Word: lenin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That opening confrontation is not only dramatic but also, by erstwhile Soviet standards, outright dangerous. It portrays Lenin as a fallible man, not a mythic hero. It admits that the Bolsheviks were detested by many of the peasants they purported to help. And the play commits the once unpardonable sin of bringing Trotsky onstage -- showing him, in fact, as shrewder than Lenin. The theme is ideological purity vs. practical necessity, with pragmatism favored all the way. Compromise with the West is extolled as sensible; worldwide revolution is dismissed as a daydream...
...Mikhail Gorbachev attended the premiere; afterward he endorsed the play and embraced its leading actor, his friend Mikhail Ulyanov. One version has Gorbachev saying, "That is me. That is me." Playwright Mikhail Shatrov, 58, says that the actual words were more restrained but that Gorbachev openly drew parallels between Lenin's reluctant peace with imperial Germany and his own reform and retrenchment. Thus the staging of Shatrov's text became a political as well as an artistic event, a landmark of changing times. And of countless cultural exchanges between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in recent years, none...
...depiction of history received in Moscow is bound to be reassuring. Says its author: "The most important question now is what legacy we are rejecting. This play is a firm rejection of Stalinism." It is also a poignant and at times eerily apt echo of the present -- as when Lenin and his colleagues sadly conclude that the apparent Communist revolution in Germany, where Marx expected his workers' revolt to start, is instead a brief outpouring of rage and envy from a still conservative people. This Lenin says his duty is to feed, clothe, house and employ the Russian people; until...
...presented a striking King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, the show marks the U.S. debut of Moscow's venerable Vakhtangov Theater and of Ulyanov, its artistic director as well as its star. Although the bulky, brooding Ulyanov in no way resembles the vulpine Lenin, he and his troupe seem wholly at ease. Amid the symbolic flutters of cloth, abrupt bursts of music, caricatures of the old bourgeoisie and odd lighting shifts, they keep a tight focus on the most troubling aspect of politics anywhere, the need to compromise principle...
...choice facing Lenin is stark: cede large territories that seem naturally part of his country, or face all-out war without being sure his army is able or willing to fight. At first he is alone in seeking peace; at the end the ballot is almost unanimous. Lenin's mood is not triumphal but exhausted, almost embittered. The last line is "I don't want you to believe me. I want you to understand me." For Soviets that is a haunting answer to the years when blind faith was obligatory. For Americans it is a sorrowful reminder that any leader...