ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
wrote plays collectively, the most successful of which passed into the
Proletkult repertory for others to perform. 49 However, the extent to which
these plays matched the innovations of pre- revolutionary theatre is debatable.
Scripts tended to be burdened by ideological affirmation, such as The
Bricklayer (1918), by the Proletkult activist Pavel Bessalko. As Katerina
Clark wryly observes: ‘Written in praise of the new age of technology and
proletarian hegemony, it concerns the wife of an architect who, predictably,
becomes disaffected with her bourgeois husband and runs off with a bricklayer
to join the revolutionary movement – to her greater fulfilment, no
doubt, but not to the satisfaction of critics, who found the plot poorly motivated
and the play terribly dull.’ 50
Such an emphasis on social content over artistic form was a problem for
professional theatre too. Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin’s key cultural advisor,
believed in preserving classical culture (such as the Bolshoi Ballet and
Mariinsky Theatre) since the proletariat were uninspired by contemporary
political performances:
And imagine, comrade Kerzhentsev, I have not only seen how bored the
proletariat was at the production of a few ‘revolutionary’ plays, but have
even read the statement of sailors and workers asking that these revolutionary
spectacles be discontinued and replaced by performances of
Gogol and Ostrovsky! 51
In turn, Kerzhentsev reports on a competition for a new repertoire of socialist
plays, but the quality of entries was so poor that the jury struggled to find
works, even from Europe, with a sufficiently correct ideological bias. Predictably,
Kerzhentsev did not feel this to be a problem, just symptomatic of a period
of transition: ‘a large part of them [i.e. theatrical works] are not of a sufficiently
high level in the artistic sense. That is understandable: proletarian culture is
only now being born. Proletarian theatre has not had the chance to express
itself; there were no conditions for its existence in historical reality.’ 52
However, the backlash against these political requirements was already
visible in the early 1930s. In 1931, the author Evgeny Zamyatin noted that
‘the repertory is now the weakest spot in Russian theatre. It seems that
something quite inconceivable has taken place: it was much easier to move
the tremendous weight of economics and industry than a seemingly light
and ethereal substance – such as dramatics.’ 53 For Zamyatin, the state
demand for drama dealing with contemporary issues had fuelled an
epidemic of bad plays; he notes that, of the longest running productions in
Moscow during 1930, ‘only one treated current problems such as industrialisation,
the kolkhozes, etc.’ 54 It is telling that one of the great novels of
this period, Andréy Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1930), addresses
precisely these themes, but as a finely judged satire of Stalin’s forced
programme of collectivisation.
55