Word: shatrov
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...Mikhail Shatrov...
...Litovsk was suppressed for more than two decades. When it finally debuted in 1987, however, Soviet leader 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...
...Shatrov's play works as more than a political curiosity. Staged by Robert Sturua of Soviet Georgia's Rustaveli Theater, which this month 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...
Meanwhile, what is by Soviet standards a spectacular thaw has got under way in the cultural domain. During the past year more than a dozen previously banned movies have been screened before fascinated audiences. On the stage, plays like Mikhail Shatrov's Dictatorship of Conscience examine past failures of Communism. Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, a novel that chronicles the murderous Stalinist purges of the 1930s, appeared in a literary journal after going unpublished for two decades. Last month a group of ex-political prisoners and dissident writers applied for permission to publish their own magazine, aptly titled...
Already published is Chingiz Aitmatov's The Executioner's Scaffold, which removed the taboo from the subject of drug addiction in our country. Poet Andrei Voznesensky published his powerful The Ditch, a piece about thieves who robbed the graves of Nazi victims. Mikhail Shatrov's antidictatorship play Dictatorship of Conscience is being performed...