Robert Russell

Reviews : Russian Studies Inside the Soviet Writers' Union. By John and Carol Garrard. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1990. Pp. xv + 303. £16.95

approaches, Goldthorpe offers a clear and competent account of the philosophical underpinnings of La Nausée. She carefully analyses the work in the light of theories expressed elsewhere in Sartre’s more formal philosophical writings, at the same time emphasizing the ambiguity of the links between the philosophy and the fiction: Sartre’s novel, she argues, is often far richer and more evocative than his theory. Goldthorpe’s study with its detailed literary and philosophical analysis, its juxtaposition of quotations from the original French with English translations and its comprehensive referencing, provides a useful critical

Bulgakov’s The White Guard and Flight

The plays discussed in the last chapter are sometimes hailed by Soviet critics as the cornerstone of Russian drama of the 1920s, but this is a judgement that owes more to politics than to art. Artistically, such works as Lyubov Yarovaya and The Gale lag far behind much of the drama of the pre-revolutionary period. The lessons of Chekhov about the representation of reality on the stage have here been completely overlooked, and the complexity of motivation which he revealed so expertly has been reduced to the single dimension of class allegiance. For a while, critics and theoreticians tried to steer Russian drama away from the path indicated by Chekhov, whom they regarded as a spokesman for Russia’s bourgeois past. Any dramatist or theatre appearing to be ‘Chekhovian’ was considered artistically outmoded and politically dangerous. To critics of this persuasion, Mikhail Bulgakov’s two plays about the Civil War, The White Guard (The Days of the Turbins) and Flight, served the cause of Bolshevism’s enemies by portraying them sympathetically as complex human beings rather than with the stereotyped satirical strokes of the poster artist. For many years Bulgakov’s plays were banned or limited to production in certain theatres only. Yet today this most talented of Soviet dramatists is widely acknowledged, in the Soviet Union as in the West, to be a worthy successor to Chekhov, and his leading place in the history of modern Russian drama is assured.

The Civil War in Soviet Drama

During the Civil War unsophisticated plays on the theme of the Revolution had drawn audiences to theatres all over the country, but the plays themselves were crudely propagandistic and unsuitable for the professional stage. In the post-war years, as the political situation gradually became more stable, the need was felt for a more polished dramatic repertoire about the Revolution and Civil War, one which could be staged by such companies as the Maly and the Moscow Art Theatre. In prose fiction a young generation of talented non-Communist writers, to whom Trotsky had given the name ‘fellow-travellers’, had emerged, but drama was slower to develop, and by the mid-1920s there was still no new repertoire on the theme of the Revolution.

Russian Drama before the Revolution

By the first decade of the twentieth century the Russian dramatic theatre had achieved some notable successes. The Imperial Theatres — the Maly in Moscow and the Alexandrinsky in St Petersburg — were well-established companies with a solid tradition of staging the classics of Russian and world drama. The Moscow Art Theatre, established in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislaysky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, had quickly built up a first-class reputation for ensemble playing of the highest quality, somewhat in the style of the German Meiningen Theatre. In the field of drama, too, Russia could now boast some major writers, after a late start. Nikolay Gogol and Ivan Turgenev had written a small number of excellent plays in the middle of the nineteenth century. Alexander Ostrovsky was a prolific nineteenth-century playwright whose work gives a vivid picture of the merchant class. Leo Tolstoy had written some notable plays. And finally, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev and other authors of their generation had recently written a number of important plays in a variety of dramatic genres.