Mayakovsky, Mikhail Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Tairov, Eisenstein--these names peal across the world's theatrical landscape like distant Russian bells. But they are names that belonged to vibrant, passionate artists. They wrestled with theatrical shape and texture. They defiantly thrust what was new and bizarre in the very face of what was sacred and old. They did battle with themselves, too, stridently assaulting each other’s theories, art, and politics. But because they did battle, with their art and themselves, the shapes of world theater changed. That this was achieved in the stifling and often threatening atmosphere of the first thirty years or so of Russian and Soviet turmoil is astonishing. There are playwrights, designers, actors, and directors working in the West today whose art would be immeasurably different if it were not for the eerie bravery, artistic and human, of these Russian pioneers.
Unseen Worlds
Russian and Soviet Theater, 1905-1932, by Konstantin Rudnisky (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1988) chronicles these times with a wealth of detail largely inaccessible before. Major artists people the pages of this important new work, but we also meet the upstarts, the political hacks, the meteors, and the squibs of Russian theater. In fact, it must be said at the outset that the detail can be overwhelming for the average reader. For the scholar, the book opens previously unseen worlds. There are minute descriptions of performances, costumes, and reviews. There are documented letters and undocumented anecdotes that in their very mass give a sense of the teeming activity of those years. Rudnitsky writes not only of the Moscow Art Theater and the Vakhtangov, but also of the Georgian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, and Jewish theater.
Fortunately, the book is exceptionally well edited and arranged. Otherwise, the detailed accounts of production after production would have become impossible to sift through. There is a spare but extremely important preface by the author. In it he proffers a number of observations that, if incorporated into the body of the work, would have made the reader's task considerably easier. For example, he states, "As distinct from painting, architecture, sculpture, poetry, prose or music, the art of the theater is always, by its very nature, contemporary and cannot live in a full-blooded existence outside its own time.” He adds, "There is no chance that what is great in the art of the theater today will also be great tomorrow. Tomorrow it will become something different.” Rudnitsky acknowledges that such observations are "universally known," but the perspective they provide is missing from the body of the work. On Rudnitsky's pages the ephemeral lies side by side with the truly revolutionary.
After this brief preface, there are but five major chapters that trace a chronology of events rather than give an analysis of thematic developments. Thus we are treated in the first chapter to a remarkably rich account of "Pre-revolutionary Theatrical Explorations," and in the fourth we see how "Extremes Converge.” It is here that the arrangement of this very large work is so superlative. At the end of each complex chapter there are literally dozens of illustrations, many of them in superb color, often accompanied by an abbreviated account of the previous text. Thus it is possible, after poring through the details of the text, to settle into a frame of mind where what you have been struggling to imagine is now made clearer. Since so much of the text is descriptive of
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