Russian Drama before the Revolution

Abstract

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.