Mark Rozovsky & The Theater at the Nikitsky Gate

[On 27 and 30 September, I published a two-part post on Yuri Lyubimov, a world-renowned Soviet and Russian stage director, that included a 1990 interview conducted by Leonardo Shapiro.  That interview was published in 1991 in Bomb magazine.

[Leo Shapiro did that interview in the spring of 1990 when he was on a trip to Moscow to stage a play there.  The play was Kafka: Father and Son by Mark Rozovsky, which Shapiro had produced in English with his troupe in New York in 1985; now he was staging its Russian-language première at Rozovsky’s own theater, the Nikitsky Gate.

[During that same trip, when he interviewed Lyubimov, Shapiro also interviewed Rozovsky—except that that transcript was never published.  It exists solely in typescript, probably only in Leo Shapiro’s papers in the Archives & Manuscripts of the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts—and in my own personal files.

[Rozovsky isn’t as famous as Lyubimov was; Yuri Lyubimov was at the height of his international renown in 1990.  Mark Rozovsky, though, was, like Lyubimov, also a rebel in Soviet days and ran a highly respected Moscow theater during the time that the USSR was transforming into the sovereign Russian Federation and the Commonwealth of Independent States.  Furthermore, Rozovsky got to Broadway: Strider, 1979-80.

[So, having profiled Lyubimov, with an interview appended, I’m going to try to do the same service for Rozovsky.  The added frisson is that very few people will have read the interview Shapiro did with this director-playwright.]

Mark Rozovsky is one of the most interesting contemporary Soviet theater directors.  In addition to writing for the stage, Rozovsky, 83, is also a theater director, screenwriter, composer, poet, and prose writer.  Mikhail Shatrov (1932-2010), a well-known Soviet and Russian playwright and screenwriter, has said about his colleague: “He is a phenomenon.  He does everything himself from start to finish: writing, directing, composing the music, and sometimes even performing.”

A multi-faceted artist, Mark Rozovsky has the title of People’s Artist of the Russian Federation (2004, “for great services in the field of art”).  He’s a Knight of the Order of Honor (1998, “for services to the state, a great contribution to strengthening friendship and cooperation between peoples, many years of fruitful activity in the field of culture and art”) as well as holding the Order of Merit for the Fatherland (2012, “for a great contribution to the development of national culture and long-term creative activity”).  Rozovsky’s a recipient of the Chekhov Medal (2005, “for Contribution to Russian Art”) and has twice been named Russian of the Year (2006 and 2012).

Mark Grigoryevich Rozovsky (Russian: Марк Григорьевич Розовский) was born Mark Semyonovich Shlindman on 3 April 1937 in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the Russian Far East.  (Some sources erroneously say that Rozovsky’s birthplace was Petropavlovsk, sometimes also known as Petropavl, in what was then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.)  His father, Semyon Mikhailovich Shlindman (1905-67), was an engineer and an economist and his mother, Olga Konstantinovna Klempt (1906-76), was a dressmaker.

When he was just six months old, Mark Semyonovich’s father was arrested during Stalin’s Great Terror and spent 18 years in labor camps.  Olga Konstantinovna loved her husband greatly all her life, her son says, and when Rozovsky married his current (i.e., fourth) wife and they had a son, the couple named him Semyon Markovich, after Rozovsky’s biological father.

(Rozovsky is currently married to Tatiana Revzina, director and musical director of the Theater at the Nikitsky Gate, her husband’s theater.  Semyon Markovich is the couple’s only child.  From previous marriages, the director has two daughters, Maria and Aleksandra. 

(Maria Markovna Flyarkovskaya, née Rozovskaya, graduated, like her father, from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University and works as the head of the literary department of the Nikitsky Gate Theater.  Her husband, Vladislav Flyarkovsky, is the host of News of Culture on the Russia-K (formerly Kultura) TV channel.  Aleksandra Rozovskaya is an actress at the Russian Academic Youth Theater in Moscow.)

Despite her feelings for Semyon Shlindman, Rozovsky’s mother married an engineer, Grigory Zakharovich Rozovsky, who offered her protection from prosecution and persecution.  Grigory Rozovsky adopted Mark Semyonovich.

Olga Konstantinovna Rozovskaya was half Russian and half Greek.  Semyon Shlindman, Mark Semyonovich’s biological father, was Jewish.  Later, the director-playwright said that Judaism wasn’t part of his life growing up.  Even so, he explained, anti-Semitism confronted him frequently—he was called zhid, the Russian equivalent to ‘kike”—and this experience impelled him to become active in Jewish causes and organizations even though he wasn’t a practicing Jew.

When he turned one year old, Mark Semyonovich’s Russian grandmother took him to live in Moscow, away from the harsh living conditions in Kamchatka.  There he had to survive World War II (or, as the Russians call it, The Great Patriotic War).  More than once, little Mark Semyonovich’s grandmother had to save his life by wrapping her body around his to protect him from the shelling.

In 1953, when the 16-year-old applied for a passport, Mark Semyonovich took the patronymic and surname of his stepfather: Mark Grigoryevich Rozovsky.  On his new passport, the boy wrote down “Greek” as his nationality                                                                                           

Rozovsky graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University in 1960 and the workshop of Konstantin Fyodorovich Isaev (1907-77), a Soviet screenwriter, playwright, and Nikolai Aronovich Kovarsky (1904-74), a screenwriter and literary historian, of the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors in 1964.  (We’d probably call this the Workshop for Advanced Scriptwriters and Directors; it’s a non-governmental institution for postgraduate professional education in Moscow.)

The young theater artist joined the Writers’ Union of the USSR in 1976 and was a member of the Community Council of the Russian Jewish Congress.

From its founding in 1958, Rozovsky headed the student theater of MSU known as Our House (or Our Home: Nash Dom), which became widely known.  (The theater, which has roots back to 1756, is considered the oldest theater in Moscow.)

In the 1960s, Rozovsky also worked on the Literaturnaya Gazeta (‘Literary newspaper’), a weekly cultural and political newspaper.  He also wrote for the magazine Youth, an illustrated literary and artistic magazine for young people where he published popular columns of satire and humor.  He also worked in radio.

After the closure of Our House by order of the party in 1969, the director staged performances at the Moscow Art Theater, Leningrad’s Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater, the Mikhail Chekhov Riga Russian Theater in Latvia, the Kirov Academic Opera and Ballet Theater in Leningrad, Leningrad’s Pushkin Academic Theater, the Lensovet Theater in Leningrad, the Moscow Mayakovsky Theater, Moscow’s Obraztsov Puppet Theater, and the Polish Theater in Wrocław.  He also helmed movies and television shows.

During the decade of the 1970s, theatrical activity completely captured the budding young journalist.  In 1970, he created the theater at the State Literary Museum and in 1974 he worked as the principal director of the Moscow Music Hall.

In 1975 he staged the first rock opera in the USSR, Orpheus and Eurydice, written by composer Alexander Zhurbin and playwright Yuri Dimitrin.  The première was staged at the opera studio of the Leningrad Conservatory on 25 July.  (Since the term “rock” had a negative connotations for the leadership of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, the production was called “zong-opera” [зонг-опера]—from the German  der Song [‘pop song’].)

In 1983, Rozovsky formed the Theater at the Nikitsky Gate (Театр У Никитских Ворот) in the Central House of Culture for Medical Workers and became its artistic director.  In the tiny theater with an auditorium accommodating just 70 spectators, he staged performances of Poor Liza (musical, 1989; from a 1792 story by Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin), Doctor Chekhov (theatrical fantasies based on the stories of Anton Chekhov, 1983), The Story of a Horse (musical, 1975, based on Leo Tolstoi’s story “Kholstomer,” Gorky Theater; New York City Off-Broadway: 1979 [as Strider]; Broadway: 1979-80), Romances with Oblomov (1992, based on the 1859 novel by Ivan Goncharov), Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1993), among others.

(Aside from the New York performances, productions of Rozovsky’s The Story of a Horse have also been mounted at the Royal National Theater in London, and in Madrid, Stockholm, Tokyo, Seoul, Riga (Latvia), Helsinki, and other cities.)

After the new theater was founded, it received the status of a professional studio theater on 1 January 1987.  The Soviet Ministry of Culture officially granted the Nikitsky Gate the status of state theater on 1 October 1991.

On 25 January 2012, the Nikitsky Gate Theater moved into new quarters.  After waiting more than 12 years, the new four-story building of a former revival cinema on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street in central Moscow opened its doors as a new playhouse.

The new Theater at the Nikitsky Gate boasts a spacious new auditorium with comfortable seating for 198 patrons and good sightlines.  The stage is equipped with the latest technologies, including modern sound and light equipment.  The lobby is decorated in green and brown tones to create an atmosphere of coziness and comfort.  With all the modern innovations, though, the historical appearance of the 18th-century mansion has been preserved.

Rozovsky’s company includes some very prominent artists, quite a few with honors such as People's Artist of the Russian Federation and Honored Artist of Russia.  They perform a wide variety of theater pieces representing philosophical parables and musicals, poetic performances and comedies, dramas and tragedies.  Currently, the Nikitsky Gate has more than 40 performances in its repertoire.  Rozovsky constantly adds new plays to the troupe’s catalogue.

Beyond the troupe’s performances at their home theater, Rozovsky and his Nikitsky Gate company participate in festivals both across Russia and around the world. 

In addition to his directorial work, Rozovsky’s the author of plays: Vysotsky’s Concert at the Research Institute (about actor, poet, singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky), Kafka: Father and Son (produced in New York City in 1985 and 1991, and in Russia in 1990; see the interview with the playwright following this profile and my post on Rick On Theater on 5 and 8 November 2015), Triumphalnaya Square (about Soviet stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold), and Songs of Our Yard (favorite songs of the Soviet past played outdoors in the inner courtyard of the theater with spectators singing along).

Rozovsky is also the author of the screenplay for the three-part TV miniseries D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers (based on the 1844 novel by Alexandre Dumas père, 1979) and the libretto for the opera Columbus’s Fifth Journey (to music composed by Aleksander Smelkov; presented at the Saint Petersburg Chamber Opera, 1994).

Rozovsky has been active politically as well as artistically.  In 1996 and 2003, he was among the cultural and scientific figures who called on the Russian authorities to stop the war in Chechnya and proceed to the negotiation process.

In October 2002, during the hostage-taking at the theater center in the Dubrovka section of Moscow, which resulted in the deaths of at least 170 people at the hands of Chechen terrorists and government forces, Rozovsky, whose 14-tear-old daughter Aleksandra was held hostage, took part in the live broadcast of Savik Shuster’s talk show “Freedom of Speech” on the television channel NTV.  Rozovsky called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Chechnya immediately.

In 2007-2008, he was a member of the Supreme Council of the liberal political party Civil Power.

After the annexation of Crimea to Russia in March 2014, together with a number of other well-known figures of science and culture in Russia, Rozovsky expressed his disagreement with the policy of the Russian authorities in Crimea.  His position was set out in an open letter published in the socio-political newspaper Novaya Gazeta, known for its critical and investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs.

Mark Rozovsky stresses the elements of poetry, psychology, and humanity in his productions.  But almost all of them also have a political aspect as well.  Before 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union, his plays were unambiguously opposed to Soviet regimentations, suppression, and censorship.  

For a time, after Our House, the student theater, was closed on party orders, Rozovsky was blacklisted.  He heard from a friend that he was on a list of performers who were forbidden to appear on radio and television and he had to rely on friends to help him get directing jobs away from Moscow, such as Leningrad, Wrocław, and Riga.

Even after the Soviet Union dissolved, Rozovsky continued to emphasize his main focus—freedom of speech.  He saw the rise of fascism and nationalism in Russia and spoke out against it vociferously, both from the stage of the Nikitsky Gate Theater and in person.  He even had a running verbal battle with ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (a misleading name).

*  *  *  *

[After having smuggled the script out of Russia, where production of the play had been forbidden by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, Leonardo Shapiro presented the world première of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son with his troupe, The Shaliko Company, at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan’s East Village from 28 February to 24 March 1985. 

[After Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev initiated his policy of glasnost, or ‘openness,’ in 1986, Rozovsky was permitted to stage the play at his Theater at the Nikitsky Gate and he invited Shapiro to come to Moscow to direct it.  Rehearsals were in April 1990 and the Russian (and Russian-language) première was in May.

[Kafka is a two-character play that’s essentially a debate between writer Franz Kafka and his domineering father, Hermann; there’s little plot to synopsize.  The play depicts the strained relationship between the Son and the Father, which Peter Wynne of the Bergen County, New Jersey, Sunday Record described as “the classical Oedipal struggle”—though I say it’s more complex than that. 

[Shapiro said that he saw Kafka as “a Jewish family play, a play about fathers and sons,” but added that it was also “a warning about the new wave of repression of the creative spirit building here in the United States.”  The Minister of Cullure certainly saw the tyrannical Hermann Kafka as a stand-in for the repressive Soviet state and Franz represented the Russian artists—which is why he banned the play in 1983 

[The text of Kafka: Father and Son was based mostly on a letter Franz Kafka wrote, but never sent, to his father (“Letter to His Father,” November 1919) and parts of “The Judgment” (1912), Kafka’s most autobiographical story.  (I posted a two-part report on Shapiro’s productions of Kafka on Rick On Theater on 5 and 8 November 2015.)

[Because this was a typescript and not a published interview, I have taken the liberty of editing what I believe were typos.  I’ve also broken up a couple of very long passages, but I haven’t rewritten anything; I just split up the paragraphs into smaller units.]

INTERVIEW WITH MARK ROZOVSKY
by Leonardo Shapiro
Moscow, April 1990
Rozovsky’s words translated by Steve Nielsen

This conversation between playwright Mark Rozovsky and Director Leonardo Shapiro took place at the Nikitsky Gate Theater in Moscow in April 1990, preceding rehearsals on Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son.  (The transcript begins in mid-conversation referring to a moment in Mark Rozovsky’s play when Kafka’s father says, “I’ll kill you.”)

Leonardo Shapiro:  I think that that was the one spot that was the hardest for us in New York.  Because the way we played it, it didn’t seem that at that moment the father was upset, it seemed like a moment of rest.  So it was very hard for us to find the logic of your introducing the idea of killing the son.  When did you write the  play?

Mark Rozovsky:  I don’t remember anymore.  I think it was in 1980, maybe 1981.

LS:  What gave you the idea?

MR:  By the way, the moment we were just discussing is very much like what prisoners in this country [i.e., the Soviet Union] lived through under [Joseph] Stalin [leader of the USSR, 1922-53].

LS:  Who?

MR:  Those who were interrogated by the KGB [Committee for State Security – the Soviet secret police].  I can understand those who confessed under torture, but there were a great many instances, and a lot of documents on this are appearing today, when the investigator did not subject the prisoner to physical torture, but got him to confess by other means entirely.  There were, of course, the standard provocations and games of nerves on the part of the investigator, but there was a huge number of cases when the accused confessed to a whole series of sins that, it was clear to everyone, he had not committed.  He would dream up a whole world.

LS:  To make them stop, or because he believed it?

MR:  It was a type of artistic fantasy.  It was complete delirium.  He dumped on himself, as they say.  [Russian theater avant-gardist Vsevolod] Meyerhold, for example, confessed that he was an English spy, a Japanese spy . . . .  The torture came later.  And  it’s a little strange to read about it today.  It’s like Kafka’s world was at work.  The more the victim confesses, the more he disarms his tormenter.  The more he surrenders the less chance there is of his being further persecuted.

LS:  Do you know the Kafka story “The Penal Colony” [written in 1914 and published as “In the Penal Colony” in 1919] where there’s a machine that carves the sentence into the prisoner like a tattoo?

MR:  Kafka had a lot of insight into the world of fascism and “socialism.”  It’s astonishing.  There’s only one other writer who had such insight into our times, [novelist Fyodor] Dostoevsky.

LS:  What actually led you think of this?  Were you thinking of that and looking for a way to write about it and then happened upon this letter to his father, or were you interested in Kafka and then you put these two ideas together?

MR:  When a volume of Kafka’s works was published for the first time [in the Soviet Union], in the ’60s, he immediately was widely read here.  There were even a lot of jokes at the time about Kafka.  And Kafka became a sign of a new style of life, new furniture, a modern sofa, the hallmark of a new cultural awareness.  It was fashionable to have Kafka on your bookshelf. 

We would gather in each other’s kitchen, with a bottle of vodka, and discuss Kafka.  It was, of course, a serious interest on the one hand, but on the other hand, Kafka, like a picture of [American writer Ernest] Hemingway, was to be found in all of the more or less cultured homes.  Which I considered terrible. 

Then, strange as it may seem, in the ’70s, the Kafka fashion passed.  People, with a very few exceptions, stopped reading him and lost interest in him.  But I had the feeling that the world in which we were living had become even more Kafkaesque. 

Furthermore, in 1968, the events in Czechoslovakia started with a discussion of Kafka.  Kafka continued to be the writer on whom our freedom and spirituality were tested.  And I wanted to write a play about Kafka because those times remain important to me. 

[Known as “The Prague Spring,” the “events in Czechoslovakia” in 1968 was an upheaval when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and attempted to grant additional rights to the citizens of the country.  The effort continued until the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact members invaded the country to suppress the reforms.]

I could have written a play based on The Trial [novel written between 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously in 1925] and that was the first thing that occurred to me.  It was like no other novel, in that it was similar to what our history was covering up.  But I decided, precisely for this reason, that I would not do The Trial and that was the first thing that occurred to me.  It reflected that history too clearly. 

And when I reread Kafka’s stories and the letter to his father, it seemed to me that these two things could be joined together, making a more profound, more indirect work.

LS:  Yes, it’s a great idea.  It’s much more interesting to create something new out of the combination of Kafka’s actual personal life and the creation of his actual imagination.  I think it gives you more freedom, and it also makes a connection between the personal and the social without having to spell it out.  The more detailed, real, and specific the story, the more weight it can carry.

MR:  Yes.  In what I was just saying, I was stressing the political side.  But Kafka’s strength is that he was able to translate the psychology of a man, the secrets of his inner “I.” 

For example, what are tenderness and caresses?  In Kafka they are the first signs of sadism.  We have become accustomed to violence, a cult of direct force against the weak.  But if I counter that violence with tenderness and gentleness, that force dissipates. 

And I also discovered that Kafka loved life, and his works are life affirming.  The morbid nature of his work and his inner depression are a means of doing battle for his love of life. 

Many people in this country rejected Kafka because he seemed so abject.  But that is not at all true.  He had a great love for life and for man.  And he, perhaps more than anyone else, was capable of joy. 

But the world around him was unjust and harsh, and it was only in his works that he opposed that world.  Only in art did his personality become absolutely free in this captive world.

And now, forgive me for putting myself in league with Kafka, this way of life has become my way of life.  Because, the only way of surviving those years was to write “for the desk drawer,” to write for the salvation of one’s own identity, as Kafka did, and be free only in art.

And this gave rise to a paradox: a blank sheet of paper, a pen, ink, a table and a chair, mothing more, and that is me. 

But out there is a huge world, a colossal bureaucratic machine, the army with its tanks and rockets, the navy with its aircraft carriers, the Ministry of Culture, and thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands, millions of people in the service and in the pay of the system.

And only one man stands up against that system, one man with a pen and blank sheets of paper.  And his only act is, from morning to night, from left to right, writing his manuscript.  That is how Kafka worked. 

But that is how, in this country, [Soviet writer, novelist, and historian Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn worked, too.  And when that manuscript came to be called The Gulag Archipelago, it turned out that that manuscript, written by one man holding a pen in his hand, was mightier than the whole world  with its army of millions and its bureaucracy of millions. 

[Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago, a non-fiction book about the Soviet forced-labor camp system, between 1958 and 1968.  (GULAG is the Russian acronym for the Main Directorate of Camps  –Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei.)  Seized by the KGB in 1973, a copy of the manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union to Paris where the first Russian edition was published that year.  Translations into French and English followed the next year.  The book became a worldwide sensation; in the USSR, it was circulated in samizdat underground publication (literally, ‘self-published’).

[Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet citizenship was revoked in 1974 and he fled to West Germany.  In 1976, he moved to the United States.  Shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship was restored in 1990; four years later, the famed writer returned to Russia, where he lived until his death at 89 in 2008.]

Who comes out on top?  The individual holding a pen, or the global system that is, in its entirely, opposed to that individual, against that one man?  The system, it turns out, is powerless, and is capable of only one thing—killing him.  It can do nothing more, because in every other regard, that individual is stronger. 

It’s very simple.  But in order to live thus, one has to have a remarkable inner strength, great talent, and faith in God.  By faith in God, I mean, above all, a sense of God in yourself.  And the messianic element in Kafka is to be found in all of the great Russian writers.

LS:  A strange Messiah.

MR:  Yes, strange, to be sure.  Therefore, here in the Soviet Union, to this day, Kafka has not been understood sufficiently profoundly.  I have in mind here the general reader.  There are, of course, some people who understand him very well, but the bulk of the readership does not understand him.  When the play [i.e., Kafka: Father and Son] is ready, I am sure that we will encounter this misunderstanding.  There will be some who understand thoroughly, and some who understand nothing at all.  And we must be ready for that.

LS:  What does that mean, ready for it?  Physically ready?

MR:  (Laughs.)  Perhaps.  We have to be ready in every way.  Perhaps you mean we should prepare ourselves by swimming laps?

LS:  In the play, when the father orders Kafka to write and Kafka writes, what does he write?

MR:  Who needs to know, the actors, the audience, or you? 

LS:   Well, in terms of the audience, there’s two choices: one is that he writes the story that he hands to the father later, and the other is that he doesn’t.  It’s either that or they don’t know what he writes.  He says that it’s his confession.

MR:  The son is describing his relationship with his father, as a result of which he perishes.  He makes an artistic image of him, and takes him from the world of everyday life into the world of art, the world of imagination.  And in that world he describes his demise as a result of what happened in the real world.