[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).
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