Living the Role

...In other words, the book is in some ways both a confession and an appeal...

...an artist who drew, potted, sculpted, and revolutionized stage make-up...

...In 1911, Gorky wrote, "Chaliapin will always remain what he is...

...Every man has the right to imagine that somewhere unknown to him, there is a sincere and affectionate friend, and I am telling this story, as best I know how, to this friend...

...But that Chaliapin is only one of many in the autobiography...

...One feels that there are several Chaliapin roles in the book: the Russian Patriot Worker Hero, the Maligned Actor, the Lover of Women, even the Artist...

...A number of pirated and corrupt versions, even an alternate version by Chaliapin himself, were published, bringing acrimony to the friendship...

...The book ends with Chaliapin returning from the freedom of Finland to the hope of a Russia freed by the War: "I eventually reached St...

...It is hard to tell what is true and what is invented...

...It is large and formless, paying little attention to time sequence, and many of the basic facts that one considers a prerequisite in an autobiography are missing (the date of Chaliapin's birth, information about his children and his two marriages and so forth...

...Thus Chaliapin's book is read most successfully not as an autobiography, but as a conscious formation of the portrait of an artist, disclosing his methods and his charm, while keeping the real personality obscure...

...In 1916, Gorky persuaded Chaliapin to relate the events of his life in the presence of a stenographer...

...Gorky rewrote Chaliapin's accounts, adding other incidents the singer had neglected to mention, and published the whole as an autobiography...

...Never did I have a more responsive and attentive audience than those workers...

...But what can I do about that...

...The stage is a vision of a democratic world, and Chaliapin is shown refusing to let officials interfere with performance, which belongs to the artists...

...He was not popular with the press, which often portrayed him as an uncivilized moujik, temperamental, greedy, and ill-mannered...

...No man living but stands in need of some justification, in his own eyes...

...a writer of an autobiography, "Mask and Soul," and numerous poems and essays...

...In the introduction, translator Nina Froud notes that she and James Hanley spent 12 years compiling the material...

...on another level, it is an act of artistic creation...

...On one level, this is an analysis of Chaliapin's oedipal problems, which he discusses at some length...

...One doubts that Chaliapin was more truthful in his narration to Gorky, since to him art was everything beautiful, and life was everything sordid and hard...

...started when he saw the clown Yashka perform at an Easter fair...

...England is an image of the freedoms Tsarist Russia did not have...

...At one point Chaliapin says: "Am I endeavoring to find excuses for myself...

...Unfortunately, there were numerous complications...

...an uneducated peasant who became one of the most honored men of his time...

...Petersburg, that had already been renamed Petrograd...

...Immediately, though, Chaliapin undercuts it: "Probably not all of this episode is true, perhaps in reality I had behaved in a rougher manner...

...In Italy, Chaliapin was told that the great opera theater of La Scala had formerly been a church, and Gorky has the singer remarking, "In Russia the transformation of one temple into another would have been quite impossible...

...Gorky's purposes are perhaps easier to understand than the singer's...

...Chaliapin was a truly remarkable man: a consummate musician who, in addition to his enormous operatic and song repertoire, played piano, violin and cello, and had tried his hand at composition and conducting...

...Germany is the image of oppressive officialdom, an excuse to say things one would not have dared say about the Russian regime...

...Now Stein and Day has brought out the first complete English version of the Gorky-Chaliapin collaboration, together with 90 plates of the singer in his various roles, and a section of letters and articles relating to the material of the book...

...Chaliapin's interest in the theater, "that 'great spectacle' that was to be for me the reverse of reality...

...blindingly bright, a joyous cry across the world...

...It was with this living of the role that, with each production, I broadened and deepened the character...

...Yet, "Prepare as I might, study and strive as I might, I never once walked on to the stage with the feeling of mastery...

...Naturally, the book does not give a unified impression...

...So wrote Maxim Gorky of his friend, the famous opera singer whom Stanislavsky considered one of the models for his "method...

...Gorky's Chaliapin is "a simple fellow, enormous and clumsy," "defenceless and vulnerable, a semi-literate cobbler and turner...

...No, I am simply narrating...

...For all its maddening contradictions and confusions, it is entertaining, witty, charming, and completely captivating...

...I imagined everybody to be afraid of him, even the police and the hated prosecutor...

...But the dramatic mood set at the beginning, in a peasant hut with the village women telling folk tales to frighten the little boy, is not followed up...

...Chaliapin, a symbolic figure, yes and an astonishingly integral image of democratic Russia, this huge personality embodies in himself all the best and most talented that is in our people, and it does not exclude the bad or the weakness that lies in us all...

...It occurred to him that if he took the officer's place she might be cured...

...However, "When I came to, I saw that her eyes remained fixed on the ceiling, as dead as ever...

...At another point he sings in a Workers' Hall...

...In a moving scene, Chaliapin describes how, as a boy, he spent the night in a room with a girl who had gone mad after she was seduced and betrayed by an officer...

...He will, indeed, and Chaliapin: An Autobiography is here to prove it...

...After Chaliapin had written Mask and Soul, his later autobiography, Gorky accused him of making up a number of incidents, including a meeting between Chaliapin and Lenin in Gorky's Moscow flat in 1905, when Lenin was not in Moscow, and before Gorky had ever met the Russian leader...

...The man himself remains an enigma, complex and fascinating...

...There seems, in addition, to be some need for a private justification of his behavior with women...

...He is the personification of the Russian peasant who has made his way through "the thorny path of every conceivable humiliation" to become the universal Russian expression, and Gorky uses him for poUtical purposes...

...I might well have kept this story back from my readers, but I just had to say that whatever I did from that time on, I did for a woman to deserve her attention and love...

...The singer uses the opportunity to justify himself for his own purposes...

...I feel that the thoughts and the excuses were later invented by me...

...Like Aristotle, Chalia-pin preferred the Probable Impossible to the Improbable Possible, and it is in this light that the book must be examined, for on its higher level, it is really about artistic creation by one of the world's foremost actors...

...In Chaliapin's obituary note on Gorky, he wrote of himself, "I always try to give a true portrayal, even of parts which may not be entirely true...

...It is a beautiful fragment in its Dostoevskian poignancy...

...There are strong traces of The Lower Depths in his description of Chaliapin's peasant origins...

...There are also two hands visible throughout the book, one Gorky's, one Chaliapin's, giving a certain schizoid quality to the work...

...Later he saw his first opera: "My ordinary life was transformed into an opera, and when Father said, 'Feodor, bring me some kvas,' I would reply, singing descant on the highest notes, 'I'm bringing it.' " He never prepared a role, he prepared an opera, learning all the parts, having sets and costumes specially designed for his productions, developing make-up that would portray the character visually, studying the history of the period, becoming familiar with the composer's life and other works...