St Petersburg

At the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater Tovstonogov staged Volodin’s Five Evenings in 1959 and The Older Sister in 1961. Audiences followed the uncomplicated twists of Volodin’s plays, which appeared to be carelessly constructed but actually were crafted with great subtlety. These were plays about themselves, “ordinary Soviet people,” as they were patronizingly described in the media, about their feelings. Volodin’s works, an amalgam of sadness and tenderness, were touchingly played by Tovstonogov’s accomplished actors—Tatyana Doronina, Zinaida Sharko, Efim Kopelyan, Yevgeny Lebedev, and Kirill Lavrov.

Both Akimov and Tovstonogov dominated their theaters, heading them, respectively, for twenty-seven and thirty-three years. (During the campaign for eradicating “formalism and kowtowing before the West” in Leningrad, Akimov was removed from the Comedy Theater; he was given his troupe back only seven years later.) These two directors were intellectually characteristic of Leningrad dramatic art. In Akimov’s theater, the director’s first visual impulse determined the concept and form of the play, and the actors sometimes seemed no more than strikingly dressed chess figures, moving in foreordained patterns. Tovstonogov’s theater was first of all a showcase for his incomparable actors.

Tovstonogov needed first-class performers to embody his creative ideas, and he knew where to find them. He discovered Sergei Yursky, who later delighted audiences with his interpretation of Chatsky (in Alexander Griboedov’s comedy Woe from Wit) as the prototype of a modern dissident. Tovstonogov likewise launched the career of Innokenty Smoktunovsky (known in the West as the Hamlet in Kozintsev’s film), offering the thirty-two-year-old actor the difficult role of Prince Myshkin in a stage version of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

That 1957 play took on a legendary aura comparable to that of Meyerhold’s production of Lermontov’s Masquerade in the first half of the century. Meyerhold’s production had reflected the emotions of Russian society on the eve of revolutionary cataclysm. A similar sense, that life could now be arranged in completely different ways, imbued Tovstonogov’s production.

Prince Myshkin appeared meekly on stage, returning from a long absence in Petersburg—just as those victims of the Great Terror who had managed to survive Stalin’s camps were returning to contemporary Leningrad. “His figure is narrow, with elongated arms and legs, not so much a human body as an outline of a body, a poor diagram for life in the flesh,”65 wrote Naum Berkovsky, an influential Leningrad critic of those years. Smoktunovsky represented the Russian school of spiritualized acting at its peak.

The production was also a manifestation of the return to Leningrad of the tradition of Dostoyevsky, who had been banned by Soviet ideologists as a “reactionary” and “mystic.” In that period Dostoyevsky’s works began to reappear, and with them surfaced the religious dimension of the Petersburg mythos. In the play The Idiot, Smoktunovsky created on stage every evening a visionary space; the audience saw in him a new Russian saint. This theatrical experience became something to tell one’s children and grandchildren about.

Another temple of high art in the fifties and sixties was the Kirov (formerly the Maryinsky) Theater—home to one of the world’s great classical ballet companies. Existing symbiotically with its famous ballet school, the company cultivated and preserved the technique of classical dance. Surviving the revolutionary hurricanes, the Great Terror, and the war years, these institutions remained true to the principles of Petersburg professionalism.

Here the legendary names of Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky were remembered and revered. Their rise in Petersburg and subsequent fairy-tale careers in the West are well-known parts of ballet history. Pavlova created an audience for ballet in the West, particularly in the United States. Nijinsky, who with Tamara Karsavina became the focus of choreographic innovation in Diaghilev’s company, speeded audience acceptance of classical dance as a central part of twentieth-century culture. The exotic sets and costumes of Benois and Bakst and the gripping music of Stravinsky and Prokofiev furthered a ballet revolution born in Petersburg.

But mid-century Leningraders had only heard of this revolution. Local ballet battles had had more impact. One concerned the patronage of “choreodramas,” the Soviet version of ballets d’action, which gained the dominant aesthetic position over the experiments of Fyodor Lopukhov, Balanchine’s mentor, and Leonid Yakobson.