Maksimilian Voloshin

Does the Moscow Art Theatre Have the Right to Dramatize The Brothers Karamazov?
It Does.

The production of The Brothers Karamazov was met in the press with a rarely encountered animosity. Words about blasphemy, a barbaric crime, and a mockery of a great work of art were uttered. Some "Spectator" in Russkoe slovo, who " writes so boldly only because [he is] convinced that many people, very many people, share his feelings," proclaimed with a pathos of genuine indignation the following:

"How narcissistic must one be to copy with a shaking hand the marvelous images created in a titanically bold fashion by the brush of a genius and to present the spectator these copies for judgment?"

It would seem that this is a vexing misunderstanding, but then how much love there is for Dostoevsky, a love that is fervent and agitated. And this love is uttered by the voice of multitudes, represented by an anonymous spectator. Then it is revealed that for this "Spectator" the novel is like "a marvelous statue of an ancient god, in which everything is beautiful, in which everything is full of a special inner harmony." This is careless. To compare Dostoevsky's novel to a marble statue, even in a fit of indignation, means confessing a complete lack of understanding of Dostoevsky. The enthusiastic love for this author turns out to be enthusiastic ignorance. But even ignorance is a condition of the soul that is full of social interest and worthy of attentive examination. In this instance it raises the question: is a general transfer of the action of a novel onto the stage admissible?

"It has already for a long time been unshakably established that every dramatization of great works of art is to the highest degree hopeless, aimless, senseless, and harmful," so speaks the voice of the majority 1. Ignorance is almost always logical. It does not know the facts, cannot make historical inquiries, and exists in a world of intellectual and verbal cliches, which it loves to string on logical threads.

It reasons thusly: the artist is a sculptor who sees in blocks of marble the forms of the gods. The form, once found, is inviolable. Who better than the artist knows what precise form his conception must take? And can one distort his dream?

"One cannot change a single line of Dostoevsky; in Dostoevsky everything is original, essential, significant to the highest decree. To strike out half-pages in a novel is already a tremendous loss."

All this might be so, but art, unfortunately, knows no predetermined paths, and life always contradicts logic.

We are told that "It has already for a long time been unshakably established that every dramatization of great works of art is to the highest degree hopeless, aimless, senseless, and harmful," but meanwhile we see that the entire history of theatre in France of the nineteenth century, for example, offers attempts, often successful, to remake a novel into a play. Let us recall that two such ultratheatrical plays such as Dumas's La Dame aux Camélias and Maître de Forge -- theatrical in the most banal fashion -- which have made the rounds of the stages of all cities because of their success, were adapted for the stage.

The novel of the Goncourts La Fille Elisa (a work approximating Dostoevsky more closely, perhaps, than all others in French literature) was produced on the stage by Antoine and became a turning point in the development of the realistic theatre in France. And almost the same kind of significance was enjoyed by the dramatization and production of another novel, Germinie Lacerteux. It is characteristic in this regard that the theatrical plays written by them exclusively for the theatre had absolutely no significance in the history of the French stage.

All this contradicts the unconditionality of the assertion that "It has already for a long time been unshakably established..." On the contrary, studying the life of the European novel, one can witness that the novel has a definite tendency to become more dramatic, and the longer it lives, the more pronounced this tendency becomes.

The novel is an epic. And what did Thespis, Phrynichos, Aeschylus and Sophocles really do, if not dramatize contemporary epics? Tragedy is always born out of the epic, to be more accurate, out of the themes of the epic. But the novel of our time is not just an epic. It contains the entire dramatic essence of social conflicts and psychological states, not yet formulated with scenic precision.

If we turn to the history of Russian theatre, then the reverse phenomenon is striking. The whole history of Russian drama reveals the theatre's aspiration to transform itself into a short story, a picture, a landscape. The theatre of manners in the middle of the nineteenth century facilitated this, but with Turgenev's theatre and, lastly, Chekhov's theatre Russian theatre became fully epic -- and then died ². The history of Russian drama ended with Chekhov and broke off with his works. And then some troubled wandering in the theatre itself began immediately. A review of all the scenic forces and possibilities began. We entered a paradoxical era of intense theatrical life, of an enormous theatrical revolution in the complete absence of dramatic literature. Productions on the Russian stage of foreign dramatists were, as it were, a trying on of forces, complex experiments. But where was the theatre to find a Russian tragedy, the kind of tragic pathos with which the whole of the Russian soul trembles? Where was the tragedy of the Russian spirit embodied? Naturally, not in the theatre but in the novel: in Dostoevsky, in Tolstoy, in Sologub.

The Russian soul is too elemental to flow peacefully in the channel of those dramatic forms we took readymade from the West. In these channels rushed along only that which could fit, namely, comedy of manners, lyricism, and the dramatic landscape. But everything elemental, everything primordial, everything not yet formed, everything that makes the Russian soul the soul of a lunatic zealot, boor, and saint, all that rushed into the novel.

In this case, the novel seemed the most comfortable form exactly because of its formlessness and infinite elasticity. To compare a Dostoevsky novel with a perfect statue, therefore, signifies either a complete inability to understand Dostoevsky or a complete inability to understand what the perfection of form means.

In Dostoevsky is found the first remarkable, yet far from finished, embodiment of the tragic Russian soul. To seek things comparable to Dostoevsky's novel, one should have to compare them to the colossal wall of the centuries, which appears in the apocalyptic vision of Hugo that opens La Légende des siècles with a bas-relief cut out "de la chair vivante et de la pierre brute." In Dostoevsky there is that quivering flesh growing together with brute stone. It is excruciating, magnificent, and horrible, but in any case it has nothing in common with the marble perfection of forms, in which one cannot cut out a single sentence, cannot change a single word. Dostoevsky is only the first day of creation, but there are six others.

The Art Theatre took a step towards the realization of a national Russian tragedy by staging The Brothers Karamazov, and this step was inevitable. In its dramatization, which suffered much from the censor's cuts, it treated Dostoevsky's text with infinite care and did not insert a single, superfluous word. Perhaps that was necessary in this first experiment. But in the future development of Russian tragedy I see an incomparably freer and more creative treatment of the text. The spirit rather than the form remains valuable for us. It seems to me that the Russian novel will play the role of a national mythology in our tragedy of the future. The fate of the Karamazovs will be our version of the house of Atreus; the Trojan cycle we will find in War and Peace, Phèdre in Anna Karenina, the Oresteia in Crime and Punishment, and the equivalent of Theban legends in The Devils ³.

The Brothers Karamazov at the Art Theatre is, of course, imperfect, but nonetheless one often senses the genuine spirit of tragedy in these two evenings. And that is extremely important.

As for blasphemy, it really was present in the theatre, not on stage but in those spectators who have not yet learned to pray during a performance of tragedy.

Notes

This piece appeared in the newspaper, Utro Rossii, on 22 October 1910.

The Dostoevsky production gave birth to fierce polemics in the ranks of the theatre critics, the majority of whom were intensely critical of the dramatization of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov: "The Art Theatre has committed a double sin. It transformed the most nightmarish symphony of Dostoevsky into some kind of chopped meat. It encroached on the sacred site of the theatre..."(E. Beskin in the newspaper Teatr i iskusstvo, 24 October 1910). A. P. Kugel', N Ezhov, and many other reviewers shared roughly the same opinion. But a few (A. N. Benois in "Misterija v russkom teatre," Rech', 27 April 1912 and V. Kranixfel'd in "Preodolenie Dostevskogo," Sovremenny Mir, 5:1911) supported Voloshin's point of view. The arguments continued after Nemirovich-Danchenko read a paper, "On the Moscow Art Theatre's Production of The Brothers Kramazov," on 11 May 1911 in the editorial offices of the journal, Ezhegodnik imperatorskix teatrov. Vjacheslav Ivanov in his paper made common cause with Voloshin's evaluation: "Dostoevsky's epos is basically a novel-tragedy. The Art Theatre assumed the role, as it were, of rhapsode and thus prepared the way for the rebirth of tragedy in the future."

1. Even D. S. Mereszhkovsky supported this opinion. Participating in the discussion of Nemirovich-Danchenko's paper in the editorial offices of Ezhegodnik imperatoriskix teatrov, he said, "Dostoevsky is essentially impossible on the stage, especially on the contemporary stage."
2. See the following from a letter from Nemirovich-Danchenko to Stanislavsky in October 1910: "Three years won't pass before Ostrovsky's theatrical conventions and his scenic constriction of psychological and even artistic issues will seem boring, and before you will find boring everything reduced to four or five acts and three walls. Even Chekhov! " (V. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Izbrannye pis'ma, Vol. 2 [Moscow, 1979], 44).
3. Compare with the following remarks of Nemirovich-Danchenko: "One must know all the world's novel literature and not just recall War and Peace , Karenina, The Precipice [ a novel by Goncharov], Smoke, The Torrents of Spring, Sportsman's Sketches, hundreds of wonderful stories by Cervantes, Flaubert, Maupassant -- one must know them, study them from a theatrical point of view." (Nemirovich-Danchenko, 43)

© Ralph Lindheim

© Zahar Davydov

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