Babel, Isaak Emmanuilovich
▪ Russian author
born July 13 [July 1, Old Style], 1894, Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire
died Jan. 27, 1940, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.
Soviet short-story writer noted for his war stories and Odessa tales. He was considered an innovator in the early Soviet period and enjoyed a brilliant reputation in the early 1930s.
Born into a Jewish family, Babel grew up in an atmosphere of persecution that is reflected in the sensitivity, pessimism, and morbidity of his stories. His first works, later included in his Odesskiye rasskazy (“Odessa Tales”), were published in 1916 in St. Petersburg in a monthly edited by Maksim Gorky; but the tsarist censors considered them crude and obscene. Gorky praised the young author's terse, naturalistic style, at the same time advising him to “see the world.” Babel proceeded to do so, serving in the Cossack First Cavalry Army and in the political police (Babel's daughter denied this), working for newspapers, and holding a number of other jobs over the next seven years. Perhaps his most significant experience was as a soldier in the war with Poland. Out of that campaign came the group of stories known as Konarmiya (1926; Red Cavalry). These stories present different aspects of war through the eyes of an inexperienced, intellectual young Jew who reports everything graphically and with naive precision. Though senseless cruelty often pervades the stories, they are lightened by a belief that joy and happiness must exist somewhere, if only in the imagination.
The “Odessa Tales” were published in book form in 1931. This cycle of realistic and humorous sketches of the Moldavanka—the ghetto suburb of Odessa—vividly portrays the lifestyle and jargon of a group of Jewish bandits and gangsters, led by their “king,” the legendary Benya Krik.
Babel wrote other short stories, as well as two plays (Zakat, 1928; Mariya, 1935). In the early 1930s his literary reputation in the Soviet Union was high, but, in the atmosphere of increasing Stalinist cultural regimentation, Communist critics began to question whether his works were compatible with official literary doctrine. After the mid-1930s Babel lived in silence and obscurity. His last published work in the Soviet Union was a short tribute to Gorky in 1938. His powerful patron had died in 1936; in May 1939 Babel was arrested, and he was executed some eight months later. After Stalin's death in 1953, Babel was rehabilitated, and his stories were again published in the Soviet Union.
Olesha, Yury Karlovich
▪ Russian author
born March 3 [Feb. 19, Old Style], 1899, Elizavetgrad, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Kirovohrad, Ukr.])
died May 10, 1960, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.
Russian prose writer and playwright whose works address the conflict between old and new mentalities in the early years of the Soviet Union.
Olesha was born into the family of a minor official. He lived in Odessa from childhood, eventually studying for two years at Novorossyisk University there. In 1922 he moved to Moscow, worked for the railway workers' newspaper Gudok (“The Whistle”), and wrote poetry and satirical prose sketches.
Olesha gained renown first as a poet. His fame as a prose writer came after the publication of his novel Zavist (serialized 1927, published in book form 1928; Envy), the central theme of which is the fate of the intelligentsia in Russia's postrevolutionary society. Olesha's obvious enthusiasm for the new state of affairs did not hinder him from seeing and conveying to the reader the dramatic clash between the rational industrial state and the creative aspirations of Nikolay Kavalerov, one of the main characters in the novel. This clash is also echoed in Kavalerov himself: he has talent and creative potential, but he throws it away. Envy is one of a number of 20th-century Russian novels in which the protagonists clash with Soviet reality and as a result find themselves marginalized.
Olesha's second widely popular book, Tri tolstyaka (1928; The Three Fat Men), was written for both children and adults. It is a story set in an unknown land about an uprising led by the gunsmith Prospero. (The name is an allusion to the magician of William Shakespeare's The Tempest.) The novel has the didactic and schematic qualities of a fairy tale and is filled with unexpected metaphors and dexterously shifting points of view. In The Three Fat Men Olesha displays the same mastery of style present in Envy and his short stories.
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Olesha had published a series of short stories and plays, among which the play Spisok blagodeyaniy (1931; “A List of Benefits”) was staged by the director Vsevolod Meyerhold (Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich). Olesha's openly lyrical speech in 1934 at the First All-Union Congress of the Writers' Union of the U.S.S.R. further bolstered his fame. After this, however, he published very little, although he often wrote for the cinema. For many years he worked on what was published posthumously as Ni dnya bez strochki (1965; No Day Without a Line); assembled from Olesha's notebooks after his death, it resembles a memoir, but its mix of sketches, essays, and other forms of writing defies categorization. It is often compared to Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor)'s equally complex The Diary of a Writer.
Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich
▪ Russian theatrical producer, director, and actor
born Feb. 9 [Jan. 28, old style], 1874, Penza, Russia
died Feb. 2, 1940, Moscow
Russian theatrical producer, director, and actor whose provocative experiments in nonrealistic theatre made him one of the seminal forces in modern theatre.
Meyerhold became a student in 1896 at the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School under the guidance of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre. Two years later, Meyerhold joined the Moscow Art Theatre and there began to formulate his avant-garde theories of symbolic, or “conditional,” theatre. In 1906 he became chief producer at the theatre of Vera Komissarzhevskaya, a distinguished actress of the time, and staged a number of Symbolist plays that employed his radical ideas of nonrepresentational theatre. For his presentation of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in 1906, Meyerhold rebelled against the stylized naturalism popularized by Konstantin Stanislavsky's art theatre and instead directed his actors to behave in puppetlike, mechanistic ways. This production marked the beginning of an innovative theatre in Russia that became known as biomechanics (q.v.). Meyerhold's unorthodox approach to the theatre led him to break with Komissarzhevskaya in 1908. Thereafter, drawing upon the conventions of commedia dell'arte and Oriental theatre, he went on to stage productions in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). During 1920–35 Meyerhold achieved his greatest artistic success as a director, beginning with Fernand Crommelynck's Le Cocu magnifique (1920; The Magnificent Cuckold) and ending with his controversial production in 1935 of Aleksandr Pushkin's story “Pikovaya Dama” (“The Queen of Spades”).
Although he embraced the Russian Revolution of 1917, his fiercely individualistic temperament and artistic eccentricity brought reproach and condemnation from Soviet critics. He was accused of mysticism and neglect of Socialist Realism. Meyerhold refused to submit to the constraints of artistic uniformity and defended the artist's right to experiment. In 1939 he was arrested and imprisoned. Weeks later, his actress-wife, Zinaida Raikh, was found brutally murdered in their apartment. Nothing more was heard of him in the West until 1958, when his death in 1942 was announced in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia;
biomechanics
▪ theatre
antirealistic system of dramatic production developed in the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) in the early 1920s by the avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold (Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich) drew on the traditions of the commedia dell'arte and kabuki and on the writings of Edward Gordon Craig for his system, in which the actor's own personality was eliminated and he was entirely subordinated to the director's will. Coached as gymnasts and acrobats and emphasizing pantomime rather than words, the actors threw themselves about in puppetlike attitudes at the director's discretion. For these productions the stage was exposed to the back wall and was then furnished with harshly lit, bare sets consisting of scaffoldings, ladders, and ramps that the actors used. Biomechanics had lost its appeal by the late 1920s, though Meyerhold's emphasis on external action did become an element in Soviet actor-training techniques.