Serf Actor: The Life and Art of Mikhail Shchepkin by Laurence Senelick

Abstract

92 Comparative Drama Here again, it all seems so obvious. But perhaps this laying bare of the obvious is Peace’s important contribution to the study of Chekhov’s dramaturgy. The book is a compendium of thoughts and ideas that we all have had at one time or another in our reading of Chekhov’s plays. One is reminded of Jan Kott’s “seemingly obvious” explication of Shakespeare, in the context of contemporaneity. Peace stresses rather the frozen sculptured moment of Chekhov’s art. Chekhov, Peace be­ lieves, belongs to universal art, but his plays are anchored in a specific time-port. His thesis may cause controversy and he does make his point relentlessly, but he is an eloquent spokesman for Chekhov’s art. E. J. CZERWINSKI State University of New York, Stony Brook Eugene O’Neill’s Critics: Voices From Abroad, ed. Horst Frenz and Susan' Tuck. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Pp. xx + 247. $22.50. Eugene O’Neill’s Critics: Voices From Abroad is a collection of thirty articles by twenty-six foreign scholars, theater critics, directors, transla­ tors, and playwrights. Written at various stages of O’Neill’s career, the selections are organized chronologically and span nearly sixty years—be­ ginning with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s evaluation of O’Neill in 1922 and ending with Timo Tiusanen’s 1980 article on O’Neill and the Finnish playwright Hella Wuolijoki. The essays represent seventeen countries (Argentina, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Poland, Republic of China, Spain, Sweden, and the USSR) and range from scholarly and critical pieces to brief eulogies, all of which “provide a picture of Eugene O’Neill’s reception and reputation, his success and failure as an inter­ national dramatist” (p. xiv). I found especially useful the bibliographical listing by country of “O’Neill Plays in Translation” (pp. 200-18)—a listing (though incomplete) of books from Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, and Chile on through Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Republic, Uruguay, the USSR, and Yugoslavia. Horst Frenz’ and Susan Tuck’s edition is a welcome addition to O’Neill studies to help complete the record as we move toward the O’Neill Centennial celebrations of 1988. JOHN H. STROUPE Western Michigan University Laurence Senelick. Serf Actor: The Life and Art of Mikhail Shchepkin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. Pp. xiv+ 305. $35.00. The tombstone of the great nineteenth-century performer Mikhail Semyonovich Shchepkin, the so-called father of Russian realistic acting, reads “Actor and Man.” This serves not only as an eloquently and char­ acteristically simple statement of Shchepkin’s orientation and calling but Reviews 93 ultimately as his final liberation from a life that was for him a prolonged condition of frustration and humiliation. This central condition of his life, the tsarist institution of serfdom, to a great extent upstaged the series of incidents which would ordinarily have proved sufficient to constitute a life. The almost Sophoclean sense of equanimity with which the serf actor accepted his lot in life and worked constructively within its restrictions might suggest a good role model but not a very enticing protagonistic role for a full-length life-in-art treatment. Nevertheless, the always meticulous and professional Laurence Senelick has done well by Shchepkin and by the period which the latter’s life and art embrace. Drawing almost exclu­ sively upon Russian sources, including the pioneering study by T. S. Grits and personal reminiscences by Shchepkin, his family, and his student Aleksandra Shubert (another of his students was Stanislavsky’s teacher Glikeria Fyodotova), Senelick has assembled a densely detailed docu­ mentary record, offering at frequent intervals suggestive connections and evocative insights. By using Shchepkin’s career as a filter, Senelick is able to avoid the impersonal panoramic view offered in the general theatrical histories of the period by Vameke, Slonim, and others. One is here able to see through the eyes of the serf actor: the developing consciousness of the modem Russian theatre; the struggle to give birth to a Russian repertory in lieu of the traditional dependency on the borrowed French forms of melo­ drama, vaudeville, and neoclassical tragedy; the often tawdry rehearsal and performance conditions, especially on...