Almost as important as Zorin's play in opening up fresh perspectives to the Soviet theater was the extraordinarily popular revival of Maiakovsky's Bedbug in 1954. Renewed exposure to the blunt, direct speech of Maiakov-sky (and to that of Hemingway-perhaps the most popular of all foreign writers with the young generation) provided Russians with a model for simpler forms of discourse. At the same time, the fresh look at the long-prohibited staging of Meierhold reminded a new generation of the expressive possibilities of non-realistic stagings. The rather sterile and pompous schematization of the Stanislavsky method that had become the accepted
way of projecting socialist realism on the stage now had a challenger. Insofar as the public was given a chance to choose, it elected to see new productions with a decisiveness clearly embarrassing to vested interests within the party.
More modern methods of staging were evidenced in 1955 in a new production of Hamlet by Okhlopkov. He seemed to be reviving the techniques of his teacher Meierhold in order to realize the latter's dream of doing a totally new Hamlet. The impresario who broke most completely with the theater of the Stalin era was Nicholas Akimov, who had fallen afoul of Stalin in the early thirties for his "formalist" staging of Hamlet.**
Unlike the theatrical bureaucrats of the Stalin era, Akimov is both a modern artist and an independent philosopher. Central to his concept of the new theater is the importance of distinguishing between the theater and the cinema, which tended to be two sides of the same dull coin in the Stalin era. The former has a unique role to play in cultural development for two key reasons. First, plays have what he calls "materiality" {material'nost'), a sense of material immediacy that can only be conveyed by real people, things, and colors. The failure to develop this sense of immediacy comes largely from conservative adherence to the conventions of the "mechanical" stage of the eighteenth century, and unwillingness to experiment boldly with an "electric" stage for modern man.
A second and even more important factor in distinguishing films from plays is the fact of audience participation. A play is necessarily "a dialogue between audience and actor in which neither can remain silent. The only dialogue in a movie occurs with the mechanic in case of failure."46 Another outstanding and experimental impresario of the Leningrad stage, Georgy Tovstonogov, has pointed to the significance of the dialogue between living performers and a living audience by speaking of the unique possibility of creating "a charged atmosphere on the stage and an electric silence among the audience."46
It is precisely such effects that Akimov was able to produce in his memorable production of Schwarz's The Shadow. Based on the fable of Hans Christian Andersen about the man who lost his shadow, Schwarz's play as staged by Akimov is a production with color, lightness, laughter, and fantasy: the antithesis of the Soviet theater under Stalin. At the center of the drama stands a lonely idealist identified in the dramatis personae as "the scholar," but known in the play as Christian Theodore. Traditional realism is challenged at the very outset when he loses his eyeglasses and observes that he sees better without them. A number of stage tricks leave the audience uncertain as to what is real, as Christian loses his shadow, which goes on to become ruler of the kingdom of fantasy in which most of
Schwarz's dramas take place. In the climactic trial scene, the new spectral ruler brings to trial the visionary idealist whose shadow he once was; and at the dramatic moment when a doctor, who was Christian's best and last remaining friend, joins the general chorus of denunciation and betrayal, "electric silence in the audience" is movingly achieved. The context is semi-comical, but the effect is more than that of sudden tears in the midst of laughter; it is a kind of catharsis, a sense of shared involvement in the tragedy, and of unspoken resolve that it shall not happen again. The characters in Schwarz's fable are far more realistic than the wooden puppets of the socialist realist theater. The motives and rationalizations for their evil behavior are psychologically credible: they are skillfully woven out of the venality and compromise of everyday Soviet life. The doctor does not denounce Christian directly in the trial scene but (like those who listen to the Christ-like preachings of Dostoevsky's Idiot) simply pronounces him out of his mind. Here, as elsewhere, the moral is not heavy-handed but only implied. One is made to feel that the message must become a living force in the life of the audience just as it has been a living and dynamic force in the production-if the vital dialogue between performer and spectator is to continue. Akimov has come closest to a short paraphrase of the message:
The contemporary epoch proceeds under the sign of the struggle of the creative principle with the parasitic; the creative with the decaying; the living with the dead; or, as Schwarz says in his language, of man with his shadow.47
Two other recently produced Schwarz plays carry even more pointed political messages: The Naked King, in which the Andersen fable about the Emperor's new suit of clothes is turned into a witty satire on the conspiracy of silence that prevailed during the Stalin era; and The Dragon, in which the slayer of a tyrannical dragon (that is, the Khrushchevian debunkers of Stalin) proves to be only another tyrant rather than the idealized St. George of Russian hagiography.48
These remarkable allegories, for all their popularity among the younger generations, are still primarily the work of older men. In the Stalin era fables and legends had the value of providing remote locations and a new "Aesopian" language with which to talk about vital questions. Others of the older generation used children's tales or "Eastern fables" as media in which serious ideas could be discussed with relative safety. Sergius Mikhalkov, an established writer of children's stories and author of an allegorical satire written in 1952, The Crayfish, which was daring for its time, composed an extraordinarily pointed poetic fable about the legendary Khan Akhmet. This cruel, one-armed ruler wanted his portrait painted, but killed the man
who portrayed him with only one arm for insulting the state, and killed a second who represented him with two arms for "lacquering over" reality. A third painter found the key to survival in this eminently Stalinesque situation by painting the terrible khan in profile.49
Schwarz, the master of dramatic fables, wrote almost all his plays during the Stalin era, though he was understandably not widely produced till after the dictator's death. Schwarz kept himself alive largely by writing for the movie and puppet theaters-the latter providing for him another outlet for Aesopian commentary on Soviet society. His fabulous world combines elements from Russian folklore and the Yiddish theater with the tales of his beloved Andersen in an effort to keep alive "the spirit of music" that had animated the culture of early-twentieth-century Russia. His first book, The Tale of an Old Balalaika, published in 1925, told of a balalaika in search of words for its music. His entire dramatic career can be seen as an attempt to provide those words for the fading but still unextinguished music of a rich culture.