30 September 2020

"The Theatrical Conscience of his Nation": Yuri Lyubimov (1917-2014), Part 2

 

[Welcome to Part 2 of my profile of Soviet-Russian director Yuri Lyubimov.  As you know, if you’ve read Part 1, this segment contains an interview of Lyubimov conducted in 1990 by American experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro.  The interview, which was published in Bomb magazine, appears at the end of the post.

[If you haven’t read the first installment of “‘The Theatrical Conscience of his Nation,’” posted on 27 September, I strongly recommend that you do so before reading the second installment below.  I’ll be picking up the biological narrative with the upheaval in Lyubimov’s life that changed its trajectory and it won’t make a lot of sense without knowing how he got there.]

By 1983, an unbearable situation had developed at the Taganka.  Not only had two new productions in a row been banned, but so had rehearsals for the stage adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel. 

At the invitation of the Great Britain-USSR Association, a British Government-funded organization established to promote and facilitate non-political contacts between the U.K. and the Soviet Union, Lyubimov left for England to stage his adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment at the Lyric Theater in London in August 1983 (Evening Standard Award). 

After a series of interviews with Western journalists in March 1984 in which he openly criticized the Soviet regime, Lyubimov was relieved of his post as artistic director of the Taganka Theater, followed by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 11 July 1984, signed by Konstantin Chernenko (1911-85), Chairman of the Presidium and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1984-85), depriving Lyubimov of Soviet citizenship. 

Ironically, Lyubimov and Chernenko’s predecessor, Yuri Andropov (1914-84; Chairman of the Presidium and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1982-84), had had a long acquaintance and Andropov, who’d been Chairman of the Committee for State Security (KGB) from 1967 to 1982, had been something of a “closet defender” of the director, as John Freedman, a theater writer who specializes in Russian theater, put it.   Andropov died on 9 February 1984 and Lyubimov’s demise at the Taganka came two months later.

The eminent director couldn’t return to the Soviet Union even if he’d wanted to—he’d probably have faced arrest, like his parents (and Vsevolod Meyerhold, one of Lyubimov’s principal models, who’d been imprisoned and then murdered in the notorious Lubyanka Prison in 1940)—as his Soviet passport was no longer valid.  Across the Soviet Union—and even in the satellites—Lyubimov’s very name was not only removed from all the posters and programs of the Taganka Theater, but his productions were banned by the Communist authorities.  Even mention of him was forbidden.

During the years of forced exile, Lyubimov worked a lot in the West.  He staged productions, both plays and operas, in Israel (which gave him citizenship), Italy, France, the nations of Scandinavia, Germany, the U.S., the U.K., and Finland,  His productions of Crime and Punishment in Austria, England, the U.S., and Italy were awarded the highest theater homors.  

I saw Crime and Punishment at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in 1987—Lyubimov’s American début.  It played at the Kreeger Theater, Arena’s proscenium house, from 2 January to 22 February.  Unfortunately, I never wrote about it, but the production was well-covered in the nation’s press.  The Wall Street Journal’s Edwin Wilson’s comments, for instance, noted some pertinent aspects of the production relative to the director’s style. 

“Rather than a straight dramatization of the story,” Wilson explained, “Mr. Lyubimov’s version is a highly imaginative collage of scenes, of dreams and nightmares.”  Of the production’s structure,  the reviewer observed: “He has a precise score for every element—music, lights, props, actors’ movements—and combines these in an astonishing synthesis of aural and visual effects.”

Robert Brustein wrote in the New Republic that

Lyubimov’s repudiation of realism . . . leads him toward a hallucinatory style that is non-linear, spasmodic, hypnotic.  It is also a style that annihilates the fourth wall and includes the audience as a character in the play.  From the moment we enter, we are implicated in the action—led through a narrow passageway as a mute woman directs our attention toward mannequins of Raskolnikov’s two female victims, toward our own images in a bloodied mirror.

In the New York Times, Frank Rich reported:  “With his co-adaptor Yuri Karyakin, the director has splintered and shuffled the novel’s scenes, as if he were dreaming about Dostoyevsky’s own dream-laden narrative.” 

The Demons, also from Dostoyevsky, was performed by the Almeda Theater in London in 1985 and toured all over Europe, including Paris’s Theater of Europe at the invitation of Giorgio Strehler (1921-97), world-renowned artistic director of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.

At the invitation of the great film director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) who was also director of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, Lyubimov staged A Feast in Time of the Plague by Aleksandr Pushkin (1986) and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1988).

Konstantin Chernenko, the head of the Soviet state, died in office in 1985.  He was succeeded as head of the communist party, which was effectively the leader of the state as well, by Mikhail Gorbachev.  In 1986, Gorbachev established the policies of glasnost (‘openness’ or ‘transparency’). allowing for greater freedom of speech and the press, and perestroika (‘restructuring’), decentralizing the economy.

With these changes in the political situation in the country, it became possible for Lyubimov to return to Russia.  In May 1988, he arrived in Moscow, and his arrival became one of the most important events in the nation’s public life.  It was rightly perceived as a triumph of justice.  The next year, his Soviet citizenship was restored.

The director returned to the Taganka, but all was not well.  When Lyubimov was stripped of his citizenship in 1984 while he was abroad, the directorship of the theater was handed to Anatolii Efros (1925-87).  Most of the Taganka actors, however, saw Efros as an enemy, a sort of quisling or usurper imposed by the state, and sometimes flatly refused to cooperate with him.  The atmosphere at the theater was fraught and Efros died a mere three years after assuming the leadership of the theater.

Efros’s successor was a staunch Communist supporter, Nikolai Gubenko (1941-2020).  Along with his artistic and managerial duties, Gubenko used his influence to make it possible for Lyubimov to return to Moscow.  When he did, Gubenko stepped down as director but remained with the company as an actor.

(In November 1989, Gubenko was appointed the last Minister of Culture of the USSR, serving until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the position was abolished.  He became the first Soviet arts professional to hold such a post since Anatolii Lunacharsky, 1875-1933, served as the first People’s Commissar for Education [Narkompros] from 1917 to 1929.  Lunacharsky was a playwright and critic.

(In 1995, Gubenko was elected a deputy to the Russian State Duma, the lower house of the parliament of the Russian Federation, where he served until 2003.  In 2005 until his death, he became a deputy in the Moscow City  Duma.)

Lyubimov restored the previously banned Boris Godunov (1988), and the play Vladimir Vysotsky was reinstated.  The following year, 1989, the premiere of Alive by Boris Mozhaev took place—21 years after the production had been banned.  In the same year, Lyubimov was given back his Soviet passport, and his name as artistic director and stage director six years later reappeared on Taganka posters.

The director of the Taganka had always been what we’d call today an auteur director, even as far back as the ’70s.  (It’s part of what got him in trouble with the authorities.)  No matter what Lyubimov staged—modern or classical prose, poetry, drama—he almost always rewrote the text a little: reduced it or supplemented it with other literary material. 

Even the text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet underwent changes.  The performance began with Vysotsky’s Hamlet singing Boris Pasternak’s poetic lines about Hamlet.  (We remember that the actor was a singer and played a seven-string guitar. The English title of a Vysotsky memoir was Hamlet with a Guitar.)  Prosaic dialogues of the gravediggers were added to the script. 

Lyubimov, however, was forced to combine work in the theater with productions abroad because of previously concluded foreign contracts.  He spent a great deal of his time away from the Taganka fulfilling these obligations.

In 1992, Lyubimov signed a contract with Mayor Gavriil Popov of Moscow intended to privatize the theater by attracting “foreign colleagues.” According to the contract, Lyubimov became the director of the Taganka Theater with unlimited authority.  He moved to the contract system which allowed him to hire or fire actors at any time.  He also received the theater building as property. 

Gubenko and Lyubimov had disagreements about the future of the theater.  As a result, the troupe was split and in 1993, most of the artists and part of the staff formed the Commonwealth of Taganka Actors (Содружество актёров Таганки – Sodruzhestvo aktyorov Taganki) under Gubenko’s leadership.

At the insistence of the disputants, Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007), freshly elected to the new office (1991-99). stepped in to resolve the conflict.  After a secret-ballot vote of members of the divided theater troupe, Yeltsin agreed to the establishment of a new company with Gubenko as artistic director.   The Commonwealth of Taganka Actors would occupy a new theater building a few doors away from the Drama and Comedy Theater and Lyubimov’s artists would remain in the old building.

In 1997, he completely abandoned obligations in the West, deciding to devote himself entirely to his theater.  He seldom worked abroad anymore, even though his company continued to tour worldwide without him. 

Taganka’s productions seemed invigorated and the theater re-energized.  In 1997, Taganka’s founder celebrated his 80th birthday with the première of his own dramatization of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. 

On 11 December 1998, the 80th anniversary of novelist AIeksandr Solzhenitsyn’s birth was marked with the première of Sharashki (the colloquial name of prison-type research institutes and design bureaus, within the Soviet Gulag labor-camp system, in which convicted scientists, engineers, and technicians worked), based on the novel The First Circle (1968). Lyubimov not only directed the play, but ironically appeared in it as Joseph Stalin.

A month earlier, Marat and the Marquis de Sade, the translation of  1963’s The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (usually known simply as Marat/Sade) by Peter Weiss, premièred. 

In 1999, for the 35th anniversary of the founding of the theater, Lyubimov staged a new version of The Good Person from Sezuan with young actors.  The play became the unofficial symbol of the legendary Taganka Theater.

In the following years, the Taganka premièred many new works, including adaptations of prose literature.  As never before, the theater company also toured extensively, traveling repeatedly to Japan, Hong Kong, Greece, Germany, Croatia, Finland, France, the U.S., Italy, Turkey, Israel, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Colombia, Portugal, Spain, and other distant shores.  Lyubimov was awarded the highest honors and prizes for his productions. 

Lyubimov developed his own system for training actors and conducted master classes all around the world.  In Italy alone, he worked with actors in Rome, Milan, Bologna, Turin, L’Aquila (home of the Teatro Stabile d’Abruzzo, the Cineforum Primo Piano, and the Istituto Cinematografico dell’Aquila), and Naples.

On 30 September 2002, Lyubimov celebrated his 85th birthday with the première of Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at the Taganka.  The years 2000 to 2003 were for Lyubimov what the critics called a kind of “Boldinskaya autumn.”  That’s a reference to the period in 1830 that was Pushkin’s most productive and creative; he’d secluded himself on an estate in the village of Bolshoye Boldino and completed an astounding amount of important work (including the verse novel Eugene Onegin).  For Lyubimov, this time yielded work that presented the viewer with “a powerful, deeply personal artistic expression of the director: six performances of great style and big themes.”

Lyubimov had initiated the contract system for artists at the Taganka and demanded strict discipline for the company members.  In his opinion, the responsibility of a good director was to protect talented actors, to apply an individual approach to them; and to require the actor either to fulfill the director’s intentions or leave the company.  The company’s artists rankled at this regime and a conflict between the artists and the director developed.

On 7 December 2010, at the presentation of the Theater Star Award (премия “Звезда Театрала”; an award based on audience votes),  Lyubimov first announced his wish to resign from the post of artistic director of the Taganka. 

In June 2011, on a tour of Good Person in the Czech Republic, the actors refused to rehearse unless Lyubimov paid them in advance.  This action offended the director, who complained that the actors cared more for money that art, and prompted him to submit his letter of resignation. 

On 6 July 2011, the Moscow Department of Culture announced the release of Lyubimov from the post of artistic director and director of the Taganka Theater at his own request.  Lyubimov left the theater on 16 July without saying goodbye to the actors.  He never returned to the Taganka.

After that, Lyubimov announced his creative plans: to stage Demons, the four-hour epic play based on Dostoyevsky (2012; Vakhtangov Theater) and Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (2013; Bolshoi Theater). 

In late October 2012 Lyubimov was sent to the Moscow City Clinical Hospital with a heart attack.  Despite intensive treatment, the director fell into a day-long coma.  He came out of the coma and was discharged at the end of November after a month-and-a-half of treatment.  It was a harbinger of things to come.

As a result of Lyubimov’s illness, the Bolshoi première of Aleksandr Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, scheduled for December 2012, was postponed to June 2013.  Interest was great and tickets for all performances of the 1890 opera were sold out long before the rescheduled première.  When the production did open, the audience gave the performance a standing ovation.

The critical response to Prince Igor was overwhelmingly positive.  Interest from prospective theatergoers was great and to satisfy that demand, on 16 June 2013, the Bolshoi broadcast the opera live on its own YouTube channel—as well as on Mezzo, a French television channel devoted to classical music, and Russia-K television (formerly Kultura) across Russia.

After mid-June 2013, the director took a rest and underwent a rehabilitation course.  He gave master classes and prepared for a new opera project in Italy—near Bologna, where he celebrated his 96th birthday.

The director dedicated the 2013-14 season to the production of the opera buffa School for Wives based on Molière's 1662 comedy, the libretto of which he’d authored to music by composer Vladimir Martynov.  On 20 May 2014, Moscow’s Novaya Opera Theater was to host the première of the opera, but the director fell ill, preventing him from staging the première.  The opera was staged by director Igor Ushakov (who’d assisted Lyubimov on Prince Igor the preceding June) at the request of Lyubimov himself. 

On Thursday, 2 October 2014, the director was hospitalized at the Botkin City Clinical Hospital in an emergency.  He was in serious condition with heart failure.  Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov died in his sleep on Sunday, 5 October 2014, at 11:40 a.m. Moscow time, five days after his 97th birthday. 

A farewell ceremony for the director was held on Wednesday, 8 October, at the Vakhtangov Theater; he was buried at the Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow (the final resting place of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and putatively Vsevolod Meyerhold).

By the end of his life, Lyubimov had staged over 100 plays and operas.  He appeared in 37 plays and 17 films as an actor, several of which are considered classics.  “People tried to stick me with the label of political theater.  But that’s wrong. I was engaged in an aesthetic, in the expansion of the palette—what shades could be added in working with space and style,” he said.  

“A fierce stylistic innovator with montage, lighting, verse, song, set, text, and acting technique,” Leonardo Shapiro, in the 1991 interview posted below, concludes, “Lyubimov is probably best known for his daring theatrical adaptations of poetry and novels and his successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) run-ins with Soviet Premiers and Ministers of Culture over forbidden material.”

*  *  *  *

[The interview below of Yuri Lyubimov by Leonardo Shapiro, “Profiles & Positions: Yuri Lyubimov,” appeared in Bomb magazine (New York), issue 34 (Winter 1991).  Many of the names mentioned below are more fully identified in the foregoing profile of Yuri Lyubimov.  Since Shapiro has only provided last names, I’ve compiled a list, with life dates, appended to the end of the interview.]

“YURI LYUBIMOV”
by Leonardo Shapiro
(Lyubimov translation by Steve Nielson)

Now 72 years old, Yuri Lyubimov is one of the grand masters and prime creators of international theater practice. He founded The Taganka Theater in 1964 as an experimental theater, building on the theories and practice of Vakhtangov, Meyerhold, and Brecht. For most of its 26 years, the Taganka has been the boldest, most outspoken and avant-garde ensemble in Russia. Vladimir Vysotsky, Lyubimov’s Hamlet and a leading Taganka actor, became a national hero (partly through bootlegged tapes of his songs that were more powerful in the Soviet Union than the combined effect of Bob Dylan, Walt Whitman, The Beatles, and Edward R. Murrow in America).

A fierce stylistic innovator with montage, lighting, verse, song, set, text, and acting technique, Lyubimov is probably best known for his daring theatrical adaptations of poetry and novels and his successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) run-ins with Soviet Premiers and Ministers of Culture over forbidden material. Some of his best known productions over the years have been: John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, Listen! (based on Mayakovsky), Hamlet (including banned Pasternak material), The Master and Margarita (adapted from the Bulgakov novel and a great hit for many years while the novel itself was still banned), Gorky’s Mother, Yevtushenko’s Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty, Voznesensky’s Antiworlds, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, and Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Since The Taganka, like other Soviet theaters, is a cumulative repertory company, most of these shows (and many more) are still running in Moscow. (This season the Taganka has 23 shows running in repertory in two theaters.)

Lyubimov went into exile in the West in 1984 when the authorities forbade his production of Boris Godunov. Now he is back at The Taganka, Boris Godunov is in repertory, and the actor playing Boris (Nikolai Gubienko) has become, under Gorbachev, the Soviet Minister of Culture. This interview took place last spring in Lyubimov’s office at the Taganka.

Leonardo Shapiro: How did you get the idea for the moving door in your production of Crime and Punishment?

Yuri Lyubimov: At first the idea was to leave the stage completely bare. In as much as the concept was such that it was essential that the audience know that Raskolnikov is a murderer, it was necessary that there be a corner where the old woman whom he killed for the object he had pawned lived; thus attention had to be focused on the scene of the murder and the rest of the stage left completely empty. The idea came about because 90 percent of the school children who study this novel in Soviet schools, write in their compositions and exams that Raskolnikov is a revolutionary, a positive figure, and that it was capitalism that led him to do what he did, all of which is, of course, false vulgar “socialization.” So in school compositions students write that Raskolnikov was right to kill the old woman and the only problem is that he was caught. And if one of the students in class were to say, “What do you mean, he’s a murderer,” the rest of the class would condemn him as a retrograde who was out of sync with the modern world. And if he were to say that the novel was the author’s soul crying out against murder in general, not only the class but also the teacher would condemn him. This alarmed me and compelled me to portray the novel differently from the way it always is staged. And that is when the idea of empty space and the door was born, in an effort to effect a very strong interaction with the audience, as with opponents. The door is a symbol of the threshold to a new life. Raskolnikov is always saying that one has to overstep the bounds, overstep . . . So this, it seems to me, is a very cynical, very appropriate image. A symbol of his nightmares, of his dreams. I had to imagine his dreams. No such dreams are described in Dostoevsky [sic], so these are imagined dreams. There are no such dreams per se in Dostoevsky.

LS: Did you have this idea before or during rehearsals?

YL: Before. Before. When I approach the actors I already have some ideas. I have a general concept of the play before I meet with the actors. Perhaps not everything is thought out entirely or laid out in scenes as in cinematography. There are things that I come upon in the process of rehearsing the play, but in general I can always demonstrate the basic shape of the play for the actors, the manner, the style, and how it will sound musically. I work with the composers a lot before rehearsals.

LS: Did you work this out analytically the way you’re explaining to me, logically? Or was it just, maybe, one night you had a dream and then there was a door?

YL: No, one always comes across such things unexpectedly. The door had to move, to fly out of this space into his dreams, in his first dream, in his first nightmare. This was very difficult to accomplish technically and was rehearsed very carefully.

LS: And the moving light? The actor moving the light instruments? That was also clear before rehearsals?

YL: Yes, I had all of that prepared from the start. It was important that the play be a play of shadows and mirages, so I laid bare the device. It is like theater on a public square.

LS: Was it a surprise to you to find out that the students approved of Raskolnikov?

YL: It was, how can I put it . . . A friend of mine, Koryagin, a teacher who worked with me on the adaptation brought me those compositions and they were the thing that moved me to do the play. I was horrified and felt a need to . . . I realized that people really grow up thinking like that. Now they have grown up, and you can see what’s happening. They wrote this while they were still in school, that Raskolnikov was right to kill her. And now people are being killed, here, in Tbilisi, in Armenia, and everywhere.

LS: Is it very different now? I understand you’re working on The Suicide now.

YL: Yes, but it will be . . . It will be Erdman’s play, but the play will be surrounded by his fate, a very difficult fate, and therefore the play will be called Erdman—The Suicide.

LS: And you started work on this once before.

YL: Yes, twice, twice, but the censors . . . Once while Erdman was still alive. Here’s a picture of him not long before his death, the one in the middle, the others are Paradzhanov and Vysotsky. Have you heard of Erdman before?

LS: Yes. How far did you get on the production before . . .

YL: No, they put a stop to it right away.

LS: But when you were working on it before, how far did you get?

YL: Only 10 rehearsals.

LS: Is your idea now very different?

YL: It’s a completely different idea. Then I thought together with Erdman simply of how to do the play so that they (the censors) would somehow pass it. We were busy together thinking of a way to deceive the censors so that they couldn’t protest. And now I don’t have those worries at all. I would even be glad if they would try to prohibit the play now.

LS: Do you think that’s possible?

YL: It’s possible.

LS: Is it difficult having too much freedom?

YL: You see, I’ve been doing this for 25 years, this theater is 26 years old. I’ve always worked freely and always said to my actors, don’t concern yourself with other people’s matters, the censors will come and do their work. That’s what they get paid for. You do what you think you should. For myself, I worked without censorship. And then I entered into battle with them, sort of surrendered. I conceded on the play Alive five, six times. But I have to finish it. It was banned, closed for 21 years, like cognac.

LS: And now?

YL: It’s running now, successfully.

LS: Why do you think that The Suicide may be prohibited?

YL: It has a strong ring to it right now and it could give rise to objections. They could start something. Though it was written over 60 years ago, it sounds as though it could have been written today.

LS: Do you really think that it would be forbidden by the current Minister of Culture? (one of Lyubimov’s best friends and a leading actor of the company.)

YL: No, what I’m saying is that the situation is unstable today and who knows what turn it could take. Before you came here, there were some young people who came up to me and wanted to meet with me. They were forbidden to meet with me.

LS: By whom?

YL: Their boss. When I was host of the program “Outlook,” a lot of material was cut from the program. So the censors still exist. It’s not true that they no longer exist. They still don’t invite Solzhenitsyn back or offer him his citizenship back. It’s completely illogical. They proclaim one thing and do another entirely.

LS: So you don’t think things have changed as much as people say?

YL: For the nonce, it’s mainly talk. To put it really roughly, if you used to be able to say five thousand words, now you can say nine thousand words.

LS: Do you think that your role has changed as an artist now that you’re not the only one saying forbidden things, now that the audience has other possibilities? There was a time when they could only come to the Taganka to see a certain kind of truth.

YL: Well, you see, it depends on whom you have in mind. It’s very abstract. We believed that we were saying something that our contemporaries were thinking about at home. That’s what we thought. But there were other contemporaries, too, who thought that we should be put in jail, or disbanded, or, basically, that something had to be done about us. They’re people, too. Therefore . . . And what does it mean that nowadays everybody is speaking the truth? The truth, after all . . . I’m not a newspaper. This is a theater, not a newspaper, or some sensational release of documents. We are artists, after all, and work with aesthetics, style, and form, and this is all independent. It’s simply become more complicated to work, that’s all. The theater was the first element in the country to enter into the free market. We had competition and had to become competitive. There’s choice. There used not to be choice. We were alone. But now there is choice. You can watch television and change the channel. There are people now, for example, who like to play at tuning in the Moscow City Council or the Supreme Soviet session. “Oh!” they cry, and get a great deal of pleasure from trying to see who is the dullest or the most orthodox. People are more alive in Moscow, and they’re interested in seeing how perestroika is proceeding. You turn on the Soviet channel—no perestroika whatsoever. You turn on the Moscow City Council channel—nobody wants perestroika. You read some Party document, say, from the Party Congress, and all the arguments are Stalinist arguments. And when you read Central Committee declarations or the Party platform, it’s all a type of raving. Everything’s very complex here. And on the other hand, there is an exodus taking place, an exodus, like the Jews from Egypt, people are leaving the country. Whoever can, does. Haven’t you seen the alarm on the one hand and apathy on the other hand?

LS: Yes. Oh, yes, certainly. Is what’s important to you in the theater, has that changed since your experience of leaving the country and coming back?

YL: The theater? Unfortunately, like a house without its owner, it collapsed. And everything that’s happening out in the streets, the erosion, it all penetrates the theater. The theater cannot be isolated, the actors feel it. Because it is a very difficult life, simply in the sense of getting through the day alive, where to get food for their families . . . It’s a very difficult life. And you can see it in the actors. They have poor concentration, they’re distracted, there’s a certain lack of precision. Maybe your actors try harder or concentrate more than here.

LS: Maybe. (Joke) But for you personally, is what’s important to you in the theater any different? Your values?

YL: Well, I think that, to put it roughly, I have to get the theater into shape, good athletic condition, to put it in terms of sport. And also, you understand, all of these horrible decades destroyed the people’s spiritual peace. People stopped believing and became cynical and are, therefore, empty. And that’s, perhaps, the most serious difficulty.

LS: Do you see theatre as a spiritual activity?

YL: I think that if an artist doesn’t have anything to say to people he should take up something else. Or it’s just searching for form for the sake of form. Mannerism. And that doesn’t interest me, I have no use for it. I love form, but only that form that the given play requires. Which you can see, for example, in Dostoyevsky. But on the other hand, if I could get the actors into proper creative and spiritual shape, I would perhaps give them more leeway and I wouldn’t have to ride them so much.

LS: What about the audience, can you shape them up, too?

YL: No, the audience now sits rather as though it had been hit in the head with a bag of dirt. Gradually a certain spectator may come who is genuinely interested in this process. The theater is a phenomenon for the elite, and is understood only by the highest level of society. It is not mass production, like television.

LS: Did you feel the audience was very different in London, in Washington, and other places where you performed?

YL: Yes. Scandinavia is more prepared for the theater. They love the theater there. The Americans are more embarrassed as far as the theater is concerned. They don’t have a real understanding of the theater.

LS: They see it as entertainment. They have lost the idea of theater.

YL: The Germans love the theater and value the director, the performance, and value the way the play is conceived. West Germany, that is. The English, of course. Poland is a theatrical country.

LS: Yes, I’ve worked in Poland. What are your plans after this production, after Erdman?

YL: I am supposed to go to Germany to stage two operas. Love of Three Oranges and The Queen of Spades in Munich. That’s in the West.

LS: And you have other plans for the Taganka?

YL: Other plans? Maybe . . . Bulgakov’s Theatrical Novel and then a type of poetic production including Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and prose from Doctor Zhivago and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s first book.

LS: All those at once?

YL: A type of gogol-mogol (“eggnog” i.e.—mishmash). That will be a year from now. If I am alive and healthy. And if I don’t fight with anybody.

[Leonardo Shapiro was the artistic director of The Shaliko Company in New York City and directed the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program.]

[The names Shapiro and Lyubimov mention in the interview are, in some instances, obscure and sometimes are given in alternative English transliterations.  Below is a list of those names with life dates, the Russian/Cyrillic spelling, and a brief identification:

·   Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-80; Russian: Владимир Высоцкий), Russian-Soviet singer-songwriter, poet, actor

·   Bob Dylan (b. 1941), American singer-songwriter; Nobel laureate, 2016

·   Walt Whitman (1819-92), American poet, essayist, and journalist

·   The Beatles [John Lennon, 1940 -80; Paul McCartney, b. 1942; George Harrison, 1943-2001; and Ringo Starr, b. 1940] (1960-70), English rock band regarded as most influential band of all time

·   Edward R. Murrow (1908-65), American broadcast journalist and war correspondent

·   John Reed (1887-1920), American journalist, poet, and communist activist

·   Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930; Владимир Маяковский), Russian-Soviet poet and actor

·   Boris Pasternak (1890-1960; Борис Пастернак), Russian poet and novelist; Doctor Zhivago, 1957; Nobel laureate, 1958

·   Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940; Михаил Булгаков), Russian writer and playwright

·   Maxim Gorky [pseudonym of Alexei Maximovich Peshkov] (1868-1936; Максим Горький), Russian-Soviet writer and political activist; a founder of Socialist Realism literary method

·   Yevgenii Yevtushenko (1933-2017; Евгений Евтушенко), Russian-Soviet poet

·   Andrei Voznesensky (1933-2010; Андрей Вознесенский), Russian-Soviet poet and writer

·   Fyodor Dostoyevsky [also Dostoevsky] (1821-81; Фёдор Достоевский), Russian novelist, philosopher, short story writer, and essayist

·   Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837; Александр Пушкин), Russian poet, playwright, and novelist

·   Anton Chekhov (1860-1904; Антон Чехов), Russian playwright and short story-writer

·   Nikolai Gubienko [more commonly, Gubenko] (1941-2020; Николай Губенко), Soviet and Russian actor, film and theatre director, screenwriter, and politician; Soviet Minister of Culture, 1989-91

·   Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931; Михаил Горбачёв), Soviet politician; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1985-91; Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, 1989-90; President of the Soviet Union, 1990-91

·   Yurii Koryagin [more commonly Karjakin or Karyakin] (1930-2011; Ю́рий Карякин), Russian writer, literary critic, and political activist; authority on works of Dostoyevsky

·   Nikolai Erdman (1900-70; Николай Эрдман), Soviet dramatist and screenwriter

·   Sergei Paradzhanov [also Parajanov] (1924-90; Сергей Параджанов), Armenian film director, screenwriter, and artist

·   Anna Akhmatova [pen name of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko] (1889-1966; А́нна Ахматова), Russian poet, translator, and literary critic

·   Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938; О́сип Мандельштам), Russian-Soviet poet; husband of writer Nadezhda Mandelstam

·   Nadezhda Mandelstam. (1899 -1980; Надежда Мандельштам), Russian Jewish writer and educator; wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam; her first book was Hope Against Hope (1970), translation of Memories (Воспоминания – Vospominaniya; the English title is a bilingual pun: the Russian word nadezhda means ‘hope’)

[Because the English transliterations of Russian names often has variations—I’ve only noted above the ones associated with the Bomb interview—I’ve included the Cyrillic spelling of the names.  Readers who wish to look the people up for further information should note that there may be variations in some of the Cyrillic spellings as well, though not frequently, and that I have omitted the patronymic (middle name) for the sake of brevity. 

[It’s common in Russian usage to include the patronymic—and I have in my profile when names appear—but you can successfully look someone up without it.  (As I noted in Part 1 of the profile, I provided a brief explanation of Russian patronymics and their use in “Michael Chekhov, Part 1,” posted on ROT on 2 November 2019.)  It’s also common practice in Russian to present names using initials, either just the middle initial (Anton P. Chekhov) or both the first and middle initials (A. P. Chekhov).

27 September 2020

"The Theatrical Conscience of his Nation": Yuri Lyubimov (1917-2014), Part 1

 

[When I was researching Leonardo Shapiro, the avant-garde director on whom I’ve published a number of pieces on this blog, one of the documents I collected was an interview he did of then-Soviet director Yuri Lyubimov.  The interview, conducted in Moscow, was published in Bomb magazine in 1991; I’ve had a copy Leo gave me since about 1992 and it’s been sitting in my files for over 20 years.

[Now that I don’t have live theater on which to write, I’ve been looking for things to post on Rick On Theater to take the place of my play reports.  I came across the old Lyubimov interview and I wondered if I could make something interesting out of it—something more than just republishing the transcript itself.

[I decided to put together a profile of Lyubimov and combine it with the old interview and run them together on the blog.  As usual with this kind of plan, the profile got longer and longer—Yuri Lyubimov had a very full and active life, not to mention a long one.  (The director died at 97 in 2014—and he was working right up to his death.)

[I’m posting the combined piece—profile plus interview—in two parts.  Part 1 below covers the first part of Lyubimov’s life, ending with possibly the most significant event in this career—perhaps second to World War II.  Part 2, to be posted on 30 September, will complete the biography and finish with the republished interview.  I hope ROTters will read both installments.]

The esteemed Soviet and Russian stage director Yuri Lyubimov had a life in the theater that would have been familiar to many artists in the latter days of the Soviet Union and the beginnings of the Russian Federation.  His innovative talent was recognized and rewarded with company directorships under the state-controlled Soviet system, but when he began to exercise an artistic vision that diverged from the approved standards, he was censured and ultimately stripped of his Soviet citizenship.  

Lyubimov was forced into exile abroad, where he continued to attract attention for his theatrical innovations.  When Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1985-91) launched his program of glasnost (‘openness’) in 1986, the stage director was allowed to return to his native country. 

Lyubimov returned to Moscow in 1989 and his citizenship was restored.  (The Soviet Union dissolved in August 1991 and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic [Russian SFSR or RSFSR] became the independent Russian Federation in December.)

Not a few Soviet artists wended a similar path, though some didn’t return to the homeland—novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948) are prominent examples—others died abroad before return was possible.

Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov (Russian: Юрий Петрович Любимов) was born on 30 September 1917, five weeks before the October (Bolshevik) Revolution in the city of Yaroslavl, Russian Republic (the short-lived democratic state under Aleksandr Kererensky, 1 September-7 November 1917).  On his father’s side, he came from kulaks, land-owning peasants (as distinguished from serfs, peasants who worked land owned by feudal lords and were little different from slaves). 

Lyubimov’s paternal grandfather, Zakhar Petrovich, a hardworking, devout, and strict man, gained his freedom in 1861 when the serfs were freed by Tsar Alexander II.  He built a productive farm on the land he received in Abramtsevo, a village near Yaroslavl.  By 1917, the year of the Russian revolution and the year Yuri Petrovich, his second grandson, was born, Zakhar Petrovich had 200 acres of land in Abramtsevo, a two-story house, a good garden, and a butter factory which employed several dozen workers.

In Yaroslavl, he had two houses and a fish trade.  Zakhar Petrovich, however, opposed collectivization, which the new Soviet state under Joseph Stalin (né Ioseb Jughashvili, 1878-1953; leader of USSR: 1922-53) initiated in 1928, was thrown out of his home and fled to Moscow to avoid arrest.

Lyubimov’s father, Pyotr Zakharovich (for a brief explanation of Russian patronymics, see “Michael Chekhov, Part 1,” 2 November 2019), was also a strong and independent man.  Having married a Romany woman against the will of his parents, he moved his family to Yaroslavl and represented a Scottish fish-trading company.  Anna Aleksandrovna Lyubimova, whose father was Romany, studied education and became a primary school teacher.

In 1922 the Lyubimovs moved to Moscow.  With the beginning of the repressions under Stalin, Pyotr Zakharovich and Anna Aleksandrovna were arrested.  Ironically, they were incarcerated in Taganka Prison, a detention center for political prisoners located in the same Moscow district surrounding Taganskaya Square where the Taganka Theater, the institution which Lyubimov would lead, now sits

Yuri Petrovoch; his older brother, David Petrovich; and their younger sister, Natalya Petrovna, became the children of “disenfranchised” persons (people stripped of their civil rights) and had to carry messages to their imprisoned parents until their release. 

Thus, even as early as the age of 11, the future theater director learned to hate Soviet authority.  This sentiment didn’t change throughout Lyubimov’s life.  Nevertheless, the family withstood the situation; no one let anyone else down.  Pyotr Zakharovich’s dispossessed father also sought refuge in his son’s Moscow home.

The Lyubimovs paid great attention to the education of their children.  The parents were passionate bibliophiles and introduced their children to the theater.  Yuri Lyubimov’s first theatrical impressions were of Aleksander Griboyedov's comedy in verse, Woe from Wit, and The Blue Bird by Belgian playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck, staged at the Moscow Art Theater by Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938). 

Young Yuri Petrovich also saw the famous performances of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s (1874-1940) The Forest by Aleksander Ostrovsky, Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, and The Lady of the Camellias (i.e., Camille) by Alexandre Dumas. 

As a member of a non-proletarian family, though, Yuri Petrovich had to leave school at 14 and enter a technical school for apprentices (FZU, the initials for fabrichno-zavodskoe uchenichestvo – ‘factory apprenticeship’) at an electrical power plant (located, like the prison in which Lyubimov’s parents were held, on Taganskaya Square—a location that tended to reappear in the path of the future theater director). 

Also at 14, the incipient director began studying at Isadora Duncan’s (1877 or ’78-1927) Moscow school of dance, which taught the dancer’s anti-traditional philosophy of dance and her focus on natural movement

After graduating from the FZU with high marks, Lyubimov planned to enter the Moscow Power Engineering Institute to become an electrical engineer.  His plans, however, changed dramatically (as it were) when he saw an announcement in the newspaper that the Second Moscow Art Theater, founded by Michael Chekhov (1891-1955; see my profile of the actor and teacher, posted on Rick On Theater on 2, 5, and 8 November 2019) was accepting applications to its studio. 

For his audition, Lyubimov recited not a monologue from a play, not an excerpt from a poem, but a speech by novelist Yuri Olesha (1899-1960) at the First Congress of Writers.  The members of the selection committee were surprised and, said Lyubimov later, laughed.  

He told them seriously and gloomily: “There is nothing funny here,” but they laughed even more.  Lyubimov added: “I feel sorry for you.”  He didn’t figure he’d be accepted, but he was; apparently his talent won out over his effrontery and his odd choice of audition piece. 

Lyubimov entered the Second Moscow Art Theater in 1934. His first stage role there in 1935 was a hairdresser’s apprentice in A Prayer for the Living based on the French play by Jacques Deval.  Then in 1936, 2MAT was closed by the Soviet authorities for insufficient orthodoxy

That same year, Lyubimov became a student at the Boris Shchukin Theater School, the conservatory of the Yevgenii Vakhtangov Theater.  Among his first roles in his student years there were Chris in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and Claudio in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (he would later play Benedick); the young actor also took part in a production of Vakhtangov’s famous Princess Turandot.

(In 1937, when Lyubimov was doing the signalman in Nikolai Pogodin’s The Man with the Gun, the young actor caught the attention of Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1874-1940.  The great innovative director and acting teacher asked Ruben Simonov, 1899-1968, the production’s director, to introduce him to the young actor.  Lyubimov remembered the parting words of the great director for the rest of his life:

I was introduced to Meyerhold when I was a student actor.  Meyerhold came to watch us at the Vakhtangov, and he was taken with the way I was doing pantomime.  Ruben Simonov, the theater’s director at the time, called me over to introduce me to him.  Meyerhold said to me, “never forget about movement.  It is a great thing, young man.  The body is as expressive as the word.  Train yourself.  Spend your whole life in training.'  And that is what I have done.)

The newly-minted actor graduated from the Vakhtangov program in 1939 and was drafted into the Soviet Army in 1940 during the Russo-Finnish War (November 1939-March 1940, a prelude to World War II).  He was assigned to the railway defense troops, occasionally falling afoul of military discipline, which landed him in the stockade several times. 

The railway troops, though part of the armed forces of the USSR, were under the command of the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, predecessor of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and, finally, the KGB.  It turned out that the chief director of the NKVD Song and Dance Ensemble had known Lyubimov in civilian life as a talented performer, so in 1941, six months after being drafted, Lyubimov was among the actors selected to join the Ensemble.

The Ensemble was under the personal control of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Lavrentii Beria (1899-1953).  The Ensemble performed before Stalin, but was actually created to perform on the front lines, and Beria, currying favor with the commander-in-chief, didn’t coddle the troupe; he sent it to very dangerous areas.

The Ensemble was often the last unit to withdraw from a combat area, almost in full view of the Germans.  Lyubimov and the troupe visited both besieged Leningrad (Siege of Leningrad: 8 September 1941-27 January 1944) and defeated Stalingrad (Battle of Stalingrad: 23 August 1942-2 February 1943).

Other artists in the NKVD Ensemble’s ranks with whom Lyubimov worked during his hitch included composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), actor and director Nikolai Okhlopkov (1900-67), and dramatist and screenwriter Nikolai Erdman (1900-70), along with dozens of other soon-to-be-famous directors, designers, composers, singers, choreographers, musicians, and conductors. 

With the Ensemble, Lyubimov went through the entire Great Patriotic War (as the Russians call it) acting as an entertainer, reading poems and playing in sketches, sometimes in the immediate vicinity of the front line.  Lyubimov was awarded several honors and medals for his service in World War II.

After being demobilized, Lyubimov returned to the Vakhtangov Theater, where he’d previously been a student, as a member of the troupe.  On the Vakhtangov’s stage from 1946 to 1964, he played over 30 roles in performances staged by directors including Okhlopkov and Ruben Simonov, his comrades in the NKVD Song and Dance Ensemble. 

Simonov, who was also the director of the company by this time, relinquished his “star roles” in the Vakhtangov repertoire in 1951 and Lyubimov took over performances of Cyrano in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Benedick in Much Ado (in which Lyubimov had played Claudio in 1936 at 2MAT).  

At the Vakhtangov, Lyubimov also played Treplev in The Seagull by Anton Chekhov in 1954 (the first performer of which role in the legendary Moscow Art Theater production in 1898 was a young Vsevolod Meyerhold).  In addition, the actor’s Vakhtangov repertoire included Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in 1956 and Mozart in Mozart and Salieri (part of Little Tragedies) by Aleksandr Pushkin in 1959.

On 23 July 1954, Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov received the title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR, the title awarded by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.  Established in 1931, it’s one of the forms of recognition by the state and society of the merits of distinguished citizens of the  RSFSR.  (Since 1992, the title has been changed to Honored Artist of the Russian Federation, with appropriate alterations to the medal and award certificate.)

Lyubimov admitted that when he was an actor he didn’t attach political significance to the arts.  Once, however, while he was still a very young man, as well as the chairman of the youth section of the All-Russian Theater Society, he pronounced at a meeting that “our theaters are all trimmed like an English lawn”—and immediately lost his chairmanship.

That Lyubimov felt some dissatisfaction with his standing and the classical acting style is evidenced, for example, by the fact that, already a mature artist, he attended a seminar for two years with the director and teacher Mikhail Nikolayevich Kedrov (1894-1972), once Stanislavsky’s most committed student.  There he thoroughly studied Stanislavsky's method, which became canonical for the Soviet theater.

Lyubimov explained the beginning of his teaching career:

. . . the last years, when I played, I felt that I was getting dumb, that I really do not like the way I work.  I began to feel that I was very poorly trained in my craft.  Well, maybe this is conceit, [but] it began to seem to me that I could still help my young colleagues—who want to pursue this profession—after all, from my own experience, I understood some mistakes in education—in acting, [e]special[ly].  Although I had very good teachers:[Valentina] Martyanova, [Vladimir Vyacheslavovich] Belokurov, [Aleksander Ivanovich] Cheban, [Serafima Germanovna] Birman, [Sofia Vladimirovna] Giatsintova, [Mikhail Mikhailovich] Tarkhanov, [Iosif Moiseevich] Tolchanov, [Boris Evgenievich] Zakhava, [Boris Vasilyevich] Shchukin.   

Making his film début in 1941 (the same year he joined the NKVD Ensemble) in Tanker 'Derbent' (1941) followed by Tsvetnye kinonovelly (1941; Colored movie novels, AKA: Novelly), Lyubimov appeared in more than two dozen movie roles.  Some were film adaptations of plays in which he’d appeared at the Vakhtangov (Much Ado About Nothing, filmed in 1956); the rest were original cinema projects. 

His final film performance was in the 1973 television movie written by Anatolii Efros, “Just a few words in honor of M. de Molière” (Всего несколько слов в честь господина де МольераVsego neskolko slov v chest gospodina de Molyera) in which he played Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (AKA: Molière).

Lyubimov didn’t turn to directing until 1959, when he staged Aleksandr Galich’s sentimental comedy How Much Does a Man Need? at the Vakhtangov.  

After two years in Kedrov’s seminars, Lyubimov became a teacher at the Shchukin School at the Vakhtangov Theater.  In 1963, after working with third-year students for six months, he staged The Good Person from Sezuan (Добрый человек из Сезуана - Dobryi chelovek iz Sezuana), based on the 1941 play by Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), as their graduation project.  

The play was performed on the stage of the Shchukin School and became a phenomenon of the theater scene.  The stunning production was an overwhelming success and as a result, Lyubimov was offered the directorship of the Moscow Drama and Comedy Theater, located on Taganskaya Square. At the age of 46, Lyubimov had changed the trajectory of his artistic life and had become a director.

Founded in 1946, by the ’60s, the theater was barely eking out a subsistence existence.  The original director resigned in 1964.  Accepting the post when it was offered, Lyubimov changed the name of the theater to the Moscow Drama and Comedy Theater on Taganka, signaling its rebirth, and it has been known colloquially as the Taganka Theater ever since.

One of the principal figures in Lyubimov’s reinvention of the Drama and Comedy Theater was actress Lyudmila Tselikovskaya (1919-92). The director had met her in 1959, just after the death of her husband, and she became what we’d call his common-law wife.  She played a major role in the formation of the Taganka Theater, conceiving many productions for the troupe and, using her connections, helping the director in the fight against bureaucratic officials.

In 1975, Lyubimov and Tselikovskaya quietly and amicably parted.  In 1976 the director met Katalin (Katarin) Kunz (b. 1946), a Hungarian journalist and translator, when the Taganka went to Hungary on tour.  Then Kunz came to Moscow as a correspondent for the Hungarian magazine Film Theater Music.  They got married in Hungary in 1978.  At 62, Lyubimov became a father for the second time; on 25 September 1979, the son of Yuri and Katalin Lyubimov, Pyotr Yurievich, was born in Budapest. 

(Lyubimov also had a son, Nikita, b. 1949, with his second wife, ballerina Olga Yevgenievna Kovaleva.  They met in the NKVD Song and Dance Ensemble.  Earlier, Lyubimov had married the actress Nina Zorina in 1935; he divorced her to marry Kovaleva in 1940.)

After long delays, Lyubimov was allowed to bring the graduates of his class from the Shchukin School into the Taganka troupe and they filmed performances of the theater’s former repertoire.  The change-over launched Lyubimov’s career as a major figure in Soviet, Russian, and world theater—as well as the careers and reputations of several other artists.  He called on many of those extraordinary colleagues he’d worked with during the war in the NKVD Song and Dance Ensemble and collaborated with them at Taganka.

On 23 April 1964, Lyubimov opened his new theater with a production of The Good Person from Sezuan.  From that moment, Yuri Lyubimov’s rapid and powerful directorial rise began.

The Good Person from Sezuan was truly a revolution in the art of theater—at least for the Soviet Union of Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) and Leonid Brezhnev (1906-82).  Since Stalin’s rule, the approved theatrical style was Socialist Realism, a style of idealized realistic art that was characterized by the glorified depiction of communist values. 

Starting with Good Person, Lyubimov introduced Brechtian “alienation” (a term I don’t like; I prefer “defamiliarization” as a translation of Brecht’s Verfremdung, a form of distancing; see “Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations,” posted on ROT on 4 July 2010).  The actors talked with the spectators, for instance, expressing their own attitudes towards the situation in the play—and thus, often, the reality in Soviet Russia. 

Brecht’s, and therefore Lyubimov’s intent was to focus the audience’s attention on the most important ideas by presenting the familiar and commonplace to the audience from an unexpected perspective.  Like his model, to achieve this, Lyubimov boldly introduced songs and choruses into performances.  

In addition to the actors not behaving according to the established conventions of Socialist Realism, the mises-en-scène built for Lyubimov productions were extremely expressive, metaphorical, and symbolic.  Theatergoers (and critics) were surprised, for example, by a casually stretched rag in Hamlet that served as an element of the scenery instead of a painted or constructed backdrop.  Said John Freedman in American Theatre, it was “a metaphor for history sweeping people away.”  One theater scholar described Lyubimov’s sets as “Meyerholdian ‘machines for acting’” (a tenet of Russian Constructivism of the 1920s and ’30s).

Along with Brecht, Lyubimov’s theatrical mentors were Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, and Vakhtangov.  Eschewing the Socialist Realism of Soviet drama, he adapted poetry and narrative fiction into more imaginative stage worlds, and he reconstructed the classics by breaking them apart and presented them from a clearly critical perspective.  In the Soviet Union, Lyubimov invented a new kind of theater: poetic drama.

Margaret Croyden, a distinguished journalist and theater scholar who made the avant-garde her particular beat, described a Lyubimov production thus:

Lyubimov’s theater is a theater of synthesis—a metaphorical mixture of language, images, lighting, sound, music and minimal scenery that are as beautiful as they are powerful.  Music, a part of every Lyubimov production, is never used as background, but to emphasize or comment on the action.

The plays at the Taganka were implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) directed against the Soviet establishment, even if the subject was the Revolution or “the Great Patriotic War.”  The director was dubbed “the theatrical conscience of his nation” by one writer, noted the late Alma Law, a scholar of Soviet theater.  “If a country does not have a theatre with an independent voice,” said Lyubimov, “that country is a cemetery.“ 

But dark clouds were already gathering around Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov.  The Good Person from Sezuan had already been criticized in its first outing for formalism (a grievous sin in the Soviet Union of Socialist Realism), trickery, and desecrating the legacies of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Yevgenii Vakhtangov (1883-1922).

By the mid-1970s, the Taganka became one of the world’s foremost theater centers.  French actor and theater director Jean Vilar (1912-71) visited the Taganka Theater and greatly appreciated its style and aesthetics.  At the 1976 Belgrade International Theater Festival (BITEF), an annual event in Yugoslavia (now Serbia), Lyubimov’s Hamlet with Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-80) in the title role was awarded the Grand Prix.  Lyubimov also received the prize for personal achievements in the arts in 1980 at Warsaw Theater Meetings, another international theater festival. 

During that same decade, Lyubimov began working beyond the Taganka.  In 1974, the Maly Opera and Ballet Theater in Leningrad invited the Taganka director to stage the ballet Yaroslavna to music by Boris Tishchenko.  The performance was innovative, stretching the boundaries of classical Russian ballet with a mixture of traditional ballet, pantomime, and choral singing.  A number of ballet critics found that Yaroslavna took a new step in the development of modern ballet.

In 1975, moving farther afield, Lyubimov staged his first opera, Al gran sole carico d’amore (In the Bright Sunshine Heavy with Love) by Luigi Nono at the world-famous Teatro alla Scala in Milan.  The libretto has no conventional linear narrative, and comments on failed revolutions—including the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the insurgency of militants in 1960s Chile under the leadership of Che Guevara and Tania Bunke (AKA: “Tania the Guerrilla”). 

Nono (1924-90) and Lyubimov together wrote the libretto, based mainly on plays by Brecht (Die Tage der Commune – The days of the commune, 1948-49), but also incorporating texts of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin.  In addition to vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra, the opera incorporates taped sounds.

Since those initial forays, Lyubimov has staged about 30 innovative opera productions on the best stages of the world, such as La Scala, the Paris Opera, London’s Covent Garden, as well as opera houses in Hamburg, Munich, Bonn, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Zurich, Naples, Bologna, Turin, Florence, Budapest, and Chicago.

By 2002, Lyubimov had staged about 50 performances at the Taganka Theater.  From the moment of its birth, Yuri Lyubimov’s Taganka became, in the words of  author and historian Natan Eidelman (1930-89), “an island of freedom in a non-free country.”

Lyubimov worked with such famous writers and poets as Nikolai Erdman, Aleksandr Tvardovsky (1910-71), Fyodor Abramov (1920-83), and Yevgenii Yevtushenko (1932-2017); theater critics Boris Zingerman (1928-2000), Konstantin Rudnitsky (1920-88), and Aleksandr Anikst (1910-88); composers Dmitri Shostakovich, Alfred Schnittke (1934-98), Karen Khachaturian (1920-2011 – nephew of Aram Khachaturian), and Edison Denisov (1929-96), and film directors Sergei Parajanov (1924-90) and Elem Klimov (1933–2003). The stage director even included outstanding scientists such as Pyotr Kapitsa (1894-1984), a leading Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate, and Georgy Nikolayevich Flyorov (1913-90), a nuclear physicist,. on the Taganka’s artistic council.

Then Vladimir Vysotsky, arguably Taganka’s—and probably Russia’s—most popular actor, died on 25 July 1980 at the age of 42.  That popularity—which extended to some of the Soviet Union’s highest officials—had shielded the Taganka and Lyubimov from harsher treatment than they had been suffering at the hands of the regime.  Vysotsky’s death removed that shield.

The theater prepared a musical performance, designed by David Borovsky (AKA: David Borovsky-Brodsky, 1934-2006), in memory of the legendary actor, singer-songwriter, and poet, based on his songs and poems.  Scheduled to première on 25 July 1981, the first anniversary of Vysotsky’s death, this production, entitled Vladimir Vysotsky, was permitted a single performance by the authorities and then banned. (Vladimir Vysotsky finally had its true début at the Taganka in May 1988.)

(This is not the place for a profile of Vladimir Vysotsky, but a few words would be revealing.

(In its obituary of Vysotsky on 28 July 1980, the Morning Star, a British socialist tabloid, proclaimed that “for a generation of Russians he was what Bob Dylan is for a generation in the West.”  The paper wasn’t referring to Vysotsky’s singing style or his voice, but his standing among his myriad of fans in Russia.

(In point of fact, says one music critic, his style “lean[s] more towards ‘a Russian blend of John Lennon, Johnny Cash, and Tom Waits’” than Dylan.  Leonard Cohen was also mentioned, and his cultural stature was compared to that of French singers Jacques Brel or Georges Brassens.  Vysotsky, though, somewhat resembled a weathered Paul Simon.  Vysotsky’s instrument, by the way, was a traditional Russian seven-string guitar.

(A native Muscovite, Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky was born on 25 January 1938.  His songs and poems featured social and political commentary which often put him at odds with the Soviet authorities and censors.  His poetry and music were rarely officially released; his death wasn’t even officially announced in the Moscow press—though it was widely covered in the international news, including the New York Times.

(A popular movie actor, Vysotsky was also a well-known, if idiosyncratic stage performer.  He had taken leave from the Taganka shortly before his death, but he returned several times to perform at the theater.  One such return was to do Hamlet again and he was to appear on the evening following his death.  When crowds appeared at the theater as word spread of Vysotsky’s passing, they found an announcement that the performance was cancelled.  Reports hold that not one ticketholder requested the offered refund.

(Early on 28 July, the morning of his funeral, Vysotsky’s body was transported to the Taganka Theater where he lay in repose on the stage, his coffin draped in black velvet.  Muscovites had been hanging around the theater since the actor’s death, but now a line formed to bid him farewell.  One observer reported that the line stretched for 5½ miles.  According to the estimates of the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs of Moscow, 108,000 people gathered on and near Taganskaya Square that day

(Lyubimov had invited Vysotsky to join him at the Taganka in 1964, the year the director took over the theater’s leadership.  Vysotsky performed a series of leading roles, such as the title part in Brecht’s  Life of Galileo, 1966.  He débuted Hamlet in 1971, playing the prince as a lone intellectual rebel, rising to fight the cruel state machine—much like the actor’s public persona.

(But Vysotsky had a serious substance abuse problem—alcohol, drugs, and tobacco.  He also had progressing cardiovascular disease and an almost hyperactive work life, giving concerts, performances, readings, and appearances all over the world. 

(In 1975, after returning from a tour to Bulgaria, Lyubimov declared that he was “unable to work with this Mr. Vysotsky anymore.”  Nonetheless, many of Vysotsky’s songs were dedicated to Lyubimov.  

(In January 1980 Vysotsky asked Lyubimov for a year’s leave.  He didn’t slow down.  At his death, rumors began about the cause—officially designated as heart failure, though no autopsy was performed.)   

Lyubimov’s next production, 1982’s Boris Godunov by Aleksandr Pushkin, was also banned.  This wasn’t the first time the theater had encountered bans.  In 1968, Boris Mozhaev’s Alive was banned and in 1970, Andrei Voznesensky’s Take Care of Your Faces was prohibited after the première and was shown only three times.

[On Wednesday, 30 September, I will pick up with what happened to the director of the Taganka Theater next that changed Yuri Lyubimovs life.  Part 2 will end with Leo Shapiro’s interview with Lyubimov, which holds its own interests.  Please come back to Rick On Theater for Part 2 of “The Theatrical Conscience of his Nation: Yuri Lyubimov (1917-2014).”]