Meanwhile the financial rewards of these fashionable younger authors, unaffected as they are by the strictures of the critics, entitle them to be considered the equivalent of best-sellers in Western countries; no literal equivalent exists since fiction and poetry, good or bad, is sold and distributed immediately on publication - such is the hunger of the public and the inadequacy of the supply. The subjects of historical novels, since romans de moeurs are scarcely safe, tend, apart from war and post-war propaganda themes, to be the lives of such officially approved heroes from the Russian past as Tsars Ivan IV and Peter I, soldiers and sailors like Suvorov, Kutuzov, Nakhimov and Makarov, honest patriots and true Russians, too often plagued and frustrated by the intrigues of sycophantic courtiers and disloyal noblemen. Their character and exploits offer opportunities of combining a pleasantly romantic and patriotic historical background with political or social sermons only too clearly applicable to contemporary needs.
This fashion was not indeed begun, but was given its strongest fillip, by the late Aleksey Tolstoy (he died this year [1945]), who alone, perhaps, had the makings of, and the ambition to be, the Virgil of the new empire which had excited his rich imagination and brought his remarkable literary gift into play.
The same gap between the young and old is perceptible in the other arts, in the theatre, in music, in the ballet. Whatever has grown without a definite break from a rich past and leans on a pre-Revolutionary tradition has, by firmly clinging to such old and tried supports, managed to preserve its standards into the present. Thus the Moscow Arts Theatre, while universally acknowledged to have declined from the extraordinary level of its golden age, when Chekhov and Gorky wrote for it, nevertheless preserves a remarkable standard of individual acting and of inspired ensemble playing which rightly continues to make it the envy of the world. Its repertoire, since the post-1937 era, is confined either to old plays or to such tame new, conformist pieces as have relatively little character of their own, and simply act as vehicles in which gifted naturalistic actors can exhibit their superb, old-fashioned skills; what the public remembers is for the most part the acting and not the play. Similarly the Maly (Little) Theatre continues to give admirable performances of Ostrovsky's comedies, which were its mainstay in the nineteenth century; the acting of plays attempted since the Revolution, whether classical or modern, at the Maly tends too often to sink to the level of the repertory companies directed by Ben Greet or Frank Benson. One or two of the smaller Moscow theatres perform classical plays with verve and imagination, for example Ermolova's theatre and the Transport Theatre in Moscow, and one or two of the little theatres in Leningrad. The best performances given even in these theatres are of classical pieces; for example, Goldoni, Sheridan, Scribe; modern plays go less well, not so much because of old-fashioned methods of acting, as because of the inevitable tameness of the material itself.
As for opera and ballet, wherever past tradition exists to guide it, it acquits itself honourably, if dully. When something new is put on, for example the new ballet Gayaneh by the Armenian composer Khachaturyan, playing in Leningrad this year, it is capable of displaying exuberance and temperament, which disarm the spectator by the gusto and delight in the art of the dancers. But it is also, particularly in Moscow, capable of sinking to depths of vulgarity of decor and production (and of music too) which can scarcely ever have been surpassed even in Paris under the Second Empire; the inspiration of the scenes of clumsily heaped-up opulence with which the Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow is so lavish derives at least as much from the tawdry splendours of the early Hollywood of ten and even twenty years ago, as from anything conceived in Offenbach's day; and such crude display is made to seem all the more grotesque and inappropriate by the individual genius of a truly great lyrical and dramatic dancer like Ulanova, or of such impeccable new virtuosi as Dudinskaya, Lepeshinskaya and the ageing Semenova, Preobrazhensky, Sergeev and Ermolaev. In either case it lacks the fusion of undevi- atingly precise, inexorable discipline with imaginative originality and wide range, and that combination of intensity, lyricism and elegance which had raised the Russian ballet to its former unattainable height.
There are still fewer signs of new life in the two great opera houses of Moscow and Leningrad, which confine themselves to a highly stereotyped repertory of the best-known Russian and Italian works, varied by occasional performances of, for example, Carmen. Minor theatres, in search of politically innocent amusement, offer their clients operettas by Offenbach, Lecocq and Herve, performed with more gusto than finish, but vastly welcomed as a contrast with the drab monotony of daily Soviet life. The contrast between age and youth is again noticeably present, not so much in the ballet (which could not exist without a perpetual recruitment of young dancers), as on the dramatic stage, where few, if any, outstanding actors or actresses have come forward during the last ten years. The audiences seem clearly aware of this, and whenever I hinted at this to my anonymous neighbours in the Moscow theatres, it was invariably assented to so rapidly that it must be a very obvious commonplace. Such casual neighbours in the theatre almost invariably expand dolefully on the regrettable absence among the younger people of dramatic talent, and even more of the right sensibility - with which the older actors, still on the stage (some whose careers go back to the early years of the century), are so richly endowed - and one or two have wondered whether the theatres of the West do not produce better young actors than the Soviet Union. Perhaps 'the tradition is not so rigid and oppressive there'. Even the Arts Theatre seems to have stopped dead in technique and feeling - or else has been forced to go back to the days before the First World War.
This combination of discouragement of all innovation - the name of the purged producer Meyerhold is scarcely spoken aloud - together with a considerable encouragement of the stage as such is bound, unless something occurs to interrupt the process, to lead in the relatively near future to a widening chasm between accomplished but unreal, and contemporary but commonplace and provincial, styles of acting. On the other side it must be said that the childlike eagerness and enthusiasm of Soviet readers and Soviet theatrical audiences is probably without parallel in the world. The existence of State-subsidised theatres and opera, as well as of regional publishing houses, throughout the Soviet Union is not merely a part of a bureaucratic plan, but responds to a very genuine and insufficiently satisfied popular demand. The vast increase in literacy under the stimulus provided by the earlier period when Marxism was in ferment, as well as the immense circulation of Russian and to some degree of foreign classics, particularly in translation into the various languages of the 'nationalities' of the USSR, has created a public the responsiveness of which should be the envy of Western writers and dramatists. The crowded bookshops with their understocked shelves, the eager interest displayed by the Government employees who run them, the fact that even such newspapers as Pravda and Izvestiya are sold out within a few minutes of their rare appearance in the kiosks, is further evidence of this hunger.
If, therefore, political control were to alter at the top, and greater freedom of artistic expression were permitted, there is no reason why, in a society so hungry for productive activity, and in a nation still so eager for experience, still so young and so enchanted by everything that seems to be new or even true, and above all endowed with a prodigious vitality which can carry off absurdities fatal to a thinner culture, a magnificent creative art should not one day once again spring into life.