The Moscow Stage

In the forties of the nineteenth century the theatre was treated everywhere with great respect — and more than anywhere else was this the case in Russia. Italian opera had not yet reached the development it attained at St. Petersburg some twenty years later, and Russian opera, represented by poor singers, and treated as a step-daughter by the directors of the Imperial Theatres, offered but little attraction. It was the drama and occasionally the ballet, when some star like Fanny Elsler appeared on the horizon, which brought together the best elements of educated society and aroused the youth of all classes, including the university students. The dramatic stage was looked upon — to speak in the style of those years — as “a temple of Art,” a centre of far-reaching educational influence. As to the actors and actresses, they endeavoured, in their turn, not merely to render on the stage the characters created by the dramatist; they did their best to contribute themselves, like Cruickshank in his illustrations of Dickens’s novels, to the final creation of the character, by finding its true personification.

Especially at Moscow did this intellectual intercourse be. tween the stage and society go on, and a superior conception of dramatic art was there developed. The intercourse which Gógol established with the actors who played his Inspector-General, and especially with SCHÉPKIN; the influence of the literary and philosophical circles which had then their seat at Moscow; and the intelligent appreciation and criticism of their work which the actors found in the Press — all this concurred in making of the Moscow Mályi Teátr (Small Theatre) the cradle of a superior dramatic art. While St. Petersburg patronised the so-called “French” school of acting — declamatory and unnaturally refined — the Moscow stage attained a high degree of perfection in the development of the naturalistic school. I mean the school of which Duse is now such a great representative, and to which Lena Ashwell owed her great success in Resurrection; that is, the school in which the actor parts with the routine of conventional stage tradition, and provokes the deepest emotions in his audience by the depth of his own real feeling and by the natural truth and simplicity of its expression — the school which occupies the same position on the stage that the realism of Turguéneff and Tolstóy occupies in literature.

In the forties and the early fifties this school had attained its highest perfection at Moscow, and had in its ranks such first-class actors and actresses as Schépkin — the real soul of this stage — MOTCHÁLOFF, SADÓSK1Y, S. VASÍLIEFF, and MME. NIKÚLINA-KOSSÍTSKAYA, supported by quite a pleiad of good secondary aids. Their répertoire was not very rich; but the two comedies of Gógol (Inspector-General and Marriage), occasionally Griboyédoff’s great satire; a comedy, The Marriage of Kretchínsky, by SUKHOVÓ-KOBÝLIN, which gave excellent opportunities for displaying the best qualities of the artists just named; now and then a drama of Shakespeare, Shakespeare has always been a great favourite in Russia, but his dramas require a certain wealth of scenery not always at the disposal of the Small Theatre. ²² plenty of melodramas adapted from the French, and vaudevilles which came nearer to light comedy than to farce — this was the ever varied programme of the Small Theatre. Some plays were played to perfection — combining the ensemble and the “go” which characterise the Odéon with the simplicity and naturalness already mentioned.

The mutual influence which the stage and dramatic authors necessarily exercise upon each other was admirably illustrated at Moscow. Several dramatists wrote specially for this stage — not in order that this or that actress might eclipse all others, as happens nowadays in those theatres where one play is played scores of nights in succession, but for this given stage and its actors as a whole. OSTRÓVSKIY (1823–1886) was the one who best realised this mutual relation between the dramatic author and the stage, and thus he came to hold with regard to the Russian drama the same position that Turguéneff and Tolstóy hold with regard to the Russian novel.