O Lga Mikhailovna Ostroumova - theater and film actress, People's Artist of the Russian Federation (1993). Born September 21, 1947. She studied at GITIS named after Lunacharsky (1966–1970). After graduating from the institute, she entered the Moscow Theater for Young Spectators.
In 1973, Olga Ostroumova left the Youth Theater troupe and moved to the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya, where she made her debut in the role of Anya in “My Dear” based on the play by R. Ibragimbekov. Olga Mikhailovna explains her transition to the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya as follows: “One of my teachers, Pavel Chomsky, left the Youth Theater; Yuri Aleksandrovich Zavadsky invited him to the Mossovet Theater. With his departure, some other repertoire policy began. And Andryusha Martynov, also a classmate and partner in “Dawns,” lured me to Bronnaya. On Bronnaya the main director was Alexander Leonidovich Dunaev, may he rest in heaven, he loved me very much. Nice man. I played classics with him: in “Barbarians”, “Wolves and Sheep”, “Bourgeois”, and other performances. And I had wonderful partners.”
Fragment of an article by Yu.N. Chirva from the collection “Russian Theater and Drama of the Revolutionary Era of 1905–1907” (1987):
“The revolution of 1905 raised in a new way the question of everyday life, the power of everyday life, the still strong foundations of the “dark kingdom”, the death of which the symbolists loudly proclaimed. And naturally brought to life whole line works that revived and reinterpreted this problem.<...>
"Barbarians" in scientific literature have long and rightly been compared with Ostrovsky’s plays, with his “ dark kingdom" This comparison can indeed give a lot to characterize the life that is depicted in Gorky’s play. The picture painted by the writer contains funny absurdities and amusing details, but the main thing in it is still the revelation of cruelty, the arrogant tyranny of some and the silent slavery and downtrodden subordination of others. This is a world devoid of spiritual interests, human relations with each other.”<...>
Fragment of the article “Barbarians,” a play by M. Gorky” from the collected works of A.V. Lunacharsky, volume 2 “Literary criticism. Criticism. Aesthetics", (1964):
“Above the endlessly wide-spread rural “straw Russia”, small-town “wooden Russia” has grown for a long time.<...>It is really difficult to understand what a small provincial Russian town is doing.<...>Everyone in these cities is unbearably bored.<...>
It would seem, what could be interesting in these pitiful and bad people, boring, stupid and not for themselves, ruining a tormented people? Meanwhile, there is a lot of interesting here, even if we take all these provincial characters, regardless of their collision with big life. After all, here, as everywhere else, they crave happiness, honor and love, but they don’t have any correct idea of what the blessings of life consist of, or what paths to take to get them.
In the center of urban philistinism stands in Gorky's play the sixty-year-old mayor Redozubov. This is an imperious house-building nature.
In external and internal appearance he is similar to many kings and rulers. Dress Vasily Ivanovich in wide purple clothes and turn him from a district mayor into a Venetian Doge - he would, perhaps, even be a wonderful Doge. He has a lot of unyielding will, impressive authority, the ability to rule, an abyss of self-esteem; and all this took forms both funny and painful.<...>
How funny is this Nadezhda Polikarpovna Monakhova, who thinks that duchesses and aristocrats always wear red, who reads nothing but bad, pompous novels, and talks only about love, so that the local old lady is embarrassed for her stupidity. Meanwhile, this very real, completely possible image in any outback, with any deep attitude towards it, turns out to be so pure, lofty, even solemn that I don’t know what other image in dramaturgy recent years I could put it next to it.<...>
Iron Russia loves to beat out of wood everything that is even more or less valuable. With her arrival, Nadezhda’s price rose and horizons opened up before her. The engineer Tsyganov would have gladly put it to use; he would not have regretted throwing his acquired thousands in style on a big spree in Paris with a “magnet woman.” The splendor of the capital of the world, a rich and adventurous life, the hot air of that same high-society romance that Nadezhda dreamed of so much - she can take all this now, and she takes none of this and prefers even death, because she only needs love, and love needs a hero.
She and others saw this hero in the heroic figure of iron Russia, in the representative of industrial energy, a native of the people, the conquering engineer - the red-haired Cherkun. This gentleman energetically breaks wooden Russia; he easily overturns both stone pillars and the spiritual foundations of Redozubov’s culture.<...>He is intoxicated by the process of extensive labor, the process of destruction, the process of creation of the colossal iron Moloch.
If “hopes” live in the depths of wooden Russia, then the heroes of the coming era of steam and steel will not be able to fulfill them. M. Gorky also mentioned the forces that the Tsyganovs and their patrons create next to them, about “destroyers” of a different type, about conscious destroyers in the name of a future golden age, in the name of future creativity. But for now these are weak and uncertain shoots. Student Lukin always has an unkind and mocking smile on his lips, and he speaks only with irony, even when he is “preaching.” He doesn’t really believe in his own strength, and, persuading the talented girl Katya to leave the Redozubov house for the big cities, he is afraid to promise her anything definite; the only thing he guarantees her is that “at least she will have something to remember about her youth.”<...>
One can blame Gorky for the fact that in his gloomy big picture there are no lighter and more certain figures than Lukin and Katya. I think, however, that it is impossible to demand from every drama that it be a whole little encyclopedia of modern social life. The playwright did well by concentrating all our attention on the clash between wooden Russia and iron Russia, on the torment of this process, on its deep general dissatisfaction.”<...>
Irina Glushchenko
Gorky in flowers
"Barbarians" at the Pyotr Fomenko Workshop theater
GORKY and “Fomenki” are a paradoxical combination.
A refined, even aesthetic troupe, when talking about which it is customary to use the words “light”, “charming”, “captivating” - and a playwright who is associated with ideology, sociality, realism... It is clear that Gorky, in interpreting The Workshop, had to adapt to a special aesthetics. And the solution was found: director Evgeniy Kamenkovich
freed from the restrictions of era and style. The play was written in 1905, Kamenkovich aesthetically and intonationally shifts events to the twenties - this is more likely Zoshchenko, not Gorky. The feeling of Zoshchenko’s element arose and was consolidated with the appearance of Veselkina - “a girl of destructive behavior” (played by). A bourgeois lady in a hat, in a colorful dress, with cheeky manners - it seems that now she will make a scene over a brush or stove. And other ordinary people, the inhabitants of the city of Verkhopole - clever young people, vulgar old men - are obsessed with an impudent curiosity to spy on someone else's life, to get into it. There are benches on both sides of the stage - residents sit down, as if in a stall, armed with binoculars in order to better see other people's suffering, passions, and love.
Years will pass
fifteen - and they will move into the famous communal apartments. Why not? The fact that the performance would be modern became clear even when contemplating the conventional, transparent decoration - here a sign with the inscription “Post Office”, here a rocking chair, here a chandelier in the Art Nouveau style. The appearance of the capital's engineers is impressive. When three men in black resolutely enter - Tsyganov ( Rustem Yuskaev) in a three-piece suit and sparkling shoes, and Student ( Kirill Pirogov) and Cherkun (
Sergey Taramaev ) - everyone in black leather, almost rockers, you understand that this is no longer the twenties, but, perhaps, the sixties. They came from another world to stir up this one. In the end everything was crushed, burned out, killed. Many people note some kind of fatigue of the “fomenki”, which suddenly yielded unexpected results. In the game of sisters Kutepovs serious drama appeared. In this performance they happened to be rivals. Pauline plays Cherkun's wife, the pitiful, eccentric Anna;
Ksenia- aristocrat Lydia Pavlovna, with whom Cherkun will fall in love. Anna is fussy and stupid; Lydia is smart, tough, strict. In the first scene, she is almost without makeup, in a riding habit, with smoothly combed hair, while Anna, posing as an artist, appears with an easel, in a picturesque blouse and a small hat, from under which curls stick out. But gradually both the appearance and behavior of both women change. If Lydia Pavlovna, as her relationship with Cherkun develops, looks more and more feminine and exciting, then Anna, on the contrary, seems to dry up, filled with powerless, painful suffering.
Galina Tyunina plays as usual - subtle, broken, romantic. in the role of Pritykina. Ridiculous, stupidly made up and powdered, she wears stupid hats, high heels, somehow humiliatingly and stupidly putting her socks on. She has to look younger - she has a young husband, whom she “adores and fears,” almost like Madame Gritsatsueva.
And suddenly - aged, without makeup, bare-haired - her husband cheats on her, calls her an old witch, and threatens to kick her out. Where did the false intonations, the feigned secularism, and tenderness go? Before us are the eyes of a middle-aged, deathly frightened woman. The rest of the actors play their own masks - well, recognizable, colorful. Sergey Taramaev
- the prime minister of the former "Zhenovach team", an actor close to the "Fomenki" in school - is in a different weight category. His presence gives materiality to the almost ethereal ensemble. This is perhaps the most “Gorky” character. The masculine appeal of this actor is strong - he rushes at Monakhova so much that the young spectators shudder. And when Monakhova-Tyunina says that no one has ever kissed her like that, you can believe it. Taramaevsky Cherkun goes through a sad evolution: from a romantic handsome man, embittered, strong, suffering, to a broken, lost person. He began his stay in the city with a war against the mayor Redozubov (played by
After the intermission, changes take place on the stage - two doors open at the back of the stage, behind which there is some kind of life - they play billiards, walk, drink, maybe dance, music plays. But the problem is that only those viewers who sit strictly in the center see this. It is clear that Kamenkovich wanted to somehow enrich the space by creating a semblance of a background, but this technique can be said to work only partially: it is difficult to feel the connection between the action on stage and in the distant rooms when you cannot see what is happening there.
The composition of the play is multi-figured, but the director could not cope with the large number of people on stage; many relationships are simply not built, and ends meet do not always meet.
Overtly dramatic or melodramatic scenes coexist with grotesque and naive psychological ones.
These changes are funny, but blur the integrity of the impression.
The play runs for four hours, and the action sometimes spreads out - the exposition is drawn out, the climax is drawn out, and the ending is simply blurred. Monakhova’s suicide and her unfortunate husband’s phrase “They killed a man” are not able to complete this motley action.
Surprisingly, the perspective of the performance is supported by Olga Kulagina’s costumes. Dresses, especially women's ones, change like the mood, and, perhaps, this is one of the rare cases in the theater when they create the atmosphere. If in the scene “The city of Verkhopole has spun” the overall tone is pearl-gray, in the scene “Balshazzar’s Feast” it is terracotta, then in the last scene “Everything is like in the novel” it is peach-scarlet.
And it's beautiful. But although dressing up, as is often the case with Kamenkovich, pretends to be thoughtful, in fact, nothing but “pleasure to the eye” can be found behind them.
The performance has two intermissions Duration of the performance – 2 hours 50 minutes From the history:
Maxim Gorky is a Russian classic of the 20th century. The play “Barbarians” was published by him in 1906 and was conceived as a satire on society, in reality it is in tune with the present day. Surprisingly, almost nothing has changed in a century. Gorky worked for a long time on the work, on the ideal of his text: two handwritten draft editions with
a huge amount corrections, as well as a typewritten copy with the author's edits in the margins. Plot: human life, moral degradation, drunkenness and partying - it seems that the engineers came not to create, but to destroy. With the appearance of “civilized barbarians,” love polygons, happiness and hatred, friendship and betrayal, deception and the struggle for truth unfold on the stage.
About the performance:
This is a large-scale, complex, deeply psychological production by People's Artist of Russia Vera Andreevna Efremova, where almost the entire acting troupe of the Tver Academic Drama Theater is involved.
Before the viewer's eyes, destinies are made, and the plot, time after time, takes an unexpected turn, forcing one to recognize the heroes of the play as modern society. It's amazing how relevant the play is to the present day!
We were working on the play
Staged by People's Artist of Russia V.A. Efremova
Assistant Directors –
People's Artist of Russia A.A. Chuikov,
People's Artist of Russia K.G. Yuchenkov
Production designer –
Honored Artist of Russia A.G. Ivanov
Costume designer – I.V. Podosenkova
Musical arrangement by G.V. Semyonova
Lighting designer - Honored Worker of Culture of Russia M.V. Semenov
The performance includes:
CHERKUN EGOR PETROVICH, ENGINEER - art. Kuzmin Taras Nikolaevich
ANNA FYODOROVNA, HIS WIFE - art. Pankova Anzhelika Alexandrovna
TSYGANOV SERGEY NIKOLAEVICH, ENGINEER - Nar. art.Yuchenkov Konstantin Glebovich
BOGAEVSKAYA TATIANA NIKOLAEVNA, HOUSEOWNER, NOBLEMAN -
LIDIA PAVLOVNA, HER NIECE - art. Plavinskaya Daria Alekseevna
REDOSUBOV VASILY IVANOVICH, CITY MAYOR - people. art. Brusin Leonid Arkadevich
PRYTYKIN ARKHIP FOMICH, MERCHANT, TIMBER - Honored. art. Zhuravlev Andrey Evgenievich
PELAGEYA IVANOVNA PRYTIKINA, HIS WIFE -
MONAKHOV MAURIKY OSIPOVICH, EXCISE OVERVIEW - Honorable. art. Ponomarev Georgy Nikolaevich
MONAKHOVA NADEZHDA POLIKARPOVNA, HIS WIFE - art. Bedareva Yulia Viktorovna
TADVASTIKOV PAVLIN SAVELIEVICH, PEOPLE - Honored. art. Gribkov Vyacheslav Alexandrovich
DROBYAZGIN, SERVES IN THE TREASURY - art. Maisky Alexey Nikolaevich
VESELKINA, POSTMaster's DAUGHTER - art.
Gorky M - Barbarians
(BDT performance after G. Tovstongov)
Description, creative team:
Leningrad ABDT named after. M. Gorky.
Directed by Georgy Tovstonogov.
Recording via broadcast.
Performers:
Explanatory text - Tamara Milyushkina;
Cherkun Egor Petrovich - Pavel Luspekayev;
Anna Fedorovna, his wife - Inna Kondratyeva;
Tsyganov Sergey Nikolaevich, engineer - Vladislav Strzhelchik;
Bogaevskaya Tatyana Nikolaevna, landlady, noblewoman - Elena Granovskaya;
Lidia Pavlovna, her niece - Nina Olkhina;
Redozubov Vasily Ivanovich, mayor - Vitaly Politsemako;
Grisha, his son - Vsevolod A. Kuznetsov;
Katya, his daughter - Zinaida Sharko;
Pritykin Arkhip Fomich, merchant, timber merchant - Evgeny Ivanov;
Pritykina Pelageya Ivanovna, his wife - Lyudmila Volynskaya;
Monakhov Mavriky Osipovich, excise supervisor - Evgeny Lebedev;
Monakhova Nadezhda Polikarpovna, his wife - Tatyana Doronina;
Golovastikov Pavlin Savelievich, tradesman - Boris Ryzhukhin;
Doctor Makarov - Nikolai Korn;
Lukin Stepan, student, nephew of the gardener - Oleg Basilashvili.
Year of recording: 1959
Summary
The monotonous life of the provincial town of Verkhopole is disrupted by the arrival of railway builders - engineers Cherkun and Tsyganov. In place of the patriarchal barbarism of the mayor of Redozubov, these “champions of civilization” bring a new barbarity: moral degradation and cruel indifference to man. It took a little time for their fruits to appear destructive activities: Nadezhda Monakhova, who was looking for high, bright love and was deceived by Cherkun, commits suicide; the official Drobyazgin, who stole government money, is hiding from the city; Redozubov's son, Grisha, becomes a drunkard. Only the student Lukin was not touched by the corrupting influence of “civilized barbarians” - he knows the goals and means of combating old and new barbarism.
Maxim Gorky, also known as Alexey Maksimovich Gorky (born Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov; March 16 (28), 1868, Nizhny Novgorod, Russian empire- June 18, 1936, Gorki, Moscow region, USSR) - Russian writer, prose writer, playwright. One of the most popular authors turn of the XIX century and 20th centuries, famous for his portrayal of a romanticized declassed character (“tramp”), the author of works with a revolutionary tendency, personally close to the Social Democrats, who was in opposition to the tsarist regime, Gorky quickly gained worldwide fame.
Initially, Gorky was skeptical about October revolution. However, after several years cultural work V Soviet Russia(in Petrograd he headed the publishing house “World Literature”, interceded with the Bolsheviks on behalf of those arrested) and life abroad in the 1920s (Marienbad, Sorrento), returned to the USSR, where the last years of his life he was surrounded by official recognition as “the petrel of the revolution” and “ great proletarian writer", founder of socialist realism.
First published in the magazine “Bulletin of Life”, 1906, No. 2, April 10, under the title “Barbarians” (a new play by M. Gorky)”, under the pseudonym A. Levy.
The play “Barbarians” was written by M. Gorky in the summer of 1905 and first published in the “Collection of the Knowledge Association for 1906,” book. ninth, St. Petersburg. 1906. Lunacharsky used this text when writing the article.
Published based on the text of the collection “Critical Studies”.
Over the endlessly wide-spread rural “straw Russia”, small-town “wooden Russia” has grown for a long time. I grew up in a sick country with some boils and blisters. The hero of Chekhov's story “My Life” says: “Pavlovo makes locks, Kimry makes boots, but what our city does, I could never understand.” It's really hard to understand what is he doing a small provincial Russian town. He is only an insignificant but painful center of nasty double exploitation. Cruel and tight primitive accumulation takes place in it in the most disgusting forms. Ruthlessly and thoroughly they drink, sweating, as if behind a samovar, the juices of tens of thousands of impoverished, wild men. Small capitalists are born here, and their capital, while causing great harm beyond its size, does not at all bring that relative benefit that makes capital a historical value. All sorts of officials huddle in such towns, small thin tentacles, which later merge into the greedy provincial bloodsucker of a large all-Russian octopus.
Everyone in these cities is unbearably bored. Naked debauchery, adultery due to skinny, binge drinking, cards, and even, perhaps, some music lover, having nothing better to do, will take on the difficult task of teaching “walruses”-firemen to play “at the top of their lungs” on the trumpets.
It would seem, what could be interesting in these pitiful and bad people, boring, stupid and not for themselves, ruining a tormented people? Meanwhile, there is a lot of interesting things here, even if we take all these provincial characters regardless of their collision with big life. All the aberrations here are interesting human personality. After all, here, as everywhere else, they crave happiness, honor and love, but they don’t have any correct idea of what the blessings of life consist of, or what paths to take to get them.
Between people of average caliber one comes across here and big people. But the county town crushes everything: ordinary average people seem vile and midgets here, and big people seem like ridiculous eccentrics. You can’t help but laugh at the county “fauna”, but look beyond its caricatures to see the deep and, I would say, clean tragedy is infinitely more instructive,
In the center of urban philistinism stands in Gorky's play the sixty-year-old mayor Redozubov. This is an imperious house-building nature.
“The man, I dare say, is cruel: he beat one wife into a coffin, another ran away to a monastery, one son is playing around like a fool, another is missing...”
And, however, these fanaticisms coexist in him with ardent love for the same children. In the atmosphere of a tiny town, Vasily Ivanovich created for himself the illusion that he really a person, moreover, the keeper of some very important and respectable foundations. But " iron Russia“Russia, large-scale capitalist, struck with its steel finger the wooden walls of dusty houses, the crippled hearts of moldy people, and all the greatness of Redozubov collapsed. Redozubov cannot adapt, humiliate himself, as the vulgar profiteer Pritikin does. He stood up to the incomprehensible “farmazons”, who brought a stream of unusual cold air into his corner, and his authority crumbled to dust - they did not frighten him at all, they humiliated him and finally took away his last children, and he broke down, he was confused, he was in tears of the truest grief lets his daughter go, in the end he turned out to be just an unhappy man, and all the undoubted wealth and the Old Testament former nobility of his nature, of course, did not help him.
But are persistent, stubborn people, people of honor par excellence, stocky and solid caryatids, who can directly and proudly hold on their shoulders whole system ideas, beliefs and actions, not an impressive, not a beautiful force? The whole point is what these proud caryatids support: in wooden Russia they support a mountain of unnecessary rubbish.
How funny is this Nadezhda Polikarpovna Monakhova, who thinks that duchesses and aristocrats always wear red, who reads nothing but bad, pompous novels, and talks only about love, so that the local old lady is embarrassed for her stupidity. Meanwhile, this very real image, quite possible in any outback, with any deep regard for it, turns out to be so pure, lofty, even solemn that I don’t know what other image in the drama of recent years I could put next to it.
What is striking about Nadezhda is her calm self-confidence, like that of a quiet, wide river. She speaks her phrases, which sound wildly in the ears of her interlocutors, with complete faith that she knows the very essence of love. She speaks like someone in power. Her beauty inspired the more intelligent provincials with an unusually great passion, which sometimes ruined their lives. But these poor people could give her as little as the little spider - her excise husband. Sensing in herself the great possibilities of love, she sets herself a heroic, romantic, unattainable ideal, stands calmly among all these men, who “don’t even seem to have eyes at all,” in a slum, which is well characterized by the police officer, saying: “A district town - and suddenly a hero, it’s even funny.” The depraved engineer Tsyganov explains to himself that Nadezhda attracts like a magnet by considering “a hungry instinct, barely covered with the rags of romance.” Tsyganov is deeply mistaken: a hungry person eats everything indiscriminately, but it is difficult to be more picky than Nadezhda. No, in her person lives in the provincial town the thirst for great and bold happiness and the subjective possibility of it, but there is no hero, there are no objective conditions, there is no one to respond to, there are no those strong hands that could take this great happiness. And the beautiful Nadezhda would have faded away, slowly fading away, still waiting, getting older, funny for the lady next door, a “seductive little thing” for various celadons, torment, unsolved, incomprehensible torment for the pitiful, madly in love husband and other pitiful, madly in love ordinary people.
Iron Russia loves to beat out of wood everything that is even more or less valuable. With her arrival, Nadezhda’s price rose and horizons opened up before her. The engineer Tsyganov would have gladly put it to use; he would not have regretted throwing his acquired thousands in style on a big spree in Paris with a “magnet woman.” The splendor of the capital of the world, a rich and adventurous life, the hot air of that same high-society romance that Nadezhda dreamed of so much - she can take all this now, and she takes none of this and prefers even death, because she only needs love, and love needs a hero.
She and others saw this hero in the heroic figure of iron Russia, in the representative of industrial energy, a native of the people, the conquering engineer - the red-haired Cherkun. This gentleman energetically breaks wooden Russia; he easily overturns stone pillars and the spiritual foundations of Redozubov’s culture. But what of this? What value does it bring with it, apart from increased exploitation? Why does he believe in himself? What is his faith anyway? He is intoxicated by the process of extensive labor, the process of destruction, the process of creation of the colossal iron Moloch. But the cynical and rotten Tsyganov appears next to him, and it is he who brings into the iron framework created by Cherkun their living content - cynical debauchery and cynical robbery; in place of the abolished Redozubov, the completely sober and prosaically unscrupulous Pritikin is installed; The youth of the district, unhappy and persecuted, lost even those primitive moral foundations that they had, and, fueled by a thirst for the sweet-drunk big-bourgeois “chartreuse,” they went to their inevitable and vulgar death. The old, wooden, collapses in souls, the new, corresponding to the iron culture, coldly, inhumanly unleashes the worst instincts, does not bring a drop of light and warmth. So what if Cherkun sings the praises of the “symphony big city"? What does it matter if there is a lot of strength and life in it? - he is only an unconscious instrument in the hands of the blind elements of capitalism, he is only his muscular body, fulfilling the will and plans of his depraved and predatory soul - the Iron Russian Gypsy: and therefore there is not and could not be in him the heroism that Nadezhda is greedily looking for. Outer determination external force as much as you like, but feel the charm true love and real freedom, reach out for real living happiness, create it cannot be achieved for oneself by someone who has no idea about it, who is as strong, as cold and automatic as his sister, the other executing agent of capital - the machine. These gentlemen either have no internal content other than working energy, meaningless as steam, or this content is a cynical thirst for profit for the sake of brainlessly wasting their lives, for the sake of dissolute extravagance.
If “hopes” live in the depths of wooden Russia, then the heroes of the coming era of steam and steel will not be able to fulfill them. M. Gorky also mentioned the forces that the Tsyganovs and their patrons create next to them, about “destroyers” of a different type, about conscious destroyers in the name of a future golden age, in the name of future creativity. But for now these are weak and uncertain shoots. Student Lukin always has an unkind and mocking smile on his lips, and he speaks only with irony, even when he is “preaching.” He doesn’t really believe in his own strength and, persuading the talented girl Katya to leave the Redozubov house for the big cities, he is afraid to promise her anything definite; the only thing he guarantees her is that “at least she will have something to remember about her youth.” He says: “It’s not us, apparently, who will create something new - no, not us! This must be understood... this will immediately put each of us in our place...” And in another place: “Open the eyes of those born blind - there is nothing more you can do... nothing!”
One can reproach Gorky for the fact that in his generally gloomy picture there are no brighter and more defined figures than Lukin and Katya. I think, however, that it is impossible to demand from every drama that it be a whole little encyclopedia of modern social life. The playwright did well by concentrating all our attention on the clash between wooden Russia and iron Russia, on the torment of this process, on its deep general dissatisfaction.
I don't have the opportunity to dwell on the shortcomings new play, because, while maintaining the proportion between its shortcomings and its advantages, it is necessary either not to mention the shortcomings, or to list and analyze the entire huge series of subtle observations, psychological revelations, symbolic contrasts and inexplicable beauties colorful dialogue sparkling with aphorisms, with which Gorky managed to give his work a special charm.
Perhaps, in the noise of the current political moment, these socio-psychological scenes from life county town seem to lie outside the mainstream of public interest. But the aggravated political conflict will subside before the widespread, deep and terrible struggle between large-capitalist Russia and petty-bourgeois Russia. The artist helps us understand and appreciate this colossal phenomenon of the barbaric war of two types of barbarians in the direct experiences of living individuals, in their ephemeral or empty triumph, in their pitiful or tragic death.
We must firmly remember, however, that the real value of all the vicissitudes of this war can only be given by those who, without clinging to the points of view of the decrepit way of life and its illusions, without dwelling on the lies or self-deception of Cherkunov’s pseudo-philosophy, also bypass the abstract moral or abstract aesthetic point of view - only those who understand that ugly iron Russia, and only it, creates the ground for a new struggle, for a new conflict, the results of which alone are able to save “Nadezhda”, perishing in the darkness of the district slums, and realize her dreams with such breadth and brightness, before which the fantastic red dresses of romantic “queens and aristocrats” will fade like stars before the sun.