Authors:
M.-Ch. Autant-Mathieu
( 11 downloads)
Abstract
Gorky started his literary career as a playwright at the Moscow Art Theatre. He
wrote his first plays for its troupe in competition with Chekhov whose plays were
performed there during the same period. Thus, two Moscow Art Theatre directors,
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko dealts with two authors whom they valued
but whose approaches differed. My paper that forms part of a study concerning Gorky’s
collaboration with the Moscow Art Theatre, focuses on the way in which Stanislavsky
and Nemirovich-Danchenko revised and embellished the history of their relationship
with Gorky in their autobiographies both written in the Soviet period, My Life in Art
(1926) and My Life in the Russian theatre (1936) respectively. In real fact, the relationship
was problematic due to Gorky’s political opinions and the difficulties that the actors
encountered playing his characters. Since the middle of the 1920s, Gorky became a
defender of the Moscow Art Theatre and consequently, the two directors put their
political and aesthetic contradictions aside and sought to reconcile themselves with
Gorky who contributed to make the Art Moscow Theatre a model Soviet theatre. Besides,
the writer supported Stanislavsky in founding an opera-dramatic studio in 1935 and
writing and publishing “The Stanislavsky System.”
Keywords: Moscow Art Theatre, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, My life in Art, My Life in the Russian Theatre, Soviet cultural politics, biased writing, The Lower Depths, Small people, Summerfolk, The Children of the Sun
Authors:
L.A. Spiridonova
( 12 downloads)
Abstract
In 1932, the Communist party ideologists called Maxim Gorky the founder of socialist
realism at the behest of Stalin. This tag has turned into an ideological cliché that
accompanies the writer’s image even in the present day and does not allow us to see him
as a talented artist who sought to create a new method in Russian literature. Believing
classical realism to be outdated already at the beginning of the 20th century, Gorky called
for such artistic format that would describe human life from the height of futuristic
ideals. Starting with the novella Mother (1906), he sought to implement the synthesis of
artistic consciousness with socialist ideals that he considered the means of harmonious
rearrangement of the new world. In The Tales about Italy and in the autobiographical
trilogy (Childhood, My Apprenticeship, and My Universities), Gorky’s dream of the
happier future life under socialism manifests itself through the synthesis of realism
and romanticism. In his late years, while advocating the method of “social realism” in
his essays, Gorky did not write a single fictional work that would incarnate dogmatic
principles that were developed already after his death.
Keywords: Gorky, Stalin, socialist realism, synthesis of realism and modernism
Authors:
M.A. Arias-Vikhil
( 11 downloads)
Abstract
Russian actress and stage director Tatyana Pavlova successfully staged two of Maxim
Gorky’s plays in Italy from 1926 through 1928. Those were The Lower Depths, the
most famous play by Gorky, and Counterfeit Coin, a play he wrote in Sorrento; Tatyana
Pavlova’s troupe played it for the first time. These productions are interesting mainly as
attempts to follow the tradition of the Moscow Art Theater where The Lower Depths was
staged for the first time in 1902. Maxim Gorky who was in Italy at a time participated
in the staging of his play: he invited Tatyana Pavlova and her actors to his villa Galotti
in Posillipo and read them the text of the play aloud, as had done it at the Moscow Art
Theater. However, Pavlova’s performance did not simply reproduce the production
of the Moscow Art Theater that contemporaries found too naturalistic. Pavlova’s
performance impressed the audience with its mystical atmosphere instead. At the same
time, the elements of the “new drama” that Gorky introduced in his play in the fashion
of such early 20th century playwrights, as Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Maeterlinck,
did not meet Italian public’s approval due to the popularity of Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s
“theatrical theatre” that reigned on the Italian stage at that time. Absence of dramatic
action, abundance of dialogues, no division of characters into main and secondary,
and overload with secondary, minor episodes hindered, in the opinion of critics,
the perception of the tragic content of The Lower Depths. The premiere of Pavlova’s
performance took place in December 1926, and in December 1927, the same Valle theater
in Rome hosted the tour of the Moscow Art Theater. This way Italian public was able to
see and compare two outstanding performances. This comparison revealed the specificity
of the “Russian soul,” its pessimism and fatalism, while the characters in Pavlova’s play
were distinguished by a sharp understanding of their existential situation.
Keywords: Gorky, Tatyana Pavlova, The Lower Depths, Italy, 1926, 1927, Vallee Theater, “new drama,” Italian theater criticism
Authors:
A.I. Dormidontova
( 15 downloads)
Abstract
This is an overview of а new collection received by the K.G. Paustovsky Moscow
Literary Museum-Center in 2017, the year of the 125th anniversary of his birth. The
collection consists of 366 items. Among them are manuscripts, biographical documents,
letters, books with autographs, photographs, posters, booklets, and drawings. These
items are of considerable interest for the study of the writer’s methods, his biography as
well as for understanding the circle of his contacts. The overview incorporates a number
of authentic documents.
Keywords: Konstantin Paustovsky, manuscripts, biography, history of literary works, correspondence, inscriptions, K.G. Paustovsky Moscow Literary Museum-Center
Authors:
Haltrin-Khalturina E.V.
( 12 downloads)
Abstract
This article seeks to trace the connection between two kinds of the Romantic sublime
envisaged in Book 8 of Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poem The Prelude, or
Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1805, 1850). Our focus is primarily on the 1850 text. I read
Book 8 against passages from Wordsworth’s fragmentary essay “The Sublime and
the Beautiful” (c. 1811/1812), attempting to grasp how the components of the natural
sublime, highlighted by Wordsworth, — power, duration, individual form — got
modified in Book 8 to produce the sensation of the human sublime. My interpretation
posits a new pattern of emphasis on aesthetical issues encapsulated in the title of
the Book 8 “Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man”: unlike the Burkean sublime,
arousing fear and awe, the Wordsworthian sublime is capable of inspiring heartfelt
adoration akin to love, when, in the course of The Prelude, an ordinary human being
appears “ennobled outwardly before <the poet’s> sight”.
Keywords: British Romanticism, William Wordsworth, natural sublime, human sublime, the fanciful pastoral, the imaginative sublime, images of shepherds, ‘spots of time’, ‘love of man’
Authors:
Anna V. Dobryashkina
( 11 downloads)
Abstract
The article examines the role of children and juvenile literature of the Third Reich
in the development of Nazi identity. In German culture of the 1930s, the image of
childhood developed during the period of the Weimar Republic underwent dramatic
changes. As the Third Reich was proclaimed “the Youth Reich” (das jugendliche
Reich), childhood lost its autonomy and merged with “youth,” the key concept of the
Nazi era. Youth, in turn, was more than age category; it implied a certain worldview,
or a specific life position that all age groups of Nazi society had to adhere to. Children
and adolescents aged 10-18 years old joined the Hitler Youth, the largest organization
in the world, and became carriers of the new ideology. Literature for children and
adolescents of the Third Reich significantly expanded its boundaries: now it included
literary works written for adults, and also those written before 1933. “Expanded
borders,” therefore, implied multiple cases of intersection between children and adult
literature, interpenetration and coexistence of these literatures within the cultural
ambience of the Nazi period. Despite the fact that the entire system of education and
upbringing fostered indoctrination while literature was one but not the only one factor
in the development of the new identity in this multilevel system, it was literature that
legitimized children’s refusal to follow their personal interests and encouraged their
engagement in the propagated ideological system.
Keywords: German literature, children and juvenile literature, the Third Reich, Hitler’s Youth, Nazism, indoctrination
