p It was not long after the Revolution that mass spectacles with thousands of people taking part were staged in Leningrad on the Field of Mars. Only a few of the scripts have been preserved, among them Alexander Neverov’s Civil War (1920) and Artyom Vesyoly’s We (1921). Finally, in the 19205, the first plays on Soviet themes were staged by the former imperial theatres and the Moscow Art Theatre, directed at the time by Stanislavsky and NemirovichDanchenko.

p Several plays by Anatoly Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for Education, were also staged. Lunacharsky was a remarkable literary critic, and an expert on art and the history of Russian and WestEuropean literature. He was also a poet and playwright, and his Oliver Cromwell (1920), Tommaso Catnpanella (1922) and The Chancellor and, the Plumber were probably the first plays by a Soviet author to bring into the old theatre the romance of the Revolution. Still, Lunacharsky’s plays did not run for long. And not just because the demand was for more topical plays (his were all historical), but also because the author was more of a philosopher and journalist than an artist and psychologist. He called one of his collections of plays and essays Ideas in Masks. Genuine dramaturgy (that is, realist and not symbolic) demands that ideas be rendered through the medium of human characters. Marx once said about Schiller (in a letter to Lassalle) that his heroes were more like a speaking trumpet for ideas than living characters. The same could be said of Lunacharsky as a dramatist.

p The first play in which the new revolutionary reality was revealed through human characters was probably Konstantin Trenev’s (1878-1945) Lyubov Yarovaya (1926). An ex-teacher, Trenev made his heroine, Lyubov Yarovaya, a teacher too, and in her, to use his own words, “embodied the attitude of a writer and citizen to the Revolution”. Yarovaya’s past emerges from the dialogue, and we learn how this woman, once far removed from politics, came to be a fighter for the Revolution. Her life is linked with Pavel Koshkin, a Bolshevik and politician with a gift for organisation. Nikolai Pogodin was quite right when he said in 1946 that: “The most 173 precious thing about this play was the author’s discovery of a new gold mine in theatrical art. And it was made clear to us playwrights that the image of the new, positive hero was going to be acclaimed most highly by Soviet audiences.”

p And indeed, the sailor Shvandya, Lyubov Yarovaya, Koshkin, and the Chairman of the Uyezd Committee (in Bill- Byelotserkovsky’s Assault} became the new popular heroes in Soviet literature. They were a far cry from Pilnyak’s “leather jackets" and Ehrenburg’s “improved communist models of men”. They were real people. Trenev’s Lyubov Yarovaya and Bill-Byelotserkovsky’s Assault introduced the heroico-revolutionary trend into the Soviet theatre. Thus, it was as far back as the middle of the nineteentwenties that the genre which, in my opinion, was eventually to 174 determine the character of Soviet dramaturgy was conceived. In Mayakovsky’s plays The Bathhouse and The Bedbug these elements of revolutionary heroism were combined with mordant satire. But this satire itself drew its truth, its inspiration and its critical trenchancy from the heroic ideals of the Revolution.

p I dare say my choice of a playwright for the title of this chapter may seem subjective. But in my opinion it is Nikolai Pogodin’s plays that embody most fully and clearly the distinctive features peculiar to Soviet dramaturgy.

p Many plays by Leonid Leonov, Vsevelod Ivanov, Vladimir Kirshon, Alexander Afinogenov, Boris Lavrenev, Boris Romashov, and also Victor Rosov and other moderns, won lasting popularity with audiences and enjoyed long runs. The individual artistic personalities of these dramatists have an important bearing on their plays. Thus Leonid Leonov combines philosophy with psychology, while Boris Lavrenev brings out the romance in political themes. The most striking feature of Pogodin’s and Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s plays is the keenness with which they probe life and plunge into the fire of human emotions.

p These playwrights are in love with the heroism of socialist construction, and this infatuation sharpened their revolutionary vision and their keenness in discerning the new in life. But this infatuation had both its strong and weak sides. The weakness lay in the too romantic attitude to the heroes of the Revolution which, in some plays, actually pushed the struggle and the contradictions into the background. In his article “On Plays" (1933) Gorky wrote: “We are living in a profoundly and totally dramatic epoch without precedent, an epoch of tensely dramatic processes of destruction and creation.”

p In Pogodin’s plays we can trace the gradual development of this sense of drama and a more profound understanding of the social and psychological conflicts of our time.

p Nikolai Pogodin (1900-1962) was born into a peasant family and grew up in the Don region. As a boy he worked in a metal workshop and then at a bookbinder’s. He started out as a journalist in 1920. He received his literary training during his ten years’ work on various newspapers, including Pravda which printed over two hundred of his articles and reports. Pogodin travelled widely in Central Siberia, Central Asia and the Volga country on newspaper assignments until 1930 when he changed over to play-writing. He wrote more than thirty plays, including both light-weight, ephemeral comedies and serious works of lasting popularity, such as his plays about Lenin. Pogodin is informative and interesting both in his accomplishments and his weaknesses. He was a citizen and writer of the nineteen-thirties, a man who belonged to the period of the 175 first five-year plans and the first socialist achievements. He depicted in his plays the people he had written about in his newspaper articles, people he had met in Siberia and in the coal fields of the Donbass where the mines were being restored at the time. His heroes were workers and peasants engaged in carrying out the first five-year plans. This was Russia awakening from its Asiatic slumber, a new Russia whose slogan was to “catch up and overtake" the Western countries. In Pogodin’s first plays (Tempo, Poem of the Hatchet, My Friend and others) the dialogue has the liveliness of an on-the-spot reportage. The heroes—commissars, seasonal workers and sharp-tongued young women—argue hotly and laugh noisily. These are not psychological dramas after Ibsen. The stage is crowded with people, a kaleidoscope of characters who come and go. And one has the feeling that the author himself is somewhere in their midst, a man in love with his countrymen, ignorant and illiterate. The tempo at which the workers go at the job is not given a psychological explanation, but the whole play breathes enthusiasm, excitement, good fun and affection. This is the new Russia on the first stage of her ascent to the peaks of the future communist society.

p Pogodin’s plays are polyphonic and, like Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s, involve a large caste of dramatis personae. He tends to divide his material into episodes rather than acts (like in classical plays).

p In his Poem of the Hatchet one of the heroes says: “What is a hatchet? It’s a piece of steel. And what is steel? It’s the country’s metallurgical problem.” In Tempo, Poem of the Hatchet, After the Ball, My Friend, Aristocrats, Silver Hollow and other plays written by Pogodin in the nineteen-thirties, the scene is set in factory workshops, at collective farms and production meetings. He based his plots on problems which actually faced the country at the time. Pogodin’s plays abound in contrasts. He uses the fabric of the everydays to bring out the drama of his plots. The tension of the atmosphere is rendered through dialogue. And that is why I think that Pogodin’s plays express with the greatest eloquence those new features in the turbulent, heroic and dramatic life of the Soviet people in those years when the first five-year plans were launched and afterwards, in the post-war years, features which have come to stay in the Soviet theatre.

p In the Poem of the Hatchet one of the characters, Party Committee Secretary Barguzin, says to the director of the plant: “We’ve got to fight. I thought it all over last night. Yes, we’re going to fight a war for our hatchet, for our metal, for our industry. Your newspaper’s not called right. You ought to call it ‘Battle’. No, not that. ‘Attack’. Yes, ‘Attack’. "

p Pogodin renders the strenuous effort of the workers and their sheer heroism with great sensitivity. Now one and now another 176 face stands out from the crowd for a minute, and all of them arc portrayed with understanding and affection. It does not surprise us that quite often his positive heroes are given comedy roles to play. In his notes to the play Poem of the Hatchet he says about one of the female leads: “Anka rushes about the empty workshop. Her hair is dishevelled and her cheeks are flaming. She is in love, and it is only thus, in this wild display of joy, strength and passion, only in this vigorous movement that she can express her emotion. The very air and the walls seem to hum in answer.”

p Indeed, the air in Pogodin’s plays really does seem to hum in answer to the hum of activity where a new world was being built.

p The Aristocrats which tells the story of criminals in a prison camp was originally called A Human Rhapsody. Pogodin is truly a rhapsodist who sees the heroic in all that is human. When you read his plays you seem to be drawn into his motley crowd of characters, you actually seem to hear the people talking in different voices, singing and shouting, and you feel life itself gushing forth from the pages of the book.

p Of course his plays do have their faults. They are perhaps too romanticised, and too descriptive. But these shortcomings arc redeemed by his awareness of the new in Russian life, by his ability to characterise a person in two or three sentences, and to convey the meaning of the Soviet people’s heroic efforts and aims.

p Last but not least, Pogodin was one of the first Soviet playwrights to succeed in rendering a life-like image of Lenin. In The Man with a Rifle (1937) Lenin is shown as an organiser and leader of the 1917 October Revolution. The title of the play was taken from one of Lenin’s speeches where he mentioned hearing an elderly woman who was travelling in the same train with him say that a man with a rifle was no one to fear any more, because this soldier was one of themselves now, another working man. In the play this soldier is Shadrin. The following episode takes place at the Smolny a few days after the Revolution: Shadrin, who does not know that the man in front of him is Lenin, addresses him in all simplicity: “Know where could I get some tea?" To which Lenin replies: “Homesick for tea, eh?" Lenin starts a conversation with Shadrin, asking him about the situation at the front and the morale of the soldiers, and by drawing him out compels the man to ponder on things and arrive at some conclusions for himself. This dialogue is very human and lively. In 1942, I saw this play put on for the collective farmers in a village in Uzbekistan. The Uzbek peasants, accustomed to folklore of the feudal times, were extremely shocked that Lenin was presented not as a giant with his head touching the clouds but as a short, bald-headed man wearing an ordinary suit and speaking informally with a soldier. But that was a long time 177 ago. Realist art has now reached the peoples of the Soviet East as well.

p In Kremlin Chimes, the second play of the series, Pogodin shows Lenin in another historical period when, the Civil War over, the work of restoring and building up the economy was begun under his guidance. In this play the author holds an indirect polemic with H.G. Wells who called Lenin the “Kremlin dreamer”. Yes, he was a dreamer, Pogodin says. But a man must dream! The future must be envisaged in dreams before it can be built. The point is how to dream. Lenin was a realistic dreamer. Whereas in the first play he was shown in conversation with Shadrin, a common soldier, in Kremlin Chimes (first edition 1940, second edition 1955) much space is devoted to the theme of the intelligentsia embodied in the image of Zabelin, a power engineer. In this play Pogodin initiates us into the inner world of Lenin, the genius and creator.

p The third part of the trilogy, The Third Pathetique (1958), deals with the last period in Lenin’s life, and has as its theme Lenin’s humanism and faith in the people. Although it ends with Lenin’s death, the play is a hymn to the living Lenin. Pogodin’s lyricism has a very powerful impact in this play, which expresses his admiration for those splendid new features in the life of mankind that arc linked with the name of Lenin.

p Another dramatist of impressive stature was Vsevolod Vishnevsky, who started the new type of heroic drama. His output was much smaller than Pogodin’s. Only two plays, The First Cavalry Army and An Optimistic Tragedy, have won lasting popularity and continue to be staged to this day.

p Vishnevsky, however, was not just a playwright, he is also known for his war diaries and his memorable war-time speeches. I often remember him as one of the most colourful personalities of my day. Like a torch lit by the October Revolution and the Civil War, he burnt with the fire of the struggle between the two worlds and burnt out in the war against nazi Germany. He remained in Leningrad throughout the siege, and indeed throughout the war. In a speech that was broadcast and televised, Fidel Castro said, on return from the Soviet Union that he could not forget that there were more than 600,000 people buried in the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery in Leningrad who had died from hunger and the bombing during the siege. In their dying hour, these people heard the voice of Vsevolod Vishnevsky in almost daily radio broadcasts. I find a certain resemblance between Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Fidel Castro in temperament and revolutionary ardour.

p In 1936 Vishnevsky said: “You want to know what I’d like to do in art? What themes stir me most? The theme of war, and the tragic in life, tragic, that is, in my optimistic view of it. I can neither 178 see nor understand life without tragedy. It’s the theme I’m going to work on, developing it beyond the limits of a straight war theme.”

p A soldier in the Red Army, Vishnevsky belonged completely to the masses. And indeed he began his career with mass spectacles. In 1921, he wrote a play called The Trial of the Kronstadt Mutineers, which was put on by sailors at the Seamen’s Club in Novorossiisk. The performance lasted eight hours, the sailors taking turns to go on stage or sit out in the hall.

p After reading his First Cavalry Army Mayakovsky said to Vsevolod Vishnevsky that the play was a continuation of his own line. The drama, the exaggeration, the scale and the extravaganza are all there in Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe, The Bedbug and The Bathhouse. And Vishnevsky’s diaries, published after his death, are full of recollections of Mayakovsky.

p What would you call An Optimistic Tragedy? It is a hymn to the Revolution and to seamen (to quote Vishnevsky). It is at the same time an epic and a tragedy. A woman commissar comes to grips with a company of sailors who had turned anarchist, and wins. Vishnevsky pitches death against laughter, brutality against lofty romance. His plays may be called unique political symphonies reproducing life’s many and different voices.

p Like Pogodin, Vsevolod Vishnevsky did make mistakes in some of his plays. Pogodin, in his play about the three students going out as pioneers to the virgin lands, ignored the heroic element entirely, while Vishnevsky paid excessive tribute to the cult of Stalin’s personality in his screenplay Unforgettable 1919. But I shall always regard Vsevolod Vishnevsky as one of the most remarkable artists born of the socialist revolution.

p There is one other trend in Soviet dramaturgy which is allied with the traditions of Chekhov’s psychological drama and Gorky’s intellectual drama. Of Pogodin one may say that to a certain extent he believed in following the Gorky tradition. In the plays of Alexander Afinogenov, on the other hand, one may discern features of the Ibsen and the Chekhov traditions. His The Crank, Fear, The Remote Past, Mashenka and On the Eve all have a small number of dramatis personae. The scene is not set in workshops, nor do his characters speak at mass meetings; more often than not they are shown in a family circle. His plays are not broken up into numerous episodes but are divided into the conventional three or four acts. They are as lyrical as Chekhov’s, and yet they are full of suspense and sharp conflicts.

p Afinogenov’s plays (like Pogodin’s trilogy about Lenin) have been produced by the Moscow Art Theatre. The players endowed the main characters—engineers, old intellectuals, veteran revolutionaries, romantic young girls and war widows—with the gentle 179 charm which distinguishes the idiom of the author. Alexander Afinogenov died on October 29, 1941, at the age of 37, when a nazi plane dropped a bomb on the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party where he happened to be at the time.

p I would not make so bold as to assert that all the modern Soviet plays on modern themes appearing on the stage provide the actors with suitable material for really challenging interpretations. Be that as it may, Soviet plays do show a sensitive response to all that is new and typical in the life of our society. Such, for instance, is Alexander Korneichuk’s Wings which speaks of trust in man as one of the basic principles of our morality; and such are Stein’s Personal. Record and Astoria Hotel. In some plays—for example in Victor Rosov’s Good Luck and A. Volodin’s Factory Girl—we observe a tendency to leave out heroism altogether (which had become a sort of canon) and to portray Soviet life in a more down-to-earth manner.

Unquestionably, the overwhelming tendency to interpret life only in its heroic, romantic aspect characteristic of the period of the Stalin personality cult produced a one-sided picture and blurred the lively struggle going on between the existing historical contradictions. But the other extreme, the deliberate evasion of heroism, must inevitably lead to “earthing” the people who are building up a new world. Gorky was quite right when he said that our age is dramatic in every respect, that it is an age abounding in conflicts. And yet characters shaped in conditions of truly Shakespearian contrasts are not so easy to portray. In this respect Soviet dramatists have to be pathfinders.