Word: sovremennik
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...young woman in black paces back and forth. Suddenly, she rattles the prison door, her pale features exposed by the spotlight. "Three hundred forty-nine days! Three hundred forty-nine days!" she screams. "Bite on your hat, anything to keep from sobbing!" Few in the audience at Moscow's Sovremennik Theater stifle the emotion inspired by such searing scenes from Eugenia Ginzburg's memoirs of the Gulag, Journey into the Whirlwind. An innocent victim of the Stalinist purges, the heroine endures humiliating interrogations, strip searches and endless nights during which she covers her ears to block out the cries...
...combine a nationalist nostalgia for Russian Orthodoxy and the Stalin era with a xenophobic hatred of corrupt Western influences on Soviet life. Many of these critics belong to the Writers' Union of the Russian Federal Republic, the largest of the U.S.S.R.'s 15 constituent republics. The literary monthly Nash Sovremennik has denounced rock music and beauty pageants as demeaning influences on Russian culture. Such writers as Yuri Bondarev and Vasily Belov have attacked the de-Stalinization process for defaming a period when, despite Stalin's tyranny, the Soviet Union became a world power...
...invective, they seem to respond most strongly to intimate glimpses of lost love, betrayal by friends and alcoholic desperation, whether in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theater or in quasi-documentary scripts about prostitutes and gravediggers performed by the city's most impressive acting troupe, the Sovremennik (Contemporary) Theater. Says Konstantin Raikin, artistic director of the Satirikon Theater, where the Russian-language debut of Jean Genet's psychosexual drama The Maids is Moscow's hottest show and among the least political: "These days, a measure of a play's appeal is to be able to say that...