In examining Chekhov’s engagement with the Moscow Art Theater, Sharon Marie Carnicke stages the serendipitous convergence of two worlds, showing us how Chekhov’s fledgling work as a playwright met with the equally fledgling theatrical dreams of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko to yield two mutually reinforcing cultural edifices that would eventually transform theatrical practices the world over.

Providing an overview of Chekhov on the American stage, James Loehlin emphasizes the game-changing effect of Chekhov, Stanislavsky, and the Moscow Art Theater on American acting and playwriting, while offering a sense of the rich history of production and experimental adaptation that Chekhov encountered both off-Broadway and across the USA.

Tolstoy’s relationship with staged art was anxious and passionate. He was not a man of the theater – of the performing arts, music was his passion – and he was highly critical of many playwrights, such as Shakespeare and Chekhov, whom he felt abused the medium. And yet he authored several powerfully effective dramas (comedies and tragedies) as well as numerous experimental dramatized folktales and parables, and even a quasi-fictive version of his own diaries in dramatic form titled A Light Shines in the Darkness. Tolstoy composed theatrical works in two distinct periods, early and late, on either side of his spiritual turning point. This essay discusses the major plays and one exemplary didactic folk miniature (The First Distiller, 1886) in the context of nineteenth-century Russian theatrical resources, official censorship, and Tolstoy’s own evolving sense of theater’s “infectiousness” as an instrument of communication and moral growth, moving from the unsuccessful farce The Infected Family (1863) through The Power of Darkness (1886), The Fruits of Enlightenment (1889), and The Living Corpse (1900). On the stage as in his prose, Tolstoy emerges as a “realist” only in the most superficial sense. In both venues he is a rebel.

Brecht the theater theoretician is better described as the theater practitioner. His innovative concepts that have come to mark the modern theater were the product of his reflections on the experiments and lessons he learned from his collaborative work in the theater and on the stage. In short, Brecht’s staging practices ground the “Brechtian” approach to theater, even though he never articulated a formal acting method, sometimes contradicted himself, and rarely recommended that actors or theater practitioners with whom he worked read his theoretical writings. This essay traces the development of key concepts around notions of nonmimetic realism and anti-illusionary theater that fed into the epic theater as well as his views of anti-consumerist spectatorship, produced in the theater through episodic structure, distancing or Verfremdung, historicization, and the social Gestus. The centrality of contradiction and dialectical thinking became for Brecht the basis of negation and imagining innovative forms in the theater for his political agenda of changing society, most clearly accomplished in his model of the Lehrstück or learning play aimed at the collective learning process of the actors.

Despite mixed reactions to the first performance of Carmen on the Russian stage in 1878 in Saint-Petersburg, it rapidly became an indispensable part of the country’s operatic repertoire.

After the Revolution, the popularity of Carmen transcended the stage, lending its name to new perfumes and the Toreador’s tune to the ‘March of the Working-Peasants Army’. In theatre, meanwhile, new trends were aligning the opera with the tastes of proletarian audiences. Seemingly embodying the ideological triangle of realism, narodnost (closeness to the ‘people’) and – by some selective argumentation – optimism, Carmen provided a benchmark for new Soviet opera.

With Carmen’s popularity came the abstraction of the heroine from the operatic context. Borrowing from Shakespeare studies and the concept of ‘Hamletism’, this chapter will coin the term ‘Carmenism’ to refer to the tendency to interpret Carmen as a symbol, which in turn influences the interpretation of Carmen the opera, and thus keeps the music and its source alive for the appropriating nation or era. Through the prism of ‘Carmenism’ and using representative case studies, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how the various Russian/Soviet adaptations not only reflected the socio-political context of the country but also had a role in forming that culture.