One of Ostrovsky's most poetical works, The Storm is set in Kalinov, a provincial town on the banks of the Upper Volga. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, Katerina is tormented by her widowed mother-in-law, Marfa Kabanova. Katerina seeks solace in an affair with a similarly tormented young lover, and the confession of this affair to her husband leads ultimately to tragedy. The Storm was a great success on its first performance the Maly Theatre, Moscow, in November 1859, and continues to be critic...
What did modern theatre in Russia look like and how did it foreground tradition building and transmission processes? The book challenges conventional historiographical approaches by weaving contemporary theories on cultural transmission into its historical narrative. It argues that processes of transmission - training spaces, acting manuals, photographic evidence, newspaper reports, international networking, informal encounters, cultural memories - contribute to the formation and consolidatio...
"Ivanov, a driving force in local government and a visionary landowner, feels burnt out at thirty-five. Once the pioneer of scientific farming methods and of education for the peasants, he now drowns in bureaucracy and debt, his large estate neglected. While his wife is dying, Sasha, a young, educated woman, falls in love with Ivanov and determines to save him. Set in a country suffering from political, ideological and spiritual stagnation, Chekhov's first full-length play anticipates the explos...
Includes the plays The Forest, Artistes and Admirers, Wolves and Sheep and Sin and Sorrow Four of Ostrovskys finest plays. The best known of these, The Forest (1871), has two young lovers in thrall to their tyrannical elders, who are prevented from marrying until a pair of strolling actors come to their rescue. In Artistes and Admirers (1881), a comedy of theatre life, a dedicated young actress renounces both love and fortune in order to pursue her sacred calling. In the comedy Wolves and Sheep...
This book is an insiders’ account of the groundbreaking Moscow production of Chekhov's The Seagull directed by Anatoly Efros in 1966, which heralded a paradigm shift in the interpretation and staging of Chekhov’s plays. It is a unique glimpse behind the curtain of the laboratory of new Russian theatre in the twentieth century. Efros' articles about Chekhov and The Seagull, his diaries, interviews and conversations, and most importantly the original rehearsal records combine to form an in-depth a...
Вечер у Клэр Гайто Газданов
by Гайто Газданов
Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays (Russian Library)
by Andrei Platonov
In this essential collection of Andrei Platonov's plays, the noted Platonov translator Robert Chandler edits and introduces The Hurdy-Gurdy (translated by Susan Larsen), Fourteen Little Red Huts (translated by Chandler), and Grandmother's Little Hut (translated by Jesse Irwin). Written in 1930 and 1933, respectively, The Hurdy-Gurdy and Fourteen Little Red Huts constitute an impassioned and penetrating response to Stalin's assault on the Soviet peasantry. They reflect the political urgency of Be...