This is a genuinely different book from most of what Progress Publishers sent abroad. It is not an Institute treatise assembled by a committee under a Central Committee secretary; it is a working theatre director talking, at length and with evident pleasure, about his own trade. Georgi Tovstonogov ran the Gorky Theatre in Leningrad — the house better known abroad as the Bolshoi Drama Theatre — and by 1972 he was one of the two or three most important directors in the Soviet Union. The book is exactly what its title says: a book about the profession of directing. It is about how to read a play, how to find its genre, how to rehearse, how to get a performance out of an actor, how to work with a designer and a composer, how to stage Chekhov and Gorky and Shakespeare so that an audience will sit still for three hours. For long stretches it is very good, and it should be read as what it is before it is read as anything else.
The date is not in doubt. The extract carries "First printing 1972," the latest events it touches are the space flights of the 1960s and the theatrical arguments of the same decade, and nothing in it postdates its spine. The Russian original — the title page survives in the scan in garbled Cyrillic as O professii rezhissyora, "On the Profession of the Director" — predates this English printing; this is the Progress translation, and the imprint in the text is genuinely Progress ("Progress Publishers would be glad to have your opinion of this book... 21, Zubovsky Boulevard, Moscow"). So we are dealing with a 1972 text by a named, real, working artist, not a reprint in a later jacket and not a book misattributed to the wrong house.
Take the craft seriously first, because it earns it. The core of the book is the chapter called "Method," on Stanislavsky's late "method of physical actions" — what Tovstonogov calls the method of active analysis. He describes it more clearly than most textbooks manage: the idea that "the most complex spiritual phenomenon is expressed through a consistent sequence of physical actions," that an actor overloaded with intellectual preparation becomes "like a rachitic child, his puny body bending under the weight of his overlarge head," that the way in is "physical reconnaissance" with "our arms, legs, back, and all our physical being." He insists that "there is no scenic life without conflict," and then complicates his own rule usefully, warning against "a superficial understanding of conflict as a clash between diametrically opposed viewpoints." He opens the chapter by disowning any claim to authority: his account, he says, is "individual and subjective, and far be it from me to suggest that it is the only valid one." That modesty is not a pose. The "About the Author" page rightly picks out the same quality — a director "so constructive in the complex business of staging a play... that this discourse on the job of the stage-director is so interesting and useful."
The critical writing is honest too. The chapter "Reflections on the Classics" is a worried, undefensive essay about a real problem: that "the classics, such great names as Shakespeare and Pushkin, Ostrovsky, Chekhov and Gorky have somehow imperceptibly slipped out of the Soviet theatre's repertoire," and that "the news that a Soviet theatre is staging Woe from Wit or The Storm is not far short of a sensation." He refuses the easy explanation — "it is not the audiences that are at fault" — and he is candid about the earlier fashion that had, in the name of class analysis, made "many fine works... primitively schematic," so that "all too often the social was vulgarised and reduced to the cheap sociological." A Soviet director in 1972 writing that vulgar-sociological Marxism ruined productions is telling the truth about his own theatre's recent past, and it is worth crediting.
Most striking of all, and most against the grain of what the series usually finds, is that Tovstonogov argues against uniformity. In "The Director and the Times" he defends the coexistence of rival styles — Okhlopkov's romantic monumentalism, Efros's austere psychology, Yefremov's plain naturalism — and writes that "unification and levelling are as intolerable in stage direction as in any other art," that in art "having everyone in step, even if the finest artists are on the flanks, is disastrous." He even ridicules the crude demand that art keep literal pace with the news — the "largest power station in the world has just been completed — Where is a play about it?" — and dismisses the notion that socialist realism means "conscientious portrayal of life" and photographic verisimilitude, calling those who reduce it to that "timeservers or cowards." This is a defence of artistic pluralism, published in Moscow, and it is real.
None of this is an accident of subject matter. It is the pattern this series has met again and again: the constraint attaches not to the topic but to the register. Where Tovstonogov writes as a craftsman — about the actor's problem, about Chekhov's sound effects, about the difference between Schiller's forest and Ostrovsky's — he is free, specific, and often excellent. The policing begins only when the voice turns to the frame. And the frame is unmistakable when it comes. "The director must not be cold or impartial," he writes in "Civic Responsibility in Art"; "he must mobilise his art against all that is base and philistine, hostile to the ideal our people and its Party serve, the ideal of communism." A director's work, he writes, "will be fruitless unless he knows life, is aware of his civic responsibility, and feels himself to be a direct participant in the historic task of building the new, communist society." These sentences are doing a job, and the job is legitimation. They are also, tellingly, almost the only sentences in the book that could have been written by someone who had never been inside a rehearsal room.
But a 1972 book by a leading Soviet director on the profession of directing carries one ghost it cannot avoid, and the test of the book is what it does with him. Vsevolod Meyerhold was the greatest director the revolution produced, Stanislavsky's most radical pupil and rival, the inventor of biomechanics and of a whole constructivist theatre. In 1938 his theatre was liquidated; in June 1939 he was arrested; he was tortured into confession and shot in February 1940. His wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was murdered in their Moscow flat a few weeks after his arrest. He was rehabilitated in 1955, seventeen years before this book appeared. So: was Meyerhold nameable in 1972, and did Tovstonogov name him?
He did. This is the finding, and it is worth being exact about, because it is not the finding the series usually returns. Meyerhold is named ten times, always with respect and never with a slur. Tovstonogov tells the student that it is "essential" to "have a good knowledge of the work of Meyerhold"; he ranks him with Stanislavsky as one of those who "understood the time in which they lived very well"; he writes that "Meyerhold is unthinkable without Stanislavsky." And he offers something no committee could have supplied — a personal memory: "I was fortunate enough to attend ten rehearsals conducted by Meyerhold." He describes Meyerhold's improvisations as brilliant, and records him stopping an ovation to insist the applause belonged to "my teacher Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky." A murdered man is here restored to the lineage, warmly, by someone who was in the room.
And yet look at the phrase inside that same sentence. Tovstonogov attended ten rehearsals at which Meyerhold, he says, "fought with his own formalism." That is the whole of what the book will say about the catastrophe. "Formalism" was not a neutral aesthetic description in the Soviet 1930s; it was the charge — the word that closed theatres and filled cases. To write that Meyerhold "fought with his own formalism" is to convert an accusation levelled at him by the state, on pain of death, into a private artistic struggle he waged and won against himself. The rehabilitation is real and the affection is real, but the manner of his ending has been removed. There is no arrest, no torture, no execution, no 1940. Raikh does not appear at all. The book can name the man because he was rehabilitated; it cannot name what was done to him, because that would require naming who did it.
The same operation runs through the one other victim the book touches. "Another of Stanislavsky's opponents, Solomon Mikhoels," Tovstonogov writes, "towards the end of his life" came round to conceding Stanislavsky's greatness. Mikhoels was the director of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre and the most celebrated Jewish actor in the country. He did not reach the end of a life; he was murdered on Stalin's orders in January 1948, his body left in a Minsk street to look like a traffic accident, as the opening act of the postwar campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans." "Towards the end of his life" is doing precisely the work that "fought with his own formalism" does — it supplies a natural, private ending for a man the state killed. This is the "erasure of the ending" that this series has documented in Soviet name-indexes, where men who were shot are recorded as merely "expelled." Here it is done not in an index but in the affectionate reminiscence of a colleague, which makes it quieter and, in its way, sadder.
What is remarkable is how close Tovstonogov comes to saying the unsayable. In the opening chapter, "Stanislavsky's Time," he twice lets the truth show through the euphemism. Of the canonisation of the Stanislavsky "system" as compulsory orthodoxy he writes: "There was a time when it was forced down people's throats whether they wanted it or not." And more precisely still: "Within the recent memory of all of us there came the order to 'fall into line with Stanislavsky.'" He even warns that the sudden, unanimous, dateless triumph of the system "should be enough to put one on one's guard." He knows. He knows that Stanislavsky's method was not adopted but imposed — that the "order to fall into line" was the same apparatus, in the same years, that shut Meyerhold's theatre and shot him for refusing to. But the confession is made in the passive voice and the impersonal construction: it was forced, there came the order. The order has no author. It arrives like weather. To name the author would be to name Zhdanov, the campaign against formalism, the destruction of Tairov's Kamerny Theatre, the murder of Mikhoels — and that is the one thing the register will not permit, even as the topic keeps surfacing.
There is a further silence, and it is the size of the job itself. This is a book about the profession of directing in the Soviet Union, and in that profession no play reached a stage without passing the state's repertoire control — Glavlit and the Repertory Committee vetted every production, and a director's working life was in large part a negotiation with that apparatus. It does not appear. The words for it are simply absent from the text. When Tovstonogov discusses repertoire he presents it as a matter of artistic taste and box-office receipts — theatres that once "fought like cats and dogs over plays," managements that "have eliminated from their repertoires 'bad box-office' authors." The picture is of a free market in scripts limited only by the public's appetite. The one institution that every reader in Moscow knew stood between a director and his stage — the censor — is nowhere named. A manual on a policed profession that never mentions the police is carrying a silence exactly the shape of the work.
The Fourth International and the wider anti-Stalinist left had described what this book cannot. Writing in June 1938 — the very year Meyerhold's theatre was liquidated — Trotsky put it in one sentence: "The October revolution gave a magnificent impetus to all types of Soviet art. The bureaucratic reaction, on the contrary, has stifled artistic creation with a totalitarian hand" (Art and Politics in Our Epoch, first published in Partisan Review; reprinted in Fourth International, vol. 11 no. 2, March–April 1950). Eleven years later, and one year after the murder of Mikhoels, Ernest Mandel — writing as Ernest Germain — devoted a whole article to the postwar assault: the "campaign against cosmopolitanism," its open anti-Semitism, the composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev arraigned for "formalistic" works, Eisenstein "literally driven to his death," the denunciation of the Jewish theatre, and socialist realism described exactly as it functioned — an order "to prescribe to artists... the line of thought to be avoided or to be imitated, to imprison creative effort... in a rigorous code of preconceived rules" ("Purge of Soviet Culture," Fourth International, vol. 10 no. 11, December 1949). Set Mandel's phrase beside Tovstonogov's. What Tovstonogov calls, in the passive, the thing that "came" and "was forced down people's throats," Mandel names, with its authors and its victims, as the deliberate policy of the bureaucracy. The two men are describing the same event. Only one of them was free to say who was doing it. (Our reply holdings do not extend to Meyerhold's 1955 rehabilitation itself; the anti-Stalinist press we hold for the 1950s and 1960s does not treat it, which is a fact about the archive, not about the book.)
None of this cancels the craft, and the reader should not let it. The value of The Profession of the Stage Director is that its two registers sit on the same page, and the honesty of the one makes the evasion of the other legible. A man who can write that "unification and levelling are as intolerable in stage direction as in any other art," and who attended ten of Meyerhold's rehearsals and never forgot them, knew perfectly well what had been done to the theatre he loved. He wrote a book full of the freedom of the workshop and empty of the freedom that the workshop was denied. Read it for the method, for the Chekhov, for the plea against uniformity — all of it genuine. Then read the two phrases, "fought with his own formalism" and "towards the end of his life," and understand that they are the marks left by the same hand that Trotsky described, still pressing on the profession thirty years on.