My ultimate intention for this portfolio of evidence is to set forth and explain the rationale and research behind my performance recital with the theme of Communist Ideological Thinking. In choosing this theme, I aim to explore three main subjects; Soviet censorship in 20th Century Speech and Drama, the formation of the ‘communist ideal’ and also the changing relationship of the arts and politics in modern Russia, as we enter a world of postmodernity. However, figure 1.a seems to suggest that this society was actually already present in the USSR, which is something that I will also touch upon in my writing.
Three of my selected pieces were written either in the Soviet Union, Russia or countries previously members of the USSR as this is a setting I will focus on. I will also evaluate decisions made in the devising process as well as including information regarding the rehearsal process.
Section 1: The rationale behind the initial thoughts
Firstly, to discuss my choice of theme; one feels that the Russian Federation (the largest nation to emerge from the break up of the Soviet Union in December 1991) has a long standing relationship with performing arts and, in particular, the dramatic arts. I felt that it would therefore be suitable to use this as my recital theme. Konstantin Alexeiev (Константин Алексиейв), better known as Konstantin Stanislavski (Станиславский), was himself awarded the Lenin prize for contributions to the arts and state. It was this that cemented the setting for most of my pieces; the USSR and Russia. However, I did not feel that this in itself would be a suitable theme choice and, therefore, had to look deeper into this topic. At first I looked at censorship of verse, prose and drama in the Soviet Union in the 20th Century. I came up with the first draft title of ‘To what extent and in what ways did the state in the 20th Century USSR control verse, prose and drama’. Although this was much more targeted than my first thoughts, I felt that this was too precise for me to be able to fully expand my thoughts. It was soon after this that I found the theme of ‘Communist Ideological Thinking’. I realised that the topic of censorship relates to and is ultimately an effect and result of the political ideology of the time. In addition to this, in choosing this theme, I was able to fully explore the background to both Russia’s political system and its stance on drama today. I was also able to explore political expressions and emotions from 20th Century Russia that are evident in both records and speeches of the time. It allowed me to explore basic communist principles not necessarily from a Russian perspective. Overall, I felt it important to choose the theme before selecting any of my pieces as I felt that it would greatly help my recital to flow more freely and have an overall deeper meaning to it, rather than having four pieces with an ambiguous link between them all.
However, although I had now chosen my theme, I didn’t have much of a starting point as to what pieces I would select. I therefore traced my steps backwards to see what clues I could pick up to help me find suitable pieces. Surprisingly, I found myself back at Stanislavski but this time as a young director in January 1904. I was amazed by the way Stanislavski treated Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’ as a tragedy when directing even though Chekhov himself considered it to be a comedy with some elements of farce. I felt that this, in itself, really highlighted the controversies and contradictions that came into politics in the years soon after this. Many people consider Stanislavski and Chekhov to be revolutionary in terms of Marxist ideology and this is something else that I wished to explore for myself. This led to me finding my first piece; a Trofimov monologue from ‘The Cherry Orchard’ in Act II containing many strong socialist thought that are juxtaposed and cooled down by the other character’s on stage who care not for these thoughts.
Having decided on my first piece, a piece of drama, I began to come up with another idea to add to my recital theme. I thought I could deliver it as ‘Communist Ideological Thinking in Russia’ through the ages. I would start it off with my extract from ‘The Cherry Orchard’ set in pre-revolutionary Russia. I would then have a piece from around the Second World War. My third piece would be from the Cold War era and my fourth and final piece would be from a modern day perspective looking back. And so, I began to think of the sort of piece I could recite from World War II. It was then that I came up with the idea of having a piece of prose and, in particular, a speech by comrade Stalin. I began to raid the archives in search for the perfect speech and I eventually found it; Stalin’s speech at the Red Army Parade on 7th November, 1941 in which he discusses the ‘great October revolution of 1918’.
I thought at this point it would be sensible to have a break from Russia’s stance on Communist thinking and instead focused on foreign literature containing this pure ideology. The era I had found myself in was post-WWII leading into the Cold War period. I found myself looking through dystopian prose in order to find a suitable piece. This led me down the Orwellian path to which I eventually found the ‘2+2=5’ extract from Part 3, Chapter 2 of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ detailing the effect that a cult of personality can have upon society at large, published on 8th June 1949.
My final piece would have to be verse and I wished for it to have a contemporary twist. I looked into Polish poetry and discovered Adam Lizakowski. His poetry is clean and straightforward on first glance but there is a great hidden meaning under it and, in particular, this is witnessed in his poem ‘An explanation of communism’. I thoroughly enjoyed finding the possible meanings of this poem but this is something that I will discuss in Section 3.
Having chosen my pieces, the next step was for me to begin to research the writers of them. The easiest one to begin with was Comrade Joseph Stalin (Иосиф Сталин (Russian), იოსებ სტალინი (Georgian)) who is best known for being a Soviet revolutionary and harsh politician but it is commonly forgotten that he is in fact of Georgian descent. Although at a younger age he was committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism but formed his new communist ideology of Stalinism later in his life. He wished for his totalitarian government to help form worldwide equality and for it to be a beacon for other nations to follow however, conversely his regime has been criticised for overseeing mass repressions, ethnic cleansing, hundreds of thousands of executions, famines and most notably, his Great purge in which over a million people were imprisoned and at least 700,000 executed. Nonetheless, he was a strong and powerful leader and had a very odd relationship with the arts and, although he seemed to condemn many other forms of entertainment, the theatre in his era flourished.
Before the October Revolution of 1918, there were already many revolutionaries present in Russia. It is often said that Anton Chekhov falls into this category and I can see why in the Marxist and Socialist nature of some of his writing. However, her was politically restricted from giving his pure views in his writing due to the fact that at the time the country of Russia was still under Tsarist rule. Stanislavski once said that ‘Chekhov often expressed his thought not in speeches, but in pauses or between the lines or in replies consisting of a single word … the characters often feel and think things not expressed in the lines they speak.’ This quotation really explains that fact that Chekhov was trying to portray thoughts in a slightly hidden, indirect way through the subtext. This is well witnessed in ‘The Cherry Orchard’ and in particular the character of Trofimov, but this is something that I will explore in Section 3.
There has always been forms of censorship in Soviet literature and sometimes poetic license has been replaced by ‘collective’ thoughts made by ‘the party’. This kind of Orwellian ‘doublethink’ was going on all the time in the Soviet Union. However many believed that the ‘prevention of literature’ failed to fully aid the state’s cult of personality. You will notice that I have littered this information with classical George Orwell thoughts that were clearly evident in Soviet society in the mid 20th Century. He felt that the socialist system in Russia at the time was poor and wished to express his own ideology through the blanket of English literature; an idea clearly evident in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’.
The poet, Adam Lizakowski, was born in Dzierżoniów. He lived in Pieszyce, Poland and worked at the “Prządka” Department House of Culture as a theatre instructor until 1981. He has been awarded two Golden Poetry Awards in Sacramento with notable work including ‘Cannibalism Poetry’ and ‘Children of the Owl Mountains’. He has mentioned very little in public about his feelings regards to the Soviet state he grew up in however, the poem ‘An explanation of communism’ seems to highlight some of his pivotal thoughts on the matter.
Another key part of research I did was that on the characters themselves; Peter Trofimov, Winston Smith and O’Brien, (not forgetting Stalin and Lizakowski themselves).
Firstly, Trofimov, a student of thirty years, is used by Chekhov in the play as a microphone for the expression of strong socialist ideas. Trofimov does not look back with longing at Russia’s earlier days, as characters such as Ranevsky do in a conservative fashion, but instead looks ahead towards the future and progress. Trofimov is sympathetic towards those whom he sees as oppressed, even after their emancipation in 1861. He expresses a communist view as he condemns the Russian intelligentsia for they are ‘rude to their servants and they treat peasants like animals’. His desire for equality and hatred for capitalism is the embodiment of Karl Marx’s negative view of economic progress.
My other two characters of fiction are both from my ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ extract. Winston Smith and O’Brien are very contrasting characters, one is a curious phlegmatic protagonist while the other is a harsh, revolutionary member of the Inner-Party. Winston is portrayed to be a simple man and yet is to blame for many of the novel’s key complex themes. He also has a pivotal connection to the past and, for some reason, would do anything to know what life was like in pre-revolutionary Oceania. This is his fatal flaw which ultimately leads to him falling into O’Brien’s trap that he is a secret agent for an enigmatic underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood. This then leads to his torture and betrayal of Julia.
O’Brien on the other hand is an incredibly complex man to understand and, in fact, the novel raises more questions about him than it answers. Physically, he is a large, well-built man in around his forties but on the inside he has many more layers. Many views him an opposite, gutsier reflection of the protagonist. Others merely see him as a powerful and cunning, duplicitous man by posing as someone else to lure in Winston. However, O’Brien does have a particularly interesting line in which he tells Winston that ‘the Party’ has once captured him long ago. We could possibly infer from this that, many years ago, O’Brien, himself, used to be just like Winston but was corrupted by ‘the Party’ just as Winston feels towards the end of the novel. This adds to the dystopian element of the novel but also to the theme of freedom versus reality as well as O’Brien being a dark reflection of Winston.
Section 2: Context to the recital and selected pieces
In this section I wish to discuss the socio-political, cultural and historical context to my pieces and my recital. One feels it imperative to first look at the political backdrop in 1903, the year in which Chekhov wrote ‘The Cherry Orchard’. In this year the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party assembled at a congress in Brussels, Belgium, however their work was still very much apart of the underground scene and the Tsar Nicholas II (Царь Николай II) was still in form power in Russia. This is perhaps the reason as to why some of Chekhov’s social ideas are dampened as he must present an idea of social change through art, in a way that still give the impression that he is not directly attacking the ruler of the time.
On the other end of the spectrum, my extract of Stalin’s speech is is last ultimate attempt to win World War II. By the 7th November 1941 German troops had progressed almost as far as the outer suburbs of Moscow itself. This speech was, in essence, not only Stalin’s but the whole of Russia’s last hope. We must also remember that Stalin himself has a cold heart and so was able to speak ill of the Germans as a whole. Russian society accepted this as there has always been a longstanding Russian hatred for the Germans; the word for a German in Russian is немец with the literal translation of ‘he who is deaf and dumb’. The fact that the German massacred an estimated 16,825,000 Russian citizens (15% of their population) would have only exasperated this feeling, strengthening people’s adoration of Stalin’s words even more.
‘An explanation of communism’ by Adam Lizakowski has a very odd context as the poet himself was born in the country of Poland while it was still a state of the USSR. This, in effect, exposed him to a certain degree of Russian culture not to mention Soviet political ideology. We must remember that, although the poem seems to state the polar opposite, Lizakowski does not agree with communist ideology and, in the poem, he is possible trying to portray the blindness of people who followed it. However, Lizakowski has kept his cards close to his chest regards to this poem and we could easily also get the impression that, although he disagreed with the ideology, he does remember some of the more positive aspects of the Soviet Union and how there appeared to be more respect of those that move in artistic circles. We know this to be the case from both Lenin and Stalin’s love for theatre, art and ballet and can therefore get the perspective from which Lizakowski is looking at the situation.
Nighteen Eighty-Four is one of Orwell’s most thought out novels, and it remains, to this day, one of the most powerful warnings ever issued against the dangers of a totalitarian dictatorship. In Spain, Orwell had reported the terrors of the fascist regime and the Spanish Civil War and in Germany and the Soviet Union, had seen firsthand the danger of absolutist political authority in a world of advanced technology. He illustrated that peril harshly in this novel.
Overall, my recital will encompass a large time period of approximately a century and so the socio-political, cultural, historical and economic context will change a lot. However, I wish for my introduction, linking statements and conclusion to encapsulate these contexts. Ultimately, one of my main intentions for the recital as a whole is to portray how these aspects of the relationship between communist ideological thinking and drama have changed over the course of the 20th Century into the start of the 21st Century and asking the question of ‘What could come next in the course of this relationship, or is it all over?’
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