Russian Drama of the Revolutionary Period by Robert Russell

Abstract

Reviews289 But from the first the awkward questions of character raised by antique tragedy were not wholly conducive to Christian moralizing, and the mode began to turn more to individual than to type. Introductions, speeches, and emblems on the stage were used to forward Christian ideas in academic productions, but these too proved difficult on the public stage; and Smith's reviews of Titus Andronicus and Catiline show how the age's best playwrights found themselves imperfectly mixing the classical and the Christian. The introduction in the Restoration of selected emphases of story and of plays as concerned with more private affairs, allowed for a simplification of plot and a consequent heightening of character while drawing still on the inspiration of the classical texts. The proscenium arch, too, further distancing play from spectator, allowed, Smith contends, "two distinct imaginative realms ... a distant world of fate and an immediate world of human suffering" (p. 256). Yet however different it might seem on the surface, Renaissance and Restoration drama in England, Smith concludes, owes much to its classical roots. Not only did antique dramas provide plots, characters, models, and themes, but their very thrust, so at odds with medieval Christianity, provided a tension that was at the very center of dramatic scripts and dramatic experiments right through the seventeenth century. If humanists might be astonished to see what Dryden, say, made of the classical ancestors they rediscovered and translated, it was nevertheless those very plays, and that very act of reintroducing them, that had a significantly indelible role in the course which drama took in the Renaissance and beyond. ARTHUR F. KINNEY University of Massachusetts, Amherst Robert Russell. Russian Drama of the Revolutionary Period. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988. Pp. xii + 186. $28.50. Titles of books are often deceiving. With an eye on the market, publishers prefer catchy, often deceptive titles to truthful and accurate ones. It is to Robert Russell's credit that he has opted for simple and unadorned phraseology—Russian Drama of the Revolutionary Period. This terse, critical study neither explores the political ramifications brought on drama by the October Revolution nor exploits research already done on the subject by Nikolaj Gorchakov (The Theater in Soviet Russia, 1957), Marc Slonim (The Russian Theatre from the Empire to the Soviets, 1963), and Harold Segel (Twentieth Century Russian Drama from Gorky to the Present, 1979). Russell adheres to his subject, drama written during and after the Revolution, and performs his task skillfully and with a fine touch that makes his reading of some of these tendentious plays more interesting than they deserve. Written for both students of Slavic literature and professional and non-professional personnel in theater, this modest but comprehensive study covers a wide spectrum, from significant works written before the Revolution to experimental dramas that shaped the literary (some would argue for "non-literary") program known as Socialist Realism, a form of censorship that dominated all areas of literature and culture in the Soviet Union since the 1930's. 290Comparative Drama Along the way Russell concentrates on works of art that deserve attention . Alexander Blok's The Puppet Booth (1906) is rightly acclaimed "representative of non-realistic drama of the pre-revolutionary period" (p. 22). However, his assertion that the play "dramatizes Blok's personal relations with Lyubov [Blok's wife] and [Andrej] BeIy" (p. 23), the symbolist poet and novelist, is arguable. Many critics question the traumatic damage done to Blok's psyche as a result of the extra-marital exploits of Lyubov. Some critics argue that Blok was even flattered by the attention showered on his wife by his poet-colleague. In regard to The Puppet Booth it is surprising that, given Russell's enthusiasm for Blok's short piece, he fails to see the influence it may have had on Lev Lunts' The Apes Are Coming (1920), a precursor of the Theater of the Absurd. Nor does he do justice to Lunts' original work in his one-page summary. But these are minor defects. Russell places literary emphasis where it belongs, on the two masterpieces of Nikolaj Erdman—The Mandate (1924) and The Suicide (1930)—and on the three highly experimental plays...