Eight years ago, when I first met the celebrated Soviet director Yuri Lyubimov at the Left Bank apartment of French actress Odile Versois in Paris, he appeared curiously subdued. Seated on an ornate couch, he quietly watched the other guests. Occasionally a smile would brighten his mobile features, and he would contribute a brief, noncommittal remark to the general conversation before lapsing into a wary silence. A faint twitch of the eyebrows was the only visible sign of his inner tension - produced by the Taganka Theater group's omnipresent Party "guide" - a female Soviet security agent whose job it was to observe his every utterance and movement while in the West.
Recently I saw him again - this time seated in the director's office of Paris' famous Odeon Theater, where he had been invited to stage a dramatic adaptation of Dostoyevski's The Possessed. All trace of his earlier reticence had vanished. [Editor's note: This interview took place before Lyubimov's trip to Washington, D.C.]
Time of Tribulation
During 1984, one unexpected and disagreeable event after another erupted in the life of the Soviet's most famous living stage director. In February of that year, which Lyubimov looks back upon with wry humor as his "Orwellian year," he was in Bologna, Italy, staging a new production of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde at the local opera house when he received word that the Communist Party committee at his Taganka Theater in Moscow had voted for his dismissal as director, a post he had held with unparalleled distinction for close to twenty years. A month later, on March 13, he learned he had been ousted by Vladimir Shadrin, head of the Moscow bureau of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, on the grounds that he had "abandoned his post."
Four days after that Lyubimov was officially excluded from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which he had joined shortly after Stalin's death in 1953 in the vain hope that, after twenty nightmare-like years, life in the Soviet Union was finally going to improve.
Next came the news that a rival stage manager and onetime subordinate, Anatoly Efros, had been chosen to succeed him as director of the Taganka Theater. Efros celebrated his promotion by staging Gorky's The Lower Depths. This was a clear indication of a return to the "theater of emotion," which Yuri Lyubimov and his troupe had always rejected as alien to their particular dramatic style. Overnight Lyubimov's name vanished from posters in Moscow, and the little 600-seat theater he had made world famous was shut down. Step by implacable step the Soviet Party apparatus was undoing his work, erasing his memory, transforming him into a "nonperson." His voluminous photographic archives were impounded, and his many Soviet decorations - so numerous that, as he humorously puts it, "I could have made a career as a doorman at one of Moscow's best hotels" - were "melted into scrap metal."
The final blow fell in July of 1984, when a decree of the Supreme Soviet's Presidium signed by Konstantin Chernenko stripped him of his citizenship for having "engaged in hostile activities and damaged the prestige of the Soviet state." Yuri Lyubimov, who had left his country nine months earlier with little more than a suitcase of summer clothes, thus found himself banished from his homeland and joining the company of many other distinguished exiles, like
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