‘The Arts in Russia under Stalin’
This is the passage omitted in the New York Review
of Books, 19 October 2000, p. 60
The same gap between the
young and old is perceptible in the other arts, in the theatre, in music,
in the ballet. Whatever has grown without a definite break from a rich
past and leans on a pre-revolutionary tradition has, by firmly clinging
to such old and tried supports, managed to preserve its standards into
the present. Thus the Moscow Arts Theatre, while universally acknowledged
to have declined from the extraordinary level of its golden age, when Chekhov
and Gorky wrote for it, nevertheless preserves a remarkable standard of
individual acting and of inspired ensemble playing which rightly continues
to make it the envy of the world. Its repertoire, since the post-1937 era,
is confined either to old plays or to such tame new, conformist pieces
as have relatively little character of their own, and simply act as vehicles
in which gifted naturalistic actors can exhibit their superb, old-fashioned
skills; what the public remembers is for the most part the acting and not
the play. Similarly the Maly (Little) Theatre continues to give admirable
performances of Ostrovsky’s comedies, which were its mainstay in the nineteenth
century; the acting of plays attempted since the Revolution, whether classical
or modern, at the Maly tends too often to sink to the level of the repertory
companies directed by Ben Greet or Frank Benson. One or two of the smaller
Moscow theatres perform classical plays with verve and imagination, for
example Ermolova’s theatre and the Transport Theatre in Moscow, and one
or two of the little theatres in Leningrad. The best performances given
even in these theatres are of classical pieces; for example, Goldoni, Sheridan,
Scribe; modern plays go less well, not so much because of old-fashioned
methods of acting, as because of the inevitable tameness of the material
itself.
As for opera and ballet,
wherever past tradition exists to guide it, it acquits itself honourably,
if dully. When something new is put on, for example the new ballet Gayaneh
by the Armenian composer Khachaturyan, playing in Leningrad this year,
it is capable of displaying exuberance and temperament, which disarm the
spectator by the gusto and delight in the art of the dancers. But it is
also, particularly in Moscow, capable of sinking to depths of vulgarity
of décor and production (and of music too) which can scarcely ever
have been surpassed even in Paris under the Second Empire; the inspiration
of the scenes of clumsily heaped-up opulence with which the Bolshoy Theatre
in Moscow is so lavish derives at least as much from the tawdry splendours
of the early Hollywood of ten and even twenty years ago, as from anything
conceived in Offenbach’s day; and such crude display is made to seem all
the more grotesque and inappropriate by the individual genius of a truly
great lyrical and dramatic dancer like Ulanova, or of such impeccable new
virtuosi as Dudinskaya, Lepeshinskaya and the ageing Semenova, Preobrazhensky,
Sergeev and Ermolaev. In either case it lacks the fusion of undeviatingly
precise, inexorable discipline with imaginative originality and wide range,
and that combination of intensity, lyricism and elegance which had raised
the Russian ballet to its former unattainable height.
There are still fewer signs
of new life in the two great opera houses of Moscow and Leningrad, which
confine themselves to a highly stereotyped repertory of the best-known
Russian and Italian works, varied by occasional performances of, for example,
Carmen.
Minor theatres, in search of politically innocent amusement, offer their
clients operettas by Offenbach, Lecocq and Hervé, performed with
more gusto than finish, but vastly welcomed as a contrast with the drab
monotony of daily Soviet life. The contrast between age and youth is again
noticeably present, not so much in the ballet (which could not exist without
a perpetual recruitment of young dancers), as on the dramatic stage where
few, if any, outstanding actors or actresses have come forward during the
last ten years. The audiences seem clearly aware of this, and whenever
I hinted at this to my anonymous neighbours in the Moscow theatres, it
was invariably assented to so rapidly that it must be a very obvious commonplace.
Such casual neighbours in the theatre almost invariably expand dolefully
on the regrettable absence among the younger people of dramatic talent,
and even more of the right sensibility – with which the older actors, still
on the stage (some whose careers go back to the early years of the century),
are so richly endowed – and one or two have wondered whether the theatres
of the West do not produce better young actors than the Soviet Union. Perhaps
‘the tradition is not so rigid and oppressive there’. Even the Arts Theatre
seems to have stopped dead in technique and feeling – or else has been
forced to go back to the days before the First World War.
This combination of discouragement
of all innovation – the name of the purged producer Meyerhold is scarcely
spoken aloud – together with a considerable encouragement of the stage
as such is bound, unless something occurs to interrupt the process, to
lead in the relatively near future to a widening chasm between accomplished
but unreal, and contemporary but commonplace and provincial, styles of
acting. On the other side it must be said that the childlike eagerness
and enthusiasm of Soviet readers and Soviet theatrical audiences is probably
without parallel in the world. The existence of State-subsidised theatres
and opera, as well as of regional publishing houses, throughout the Soviet
Union is not merely a part of a bureaucratic plan, but responds to a very
genuine and insufficiently satisfied popular demand.
Crown copyright material in the British
Public Record Office is reproduced by permission of the Controller of Her
Majesty’s Stationery Office; revisions © The Isaiah Berlin Literary
Trust 1997, 2000