Russian Playwright Research Articles

Staging Contemporary Russian Teenage Femininity in Yaroslava Pulinovich's Natasha Plays

For this project, I analyze two of twenty-two-year-old Russian playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich's works, Natasha's Dream and I Won, to examine how she explores the tensions present in contemporary Russian youth culture. In addition to my literary analysis of her plays in relation to contemporary Russian youth culture, I also consider how Pulinovich innovates contemporary performance for audiences between ages sixteen and twenty-five via her work in the Russian New Drama movement. As Pulinovich negotiates the competing forces of progress and tradition within the liminal space of contemporary Russian adolescence, the stories of her Natasha characters emerge as microcosmic examples of sociopolitical and cultural trends that shape the lives of young people, particularly young women, in contemporary Russia. Pulinovich's Natasha plays offer an important new perspective on young adults' lives from the field of Russian theatre for youth.

Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama Vitaly Chernetsky Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama. By Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2009; pp. 316. $25.00 paper. This volume is a comprehensive introduction to innovative Russian drama emerging over the past decade. The book is lucidly written yet makes bold and constructive use of a wide range of theoretical concepts, from anthropology to Lacanian psychoanalysis. To date, drama has been fairly marginalized within the study of Russian literature; thus this volume fills a very important lacuna. While the book's principal focus is on "New Drama" as a specific movement within Russian literature and theatre that emerged around 1999, Beumers and Lipovetsky also provide extensive historical and cultural context for this phenomenon. [End Page 478] Performing Violence opens with two prefatory essays, one by Kirill Serebrennikov, the theatre director most closely associated with the movement, and the other by Sasha Dugdale, the leading English translator of the plays by New Drama authors. The latter provides an eyewitness account of the birth of the movement, an unforeseen result of a series of seminars sponsored by the British Council in Moscow involving several writers, directors, and other members of London's Royal Court Theatre. These talks, and in particular the introduction of verbatim drama (documentary drama) spurred a surge of interest in the form among young Russian playwrights. Within a few years, what once seemed like tentative experiments of younger authors eager to break the dominance of plays by classic and foreign authors on the contemporary Russian stage coalesced into a heterogeneous though clearly identifiable movement. For the first time in many years, drama, rather than poetry or prose, appeared to be at the forefront of innovation within Russian literature. As Serebrennikov notes in his foreword, the principal accomplishment of New Drama is "the recording of a new linguistic reality"; it "forced the actor to speak the language of today" as heard on the streets of Russia (11). While the phenomenon of New Drama did not spread widely beyond the core group of playwrights and experimental theatre stages, this is the first school of playwriting in Russia to receive international recognition in our time, particularly in Britain, where many of these plays have been staged in recent years. A dominant feature of New Drama is its neo-naturalist aesthetic, with unprecedented prominence given to representations of violence. New Drama's main thematic preoccupation is the deep crisis of identity that has characterized post-Soviet society. New Drama playwrights' strategies of tackling this problem range from appeals to shared existential experiences and memories, to bold interrogations of the place of the Self vis-à-vis the Other and a return to the in-your-face performance characteristic of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde theatre. Although many of these playwrights reject what they believe to be the dominant features of postmodernism, especially in its consumerist incarnation, Beumers and Lipovetsky disagree, arguing that the hyper-naturalism of the Russian New Drama builds on the foundations of a wide range of postmodernist cultural strategies—and this is particularly pertinent to the carnival of cruelty observable in these plays, and in the eroticized charge manifested in them through such violence. In their theoretical model, Beumers and Lipovetsky emphasize the ritual aspects of play and the sacralization of theatrical language and space, linking New Drama experiments with the tradition begun by Chekhov and radicalized by Artaud and Genet. Russian New Drama does not seek to represent or reflect life, they assert; instead, it aspires to create a magic/ritual space of performative existence and a special type of communication with the audience. The ubiquitous violence in these works has several functions: first, it demonstrates the disintegration of Soviet social order and the ensuing chaos; second, it reflects a new social reality linked to the redistribution of both symbolic and economic capital; and finally, it points to the sacred by performing the ritual of transgression. Beumers and Lipovetsky deftly trace the place and logic of violence within Russian culture from the early post-revolutionary days to the years after the collapse of the USSR. In particular, they point...

Nikolai Evreinov and Edith Craig as Mediums of Modernist Sensibility

Nikolai Evreinov (1870–1953) was a Russian playwright, director, and theorist of the theatre who played a leading part in the modernist movement of Russian theatre. Evreinov's 1911 monodrama The Theatre of the Soul(V kulisakh dushi) was staged by the Crooked Mirror theatre in St Petersburg in 1912. It was also performed in London (1915) and Rome (1929), and inspired Man Ray to create his aerograph The Theatre of the Soul (1917). In this article Alexandra Smith links Evreinov's play to Russian modernist thought shaped by the atmosphere of crisis associated with the Russo–Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution. It demonstrates that Edith Craig's production of Evreinov's play suggests that the philosophy of theatricalization of everyday life might enable modern subjects to overcome the fragmentation of modern society. Craig's use of the montage-like techniques of Evreinov's play prefigures cinematographic experiments of the 1920s and Marinetti's notion of synthetic theatre. Alexandra Smith is a Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and is the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006), as well as numerous articles on Russian literature and culture.

The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theatre (review)

238Comparative Drama The book has been superbly edited. I noted only two proofreading errors. The endnotes are profuse with information and ideas. (Unaccountably the page numbers have been omitted from several articles and chapters.) The index is precise and thorough. Altogether, this is a remarkable achievement. Denis Salter McGiIl University Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter. The Play ofIdeas in Russian Enlightenment Theatre. DeKaIb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. Pp. 296. $40.00 casebound. Elise Wirtschafter offers an intelligent reading of some 260 largely forgotten plays. She suggests the lapse of memory is unjust, not so much in the light of aesthetic standards but because the texts shed considerable light on the formation of Russian society in the eighteenth century. The overriding and convincing argument ofthe book is that theater both reflects and shapes Russian social history at a crucial moment of its transition into the modern era. Since the plays at issue illuminate Enlightenment principals that have recenüybeen looked at with considerable nostalgia and some hope ofcontemporary revival, the exercise is not narrowly academic but engaging for our own time. After a redundant but thankfully briefhistory using long-available studies on the formation ofpublic theater after Peter I,Wirtschafter demonstrates why the typical dismissal of eighteenth-century plays for their excessive optimism and stereotypical characters is unjust. Beyond the stereotypes and happy endings , Russian playwrights most often imitating Western texts explored fairly complex and compelling dilemmas: the conflicts oflove and duty, passion and economic stability, service to society and personal moral obligations, female agency and the prevalent patriarchy. The last, the Russian condition reminds us, is a particularly challenging topic that should not be reduced to a simplistic interpretation of male-female relations. Eighteenth-century Russian society to all appearances might appear to offer a perfectly conventional model of patriarchic despotism, male domination, and female subjugation to unjust social norms, if it were not for the four women who ruled the country from 1725 to 1796. Wirtschafter bravely salvages some material for feminist critique by differentiating between a dominant patriarchal despotism and a limited female agency, yet the historical evidence reflected in the plays she explores clearly subverts the narrow gender-based view in favor of a broader appreciation of Reviews239 issues troubling both sexes. Two undervalued writers, Catherine II and Princess E. Dashkova, cases in point, demonstrate through their works that the patriarchal order allowed not only women who were "legitimate bearers of independent authority" (66) but talented female playwrights involved in the pressing social topics of the day. Wirtschafter is an honest historian without agendas to impose, hence the chapter entitled "The Patriarchal Household" can transcend reductive explications to reveal important values and ideas played out onstage concerning emotions , loyalty, and family duty. It is true that women onstage and off were expected to perform "extraordinary feats of faithfulness" to fulfill their Alcestis roles of loyal wife (adapted by Sumarokov from Euripides in 1759), and that men were not assigned equally high standards in matter of carnal love. But such ideas ofmoral virtue were notjustifications for the baser urges or drive to power; men were expected to learn as much as women from Alcestis and her numerous spin-offs.A distant ancestor ofthis reviewer,A.A. Rzhevsky, demonstrated in his tragedy The False Smerdis (1769) some ofthe important lessons at issue by creating a dichotomy of heroic woman and base male. Smerdis, a "typical tyrant ofthe 18lh century Russian stage" as Wirtschafter puts it, is all patriarchal and monarchial authority originating in vile impulses of revenge and bloodshed, while his wife, the noble Fedima, committed by her sense of duty to a monstrous marriage, fulfills the audience's highest expectations of human decency, loyalty, and devotion. In a number of cases, the plays explored by Wirtschafter are particularly appealing because they show a high degree ofself-reflection in questioning the sacred tenets of the Enlightenment. Ya. Kniazhin's comedy, The Unsuccessful Peace-Maker, or Without Dinner IAm Going Home (1787), for example, shows dry logic to be inadequate in the face of complicated family relationships. In another play, based third-hand on Shakespeare and Nicholas-Thomas Barthe's transformation ofTheMerry Wives ofWindsorinto Les Fausses Infidelities (1768), the human passions...

The Art of Compromise: The Life and Work of Leonid Leonov

Although the Russian novelist and playwright Leonid Leonov had published extensively before 1917 he considered that his literary career began only in 1922 with the short story Buryga. His talent developed rapidly in the comparatively free cultural climate of the first decade of the Revolution and by 1927 his characteristic style and themes were already formed. It was in this year, however, that the Communist Party began to impose its demands on the artists and intellectuals. Leonov's beliefs and values were incompatible with the Soviet version of Marxism but he tried to affirm them indirectly in his work through structure, imagery and allusion, while outwardly conforming to official demands. This manoeuvring inevitably led him into some questionable compromises which in turn damaged his reputation, both at home and abroad. Leonov himself was painfully conscious of the moral dilemmas involved and his later works return again and again to the question: is it possible to compromise without being compromised? There are fourteen chapters in the volume, each devoted to one or more of Leonov's works, setting the successive stages of his evolution against a background of changing cultural and political policies.

Bunin Reincarnate

SEER,Vol. 8o,Noo. 3, July 2002 Review Article BuninReincarnate ANDREI ROGACHEVSKII Marullo,Thomas Gaiton. If You SeetheBuddha: Studies intheFiction ofIvan Bunin. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, I998. Xii + 208 pp. Notes. Index. $54.95. Roshchin, M. IvanBunin.Molodaia gvardiia, Moscow, 2000. 329 pp. Illustrations.Appendices. Priceunknown. Heywood, Anthony J. Catalogue oftheBunin,Bunina,Zurov andLopatina Collections. Edited by Richard D. Davies, with the assistance of Daniel Riniker. Leeds University Press, Leeds, 2000. xxxiv + 393 pp. Index. fio.oo. Filmonvideo Title:Dnevnik egozheny (His Wife's Diagy) Directed by AlekseiUchitel' Companies and Studios: Roskino and TPO Rok, with Lenfilm and A. M. Studio (Bulgaria) Producers:AleksandrGolutva andAlekseiUchitel' Screenplay:Dunia Smirnova Director of Photography:IuriiKlimenko Music:Leonid Desiatnikov Leading Actors: Andrei Smirnov, Galina Tiunina, Ol'ga Budina, EvgeniiMironov, Elena Morozova Language and Duration: Russian, French, German and English; I04 minutes Videorelease:PyramidHome Video Price:905 roubles THERE is a lamentable discrepancy between Russia's reverential attitude to its firstwinner of the Nobel Prize in literature,Ivan Bunin (I870-I953), and his reputation in the West, of which the following statement is somewhat characteristic:'the award of [the Nobel Prize] to the relativelypaltry emigre Bunin in 1933 was commonly regarded at the time, and rightly,as a despicableact of political expediency." It Andrei Rogachevskiiis Lecturer in Russian in the Department of Slavonic Studies, Universityof Glasgow. I G. S. Smith,D. S.Mirsky, ARussian-English Life,i890-i939, Oxford,2000, p. I 9 I. 488 ANDREI ROGACHEVSKII is rather unfortunate that Bunin's trademark'unnarrative'2fiction is significantly responsible for making him a writer in the quiet taste, especially abroad, as the beauty of his style cannot always be satisfactorilyrecreatedin translation.In Russia, however, his superior statuswas sealedin i 909, when Bunin,who had not finishedsecondary school and had never gone to university, was elected an Honorary Member of the Russian Academy. His consistently fervent antiBolshevikstand ,both beforeand afterhis 1920 emigrationto Francein the wake of the Russian revolution, earned him additional respect in the opinion of all those who did not succumb to the communist propaganda. During the Thaw, the ban on his writings in the Soviet Union was partiallylifted,which renewed active interestin Bunin'slife and work. This interest was further strengthened in the years of perestroika,when the last ideological obstacles to the reprints of his most vitriolic anti-communist non-fiction were removed. It is hardly surprising that in Bunin's home country the re-emergence of his previously suppressed and/or hitherto obscure emigre publications3 has finally resulted in the discussion and re-evaluation of the writer's legacy as a whole.4 One of the most recent attemptsat re-assessmentis IvanBuninby the well-known Russian playwright Mikhail Roshchin, the author of Valentin i Valentina (I970), Stargi ovyi god(7heOld Newrear,I973) and other comedies and dramas. Regrettably, this book proves to be little more than a compilation of lengthy extractsfrom Bunin's fiction and publishedcorrespondence,his and his wife's diaryentriesas originally reproducedin MilitsaGreene'sthree-volume Ustami Buninykh (AsSpoken by theBunins, Frankfurt-am-Main,I977-82), the diary of the writer Galina Kuznetsova (with whom Bunin was romantically involved),5 various memoirs and occasional press cuttings. Some quotations run into severalpages, and, as the book unfolds, one graduallyacquiresa feeling that this 'cut and paste' technique borders on copyright 2 D. S. Mirsky, A HistogyofRussianLiterature, London, I949, p. 392. 3 See, for instance, 0. B. Vasilevskaia (ed.), I. Bunin, Velikiidurman:Neizvestnye stranitsy, Moscow, I997, and idem., Publitsistikai9i8-i953 godov,ed. 0. N. Mikhailov, Moscowv, I998; incidentally, none of these collections seems to have obtained the reproduction rights from the Bunin Estate. 4 Various aspects of it have also been covered in Alexander F. Zweers, Vpoiskakh utrachennoi garmonii:Proza I. A. Bunina ig3o-I94o-kh godovby AVI. S. Shtern,Omsk, I997, and The Narratology oftheAutobiography: AnAnalysisoftheLiterary DevicesEmployed inIvanBunin's'TheLife of Arsen'ev',New York, I997; I. P. Karpov, Proza Ivana Bunina, Moscow, I999; T. A. Nikonova (ed), I. A. Bunin:Dialogs mirom, Voronezh, I999 and other publications. For earlier views of Bunin, unencumbered by Soviet censorship, see Serge Kryzytski, The Works ofIvan Bunin,The Hague, 197 I; James B. Woodward, IvanBunin:A StudyofHis Fiction,Chapel Hill, NC, i980; Julian W...

Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell'Arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama

Douglas Clayton examines the tradition of commedia dell'arte as the Russian modernists inherited it, from its origins in Italian street theatre through its various transformations: in Italy (Gozzi and Goldini's plays); in France (the development of Pierrot and the restructuring of the plot); and in Germany (Tieck's and Hoffmann's metatheatre). He also analyses crucial texts by Gozzi, Lothar, Benavente, and Schnitzler that came to play a central role in the Russian theatre. Tracing the history of commedia dell'arte on the Russian stage, he demonstrates that the introduction of the tradition was theory-driven and discusses several milestone productions in the pre- and post-revolutionary period. Clayton examines the impact of commedia dell'arte, russified as the new theatrical genre of balagan, on both popular and lesser-known Russian playwrights, and, in conclusion, explores the significance of the commedia dell'arte as a theoretical underpinning for Sergei Eisenstein's theories of theatre and film.

Pierrot in Petrograd: the Commedia dell'Arte/Balagan in twentieth-century Russian theatre and drama

Douglas Clayton examines the tradition of commedia dell'arte as the Russian modernists inherited it, from its origins in Italian street theatre through its various transformations: in Italy (Gozzi and Goldini's plays); in France (the development of Pierrot and the restructuring of the plot); and in Germany (Tieck's and Hoffmann's metatheatre). He also analyses crucial texts by Gozzi, Lothar, Benavente, and Schnitzler that came to play a central role in the Russian theatre. Tracing the history of commedia dell'arte on the Russian stage, he demonstrates that the introduction of the tradition was theory-driven and discusses several milestone productions in the pre- and post-revolutionary period. Clayton examines the impact of commedia dell'arte, russified as the new theatrical genre of balagan, on both popular and lesser-known Russian playwrights, and, in conclusion, explores the significance of the commedia dell'arte as a theoretical underpinning for Sergei Eisenstein's theories of theatre and film.

Alexander Ostrovsky by Marjorie Hoover (review)

BOOK REVIEWS311 Completeness, however, is always difficult, especially when one attempts to catalog a prolific author such as Sinclair Lewis who has attracted so much critical attention. As bibliographers approach their work's terminus ad quern, they simply cannot obtain all of the current articles and reviews which rightfully belong in their catalog. Yet their disclaimers regarding selectivity do not satisfy users. Sinclair Lewis is no exception. A cursory examination of this reference guide reveals only four entries in 1978. A quick check of the MLA International Bibliography for the same year produces two additional references, one in a festschrift and the other from the Yale Review. To wait for the appearance of some journals which stay notoriously behind publication deadlines would be to sacrifice even more a timely publication. Sinclair Lewis appeared two years after its cutoff date, a delay which we in academe have come to consider "acceptable." Ultimately, computerized bibliographies will make these delays obsolete; but until that time arrives, we must be grateful for the laborious efforts of such dedicated scholars as the Flemings. Robert Fleming's brief introduction to this checklist gives readers an overview of the ebb and flow of criticism about Lewis's work. The year 1951 seems to be the peak of that criticism. His annotations, descriptive in form, supply the focus of the selected articles and reviews; they are sufficient to allow students to determine whether the material might meet their needs. And the index — an indispensable part of any bibliography — is thorough and detailed. JAMES A. GRIMSHAW, JR. United States Air Force Academy Marjorie Hoover. Alexander Ostrovsky. Boston: Twayne, G.K. Hall, 1981. 155p. When one thinks of great Russian writers of the nineteenth-century, the names Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov immediately come to mind. Beyond these great figures, the average Western reader is quite ignorant of Russian literature. Marjorie Hoover has taken a significant step in introducing the Western reader to the wealth of Russian literature. The preponderance of scholarly writings and collections of translated works of the others have overshadowed the work of Ostrovsky. Hoover has successfully defended Ostrovsky's position as one of the great Russian playwrights. In this analysis, only a brief biographical description of Ostrovsky is given, concentrating rather on his major works. It is typical of anthologies to allow only brief descriptions of his major works, their themes and analysis of the critics of the period. The "dark kingdom" described by Dobrolyubov, the samodurstvo of the merchant class, and the plight of women in Russian society are themes commonly analyzed by critics of Ostrovsky. Hoover has delved more deeply in her analysis. The sociopolitical mood of the times (1847-1886) and its effect on Ostrovsky as shown in his works, is a traditional basis for analysis used by Hoover and other critics of nineteenth-century Russian literature. This sociopolitical analysis is regarded by Hoover as too rigid and over-simplified. Hoover has been more judicial in her approach and has demonstrated the involved transition made by Ostrovsky from his early works to his later "mature" works. Most major plays are discussed in terms of plot, structure of the play, and character development. Although a number of collections of Ostrovsky's works do exist, and in the recent revival of Ostrovsky in the Soviet Union much new material has been published, very little writing of a critical nature is available. Hoover's book, although a general overview, is a very 312ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW informative and scholarly response to that. In addition to critical evaluation of Ostrovsky's works, much reference is made to the great socio-literary critics, other great Russian and European writers of the time, and their overall effect on Ostrovsky and his works. Alexander Ostrovsky is both concise and informative not only in text, but in footnotes and bibliography as well. For those who wish to investigate further, the bibliography, although not extensive and much is available only in Russian, is an excellent guide to hard-to-find information. MARY JO SMITH University of Arizona George Hunt. John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1980. 232p. Professor Hunt has provided an interesting...

Vasilii Aksyonov: Contemporary Russian Playwright

Vasilii Aksyonov: Contemporary Russian Playwright

Correction: Vasilii Aksyonov: Contemporary Russian Playwright

Correction: Vasilii Aksyonov: Contemporary Russian Playwright

A Word From The Silent Partner: A Book About Nemirovich-Danchenko

Do NOT UNDERRATE THIS BOOK BECAUSE of its deceptive title: it turns out to provide a very valuable and eye-opening first person account of the theatrical and literary activities of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943), Russian playwright and co-director with Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theater, in the last dozen years of his career. It was compiled from the papers of the late Serge Bertenson, who had been Nemirovich's secretary and key assistant for several years in Moscow, and who after emigrating to America kept up a steady correspondence with his former chief in the old country. Printed entirely in Russian, this book contains 119 extensive letters written by Nemirovich to Bertenson, as well as 49 letters by other Russian cultural figures, and 171 entries from Bertenson's diary on theatrical topics. These 339 documents, almost all of which are published for the first time in any language anywhere (including the USSR), are arranged chronologically from June 30, 1928, when Bertenson permanently left Russia for Hollywood, to April 25, 1943, when Nemirovich died in Russia.