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In medias res: A Diary of the Moscow Theater Season, 2007-2008

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Monika Greenleaf
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Abstract

In this essay, Monika Greenleaf explores some reasons for, and directions of, the Moscow theater's growth as a cultural stimulus in Vladimir Putin's increasingly imperial, ideologically unified Russia. Focusing on four factors, the first part suggests why the theater, unlike the film industry, resisted collapse in the 1990s: directors’ studio theaters, the new “writer's theater,” the development of “autonomous and self-sustaining” institutions, and theater finance. The second part examines two functions of the theater in a postliterate age: to forge a richer sense of Russian identity by offering mimetic contact with, and choice among, many epochs of its historical and verbal heritage and to offer a traditional locus of resistance to the new regime of privatized spaces and bodies. Using a selection of current plays that reproduce past prose works in the present, Greenleaf analyzes the aesthetic effect of this encounter on the audience and its potential ideational ramifications.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , Summer 2008 , pp. 422 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

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References

1. Nancy Condee, “Imperial Ectoplasm” (part of “National Cinema“: Pittsburgh Film Colloquium Roundtable), KinoKultura, no. 6 (October 2004) at www.kinokultura.com/ october04.html (last consulted 22 February 2008).

2. This section, which deals with the re-establishment of theatrical institutions following perestroika, synthesizes the work of a number of prominent theater scholars, directors, and commentators. See Elena Grueva's experienced overview, “Konets antrakta,“ Stengazeta, 6 November 2007, as well as her many reviews of specific plays in Stengazeta, Vash dosug, Itogi, and Kommersant. For simplicity, I will cite from the articles by Freedman, John and Ross, Yana collected in Tom Sellar, ed., Russian Theater: The Tzventy-First Century, special issue of Theater 36, no. 1 (2006)Google Scholar; John Freedman: “Russian Theater in the Twenty-First Century: A Critic's Journal,” 5-25; Yana Ross, “Russia's New Drama: From Togliatti to Moscow,“ 26-43; Nina Karpova ‘“My Vast Country': Russia's Regional Theaters in Transition,“ 96-107; and “Art Is Not for Fear: Russia's New Directors in Conversation,” 130-49 (directors interviewed by Tom Sellar and Yana Ross, trans. Yana Ross). John Freedman's theater review column in the Moscoxo Times, as well as his collected essays in Moscow Performances: The New Russian Theater 1991-1996 (London, 1998), and its sequel volumes, are invaluable resources. For a more critical view of the current Russian theater, one that tends to locate its glory days in the past and concentrates on experimental drama, see Davydova, Marina, Konets teatral'noi epokhi (Moscow, 2005)Google Scholar; and articles in the collection by Maksimova, V A., ed., Pro Scenium: Voprosy teatra (Moscow, 2006)Google Scholar; Natal'ia Kaz'mina, “Kto derzhit pugovitsu,“ 6-31; Grigorii Zaslavskii, “Sovremennaia p'esa: Na polputi mezhdu zhizn'iu i stsenoi,” 3 2 - 57; Genadii Demin, “Russkii teatr nachala XXI veka: Vremia vyzhivaniia?” 76-97; Mariia Khalizeva, “Teatr ‘Satirikon': Ot obshchedostupnosti k khudozhestvennosti,” 162-72; and Marina Svetaeva, “'Razumnyi konservatizm i kul'turnaia traditsiia …’ Rossiiskie imperatorskie teatry,” 221-335. For a broader-based history of theater and its societal reception, see Dmitrievskii, Vitalii Nikolaevich, Teatr i zriteli: Otechestvennyi teatr v sisteme otnoshenii stseny i publiki. Ot istokov do nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg, 2007)Google Scholar.

3. Ross, “Russia's New Drama,” 35.

4. Freedman, “Russian Theater in the Twenty-First Century,” 9-11, 21-22.

5. Council of Europe/ERI Carts, Compendium Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe, 8th ed. (2007), Russia/ 6. Financing of Culture at www.culturalpolicies.net/web/russia.php?aid=61 (last consulted 22 February 2008).

6. Memories of John Browning: The Lhevinne Legacy Continues, DVD, directed by Salome Ramras Arkatov (Los Angeles, 2007).

7. Maria Shevtsova, Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (London, 2004).

8. I will highlight nine of the forty-eight plays I saw during fall 2007. The dates of their premieres range from the beloved Fomenko's Odna absoliutno schastlivaia derevnia (20 June 2000) and Voina i mir, nachalo romana (7 February 2001) to the recent Zhenit'ba Belugina (24 January 2007) and Zatovarennaia bochkotara (7 September 2007). The point is that the repertory system allows them to coexist in close proximity.

9. The question of the “middle class” in Russia has always been a vexed one. Throughout the nineteenth century, the wealthy kuptsy and the lower-class urban meshchane (shopkeepers and craftsmen) were legally differentiated, the latter being assigned to specific towns and slobody and needing to obtain special passports even for short trips. For example, Chekhov's father, a serf until his father “bought out” the family's freedom in 1841, was first registered in the meshchanskoe soslovie while he worked in sugar-production, then was engaged by a kupets and “vyshel iz meshchanskogo soslovia” in order to join first a lower, than a higher kupecheskaia gil'da. I thank Anna Muza for her clarifications and for directing me to the useful sites: http://www.pseudology.org/razbory/Sosloviya_Russia.htm (last consulted 18 February 2008) and http://chehov.niv.ru/chehov/family/semya.htm (last consulted 18 February 2008). See Aleksandr Minkin, “Tainy Vishnevogo sada,” Moskovskii komsomolets, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,12 December 2005, for a fascinating examination of the lower-class merchant Lopakhin's centrality to the play.

10. Aksenov, Vasilii, Zatovarennaia bochkotara (Moscow, 2006), 3–70.Google Scholar

11. Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2005).Google Scholar

12. A Sinologist, Boris Vakhtin was virtually unknown as a writer. His two novellas Odna absoliutno schastlivaia derevnia and Dublenka were first published by Ardis: Dublenka: Dvepovesti (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982).

13. The main stage's hall has six hundred seats, but there will also be a smaller stage. John Freedman, “A Theater with a View,” Moscow Times, 25 January 2008.

14. The number of spectators dropped from almost 72.9 million in 1985 to 27.6 million in 1998 and grew slightly to 31 million in 2001. This figure decreased again in 2004 to 28.2 million (196 per thousand). Cited from Council of Europe/ERI Carts, Compendium Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe, Russia/ 6. Financing of Culture, 6.1 Short Overview