The Magical Chorus

A direct connection to the Chekhov line of the old Art Theater was seen in this production. It was perceived, as The Seagull had been in its day, as the company’s political and social manifesto, and audiences saw Chekhovian traits in the characters of Bulgakov’s play, noble idealistic officers who defended the doomed “White idea” from the victorious Bolsheviks.

The Days of the Turbins at MAT had a difficult history. The public adored the play, it was sold out, but the orthodox critics were vicious. Stalin, by then the highest cultural arbiter of the land, was drawn to the play and saw it at least fifteen times; scenes from the production appeared in his dreams, he confessed.

In 1929, Stalin wrote about The Days of the Turbins: “The main impression that the audience is left with is an impression that is beneficial for Bolsheviks: ‘if even people like the Turbins are forced to put away arms and bow to the will of the people, admitting their cause is completely lost, that means the Bolsheviks are unbeatable, and you can’t do anything with them, the Bolsheviks.’ The Days of the Turbins is a demonstration of the crushing power of Bolshevism,” he concluded.⁹

Despite that, Stalin’s attitude toward Bulgakov was unpredictable: sometimes he encouraged the writer, sometimes he punished him. Stalin would not reply to Bulgakov’s letters, but once he telephoned him. The writer, anti-Soviet at heart and a sober, ironic person, nevertheless got drawn into this cat-and-mouse game to the extent that it became one of the central themes of his work, reflected in his exquisite novel about Moliere and his patron Louis XIV (a very transparent parallel), a fine play on the same theme, Cabal of Hypocrites, and his phantasmagoric novel The Master and Margarita, his final statement and one of the peaks of twentieth-century Russian prose. One of the main characters of the novel, Woland, a Lucifer-like figure, enters into a complex relationship (not unlike the one between Stalin and Bulgakov) with the Master, a writer.

The Master and Margarita was not published in Bulgakov’s lifetime, nor did he succeed in staging his last play, Batum (about Stalin’s youth), which was written at the request of the Art Theater. The theater awaited Batum like manna from heaven and they were elated by the manuscript, which the author delivered in 1939. But Stalin told Nemirovich-Danchenko that while he considered Bulgakov’s work “very good,” it should not be staged: “All children and youths are the same. Do not put on a play about the young Stalin.”¹⁰

This was a mortal blow for the vulnerable Bulgakov, and he died soon afterward at the age of forty-eight. As for the Moscow Art Theater…well, it had survived the death of Chekhov, the battle with Gorky, even the arguments, alienation, and then enmity (hidden from outsiders) of its two great founders, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich- Danchenko. MAT continued presenting The Days of the Turbins right up until the war in 1941 (almost a thousand performances), when the sets were lost in a fire during an air raid.

The Art Theater was awarded the title “Academic” by the state in 1920, which conferred substantial privileges. In 1923, Stalin added the name “Gorky” to the company. Russian emigres were outraged, recalling how in 1904, Nemirovich-Danchenko publicly told Chekhov, “This company, Anton, is yours!” The emigres could not resign themselves to the idea that those days when you could say fairly openly what you thought were gone forever; in the new reality, Stanislavsky, who had always disliked Gorky for his pro-Bolshevik sentiments, now had to address the writer in the name of the Gorky MAT this way: “From now on we will work together on Soviet theater, which alone can support theater perishing all over the world.”¹¹

Stanislavsky was more or less sincere at least about “theater perishing all over the world.” Traveling to Europe for treatment (Stalin generously allotting hard currency for that), Stanislavsky became convinced that culture there was in free fall: “Hitler broke them all up. There is no theater.” While in the Soviet Union, thanks to Stalin, not only was MAT declared the best and exemplary collective that all others should emulate, but his cherished Method of training actors was officially proclaimed The Only True Method, with all the concomitant consequences.

Stanislavsky was clearly pleased: “In places that in tsarist Russia were barren fields, impenetrable tundras and backwaters, now life is thriving, art is blossoming, and they are studying my Method.”¹² For all that, Stanislavsky, who died in 1938 with every possible prize and honor under his belt, being made one of the first People’s Artists and receiving the Lenin Order, had not crossed the threshold of the MAT in the last years of his life, citing declining health.

Locking himself in his Moscow mansion like a medieval monk, Stanislavsky doggedly worked on his Method, which spread all over the world in approximate retellings and versions and was received as if it were the Holy Grail by many actors; in particular, in the United States, students of the Method, which had been adapted by Michael Chekhov (nephew of the great writer and a former student of Stanislavsky) and Lee Strasberg, included Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Anthony Quinn, and then Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and even Marilyn Monroe.

Stalin made MAT and the Bolshoi his official court institutions that could not be criticized (except on his own orders). No wonder that MAT ossified and after the deaths of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko gradually turned into an empty shell. During the 1950s and 1960s, when audiences fought to get into Oleg Efremov’s Sovremennik Theater and Lyubimov’s Theater on the Taganka, obtaining tickets for MAT was not at all difficult. Tourists made up most of the audience.

Even high officials realized it, and in 1970 a special decision of the Secretariat of the Central Committee appointed Efremov to shore up MAT, which seriously weakened the Sovremennik but did not return MAT to its former glory. Efremov, a talented actor and fine director, who often went off on Karamazovian drinking binges, remained artistic director of MAT until his death in 2000, trying to renew it as best he could. Still, he was obliged to produce officially approved works like Steel Workers or The Party Committee Meeting with lines like: “As they justly pointed out to us at the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress…”

The low point of the new MAT came with the infamous production of a play about Lenin called Thus We Will Win! in March 1982, which was attended by Brezhnev and an entourage of Politburo members. In the government box, furbished specially for Stalin, the general secretary sat surrounded by three future Soviet leaders: Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Gorbachev.

Brezhnev was very ill (he died in November of that year) and had trouble both hearing and comprehending; in a loud voice, he kept asking his comrades, “Is that Lenin? Shouldn’t we greet him?” It was a great embarrassment. The audience laughed openly at what was going on in the box and on the stage, and the sorry episode became a symbol of the situation not only at the Moscow Art Theater but in the USSR as well.

On April 30, 1983, just a bit over three years later, Gorbachev, now the new ruler of the country, returned for a performance at MAT. He had been general secretary less than two months, and he clearly wanted to send a signal to the capital’s intelligentsia: he chose to attend Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (in Efremov’s staging) rather than one of the “Party” plays. A week later he telephoned the director.

Efremov naturally remembered Stalin’s phone calls to Pasternak and Bulgakov, which were part of the MAT lore, for it was after the ruler’s condescending conversation with Bulgakov that the writer was hastily given a job as assistant director at MAT. Neither Khrushchev nor Brezhnev repeated Stalin’s gambit. As a Party member, Efremov considered a call from his new boss, Gorbachev, a signal event; embarrassed by the sweat that appeared on his brow during the call, Efremov paraphrased Chekhov to explain apologetically to his assistant: “It is hard to squeeze the slave out of oneself.”¹³