BITS OF LIGHT IN A GRAY WORLD: CULTURAL LIFE IN THE SOVIET UNION
Medvedev, Roy
Certain changes in the USSR's domestic and foreign policy, the swift replacement of high-ranking leaders, the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, and, of course, the Chernobyl disaster have riveted...
...These include Stavitsky's No...
...And the audience also responded with laughter to Siry's bitter joke: "In the spring we plant seeds, and in the fall we harvest . . . plenums...
...Certain changes in the USSR's domestic and foreign policy, the swift replacement of high-ranking leaders, the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, and, of course, the Chernobyl disaster have riveted all attention, causing little notice to be paid to the recent changes in Soviet culture that became increasingly distinct in 1986...
...Responsiveness of the Theater UNDOUBTEDLY, BECAUSE THE THEATER iS one of the most "efficient" forms of art...
...But, not used to speaking, the woman says nothing...
...At the end of the 1950s after the Twentieth Party Congress, the changes in society's atmosphere found their most immediate reflection in poetry...
...In the Russian republic alone, there are more than 70 theaters which could sell only 50 percent or fewer of their tickets...
...But in those years the situation was even worse in the realm of culture...
...As he rose, he brought "his own" people up with him...
...But experience tell us that there can be no real democracy as long as there are no opposition parties...
...And why you're here in the first place...
...It is hard to get tickets for Radzinsky's The Theater of Nero's and Seneca's Time at the Mayakovsky theater in Moscow...
...One feels like hurling at this art the accusation that it "does not belong to the nation...
...Many doors were closed to the creative intelligentsia, though those to the West were opened a bit...
...Just a year ago the government took strong steps against alcoholism, but, by fall 1983, the country's theaters were running some twenty plays on the fatal effects of alcohol...
...Personal garden plots are a step back...
...No one listens to anyone else...
...Theater attendance has decreased and, on average, Soviet theaters are only 70 percent full...
...In two hours the studio took down 800 questions, some of which clearly made the ministers and academicians uncomfortable, unaccustomed as they were to "accounting" to an audience of millions...
...There were even some good films . Red Berries, The Belorussian Station, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, Your Son, 0 Earth, and A Train Station for Two...
...The play's main thrust, which so pleased Ligachev, was that Vybornov would rid himself only of the most incorrigible coworkers and the rest would do their duty differently, with the exercise of conscience...
...His mother is dead when he arrives and, after her funeral, Vybornov unexpectedly shows up at the home of Vazhnov, who is celebrating his silver wedding anniversary with his guests...
...And was it all for nothing...
...When there is a great deal of half-truths, ostentation, pomposity, superficiality, and plain hogwash, it's hard for the truth to shine through...
...THERE IS ONE SPECIAL CHARACTER in the play, the Outsider, a part played by Yankovsky...
...Others have simply been silent for a considerable time...
...Vybornov is sixtyfive years old and had begun his career in that small town—during the war as the head of a tungsten mine and later as the secretary of the district and provincial committees...
...Vybornov, an important figure in Moscow, travels to a small and remote provincial town because his mother has fallen seriously ill...
...the "defense counsel" and the "witnesses" present their versions...
...The third notable play of the season, The Dictatorship of Conscience, was performed by the Lenin Komsomol Theater...
...Siry also exclaims, "And their own Soviet state takes more from the muzhiks than the money lenders used to," though the Soviet audience knows that the money lenders crushed the countryside with debts way before the revolution...
...And when a kolkhoz meeting removes the kolkhoz chairman from office because of his drunkenness and even expels his cronies from the party, in disregard of the District Committee's recommendation, Martynov views this as a "revolt" and as impermissible anarchy...
...All people care about is themselves, themselves...
...All the same, the last fifteen years have seen a decline in Soviet theater...
...On one program devoted to problems at school young people spoke about their personal freedom and rights as they applied to their lives at school...
...Vampilov was probably the sole playwright to earn a major reputation and that, unfortunately, came after his tragic death...
...Wake up...
...I lived by your ideas and what you said...
...I know, I worked for you...
...To turn back now...
...In this case, the "courtroom" is the editorial offices of a contemporary youth newspaper...
...Stalin's death changes the village and Borzov is replaced by a new leader, Martynov...
...The district's agriculture is in decline, and only one wealthy collective farm remains, whose chairman, Siry, is related to Vazhnov and is a guest at the celebration...
...All the action takes place in the new, enormous house that Vazhnov built with Goloshchapov's help, based on fictitious cost estimates...
...And your power...
...No one denies that in the 1970s the USSR's rate of economic growth began to slow to the point of stagnation...
...For various reasons, the following people, a list by no means complete, became emigres: Rostopovich, Solzhenitsyn, Vladimov, Nekrasov, Brodsky, Aksyonov, Kopelev, Zinoviev, Lyubimov, Tarkovsky, Neizvestny, Rabin, Voinovich, and Etkind...
...Notable changes for the better have occurred in local television as well, for example in Georgia and Stavropol, where I recently spent a month...
...This decline in the theater is explained not by the competition from film and television but by the low level of the performances and the boring plays, a situation that is changing...
...The Soviet Ministry of Culture had long denied permission for its staging and only after Politburo member Ligachev attended a performance was the play allowed into the repertoire...
...TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY RICHARD LOURIE...
...It touches neither the nation's genuine joy nor its pain—Roshchin...
...Openness," both in Lenin's understanding of the term and in the current understanding, is far from any assumption of freedom for an opposition...
...But why the theater...
...But the majority of viewers in Moscow thought that the Americans had gained the upper hand...
...And not just at our district...
...Such compromise of conscience allowed some of these people to assume high positions in the cultural hierarchy but ruled out the possibility of their creating works of artistic value...
...Our art is like our commerce: you won't find what you need and you won't need what you find...
...All the district's affairs are in the hands not of the rather stupid Vazhnov, but of the clever and cynical Goloshchapov, a bribe-taker who has sent Poletaev, editor of the local newspaper, to prison for attempting to criticize the authorities...
...We're overstimulating the people...
...The performance takes the form of a "courtroom" debate, after the revolution a favorite form among young people for defending their ideas...
...And death has claimed a good many of our best people in the last fifteen years, including Tvardovsky, Romm, Tendryakov, Trifonov, Shostakovich, Abramov, Simonov, Bek, Khachaturian, and Dumbadze...
...Soon we'll have reached the point of giving the land back...
...I want the good life too,"—this was said openly and cynically by one of the people who made the false and ostentatious epic film The Liberation...
...With that eagle eye of his...
...Many of the plays staged last season not only enjoyed great success in attendance but were widely commented upon by the country's leading newspapers and magazines...
...Several theaters have staged successful performances of Kudryatsev's Ivan and the Madonna and Dozorsky's The Last Visitor...
...And this helped the theater begin a restructuring more rapid than has proven possible in fiction, film, music, or the visual arts...
...The play—entitled Say It—was staged by Fokin, a young director at the Ermolov Theater in Moscow...
...It opens to music written by the composer Mynbaev based on Pushkin's poem "The Possessed," lines from which Dostoevsky used as the epigraph to his novel The Possessed, whose theme was the degeneration of revolutionary ideas and of the revolutionaries themselves...
...These plays cause the audience to think not only about the hardships suffered in the countryside after the war but also about the life lived in all rural Russia, and the life of the whole nation...
...Goloshchapov is an overt Stalinist, and his ideal is "order" based on fear and constraint...
...A good number of talented cultural figures, having won the popularity they deserved in the 1960s, were either unable or unwilling to withstand the pressure exerted on them and began going not against the current but with it, betraying the truth of art in favor of the official embellishment and distortion of reality...
...We suffered losses of another sort as well...
...In a word, changes are being felt in nearly every realm of culture...
...Of course, the creation of spiritual values continued even during the last fifteen years...
...The "prosecutors" attack the reality of the communist world...
...Burlatsky's Only One Night staged by the 48 Moscow Satire Theater was also noteworthy...
...You local pashas...
...You ran it like it was 49 your own...
...Even the "punks" had a chance to have their say, those extremist and unprincipled adolescents between fifteen and seventeen whose very existence was denied in the USSR just three or four years ago...
...Vybornov had always given them support in times of trouble...
...In the opening scenes we see a poor village in 1952, tyrannized by the all-powerful and unscrupulous District Committee Secretary, Borzov, whose main task is not the growing of grain but the taking of it from the kolkhozniks...
...But the vestiges of "Borzovism" do not disappear immediately...
...Literature is a very individual matter, which is both its strength and its weakness...
...The names of Yevtushenko and Bondarev will suffice in this context...
...At first distracted, but then with increasing confidence, Vybornov repeats what his mother has said to him: "Power without conscience is shameless...
...How many years did we lead, mobilize, and support the people...
...The viewing audience in Stavropol looks forward to a special semi-monthly program called "Television's Satirical Lens...
...These changes have an importance that is not confined to themselves...
...If you have something to say, say it...
...When surveying the path taken during the last fifteen years, many of our major cultural figures now voice very critical opinions: Now, as never before, we are drowning in a sea of the illegible, the unexacting, spiritual illiteracy— Valentin Rasputin...
...Many talented people focused their attention on subjects far removed from the present...
...He leaves for Moscow to assume a new high post but now he will do his job differently...
...An absorbing and pointed interview was done in March 1986 with Academician Likhachev, a representative of the moderate liberal wing of the Soviet intelligentsia...
...Often, the times compelled this...
...That I don't understand...
...The creative intelligentsia continued not only to search but to discover, taking pleasure in new books by Aitmatov, Bykov, Astafev, Zhigulin, and Okudzhava, to name but a few...
...Vazhnov's conscience begins gradually to awaken and he is even ready to give up his house and let it be turned into a kindergarten...
...Say It...
...According to newspaper reports, he has been released from his position "pending a new job" but he has not received his new assignment...
...In the final scene, speakers at a party conference read speeches whose texts had been written the previous year...
...In the past year only works of prose captured all the critic's attention: Rasputin's novella The Fire and Astafev's novel The Sad Detective...
...Whether it was cruel or democratic, loyalist or voluntarist, doesn't matter...
...You've forgotten your soul and your conscience...
...one would have to describe it in terms of decline, not stagnation...
...Theaters in the Russian republic had a million fewer customers in 1984 than in 1983...
...The moral is simple—until the people begin to speak, there will be no changes...
...The principal reason for the decline in the theater is a general and not only a literary one...
...As we have seen, the theater has been able to "survive" in the age of movies and television...
...In one go, "from boundary to boundary, along the mountain tops," so to speak...
...Vybornov has not been to his home town in twenty years and is indignant at much of what he sees...
...The stage presents an interesting but well-rehearsed debate...
...It's terrible, Gena, the life you people lead...
...These are outstanding works which just two or three years ago might have been rejected by publishers as "slanderous...
...A new play can be created more quickly than a new film or novel...
...Equally critical observations on the decline in the opera were recently made by the Soviet National Artist, Pokrovsky, on the decline in stage shows by the composer Zhurbin, the decline in architecture by the artist Kumankov, and the general decline in culture by Academician Likhachev...
...During the initial performances, he also addressed the audience, drawing them into the debate as well...
...This is your mother speaking to you...
...The same is said to Vybornov by Siry, the kolkhoz chairman, reminding him of Goloshchapov's machinations which Vybornov had encouraged at one point, and of Vybornov's friendship with the swindler, Berendeev, whom Vybornov had recommended for the post of Province Committee Secretary and who had recently been dismissed from that post...
...A tremendous stir was caused by the program "Problems—Research--Solutions," in which leaders of industry, agriculture, and science were asked questions by telephone...
...All that matters is that you keep your chair...
...Not only criticism is on the increase...
...the country's entire cultural panorama is slowly changing...
...THIS LIST COULD BE EXTENDED, but three plays were the main events of the season, both in artistic and political terms...
...To believe our press, the Soviet side "won" the debate...
...A television debate—"Leningrad-Seattle"— took place in the spring of 1986 in which the Americans spoke openly about their concern for human rights in the USSR, and about Poland and Afghanistan...
...That was the end of audience participation...
...District life is depicted in another play worthy of mention, the stage version of Ovechkin's book District Days, which started the "village prose" school in the 1950s...
...Gorbachev also attended a performance, as did many of the delegates to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress...
...As a well-known writer put it, when he watches television he feels like hurling an iron at the screen...
...The theater posed more questions than it answered but, at the same time, it was mastering new styles and learning the lessons of Western drama...
...Of course, in the end it is Lenin's ideas that gain the upper hand, but the very idea of putting them in doubt and allowing the enemies of Leninism to speak their piece seemed blasphemous to the Ministry of Culture and it was only the intervention of Politburo member Ligachev and the Central Committee Secretary Yakovlev that enabled Shatrov's play to remain in the theater company's repertoire...
...To deepen its analysis, a new character was added to the play, the Writer, the young Ovechkin, who enters into a polemic with Martynov, defending the people's rights...
...society's real life still lacks genuine democracy...
...The play's subject is not a complicated one...
...Have you really become like that too...
...If it's a question of what's in first place in culture, there can be no argument that in 1986 it was the theater, primarily that of Moscow and Leningrad...
...For a very long time we have been producing a literature that is oversimplified and glossy...
...Vysotsky and Shushkin died before they had reached the age of forty-five...
...Until now, interesting programs were a rarity here...
...Events of ancient history prove relevant to the contemporary playgoer as well...
...He was executed in the 1930s...
...Livestock for personal use is a step back...
...They reflect political moods and currents and, in turn, influence the development of political currents, and even movements...
...A milkmaid is reading a report but Martynov takes the text away from her and says: "Say it...
...But the theater rests on a stable group that forms solid traditions, styles, and schools...
...Indignant, Vybornov cries out at the festive table: How far are you people going here...
...most of what was shown was old, boring films, and only sports events could draw a large audience...
...But to no less a degree this was the work of the mediocrities whose writings created an atmosphere without principles or standards—Astafev...
...We talk a lot about democracy these days...
...and the "objective judges" issue their verdicts...
...Of 46 the hundreds of poets accepted into the Writers' Union in the last fifteen years, I would be hard pressed to name even one whose lyrics and long poems could have won nationwide attention...
...One of the spectators who rose to speak, said: "My grandfather was a socialist and a Menshevik...
...At this 50 point, a group of actors symbolizing the people begins walking back and forth on the stage, repeating one thing over and over: "Say it...
...But the audience is well aware whom the roguish Goloshchapov has in mind when he says: I sometimes wish that he could come back from the dead and take a look around...
...Theaters function in good times and in bad when novels by excellent writers are being rejected by publishers and film directors are without work and without pay...
...The current secretary of the district committee, Vazhnov, was his former chauffeur, and Goloshchapov, the chairman of the district soviet, had once been his assistant...
...But at the whole world, the way he knew how...
...During the last fifteen years it has been the theater that has suffered the fewest losses in personnel...
...Dodin, a stage director with the Leningrad Dramatic Theater, mounted stage versions of Abramov's novels The House and Brothers and Sisters...
...Of course, today too certain lyrics and even long poems by Yevtushenko and Voznesensky have been the center of great attention, but this was not so much a poetic as a political phenomenon...
...Have you forgotten what it's all about...
...The departure of so many talents from our culture, albeit for various reasons, has not been matched by the appearance of new talents...
...Films are made by a group that disperses after the film is complete...
...And among the prose writers, I could name only one—Valentin Rasputin...
...Do you think I can't see it...
...Vybornov had already known about the arrest of their former friend, Poletaev, the editor, but had not found the time to look into the case...
...It was, of course, difficult for these people to work in the stifling atmosphere of the last Brezhnev years, and their experiments were usually limited to subjects of personal confusion and "marginal" people...
...You little tsars...
...The appearance in the press of such criticisms attests to a change in Soviet culture, one which in part began spontaneously and in part is a reflection of the struggle taking place on the political level...
...First, there is the Moscow Art Theater's performance based on Masharin's play The Silver Wedding Anniversary, which had been thoroughly reworked by the theater...
...I would rather see documentary films than any dramatic trash...
...A deputy minister of education was there to answer the children's questions and sometimes did not seem at all confident in doing so...
...I am tired of the mediocre fiction, all the grayness which fills our magazines and which our publishers publish...
...With each passing year we are increasingly deluged with novels of no use to anyone but their authors, paintings that are even of no use to their painters, films striking in their lack of artistic personality, and songs that can neither be sung nor listened to...
...In Goloshchapov's opinion, dissatisfied machine operators should not be given prizes but prison sentences...
...There is another character in the playVybornov's dead mother, who appears on the stage as a ghost and as memories, saying to her son: Everything's different now...
...Changes in Television SOVIET TELEVISION HAS BEEN MORE ENERGETIC in responding to the changes in the political atmosphere...
...To restore things back to what they were...
...There was also a good response to the new program "The 12th Floor," which is aimed 47 at a younger audience...
...As in others of his plays, the author, Shatrov, builds his action on the contrast between Lenin's ideas and what has happened since his death...
...In this regard, the enormous success enjoyed by Pikul's "historical" trash and by Standyuk's and Chakovsky's pseudo-historical novels demonstrates a degradation not only of the writer's craft but of the reader's taste as well...
...We've spoiled the people...
...Their Soviet opponents strove to parry the attack by condemning the American way of life...
...Without studying the changes in our cultural life at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, it is difficult to understand many of the important political events of the last twenty years, including the dissident movement with all its various leanings and shades...
...At one point, in kindergarten or grade school, we all learned the song about Stalin, "From Boundary to Boundary, Along the Mountain Tops...
...You're an evil force...
...Strangely, Krushchev is not among the cast of characters, though without the part he played, the Cuban crisis would neither have arisen nor been safely resolved...
...is possibly the first play to have not only raised the issue of the party's responsibility but its guilt to the people for its poor leadership...
...THE PLAY CONTAINS MANY ALLUSIONS, some which are not clear to all...
...Martynov spends day and night on the kolkhozes but believes that all important decisions should come from above...
...I will not speak of music, architecture, and the fine arts, which registered practically no achievements...
...THE MAIN REASONS FOR THE CHANGES in the culture—changes for the worse not the better— were the worsening of the political and moral atmosphere in the society, a step-up in pressure on the intelligentsia, the fear of all novelty and talent, and the encouragement given to aggressive mediocrity...
...But now television is starting to show movies it had not shown before and to broadcast some interesting spectacles...
...It is not surprising then that it was the theater that in the last ten years produced the group of young and talented playwrights and directors who have been called the "new wave...
...The play's main heroes are the intelligent and decisive John Kennedy and his noble and charming brother, Robert, winning a difficult victory over the American "hawks" during the Cuban missile crisis...
...The greatest successes in the 1985-86 season were enjoyed by fifteen to twenty new plays...
...40 Sholem Aleichem Street at the Stanislaysky theater in Moscow, a play which, albeit in distorted form, raises the issue of the reasons for Jewish emigration from the USSR...
...But he also reproaches Vybornov: You ran your policy like it was your own too...
...Only in it for yourselves...
...The Contemporary Theater has revived one of its previous stagings, The Bolsheviks by Shatrov, as if to build a bridge between the 1960s and the 1980s...
...In the last few months it has been only at the readings given by Zhigulin and Okudzhava that one could hear genuine civic poetry...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
