school, and founded the prestigious Sovremennik (Contemporary) Theater in 1958, and spoke to the conscience of the country after Stalin’s death. He reinvigorated MAT’s psychological realism in acting while he relaxed its history of realistic design. When he took charge of MAT in 1970, he found an unwieldy company of more than one hundred actors. In 1987, with per-estroika (“reconstruction”) occurring in the Soviet Union, Yefremov decided to reconstruct the company by splitting MAT in two. Yefremov retained The Chekhov Art Theater in the 1902 art nouveau building, and actress Tatyana Doronina took charge of The Gorky Art Theater. While Yefremov focused on reviving artistic goals, Doronina made The Gorky a voice for the nationalists of the 1990s. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the Art Theater and all of Russia’s theaters struggled to survive. Not only did the loss of governmental subsidies create extraordinary financial instability, but the traditional audiences, who looked to theater for subversive political discussion, deserted theaters for television news. In 2000, Yefremov’s student, actor-director Oleg Tabakov, took reluctant charge of the theater’s uncertain future.
In its first twenty seasons (1898-1917), MAT revolutionized theatrical art through the production of a repertoire of more than seventy plays. The theater opened in 1898 with two major works: Alexei Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor Ionnovich, which brought mediaeval Russia vividly to life with arche-ologically accurate designs, and Chekhov’s The Seagull, which added psychological realism in acting to illusionistic stage environments. MAT premiered all of Chekhov’s major plays between 1898 and 1904, with Stanislavsky’s staging of The Three Sisters (1901) hailed as one of the company’s greatest triumphs. Realistic productions, characterized by careful detailing in costumes, properties, sets, and acting choices, predominated. MAT produced more plays by Henrick Ibsen than by any other playwright, with An Enemy of the People (1900) providing Stanislavsky with one of his greatest roles. Even Ibsen’s abstract play, When We Dead Awaken, was directed realistically by Nemirovich (1901). For Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902) MAT used representational detail to create a social statement about the underclass. Nemirovich especially furthered the cause of stage realism, often overburdening plays with inappropriate illusion. His unwieldy realistic production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1903) garnered much criticism.
Stanislavsky’s growing interest in abstracted styles led to MAT’s production of a series of symbolist plays. Notable among these were Stanislavsky’s stagings of Leonid Andreyev’s The Life of Man (1907), which featured stunning stage effects developed by its director, and Maurice Maeterlinck’s fantasy, The Blue Bird (1908), as well as Gordon Craig’s theatricalist production of Shakespeare’s
MOSCOW BAROQUE
Hamlet (1911). 1907 saw the two MAT styles collide uncomfortably when Nemirovich presented his overly naturalistic version of Ibsen’s Brand alongside Stanislavsky’s abstracted production of Knut Hamsun’s The Drama of Life. When Stanislavsky began to apply his new ideas about acting to Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (1909), he utilized abstraction both in the symmetrical set design and in the actors’ use of static gestures in order to focus on inner states. This production caused a permanent rift between Stanislavsky and the company.
Although MAT greeted the 1917 revolution optimistically, it lost economic viability. Its first postrevolutionary production was Lord Byron’s Cain in 1920, interpreted by Stanislavsky as a metaphor of the postrevolutionary civil war. MAT struggled to find the necessary funds and materials to realize the production. In order to survive financially, half of the company toured Europe and the United States from 1924 to 1926 with their most famous realistic productions, among them Tsar Fyodor Ionnovich from 1898 and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard from 1904. This tour solidified the international fame of Stanislavsky and MAT. In the late 1920s, MAT participated in the general theatrical trend toward a Soviet repertoire. Stanislavsky staged Mikhail Bulgakov’s controversial view of White Russia in The Days of the Turbins (1926) and Vsevolod Ivanov’s Armored Train 14-69 (1927). During the 1930s and 1940s, under the yoke of Socialist Realism, MAT’s work lost its verve, its productions becoming undistinguished. In the 1970s, Yefremov reinvigorated the company by employing talented actors and revived its repertoire by staging new plays, such as Mikhail Roshchin’s portrait of young love in Valentin and Valentina (1971) and Alexander Vampilov’s Duck Hunting (1979), in which Yefremov played the fallen hero. See also: CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH; MEYERHOLD, VSEVOLOD YEMILIEVICH; MOSCOW; SILVER AGE; SOCIALIST REALISM; STANISLAVSKY, KONSTANTIN SERGEYEVICH; THEATER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benedetti, Jean. (1988). Stanislavsky [sic]: A Biography. New York: Routledge. Carnicke, Sharon Marie. (1998). Stanislavsky in Focus. London: Harwood/Routledge. Leach, Robert and Borovsky, Victor. (1999). A History of Russian Theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rich, Elizabeth. (2000). “Oleg Yefremov, 1927- 2000: A Final Tribute.” Slavic and East European Performance 20(3):17-23. Worrall, Nick. (1996). The Moscow Art Theatre. New York: Routledge.
Moscow Baroque was the fashionable architectural style of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, combining Muscovite (Russo-Byzantine) traditions with Western decorative details and proportions; the term also sometimes applied to new trends in late seventeenth-century Muscovite painting, engraving, and literature.
The term Moscow Baroque (moskovskoe barokko) came into use among Russian art historians in the 1890s and 1900s as a way of categorizing the distinctive style of architecture which flourished in and around Moscow from the late 1670s, and in the provinces into the 1700s. In the 1690s, Peter I’s maternal relatives the Naryshkins commissioned many sumptuous churches in the style; hence the supplementary art historical term “Naryshkin Baroque,” which is sometimes erroneously applied as a general term for the style. Some of the early examples of Moscow Baroque are reminiscent of mid-seventeenth-century Muscovite churches in their general shape and coloration-cubes constructed in red brick with white stone decorations and topped with one or five domes-but the builders had evidently assimilated a new sense of symmetry and regularity in their ordering of both structural and decorative elements. Old Russian ornamental details were replaced almost entirely by Western ones based on the Classical order system: half-columns with pediments and bases, window surrounds of broken pediments, volutes, carved columns, and shell gable motifs. One of the best concentrations of Moscow Baroque buildings was commissioned by the regent Sophia Alexeyevna in the 1680s in the sixteenth-century Novodevichy Convent in Moscow, which includes the churches of the Transfiguration, Dormition, and Assumption, with a refectory, belltower, nuns’ cells, and crenelations on the convent walls in matching materials and style. Similar constructs can be found in the Monastery of St. Peter (Vysokopetrovsky) on Petrovka Street in Moscow. Civic buildings were constructed on the same principles: for example,
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Prince Vasily Golitsyn’s Moscow mansion (1680s) and the Pharmacy on Red Square (1690s). A number of these projects were carried out by the architectural section of the Foreign Office.
In the 1690s builders regularly incorporated octagonal structures, producing the so-called octagon-on-cube church. One of the finest examples, the Intercession at Fili, built for Peter’s uncle Lev Naryshkin in 1690-1693, with its soaring tower of receding octagons, gold cupolas, and intricately carved limestone decoration, bears witness to both the Naryshkins’ wealth and their Westernized tastes. Inside, all the icons were painted in a matching “Italianate” style and set in an elaborately carved and gilded iconostasis. This and other churches such as the Trinity at Troitse-Lykovo, Boris and Gleb in Ziuzino, and Savior at Ubory, with their tiers of receding octagons, also owe something to distant prototypes in Russian and Ukrainian architecture (the wooden architecture of the former and the dome configuration of the latter), while the new sense of harmony in their design and planning evokes the Renaissance. The style spread beyond Moscow.
Analogous developments can be seen in allegorical prints of the period, embellished with a characteristic Baroque mix of Christian and Classical imagery, most of which originated in Ukraine. A characteristic example is Ivan Shchirsky’s engraving (1683) of Tsars Ivan and Peter hovering above a canopy containing a double eagle, with Christ floating between them and, above Christ, a winged maiden, the Divine Wisdom (Sophia). In icons painted in the Moscow Armory and in workshops in Yaroslavl, Vologda, and other major commercial centers, influences from Western art can be seen in the use of light and shade and decorative details such as scrolls, putti-like angels, ornate swirling cloud and rock motifs, dramatic gestures, and even some borrowings from Catholic iconography: for instance, saints with emblems of their martyrdom; blood dripping from Christ’s hands and side. In poetry, syllabic verse and Baroque motifs and devices were imported from Poland and practiced by such writers as Simeon Polotsky,
