31 - Theater

Summary

Dostoevsky expressed great interest in the theater, which played an important role in the culture of his time and profoundly influenced story elements, narrative style, and key ideas in his fiction and nonfiction works. He attended the theater regularly and thought about, discussed, and wrote about it in letters, articles, and a review, as well as in his fiction. He associated with theater people in various ways and made several unsuccessful attempts to write dramas. While incarcerated, he participated in prison productions, and he is known to have played the Postmaster in Gogol's The Inspector General (1835) for a Literary Fund benefit in 1860. As he got older, Dostoevsky gave more and more public readings, both from his own works and from those of Pushkin and Gogol. Leading actors of the day also gave readings from Dostoevsky's work: the great serf-born actor and director Mikhail Shchepkin (1788–1863) probably gave the first, from Dostoevsky's Poor Folk (1846), in 1849; later, Marmeladov's monologue from Crime and Punishment (1866) became a favorite performance piece of St. Petersburg tragedian Pavel Vasiliev. Although no drama of Dostoevsky's survives, his contribution to Russian theater is noteworthy. Many critics have commented on his fiction's theatrical and dramatic qualities and its influence on contemporary and later playwrights; in 1878, with “A Charming Dream” (based on Uncle's Dream, 1859), Dostoevsky saw the first of an ever-increasing number of stage and screen dramatizations of his works.

Dostoevsky experienced two quite different epochs in Russian theater history, divided by his ten years of Siberian exile (1849–59). In the early nineteenth century, Romanticism claimed Russian theater from neoclassicism and produced a small but influential core of Russian dramatic masterpieces by Alexander Griboedov, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Nikolai Gogol; nevertheless, in the 1830s and 1840s, Russian theater remained essentially a foreign implant, with the majority of available fare either translating or closely imitating Western European models. When Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg in 1859, however, Russian theater was coming of age and had started claiming a central place in the national literary culture with the works of Alexander Ostrovsky, Alexei Tolstoy, Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ivan Turgenev, and Alexei Pisemsky. In this period, Dostoevsky experienced (and indirectly contributed to) the flowering of Russian nineteenth-century realist drama and the corresponding triumph of the “natural” style of acting over earlier neoclassical declamatory techniques.