[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 Мольера – Vsego 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 Lyubimov’s 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).”]
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