‘I will not Work in such Conditions any more…’

Abstract

‘When my first production The Fallen and the Living was closed down, some friends of mine arranged a meeting for me with Andropov. He was Secretary to the Central Committee at that time. I had a long conversation with him. He started by saying: “I thank you as a father”. I didn't understand and said, “What for exactly?” He replied: “You didn't accept my children into the theatre”.’ The chief director of the Moscow Taganka Theatre Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov was in London at the end of 1983 and in early 1984. He collected the Evening Standard prize — England's most prestigious theatre award — for his staging of Crime and Punishment based on Dostoevsky's novel. In London, Yuri Lyubimov made a number of statements in which he severely criticised official Soviet cultural policy, in particular with regard to the theatre. These statements caused anger among Soviet embassy officials in London and even provoked threats. On 17 February 1984 Lyubimov granted M. Fillimor, a correspondent of L'Alternative, the interview which we publish below. Yuri Lyubimov asked for the interview to be prefaced with two epigraphs: one from A. Pushkin — the second from F. Shalyapin's book The Mask and the Soul. The quote from Shalyapin comes from the 1932 Paris edition of the work (the corresponding pages are omitted in the Soviet edition). The interview was first published in the magazine L'Alternative, Paris.