Joseph Macleod - Actors Cross the Volga: A Study of the 19th Century Russian Theatre and of Soviet Theatres in War

Actors Cross the Volga: A Study of the 19th Century Russian Theatre and of Soviet Theatres in War — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Actors Cross the Volga: A Study of the 19th Century Russian Theatre and of Soviet Theatres in War" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...118

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: ART AND CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Volume 6

ACTORS CROSS THE VOLGA

First published in 1946 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd

This edition first published in 2019

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1946 Joseph Macleod

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-35894-2 (Set)

ISBN: 978-0-429-42671-1 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-36487-5 (Volume 6) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-43103-6 (Volume 6) (ebk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1946

THIS BOOK IS PRODUCED IN COMPLETE
CONFORMITY WITH THE AUTHORIZED
ECONOMY STANDARDS

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
ABERDEEN

AUTHORS PREFACE

W HEN the public has indicated its interest in a first book on a new subject, it rightly tends to be critical of a successor. The author was surprised and pleased by the welcome given to The New Soviet Theatre in 1943. He is all the more conscious of the faults in this book. The critical reader, if he or she takes it as a history, will feel that it has no middle, or perhaps that the middle is contained in the earlier book, and that this is clumsy. But this is not a history. It is a study of Soviet theatres in war.

The extraordinary vigour of the Soviet theatres in war, however, cannot be understood without some knowledge of the pre-Revolutionary background, the nineteenth-century Russian theatre ; and as far as the author is aware, there are no books in English (and those few in Russian are practically unobtainable) on this subject. An absorbing subject; and one which is treated herein too sketchily.

Nor is the main body of the book a complete history, but again only an interim report. A transmission. A channel, through which information may circulate. The details had to be culled from many sources; they were bewildering in their prolixity ; and the task of setting them in order, of getting them in due perspective, had to be done spasmodically, in leisure hours which became fewer and fewer as the work progressed. Nor have the writing of the final chapters and the revision of the whole been made any easier by the intermittent arrival of flying bombs, which meant keeping the sources and the growing manuscript in a place of safety away from the desk at which the writing was done.

If therefore there are inconsistencies, redundancies, repetitions, mistakes in detail, if the writing flags or the path seems to disappear in the undergrowth, the author begs for clemency. It seemed to him that the need for a full understanding of our Soviet Allies culture and evaluation of life (such as best a theatre can give) grew more urgent as victory drew nearer, and he hastened to finish his task as a contribution to that understanding, without which no peace in the world can be permanent, but our twenty years friendship may be wrecked by misconstruction.

TO

KIT

IN RETURN FOR THINGS FOREGONE

AND FORGONE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Front-Line Theatre

And Art made tongue-tied by Authority

S HAKESPEARE

Part One
OLD WORLD: EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I
IMPERIAL THEATRES

A B IRDS-EYE V IEW

It is the year 1850. Imagine that we are flying at a great height northward over the Black Sea, the shores of which for centuries have been visited by little boats of various shapes, trading between East and West. We are approaching the land, land that stretches West for one and a half thousand miles, North for one and a half thousand miles, and East for something like four thousand.

To our left a great river approaches from due West, entering the Black Sea not so very far from where Ovid comforted himself with his Tristia mournfully in exile. This river, the Danube, connects many of the countries, and several of the capitals, of the European civilisation to which we belong, with this strange land below us. Cutting through the grey plains from the north come three more great rivers, the Dnieper, the Don and the Volga, not all flowing into this Black Sea, but all bulging eastwards, as if the people on the inside of the bulge were pressing in that direction, or as if water, obligingly lending itself to the disposition of man, had thrown up three lines of ramparts against the unpredictable East. And far to our right is the reply of the unpredictable East, a similar rampart bulging back against us, the Ural River. Impossible not to imagine from the very geography that here is not a No-mans-land between Athens and China.

It is not a land we know well. Even the air is filled with the unfamiliar. From the steppes rise bustards, evil-looking, bald spectres, more like nightmares than birds, which bump along the ground like overladen aeroplanes before they can take off. The eagles in the mountains are not the eagles wc know. Even the little homely birds, singing a few yards from the soil, are of unexpected colour. Thrushes are black or grey.

And the people, too, are different from what we have come to call European. True, there are a few cities which have houses and public buildings of architecture in a recognisably Italian-origin style, though an altered one. In St. Petersburg (which is commonly called Peterburg), and Moscow, and Odessa, there are more than a hundred thousand of a city population. Four other towns have half that number ; some twenty have a quarter. And in these there are well-to-do people who do not depend on the land directly for a living, merchants, doctors, and the like, who use handkerchiefs and crowd their rooms with knick-knacks and furniture, whose wives and daughters study the French fashions and wear much lace. In these towns there are a few schools; but most children of the well-to-do are taught at home by foreign governesses and tutors. The rest are not taught at all.

Peter the Firsts window on Europe has been dimmed and shrouded with lace curtains and the police. The harsh reign of Nicholas the First is coming to an end. Pushkin is dead ; Lermontov is dead ; Byelinsky, the great critic and thinker who located and directed the new Russian literature, died two years ago, thereby cheating the police on their way to arrest him. Gogol is still alive ; Ostrovsky, in his twenties, is making his mind up ; Turgenyev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy are young men not ye on their feet, though in two years Turgenyev is to be arrested, and Dostoyevsky taken out for execution and then sent to Siberia in partial reprieve. Cultured people are proud of these writers, who are putting Russian among the European literary languages; but cultured people are few, and confined to the towns.

Next page

1234567...118

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Actors Cross the Volga: A Study of the 19th Century Russian Theatre and of Soviet Theatres in War»

Look at similar books to Actors Cross the Volga: A Study of the 19th Century Russian Theatre and of Soviet Theatres in War. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Karan Singh

Folk Theatres of North India: Contestation, Amalgamation and Transference

Brian Powell

Japans Modern Theatre: A Century of Change and Continuity

Eric Csapo (editor)

Theatre and Autocracy in the Ancient World

Ann Hosein

The History of Theatre

Scott L. Hoffman

A Theatre History of Marion, Ohio: Theatre History of Marion Ohio

Michael Coveney

London Theatres (New Edition)

Pilkington

Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People

McNicoll

The opening act: Canadian theatre history, 1945-1953

Erika Fischer-Lichte

History of European Drama and Theatre

Marvin Carlson

Theatre: A Very Short Introduction

Laurence Senelick

Wandering Stars: Russian Emigre Theatre, 1905-1940 (Studies Theatre Hist & Culture)

Spencer Jay Golub

The Recurrence of Fate: Theatre and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (Studies Theatre Hist & Culture)

Discussion, reviews of the book Actors Cross the Volga: A Study of the 19th Century Russian Theatre and of Soviet Theatres in War and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.