Tamizdat – Тамиздат

[The article reposted below, about books banned in the Soviet Union (and now also in Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation), caught my attention for two reasons.  One, it’s about Russian literature, and, as many readers of Rick On Theater will know, I studied Russian in college and then in the army. 

[Two, I am utterly opposed to censorship for political or religious reasons.  As I’ve said many times on this blog, I am pretty much a First Amendment absolutist.  I’ve blogged on various kinds of censorship, mostly in this country, on ROT, and, having read “Banned by the Soviets,” I knew I had to add it to my coverage of this act.]

“BANNED BY THE SOVIETS, AVAILABLE IN NEW YORK”
by Sarah Chatta

[This article ran in the print edition of the New York Times on 1 March 2026 in the “Metropolitan” section.  It was posted online as “The Kremlin Banned These Books. You Can Find Them in a New York Library” on 23 February.]

A professor has built a collection of contraband books from an earlier era.

Millions of banned books were smuggled into the Soviet Union in the 20th century — often in small batches, hidden in deliberately mislabeled containers, packed in food tins or tampon boxes and, in at least one case, tucked into a child’s diaper.

Soviet tourists visiting Western Europe brought mini-volumes of “Doctor Zhivago” [Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), 1957 in Russian (Milan, Italy); 1958 in English (New American Library)] back home with them. Members of the Moscow Philharmonic were said to have lined their sheet music with book pages. From balloon-launching sites in West Germany, copies of George Orwell’s [1903-50] “Animal Farm” [English; 1945] were lofted into Eastern Europe.

Published in Russian and other languages and known as “tamizdat,” the books were part of an audacious American venture, part literature, part propaganda and part spycraft, to destabilize the authoritarian Soviet regime from within.

Over the past several years, Hunter College in Manhattan has become home to a library of these remarkable books, thousands of which were once banned in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and hundreds more that are censored in Russia today. The library is run by the nonprofit Tamizdat Project, which now possesses one of the largest special collections of contraband Russian literature in the world.

[Hunter College at Park Avenue and East 68th Street is a division of the City University of New York (CUNY).]

The library is open to visitors upon request, and this month White Rabbit Books on the Upper West Side will open a new section of its store devoted to selling old and new contraband Russian literature curated by the project.

[White Rabbit Books at 200 West 86th Street, Manhattan, New York City, is a bookstore with Russian, English, Ukrainian, and Hebrew books designed for various children’s ages.  It hosts book club activities and cultural events for children and teenagers. (White Rabbit Books in the United Kingdom is a prominent music and literary publisher based in London and Essex, not associated with the NYC shop.)]

The Tamizdat Project is the brainchild of Yakov Klots, a soft-spoken, unassuming literary scholar who teaches at Hunter. He chose the name from a Russian word meaning “published abroad,” which, along with samizdat (“to self-publish”), was one of the two main methods of evading Soviet book censorship. The Iron Curtain, he noted, “wasn’t so iron after all,” and the books seeped through.

[Chatta is a little free with her English renderings of samizdat (самиздат) and tamizdat (тамиздат). They’re two Russian portmanteau words formed by joining two words (or parts of two words, to coin a new word that combines their meanings (English examples: ‘televangelist’ = ‘television’ + ‘evangelist’; ‘cockapoo’ = ‘cocker spaniel’ + ‘poodle’).

[The Russians, and especially the Soviets, were very fond of acronyms (GUM [ГУМ]; Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazín [Государственный Универсальный Магазин], or State Universal [that is, ‘Department’] Store; since 1991, Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin [Главный Универсальный Магазин], Main Universal Store) and portmanteaus (Soviet: Comintern [Коминтерн]; Communist International [Коммунистический интернационал; Kommunisticheskiy internatsional]; post-Soviet: Zomboyashchik [Зомбоящик], Zombie [зомби] +  Yashchik [ящик; ‘box’] = “Zombie Box,” slang for a television).

[In this instance, the second part of the portmanteaus is from the word izdatel'stvo (издательство), which means ‘publishing house’ or ‘publisher.’ The portmanteau use was meant as a pun on the name of the official Soviet state publishing house, Gosudarstvennoye izdatel'stvo (Государственное издательство), known as Gosizdat (Госиздат).

[Sam (сам) is the Russian word for ‘self’ (samoubiystvo [самоубийство]: ‘suicide,’ literally ‘self-murder’), so samizdat is literally ‘self-publisher’ (as if there were publishing company with such a name) or, more colloquially, ‘self-published.’ Unfortunately, in the more comfortable English term, the wry pun is lost—but it probably wouldn’t really connect with an English speaker in any case.

[Tam (там) is Russian for ‘there’ (the opposite of tut [тут; ‘here’]), so tamizdat (тамиздат) is literally ‘there-publisher’ or ‘over there-publisher’—meaning, of course, somewhere other than the USSR.  Again, we’d more likely say ‘published abroad.’

Mr. Klots has assembled the library bit by bit, recruiting his students to build the metal IKEA bookshelves and soliciting book donations from friends and strangers, including the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle [b. 1954; U.S. Ambassador to Russia: 2008-12].

With this collection, the story of the “significant intellectual effort of both Soviet creators and Western partners — the publishers and funders and whoever else, smugglers — it is all in one place,” said Alla Roylance, New York University’s Slavic studies librarian, who donated some of her own books to the Tamizdat Project. “That is incredibly relevant these days,” she added, as the Kremlin unleashes a new wave of censorship.

Page by page

Mr. Klots grew up with contraband Russian literature in the Soviet city of Perm, near the Ural Mountains. His mother, he said, “would take a train to Moscow just to stop by an apartment of one dissident who would give her Solzhenitsyn.” Then she would stay up late into the night duplicating the borrowed book, page by page.

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident, best known for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian, 1962; English – censored, 1963; uncensored, 1991), August 1914 (Russian, 1971; English, 1972), and The Gulag Archipelago (Russian, 1973 by a Parisian publisher; English, 1974).]

“One of my childhood memories is my mother typing something at night and me falling asleep to the sound of the typewriter,” he said.

Countless Soviet households have similar stories of treasuring contraband literature — hiding “Doctor Zhivago” under a grandmother’s mattress, making a copy of the poet Anna Akhmatova’s masterpiece, “Requiem.”

[Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was a Russian and Soviet poet who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and 1966. She is best known for Requiem, an elegy about the Stalinist terror (published in Russian in Munich in 1963 and in English in 1973).]

In the winter of 2022, Mr. Klots had just finished writing a book about the history of Cold War censorship [Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era (Northern Illinois University Press, 2023)]. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Kremlin began a crackdown on free expression at home at a scale unseen since the Soviet era. Russian officials targeted authors, arrested publishers and censored fan fiction websites. The police raided bookstores, and officials drew up lists of objectionable literature, requiring librarians to pull works by Vladimir Sorokin [Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright; b. 1955], Lyudmila Ulitskaya [Russian novelist and short story writer; b. 1943], Haruki Murakami [Japanese novelist, essayist, and short story writer; b. 1949], Truman Capote [American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright; 1924-84], Susan Sontag [American critic, essayist, and novelist; 1933-2004] and Danielle Steel [American romance novelist; b. 1947], among others.

“All of a sudden it became no longer history, but the present and reality again,” Mr. Klots said. “I just couldn’t stand in front of my students and only teach and only tell them about the peculiarities of Russian literature.”

[It’s also not confined to the former Soviet Union! On 6 February 2025, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA, the Pentagon agency responsible for planning, directing, coordinating, and managing pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade educational programs), announced it would remove books related to “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” from its schools. See “Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools” (11 November 2025). 

[An order to remove certain books from service academy libraries was issued on 29 March 2025. The action was directed at the U.S. Naval Academy before being expanded to West Point (9 April) and the Air Force Academy (15/16 April).]

He founded the Tamizdat Project, through which he built the library, raised money to help students fleeing war and persecution, and archived oral histories of literary repression. When the Tamizdat Project announced it was publishing a book by an author critical of President Vladimir Putin [Linor Goralik, Exodus-22 | Исход-22; 2025], Russia branded the organization a “foreign agent.” Now, anyone in Russia who so much as shares the Tamizdat Project’s website without a disclaimer could be penalized.

Mr. Klots shrugged off the threat. The Tamizdat Project plans to publish five new titles this winter and spring. If history is any indication, he said, the impact of a tamizdat book could be like a stone thrown in a lake: “Wherever it falls, the waves get much bigger.”

A pure detective story

New York City is a fitting locale for the work of the Tamizdat Project. For most of the 20th century it was home to the publishers, academics, activists and philanthropists who saw the potential of contraband books during and even before the Cold War.

The first novel officially banned in the Soviet Union, “We” [Мы, romanized: My] — a dystopian vision of totalitarianism by Yevgeny Zamyatin [Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire; 1884-1937] — was published twice in New York before it could be released at home. Mr. Zamyatin managed to send his manuscript abroad, and E.P. Dutton released it, in English, in 1924. More than 60 years later, when Soviet authorities lifted the ban, some of the country’s citizens had already read it. Mr. Zamyatin’s Russian-language original had already been printed in 1952 by Chekhov Publishing House in New York.

“It was just a pure detective story, how every single book got published as tamizdat,” Mr. Klots said.

Chekhov Publishing House received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency through the Ford Foundation, writes the British journalist and historian Frances Stonor Saunders [British journalist and historian; b. 1966] in “The Cultural Cold War,” and was one of numerous literary ventures in the city supported by the agency. The C.I.A. also had a banned-book dissemination program, known for years as the International Literary Center, headquartered on Park Avenue. Under the stewardship of the exiled Romanian aristocrat George Minden [1921-2006], the organization ran a vast international book distribution network that smuggled some 10 million books and magazines into communist countries, often by mail and in diplomatic pouches.

At its height, the Cold War project of printing literature banned in — and very often destined for — communist countries explicitly involved more than a dozen New York publishing houses.

Government analysts described Cold War book distribution, probably one of the least expensive of the C.I.A.’s covert operations, as a “demonstrably effective” way of reaching the Soviet elite and influencing their attitudes “toward intellectual and cultural freedom, and dissatisfaction with its absence.”

Newly relevant

As the scope of Russian censorship has widened in recent years, the history of New York’s Soviet-era banned-book publishers has gained new relevance. “Even if these people are no longer around,” Mr. Klots said, they “laid the foundation for a project like the Tamizdat Project to exist and to build on their legacy.”

One of the Tamizdat Project’s most significant donations came from the family of Edward Kline [1932-2017], a philanthropist who led a double life in New York. Most knew him as the millionaire chief executive of the Kline Brothers department store chain, but the Soviet human rights movement knew him as a chief advocate and underwriter of its publishing work.

The Tamizdat Project has started to reveal the extent of Mr. Kline’s activities. Among his many endeavors, he acquired and revived Chekhov Publishing House, releasing what became canonical 20th-century Russian literature: original works by Nadezhda Mandelstam [Soviet writer, translator, educator, linguist, and memoirist; 1899-1980], Lydia Chukovskaya [Soviet and Russian writer, poet, editor, publicist, memoirist and dissident; 1907-96] and Joseph Brodsky [Russian and American poet and essayist; 1940-96].

Mr. Kline’s daughter, Carole Feuer [b. 1960], spoke with the Tamizdat Project about the years when Soviet exiles like Mr. Brodsky frequented her family’s Park Avenue apartment. During one visit, a leading dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, Alexander Godunov [1949-95], defected to the United States in her living room [1979]. “He was somewhat cute,” she said, “and it was the day I was supposed to go to college.”

Several years earlier, Mr. Kline started Khronika Press with the Soviet dissidents Valery Chalidze [Soviet author, publisher, dissident, and human rights activist; 1938-2018] and later Pavel Litvinov [Russian-born U.S. physicist, writer, teacher, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident; b. 1940]. Khronika produced a bimonthly magazine in Russian and English that regularly broke news of arrests and human rights abuses in the Soviet Union [A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR (1973-82); Хроника защиты прав человека в СССР (Khronika zashchity prav cheloveka v SSSR)]. For a time it served as the main voice of the Soviet opposition.

Without Mr. Kline, his old collaborator Mr. Litvinov told the Tamizdat Project, Khronika Press “wouldn’t have existed.”

A growing movement

Today Mr. Klots is one of many in a growing community of Eastern European immigrants picking up where the Soviet human rights movement left off. A new group of Russian dissidents recently created a new Kronika in New York, this time backed by PEN America [nonprofit organization whose goal is to raise awareness for the protection of free expression in the United States and worldwide] and Bard College [Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], with a more expansive mandate than its predecessors: to preserve independent media from places where journalists are persecuted, including Russia and Guatemala. It calls this work “digital resistance to state censorship.”

In Brooklyn, Anya Morlan-Stysis opened Kvartira [731 Washington Avenue], a nonprofit bookstore that caters to Eastern European exiles and their supporters. Against bright yellow walls and a wide array of children’s literature, Kvartira hosts talks with dissident authors and evenings for participants to write letters to political prisoners. It is the only brick-and-mortar shop listed in New York City as a vendor by the banned-book publisher Freedom Letters. (Last September Russia added the store’s website to a register of proscribed sites, citing unspecified “extremist information.”)

In 2024 Knopf published “Patriot,” the memoir of the late opposition leader Aleksei Navalny [1976-2024], which Russia has since outlawed for inciting “hatred and enmity” toward the government. Last summer Abrams [Books; U.S. publishing house] released an English translation of “Pioneer Summer” [by Ukrainian-Russian duo Katerina Silvanova and Elena Malisova], the gay teen romance that the Kremlin banned after it became a popular sensation. This represents only a small fraction of the global output of contraband titles, some 600 or 700 by Mr. Klots’s estimate, produced since 2023.

[The Pioneers (Пионеры) was a children’s communist organization in the USSR. Children joined in elementary school and remained until around the equivalent of our middle school/junior high; adolescents shifted over to other organizations.

[On the surface, the Pioneers resembled the Boy Scouts and other similar organizations, but along with the scouting activities, community projects like collecting scrap metal, and sports, the Pioneers also went through ideological indoctrination and military simulation games and basic military instruction.

[Membership was virtually mandatory as the Pioneers and the Pioneer Palaces were the only outlets for any kind of programs for children and youth. Inducements, such as preferential admission to universities and especially to the top schools, made membership attractive. Children who chose not to join were often marginalized by their peers as well as the party apparatus that controlled access to both amenities and necessities.]

“I can’t help thinking about what will actually remain from this new time of tamizdat that’s so exponentially growing today,” he said. “I can’t imagine anyone reading Solzhenitsyn as their bedtime reading, can you? But everyone was doing it not so long ago.”

The Tamizdat Project hopes to help a new generation rediscover such books. “It’s enough for a text to find itself elsewhere for it to become a new book,” Mr. Klots said.

[I served five years in the army in the early 1970s, a low-point in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, as a Military Intelligence officer, including, as ROTters will know, a 2½-year tour in West Berlin.  Though both samizdat and tamizdat were in practice at that time, I never had any contact with that kind of publication.

[Years after I got out of the service and was trying to make my way in the theater in New York City, however, I saw first-hand the final chapter of a story that began with a variation on both publishing tactics.  (I’ve told this story on ROT before, but readers, I think, will excuse me for telling it again here.)

[I got to know experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) in the mid-1980s and into the early ’90s (and have blogged about him, his company, and their work many times).  In 1992, when I was researching a profile of Shapiro and The Shaliko Company for The Drama Review, the director was in rehearsal for his third staging of Kafka: Father and Son by Russian dramatist and director Mark Rozovsky (b. 1937).

[Shaliko had produced the play first from 28 February to 24 March 1985 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, its world première.  It’s the story of the play’s origin and how Shapiro got the script and brought it home that’s pertinent here.

[In March 1984, Shapiro and his partner in The Shaliko Company, Elena Prischepenko went to Russia on a three-week theater tour with a group of theater professionals.  The tour spent two weeks in Moscow and at the Soviet writers’ union, Shapiro made “a rather intemperate . . . speech” about seeing so many plays with “happy endings.”  He asked the assembled playwrights why they didn’t “have the courage to talk about life as it really was.” 

[According to Shapiro, after the session, Rozovsky told him, “I have play, no happy ending, you want?”  They arranged to meet secretly and the playwright turned over the manuscript of Kafka: Father and Son (Russian: Кафка: отец и сын), “[j]ust like . . . a spy novel.” 

[Rozovsky had workshopped Kafka at the Moscow Art Theater Studio around 1983, but Pyotr Demichev (1918-2010), Minister of Culture for Soviet leader Yuri Andropov (1914-84; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1982-84), who’d been Chairman of the KGB from 1967 until 1982, cancelled the performances after the second preview, because the Czech embassy protested that discussions of the works of Franz Kafka (Czech; 1883-1924) had been the incitement for the start of the Prague Spring of 1968, so it never officially opened. 

[Shapiro said he “smuggled it out under my shirt,” and Prischepenko translated it when they got back to the United States.  In March 1985, Shapiro presented the world première of Kafka: Father and Son.  The play was both “published” (in typescript only) by samizdat and, since it was accomplished abroad, by tamizdat.

[After Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1985-91; President of the Soviet Union: 1990-91) 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.

[Here’s a list of past posts on the topic of censorship: 

•   “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009)

•   “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010)

•   “Disappearing Theater” (19 July 2010)

•   “‘The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)’” by Paul Molloy [Allegro] (22 May 2011)

•   “Culture War” (6 February 2014)

•   “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015)

•   “‘How to Free Speech’” by Lee C. Bollinger (23 November 2015)

•   “Fighting for Free Expression” (5 February 2016)

•   “‘Arts and the State’” [1990] by Paul Mattick, Jr. (14 November 2021)

•   “Censorship on School Stages” (30 July 2023)

•   “‘The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship’” by Allison Considine, Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith (21 April 2024)

•   “America’s Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” (25 October 2024)

•   “‘The Arts and the Battle for the Soul of Civilization’” by Dr. Indira Etwaroo (4 May 2025)

•   “Degrading the Arts (Redux)” (14 May 2025)

•   “Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools” (11 November 2025)

•   “More on Censorship of School Theater” (12 December 2025)

[Sarah Chatta is an editorial assistant in the Opinion department of the New York Times.  In addition to her editorial work, she writes for the paper.  Before joining the Times in October 2024, Chatta held several diverse roles in journalism and education, including fact-checker at the New Yorker, where her writing and translations were also published; freelance editor for Novaya Gazeta Europe, an independent Russian newspaper published in Riga, Latvia; investigative story coordinator for the syndicated tabloid television newsmagazine Inside Edition; and international reporter for the Daily News in Sri Lanka and the Chilkat Valley News in Alaska.  Chatta studied Russian and creative writing at Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio), which informs much of her current reporting on Russian literary and cultural history.]

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.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Brustein wrote in the New Republic that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*  *  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LS: And you started work on this once before.

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

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

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

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

YL: Only 10 rehearsals.

LS: Is your idea now very different?

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

LS: Do you think that’s possible?

YL: It’s possible.

LS: Is it difficult having too much freedom?

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

LS: And now?

YL: It’s running now, successfully.

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

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

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

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

LS: By whom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LS: Do you see theatre as a spiritual activity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LS: And you have other plans for the Taganka?

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

LS: All those at once?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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