1 - Russian drama: Suicidal escape from the judgment of existence

Summary

As Russian critics unanimously agree, the case of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide cast a shadow on Russian drama of the 1980s. It was completed in 1930 and condemned to 57 years of non-existence for political reasons.

Several attempts to stage or print the work ended in failure. The censorship was eventually lifted in 1987, when The Suicide was published by “Sovremennaya Dramaturgia.” Later, several soviet theatres staged the play (though it is disputed which was the first to do so). But The Suicide was first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place, Stratford, on 13 June 1979.

No one could have imagined that the revival of this legendary drama would prove the relevance of the topic of a suicidal escape from the judgement of existence in contemporary Russian drama. Even the most recent studies on this subject indicate only the opposing, generic tendencies in Russian dramaturgy of the 1980s.

First of all—the ever strong penchant for “broad, epic presentation of the reality” in the name of journalistic or “sociological slogans.” According to Ippolit Zborovec, this model performed “purely ideological and myth-creating” functions.

Secondly—the renewed attempts at lyricization of the presented world87—following the psychological American arts (especially Tennessee Williams), which had been highly influential since the 1970s.

Somewhere in between these genre trends distinguished by the theorists lay new thematic solutions that started to appear at the same time when Russians began to discover the dramas of Sławomir Mrożek, Janusz Głowacki and Ireneusz Iredyński—authors who had so far been absent on the scenes of Russian theatres at that time.

But all this was already happening at the end of the Soviet world, which Erdman's protagonist could not accept, nearly annihilating the author himself and his work.

Erdman

It is not difficult to come up with the reasons why The Suicide had been censored for so many years. This apparently pro-NEP, anti-bourgeois comedy was an accurate (and hence dangerous) description of a system, whose main purpose was to suppress and annihilate the individual, in favor of the masses and the world of triumphant ideology.