuals to use their passport to gain access to the Internet, we continued to see signs that the turmoil lately engulfing Russian culture and media is not about to let up.

Once again, Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky singled out a favorite punching bag for criticism — Moscow’s Gogol Center. Speaking at a session of the presidential council on cross-national relations, he ridiculed Kirill Serebrennikov’s production of Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” which begins with a comic prologue depicting drunken men attempting to get a broken wagon back on its wheels.

And for the first time in its storied 12-year history, the independent Teatr.doc, which has declared it will not obey the anti-obscenity law, has indicated that recent government policy changes could threaten the theater’s existence.

“Beginning in spring 2015 Teatr.doc will not be able to win a single grant, regardless of the quality of our projects,” wrote the theater’s managing director Yelena Gremina on a newly established Facebook page entitled Who Would Like to Help. The theater will host fundraisers to make up for the substantial loss in financing they expect to face next year. The first of these events will take place July 18, with tickets costing 1,000 to 10,000 rubles for the opportunity to hear major contemporary writers read from their latest works.

As fate would have it, I came home to learn about these latest developments after participating on Thursday in a conference hosted by the European Union Delegation to the Russian Federation. Chaired by Tomas Reyes Ortega and Soren Liborius, it devolved into a discussion about whether Russia’s current cultural politics are a hindrance to its relationship with Europe, or whether this is a time of increasing clarity in Russia’s perception of itself and, therefore, a prime time for renewed international cooperation.

Inna Prilezhayeva, project director at the Association of Culture Managers, put forth the notion that Russia today is not anti-European, that its values are compatible with those of Europe and that this is the ideal time for Russian and European collaboration.

As the second invited speaker, I found myself in the position of being a downright sourpuss. I could not help but bring up the flurry of repressive actions, measures or language used by the Russian government or its officials over the last six months in regards to artists and their work.

Aside from the anti-obscenity law, these have included numerous attacks on Gogol Center and the Taganka Theater; two issues of Kultura newspaper accusing dozens of directors and playwrights of perversion and evil intent; the banning of a showing of a documentary film about the Pussy Riot protest punk group; the banning of numerous theatrical events at the recent Moscow International Book Festival; a proposal to outlaw the “unjustifiable” use of foreign words in the media and the arts; and accusations that the Golden Mask Festival offered an “anti-government performance” during one of its evenings celebrating its 20th anniversary.

This, I said — and as I have written in these pages in the past — is too similar to dangerous and deadly periods in Russia’s past to ignore. As I spoke at the conference I still did not know about Medinsky’s comments or the fears raised by Teatr.doc.

In fact, the culture minister’s claims were more than just controversial, they were very strange. He fired his latest salvo at the Gogol Center while making his main point that, specifically, Russia’s Young Spectator Theaters should be held under greater control so as to stop them from tormenting schoolchildren with experimental interpretations of the classics.

What Medinsky either didn’t know, or didn’t care to clarify, was that the Gogol Center has nothing to do with the official chain of Theaters Yunogo Zritelya, or, Young Spectator Theaters, throughout Russia. In any case, as quoted on the “http://km.ru/” website, the minister declared that Russian classics should be presented on stage “in a technologically contemporary manner, but without essential distortions, without eccentricities in the guise of an innovative reading.”

So, while kicking the Gogol Center apparently just because it’s there, Medinsky’s declaration actually might have been an assault on Moscow’s Theater Yunogo Zritelya, where directors Genrietta Yanovskaya and Kama Ginkas have won international renown for their inventive productions of Russian classics. Or it might be a warning for other well-known Russian Young Spectator Theaters in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg or Krasnoyarsk, all of which have played an important role in developing the art of theater over the last decade or more.

In this increasingly repressive atmosphere, Teatr.doc’s moves to ensure its survival are understandable. Declaring that she is not afraid of what the future has to bring, Gremina wrote on Facebook, “but we don’t simply want to survive, we want to continue working productively. For that reason we are now thinking about the cold spring of 2015 that awaits us.”

Speaking informally after the EU-hosted conference, Helena Autio-Meloni, the cultural counsellor at the Finnish Embassy in Moscow, summed up thoughts I heard from several attendees. “These are the most difficult times I have known in 30 years of dealing with Russia,” Autio-Meloni said, “but we must not be deterred by that. There are great people here who share our values and we must do everything we can to support them.”

Moscow’s Culture Codes

Reposting of Theater Plus blogs No. 270 (approximate). As I stumbled to the end of my blogging experience at The Moscow Times (I remind you that these columns were no longer called “blogs” on the site, and the “columns” that I wrote were already numbered), I found myself swinging back and forth between hard political business and “escapist” stuff about culture in Moscow. That was the influence of a new personal blog I began writing in May 2014 and which I continue to write today. My photo above: A QR code on a fence on Tverskoi Bulvar provides access to a website full of information about the Moscow home in which Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen was born in 1825.

• By John Freedman
• June 29 2014 16:27

If you have walked anywhere in Moscow you have seen them, the blue squares with the qr codes in the middle and the white writing on them. If you have a smart phone you may have even tried accessing the information those codes provide access to.

But there is also a way to tap into at least some of that information even if you’re sitting at home in Moscow or vacationing across the seas. And there is a lot of information to be had.

I, for example, came home from a walk a few days ago and typed in the code (qr.mos.ru/100038) that I saw on a fence in front of the monument to the revolutionary writer Alexander Herzen in a courtyard on Tverskoi Bulvar. It turned out that the information was not about the monument itself, but about the two-story yellow building right next to it. Herzen was born there in the corner room on the second floor in 1825.

As the webpage on the Know Moscow site tells the story, Herzen lived here until September of the same year, “the illegitimate child of the Moscow nobleman Ivan Alexeyevich Yakovlev and Henriette Wilhelmina Luisa Haag from Stuttgart. Subsequently, as an adult, Herzen would come here to visit his cousin Alexei Alexandrovich Yakovlev.”

From there the story expands to tell of other famous people who lived or visited here, as well as of the building’s role in Russian literature. For those who didn’t know, this is the place that Mikhail Bulgakov described satirically as the writer’s club in his novel “The Master and Margarita.”

In addition to the informative text, there is a photo gallery of the building and its environs, an interactive map that allows you to pinpoint the location, and an audio feature that allows you to listen to the text about the building if you prefer that to reading. All of the texts, printed and spoken, are in Russian.

But having navigated this single page about the Herzen home, you have only scratched the surface of the website.

A bar menu along the top of the page provides several other entry points to information about Moscow’s cultural history. The choices include Homes, Routes, Museums, Territories, Personalities and Authors. The latter link provides information about some of the people who have written for the site, or who have conducted walking tours in the Routes section. They include the musician Alexei Kortnev, the film director Alexander Mitta, and the actress Yulia Rutberg.

The page devoted to the famed Taganka Theater, located in the Homes section, is especially rewarding for its small photo gallery. There is one shot of the building as it looked in 1912 when it was a movie theater, and two street snapshots taken during the height of the theater’s popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. Featuring a wooden facade and very few posters advertising shows in repertory, it looks very different from the playhouse we know today.

The richest section on the site is probably the one titled Personalities. It does not offer exhaustive information about all famous Muscovites by any stretch of the imagination, but it still is a treasure trove of information and photos. Here we can learn about the poet Marina Tsvetayeva, the architect Giacomo Quarenghi, the Nikitin brothers circus artists, the novelist Boris Pilnyak, and dozens of others.

The page devoted to writer, journalist, publisher, shoe repairman, entrepreneur, penniless wanderer, soldier and circus actor Vladimir Gilyarovsky is a great place to learn some of the basic facts about one of Moscow’s most beloved writers. Gilyarovsky is widely agreed to be the best chronicler of life in Moscow that the city has ever seen. His stories, sketches and essays, written in the late 19th century were wildly popular with the public, though not so appreciated by the authorities.

The Know Moscow site tells about an incident in 1887 when the writer’s book “Slum People” was burned publicly.

“Gilyarovsky attended the auto-da-fe of his book and was able to pull a few pages from the fire. The writer later recalled, ‘They burned my book and I lost all interest in writing belles lettres. I gave myself over entirely to journalism, rarely, however, writing poetry and stories, but never again with the same passion as before. I was famous, but I didn’t have a kopek to my name.'”

Gilyarovsky learned the hard way that Moscow does not believe in tears. Fortunately, others have made it their business to tell his and other prominent Muscovites’ tales in innovative and entertaining ways. With a smart phone, a tablet or a plain old-fashioned computer, you can have some of Moscow’s greatest stories at your fingertips.

Russia’s New Culture War (2014)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 260 (approximate). Still another piece witnessing the collapse of the Russian cultural sphere two decades into the 21st century. Below I ask, “Is this 1933 or 2014?” I wasn’t foolin’. Image above: A 1928 issue of Contemporary Theater magazine calls for cultural revolution and exhorts artists to create art that creates a good mood.

• By John Freedman
• April 13 2014 21:55

I’ve seen this before. Not in my lifetime, no. I saw it unfold before my astonished eyes in crumbling, yellowing newspaper clippings from the late 1920s and early 1930s. I saw it in stack after stack of microfiche materials. I saw it in the letters, poems, stories, plays and memoirs of those who lived through the nightmare of a culture collapsing on itself and its citizens.

Now I am seeing it again in newspapers and the internet. I am hearing it on the radio and watching it on television.

Headlines and calls to “Attack!” and “Ban!” Accusations of “Unpatriotic!” The split of artists into “Our” writers and “Not Our” writers. The vilification of anything foreign and those influenced by “decadent, evil” foreign culture.

Is this 1933 or 2014?

I experienced all this firsthand while doing research on a writer whose life and work were crushed by ideology and politics. His name was Nikolai Erdman. He wrote one of the best plays, “The Warrant,” that the renowned Vsevolod Meyerhold ever staged. That was in 1925. Around 1927 to 1928 Erdman wrote his next play, “The Suicide,” specifically for Meyerhold, but it never was staged in his lifetime. Death came to Erdman in 1970.

Erdman, Meyerhold and “The Suicide” were attacked viciously in the Soviet cultural and political press, as well as in the backrooms and corridors of power. The play was banned. Erdman was arrested and exiled. Meyerhold, a few years later, was arrested and murdered in the basement of the Lubyanka.

I studied those newspapers. I know the language that was used to do those evil deeds. I know the tack the hacks took. I know the way they went after people to destroy them and their work. It was an ugly, revolting, heinous process.

Are we on the verge of seeing it happen again? It’s getting close. The prerequisites are in place. In the last few days we have witnessed an extraordinary number of events that indicate a culture war is in full swing.

It now appears that a notorious phrase, “Russia is not Europe,” originally published in a draft for an official document to be called the Foundation of State Cultural Politics, will be dropped, according to an account published Friday on the Rbc.ru site. But merely by testing the phrase on the public, the Ministry of Culture gave a clear indication of where its sympathies do and do not lie.

According the draft, published in Izvestia, art that does not “contain spiritual and moral content, or which exerts a negative influence on society” must, at the least, not be given government support. “At the most — the state must suppress negative impact on the public consciousness,” the draft declares.

Aggressive, isolationist and repressive positions have been unleashed in all spheres of Russian society, as is witnessed by the vilification which even now continues to be heaped on popular musician Andrei Makarevich after he published an open letter opposing the annexation of Crimea in late March.

Arguably the most flagrant attack took place Thursday with the publication of the latest issue of the Kultura newspaper. In a front-page broadside this publication, positing itself as “the cultural space of Russian Eurasia,” unleashed an unprecedented attack on contemporary playwrights. Echoing the language and format used to ostracize artists in the 1920s and 1930s, it laments that state funds “were spent on sleaze, obscenities, pornography, and on worthless shamanism disguised as innovation. On everything that corrupts the viewer, drives him into depression, kills living sensations in a man, creates the image of Russia as a dull and hopeless country.”

Suggesting one must know one’s enemy, the newspaper added, “We are convinced that, despite such sickening ‘creativity,’ you should be familiar with it. Forgive us for being forced to offer you works, which are stunning in their level of blatant vulgarity and cynicism. In order to get rid of dirt, you first must assess the extent of the contamination. Read as much as you can, and draw your conclusions.” The full text may be accessed in English in a blog I published on the NiteNews theater website.

On a two-page spread the paper printed sarcastic synopses and brief excerpts from plays by two dozen writers. It assailed the use of obscenities, railed against any hints at homosexuality, disparaged anything perceived as unpatriotic “praise” of the West, and, interestingly, as happened in the 1930s, condemns formal experiments that deviate from traditional literary styles.

Lev Naumov’s play “Once Upon a Time in Manchuria” is summarized as such: “Some Russians during the Russo-Japanese War are held prisoner by the Japanese. Two leaders emerge among them — a patriot and an anti-patriot. Precisely the Russian patriot, who preaches traditional values, turns out to be capable of murder in order to survive. On the contrary, his opponent, who defends humanism and universal values, behaves with unwavering nobility.”

The description of Maksym Kurochkin’s “Mooncrazed” states that, “The dying Cyrano de Bergerac raves in delirium and communicates with a man named Chizhevsky from the far-away 21st century, who, for his part, is high on drugs. There is no plot connection [between the two]. One of Moliere’s heroes is a syphilitic, infected by a prostitute. Obscenities abound.”

Yury Klavdiyev, whose violent morality tale “The Slow Sword” leads the list of offending plays, responded with pride to being included among what he called — borrowing a phrase from the Stalin era — “enemies of the people.”

“I stand as Number One in the hit-parade of enemies of the people in the current issue of Kultura,” Klavdiyev wrote on his Facebook wall. “Some time ago I wrote my ‘The Slow Sword’ precisely to give people like Yampolskaya [the paper’s editor] butthurt. How pleasant it is when things work out.”

Another sign of the times was an article published in Novaya Gazeta on Friday, the spirit of which hearkens back to the 1960s and 1970s when theater critics avoided criticizing controversial artists so as not to play into the hands of the authorities. In it Marina Tokareva declared that, “under the banner of patriotism the authorities have passionately become one with obscurantism, savagery, a medieval mentality,” and she declares that from now on she will support work by controversial directors Kirill Serebrennikov and Konstantin Bogomolov whether she actually likes it or not.

“It is more respectful to support the persecuted than those who are hand-fed by the State,” Tokareva concluded.

Finally, for today at least, I point to an article that the respected critic Natalya Kaminskaya wrote about the unending internecine battles that have afflicted the Taganka Theater all season long. In a piece for Profil entitled “Theater in the Era of the Crimean Conquest,” she declares that, “political denunciations have become the best means for settling scores and removing competitors.”

“Just a half-year ago,” Kaminskaya opined, “you could accuse your opponent of lacking talent or, at least, of immoral behavior. But such arguments today already seem feeble. Now you have at hand a truly killer argument — the lack of patriotism.”

The Taganka Lives! (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 242. This was an extremely exciting season and the idea was sheer genius. Idiots saw to it that it failed. The story begins in my previous blog and continues here. The Moscow Culture Committee, under the direction of Sergei Kapkov and with the expert aid of Yevgenia Shermenyova, decided that the best way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Taganka Theater, was to turn over a whole season there to some of the hottest, most interesting talents in the field – directors, designers, theoreticians, etc. The group – the Taganka Jubilee Year group – began with a subtle, intelligent and controversial exhibit, about which my last blog provides information. Next came a series of shows staged by top young directors. All of them (the first one is reported below) were fascinating, each in its own way. I’m pretty sure the idea was that, if the project were successful, the Taganka might have been given over to these young talents. But the troupe at the theater, terrified and ignorant of the notion of experimentation, raised a holy ruckus. They sabotaged the exhibit, they whined and went on attack in the press and at live events, they refused to take part. Eventually, everybody just decided, “Screw You!” if you don’t to try something new. Indeed, a glitzy actress was installed as artistic director the following season and Moscow pretty much forgot the road to the Taganka. It’s a shame. A crying shame. But it is also so indicative of the way things get done, or don’t get done, here. Good ideas are bad. Brilliant ideas are horrible. It’s enough to make a person go mad. My photo above shows Ksenia Peretrukhina’s stage design for “Orchestra Rehearsal,” which used television monitors and elements from old productions at the Taganka Theater.

08 December 2013
By John Freedman

You must accept my apology in advance. I have written several blogs and articles in a row about theater scandals. Yes, the topic is getting old. But it is also heating up. I don’t invent these things, I just follow them.

So, here we go again.

The Taganka Theater just can’t do without a good scandal. It’s in its blood. Yury Lyubimov gave birth to the theater 50 years ago in scandal — firing most of the resident actors when he took it over in 1964 — and he left it in scandal in 2011 after a bitter falling-out with the members of the troupe.

Don’t misunderstand me. There has been a myriad of high-quality, history-making productions at the Taganka throughout its life. But it is also a fact: the words “scandal” and “controversy” have been used in tandem with the Taganka more than any other theater in Russia.

The latest kerfuffle took place Friday during and after the premiere of a new production called “Orchestra Rehearsal.” It was the second event in the 50th anniversary project being conducted by a group of young artists, critics and future theater managers with the aid and encouragement of the Moscow Culture Committee. The first event, a low-key exhibit in the theater’s foyer, exploded in scandal two weeks ago when angry Taganka actors demanded the “interlopers” who created the exhibit be kicked out. Heated press conferences were held, graffiti appeared on some of the exhibits and accusations of people seeking to “destroy” the Taganka and “dismantle the Russian repertory system” flew fast and heavy.

Enter a soft-spoken young director named Andrei Stadnikov. It fell to him to create the first of several full productions that will comprise a season of various events honoring the Taganka’s jubilee year. Under the circumstances, it couldn’t possibly have come off without incident. And, of course, it didn’t.

There were attempts to disrupt the performance when it was underway and a scheduled post-show discussion at times turned into a free-for-all shouting match. One furious spectator stood in the third row during the curtain calls and, pointing an accusing finger at each actor, shouted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” over the thunder of a standing ovation from, perhaps, half of the crowd.

During the discussion a teacher who identified herself as a fan of the Taganka complained that she couldn’t hear the actors and couldn’t see them because of the low light. She concluded that she will no longer recommend the Taganka to anywone and that she would return to her students the next day to declare that Russian culture, indeed, is dying.

Stadnikov planted a few little structural bombs in his otherwise low-key production. At one point the actors seemed to rebel against the show and begin arguing among themselves, demanding that the director explain what they were supposed to be doing. This gave disgruntled spectators the opportunity to join in the chorus of dissent and a few, indeed, did so. During a musical interlude where actors worked their way from chaos and cacophony to a few, gentle, dying, harmonious notes by playing on string instruments with various objects, someone in the audience shouted sarcastically “Bravo! Can you play that again?!”

During the discussion the composer Dmitry Vlasik expressed amazement at the intolerance some showed. “Even in the arch-conservative Moscow Conservatory you don’t hear outbursts like this anymore,” he said.

The fact of the matter is that Stadnikov, working with designer Ksenia Peretrukhina and choreographer Olga Tsvetkova, staged a gentle, insightful, sensitive performance that sought to take a glimpse inside a legend. The result was moving and thought-provoking, a ground’s-eye view of a cultural colossus.

Peretrukhina’s design is subtle and meaningful. She used elements from several famous old Taganka productions, spreading eleven television monitors around the stage. Most of the time they showed nothing but static, but for brief seconds images of famous Taganka actors would come into focus and then disappear into static again.

The actors for the most part performed in the hall with the spectators — until the end the stage itself was a space reserved for the past.

Much of the spoken text was drawn from interviews done with theater employees — electricians, firemen, a public relations agent, costumers and the like. These usually anonymous workers all are played by actors, but their words, we are informed in the program, remain unchanged. The first of the voices to be heard was that of a man whose mother worked at the theater well before it became known as the Taganka. The second was with a fireman on the job for just two days.

Some of those interviewed spoke with piety of Lyubimov and the Taganka. Others were more ironic or realistic in their attitudes. A couple of cleaning ladies, migrants from former Soviet republics, express little sense of the history around them but are conscientious in their attitude towards their job. An electrician claiming that Lyubimov was a great artist is reminded by a colleague that he used to ridicule the director before he resigned. The chastised worker sheepishly admits it’s true.

A turning point in the performance takes place when a woman tells how she once passed the theater on Alexander Pushkin’s birthday. She was impressed to see that the Taganka was performing Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” that day.

“I went to see ‘Eugene Onegin’ and I realized Lyubimov was a genius,” she said, adding that she then wished to work for him and “help him in his work.”

“The fact that Yury Petrovich is not here any more doesn’t matter,” she concludes, “His influence on this theater has not ended.”

Later we hear the words of a PR manager who began working at the theater as a ticket taker and then an administrator. “I don’t love people much,” she declares, “but I love this place. I believe this place will either disappear into oblivion or will have a great future. It will never be mediocre.”

The image that arises is touching and believable at the same time. The great Taganka isn’t a “great theater” every moment to those who work there. It cannot possibly be. It is the place they live the biggest part of their lives. One woman speaks fondly of the theater because it is where she met her husband. This is real-life stuff. It lends flesh and blood and a true humanity to a place that some would rather see in unmoving and unchanging bronze.

“Orchestra Rehearsal,” which only takes its name and basic idea from the Federico Fellini film, ends as five of the actors repeatedly walk up to the back wall on stage. At first it seems we are watching curtain calls from a backstage vantage point. But soon the actors are running up to the wall and slamming into it with increasing fury. It is as though they wish to break it down, or break through it. They cannot. They eventually fall in exhausted heaps. The famous back wall of the Taganka remains standing.

This latest scandal won’t be the last we see at the Taganka this season. But here’s one thing we can already say for certain: The Taganka is alive. Stadnikov’s “Orchestra Rehearsal” makes that abundantly clear.

Controversies Dog the Taganka and the Moscow Art Theater All Week Long (2013)

Reposting of Theater Plus blog No. 241. The new contentiousness and the new career maneuvering. That’s really what this old piece was about. The Bogomolov/Art Theater flap turned out to be hilarious. Bogomolov chocked up points by screaming “censorship” and quitting the Art Theater loudly, then shored up his future career by backtracking everything and meekly going back to Oleg Tabakov at the Art Theater. After this Bogomolov always praised Tabakov to the heights. One suspects he was maneuvering to get the top job there after Tabakov, but it didn’t happen when Tabakov died a month ago. That job, to the surprise of most, went to Sergei Zhenovach. As for the Taganka, it never was able to live without controversy and scandal. This one, a revolt against a wonderful ly subtle exhibit by Ksenia Peretrukhina asking questions about the Taganka’s history, was attacked verbally and physically by some of the actors at the theater. The “humor” in that was that the actors claimed they were defending the honor of the theater and its founder Yury Lyubimov, but they were the very same people who drove Lyubimov out shortly before. I look back and I see that this week might have been the week when all the insanity of Russia today came to the theater and set in for the long run. My photo above: A sign at the stage door entrance to the Taganka reads, in part, “To the Anniversary Year Group: Do you have the moral right to come and destroy what has been created by the labor and talent of several generations?”

By John Freedman
December 1, 2013, 17:25

If Russian theater is a mirror of Russian society — and most any Russian theater artist will tell you that is true — then Russia is in turmoil.

Two of Moscow’s most famous theaters have been rocking and rolling to scandalous events all week long. The Taganka Theater, a true lightning rod for controversy over its 50-year history, and the Moscow Art Theater, usually, though not always, a bit more sedate throughout its 105 years, have been splattered all over the news seven days running.

The D-Day for the onslaught was Tuesday, Nov. 26, when an exhibit honoring the Taganka’s 50thanniversary was unveiled, and the first of several previews of Konstantin Bogomolov’s production, “The Karamazovs,” opened at the Art Theater. Both events blew sky-high, with some Taganka actors demanding the removal of the exhibit, while reports emerging from the Art Theater had “The Karamazovs” being closed down even before it opened.

A lot has happened since then and some of the pieces that seemed blown to smithereens have miraculously fallen back into place. But let’s walk through this step-by-step.

Bogomolov, distressed that artistic director Oleg Tabakov required changes in “The Karamazovs” quit the Art Theater on Nov. 25. That’s a fact. He handed in his resignation and Tabakov accepted it. Before the dust settled, however, it was announced that “The Karamazovs” would not be pulled from repertory as was originally thought. Moreover, within a few days Bogomolov, through Facebook and various news agencies, declared there had been no censorship and that, wonder of wonders, he wanted his job back.

As of Sunday I saw no official response to that but it is hard to believe that the Art Theater, which has very much become a commercial playhouse in the Tabakov era, would turn its back on a director who is so good at putting bodies in seats.

Incidentally or not, Bogomolov’s ability to attract spectators and attention was proved again on Thursday during a performance of his staging of “An Ideal Husband.” As a cross bearing a nude actress hung in mid-air over the stage, two Orthodox Church activists ran on stage shouting denouncements of the production and exhorting those in earshot to consider the purity of the church and its faith.

A sign at the stage door entrance to the Taganka reads, in part, “To the Anniversary Year Group: Do you have the moral right to come and destroy what has been created by the labor and talent of several generations?”

The protesters, led by Dmitry Tsorionov who goes by the name of Enteo, were finally subdued and led offstage by two theater administrators. The police showed up 20 minutes later, by which time, as actor Valery Troshin told Provoslavie i Mir, Enteo reportedly was seen giving an interview to a camera belonging to the NTV network.

Almost as if they are being tipped off by someone, NTV cameramen are always present at religious protests of theater performances. They were with Enteo last year at Teatr.doc when he attempted to interrupt a theatricalized evening devoted to the Pussy Riot case, and they were present earlier this year when Orthodox protesters, dressed as Cossacks, temporarily stopped a theatrical performance at the Sakharov Center.

A sign at the stage door entrance to the Taganka reads, in part, “To the Anniversary Year Group: Do you have the moral right to come and destroy what has been created by the labor and talent of several generations?”

Whether or not protesters will now take aim at “The Karamazovs” remains to be seen. Like “An Ideal Husband,” the production is a kitschy, inventive, radical adaptation of a classical literary work that strives to achieve a maximum of political satire. In any case, an hour before the protest against “An Ideal Husband” took place at the Art Theater, Bogomolov talked about God, Fyodor Dostoevsky and “The Brothers Karamazov” on the Kultura television channel’s Glavnaya Rol (Lead Role) program.

“As strange as it may seem, it is in part a rather religious production,” Bogomolov said about “The Karamazovs.” “Dealing with Fyodor Mikhailovich you can’t distance yourself from that.”

Meanwhile, the controversy over the 50th anniversary exhibit at the Taganka Theater continues to fester.

On Thursday a Facebook page entitled Taganka Theater Labor Union was opened. It posted videos of a press conference held the previous day, as well as an address to the press signed by actor Ivan Ryzhikov. Here one can read and listen to claims that the anniversary exhibit is an “act of vandalism in regards to the theater’s anniversary and history” and that the Moscow Culture Committee’s plans to turn the theater into a “Center of Creative Heritage” is part of an “attempt to destroy the repertory theater as a serious, professional manifestation of our national culture.”

On Friday, Moscow Culture Committee Director Sergei Kapkov flatly stated during an interview on Echo Moskvy radio that the anniversary celebrations will go on as planned.

The spark that lit this fire was a simple exhibit, “An Attempt at an Alternative,” mounted by designer Ksenia Peretrukhina while the theater’s foyer undergoes renovations. In place of posters, photos and sculptures that hung on walls telling the theater’s history, Peretrukhina posted texts that asked questions about the past and the future of the theater.

One text that seems to have had presentiments about the looming protest, provocatively asks, “What right do you have to come here, to be here, to lay claims to something, to touch history? What is your relationship to this theater? If we define the right as having a relationship to the theater, it would be hard to find any person who did not have such a relationship. The history of the Taganka touched not only those who founded this theater, but many others who were spectators, witnesses, persecutors or sympathizers.”

The texts are laconic, clear and thought-provoking. So provoking, in fact, that at least one dissenting actor scribbled derisive responses alongside the texts. “Here I tired of reading you. Too wordy,” someone wrote in felt pen beneath one text. “Not one new thought,” is scribbled in the same handwriting elsewhere. A huge question mark followed by the words “Insufficient intelligence” were scribbled on one of the posters announcing the exhibit.

The idea, hatched by Sergei Kapkov and the Moscow Culture Committee, was that it made sense to bring a young team, the Anniversary Year Group, into the Taganka to create events reflecting upon the theater’s place in history after a half century. Following the resignation of founding director Yury Lyubimov two years ago due to a bitter conflict with the actors, the famed playhouse has been virtually rudderless. It was run with questionable success for one and a half seasons by actor Valery Zolotukhin who resigned as artistic director this spring one month before his death.

To make things worse for the theater, Yury Lyubimov this summer was able to force the theater to close down all of his productions that were remaining in repertory. That left the great and famous theater with just a few shows running. Several new shows created by the young Anniversary Year Group begin opening this month, starting Friday with “The Rehearsal of an Orchestra,” a documentary play about the state of the Taganka Theater today.

Kapkov, in his interview with Echo Moskvy, brought up the paradox that the actors who are claiming vandalism now in regards to the theater founded in 1964 by Yury Lyubimov, are the same actors who essentially drove Lyubimov out in July 2011.

“Which theater must be preserved?” Kapkov asked rhetorically. “The legendary stage is preserved as it is. And it will be preserved. The theater of Lyubimov, Lyubimov’s Taganka does not exist. Does Zolotukhin’s Taganka exist? It doesn’t exist either.”