The distinctive new feature of the post-Stalin stage was the increasing success of problem dramas on contemporary themes in pushing out older Russian classics and propagandists melodramas from theatrical repertoires. In the late Stalin era, for instance, Ostrovsky and Gorky tended to be the most frequently performed dramatists. By the early sixties, however, their works received less than one tenth the number of performances in Moscow that they had been given in the last year of Stalin's life.50
The harsh official criticism of Zorin's Guests just after Stalin's death encouraged aspiring dramatists to be more oblique but at the same time more many-sided in their critiques of Soviet society.51 The popular and gifted young playwright Volodin ridicules a Young Communist League organizer in his Factory Girl, and tells in intimate, unheroic terms of an old love broken up by long years of absence (presumably in a forced labor camp) in his Five Evenings. A virtual catalogue of new thematic material is introduced into the play Everything Depends on People, which includes a suicide of despair, and a sustained on-stage dialogue between a scientist and a priest in which the latter scores more than a few telling debating points.
Zorin's new play of 1962, By Moscow Time, presents the now-characteristic juxtaposition of an old-style party official with a young reformer anxious to press de-Stalinization to the limit. The latter decides that the old man must go because "he is not a town, you can't just rename him." Another play of the same year, More Dangerous than an Enemy, works this juxtaposition of the good worker and the bad bureaucrat into a farcical, almost Gogolesque plot. Staged appropriately enough by Akimov, the play
depicts the battle of wits between evil party leaders and the good scientific workers in a provincial institute dedicated to the study of yoghurt. When the managers hear a rumor (ultimately proved false) that Moscow is about to launch a new campaign to rid the USSR of fools, they make great efforts to arrange to pin this label on their subordinates-only to be outfooled by the scientific workers after a series of episodes faintly reminiscent of a Damon Runyan story. Aksenov's Always on Sale of 1965 is both more inventively fantastic and more bitingly contemporary in vernacular language and satirical thrust than these earlier plays, and may be the harbinger of more interesting drama yet to come.
The new dramas on contemporary themes clearly provide both the best entertainment available in the USSR and some of its most effective social criticism. The old dream of Schiller and so many others of restoring to the theater the quality it once possessed as an educational and moral force in society seems, indeed, closer to realization in these new Soviet plays than in the avant-garde theater of the West. However, in view of the straggle still required to gain official consent for any theatrical production in the USSR, the day is probably still far away when the stage can serve-as Tovstonogov put it-as "a great exponent of public thinking … a huge operating table where the actor, the surgeon, can sense the throb of the human heart and brain."52
New movies, like new plays and poems, illustrate the "interrupted renewal" of Russian culture. Not only has the recent Soviet cinema recaptured some of the creative vitality of its precocious infancy in the 1920's, it has added as well new dimensions of disinterested humanism and psychological introspection.
Many of the outstanding films of this cinematic renaissance have dealt with the event that has the deepest meaning for the younger generation: the Great Fatherland War (as World War II is known in the USSR). Whereas the many war movies of the late Stalin era emphasized the glory of Soviet victory and the wisdom of the dictator's leadership, the new war movies focus on the impact of this most destructive of all wars on ordinary Russian people. Beginning with Michael Kalatasov's The Cranes are Flying of 1957, Russian films began to portray war as devoid of all constructive purpose. The war became an unwelcome intruder into the world of personal and family relationships, which suddenly seemed somehow more real and appealing than the public world of the "new Soviet man." "The fate of a man" is made to seem as important as ultimate victory or defeat in the cinematic version made in 1959 of Sholokhov's short story of that name. The following year appeared Ballad of a Soldier, the first of the great films of Gregory Chukhrai, which portrays with photographic skill, heartbreaking
simplicity, and a complete absence of propaganda the accidental heroism, brief leave, and return to death of a childlike young Russian soldier. Chukhrai's Clear Skies, which provided the occasion for an emotional demonstration of approval at its first performance in Moscow in 1961, contrasts the honor and suffering of Soviet prisoners of war with the brutality of the system which suspected and humiliated them in the post-war period. The picture which makes the most daring technical innovations and at the same time the most moving indictment of war is My Name Is Ivan, which appeared in 1962, introducing dream sequences along with documentary excerpts into its tragic tale of a young orphan.
This new cinematic emphasis on the integrity of the individual rather than the nature of his cause has also altered the traditional method of representing the Civil War. Just as Hollywood has introduced "good Indians" into its melodramatic Westerns-partly out of a need to break the monotony and partly out of a belated sense of justice-so Soviet films have begun to find traces of humanity and even nobility in the White opposition. Indeed, audience sympathy is ultimately on the side of an individual White guardsman in two widely admired recent films of the Civil War: Chukhrai's Forty-First of 1956 and Vladimir Fetin's The Foal of i960.
Finally, it is interesting to note the return of film makers to those classics which especially fascinated the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century. Thus, Gregory Kozintsev has moved on from his sensitive Don Quixote of 1956 to his film version of Hamlet in 1964. In contrast to Turgenev's "Hamlet and Don Quixote" of almost exactly a century before, Kozintsev depicted Quixote as a psychologically disturbed and tragic figure, and gave to Hamlet a certain quiet nobility. Like Pasternak (whose translation of the play was used for the script), Kozintsev seemed to be vindicating Hamlet from the symbolic opprobrium heaped on him by Turgenev (and the lesser critics of the Stalin era). The message that the new Soviet drama as a whole is conveying to its interested if often perplexed audiences is essentially that which Hamlet conveyed to the loyal but two-dimensional Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy."53
At the same time, it is only fair to note a less flattering resemblance between the present generation and the "Hamletism" of the old intelligentsia: its confusion and uncertainty of objectives. The younger generation is far surer of what it opposes than of what it accepts, and much of its work is not technically impressive by the increasingly refined standards of literary criticism. Yet the authenticity of aspiration and popularity of the quest cannot be denied. Their art has, as Tertz maintains, "hypotheses instead of a goal"; and the testing ground for such hypotheses lies not in the
hothouse of literary criticism but in the broad arena of life. The response elicited in the lives of the audience-that indispensable second participant in Akimov's unending dialogue of creative culture-is a truer measure of significance than the reviews of critics. Increasingly, new productions in the USSR are animated by lively and often turbulent "exchange of opinion" sessions in which artists discuss with the audience the nature and significance of a play immediately after the final curtain.54