At Queen Mary College, University of London, where I used to teach, there is a tradition of staging a Russian play, in Russian, once a year. Ten years ago, when no one else put themselves forward, I offered to direct Fourteen Little Red Huts. Other members of staff tried to persuade me to choose something “more straightforward,” “less harrowing,” “more stageable”; I replied that, since this would be my first experience of directing, I wanted to choose a play that I knew well and that was important to me.
Fourteen Little Red Huts has seldom been staged. I have heard of only three productions: in Saratov in the late 1980s, in Paris in 2000, and at the Voronezh International Platonov Festival in 2013. Platonov wrote several plays, as well as film scripts, but Russian theater directors evidently prefer to put on adaptations of his stories and novels. Why they avoid the plays I do not understand. Perhaps the plays truly are problematic and only my own blindness enabled me to step in “where angels fear to tread.” Or it may just be that Russian directors are slow to seek out new repertoire; Russian publishers have been equally slow to bring out accessible editions of recently discovered stories by Platonov.
After the college production of Uncle Vanya the previous year, a Russian colleague had said to me, “Chekhov was present.” I knew what he meant: the production had been far from faultless, but it had embodied something of Chekhov. The student director had, at least, not erected barriers between Chekhov and the audience—something that even the most prestigious directors do all too often. My hope was that the audience for Fourteen Little Red Huts would respond in a similar way, that they would feel afterward that at least something of Platonov “had been present.” I wanted to allow Platonov to speak; he had, after all, already suffered more than enough from interfering editors and censors. I wanted to impose as little as possible of my own, to allow the spirit of the production to emerge from the text itself. I know that Platonov used to read his work out loud in a neutral, inexpressive voice. I know that Beckett, whose work Fourteen Little Red Huts in many ways anticipates, constantly enjoined his actors “not to act.”
I also understood that I had to work with little time, little money, and a small, almost all-female cast with no understudies; whatever clever ideas might occur to me, I had to accept that chance would play an important role. Platonov himself can be seen as a collage artist, someone who put together works of remarkable philosophical and psychological subtlety out of whatever materials were nearest to hand: Soviet songs and slogans, articles from Pravda, speeches by Stalin, the language of bewildered—though often perceptive—workers and peasants. Throughout the rehearsals I tried to keep his example in mind. In the end, chance was generous to us, transforming the aspect of the production about which I felt least confident: the visual one.
Kazimir Malevich’s most famous work, Black Square, seems to have been intended as an expression of revolutionary optimism; it is difficult, however, not to see it as an expression of despair. Thinking that Malevich’s black futurist icon encapsulates the mood of Platonov’s tragedy, we decided that the workers on the collective farm should wear white T-shirts with a Malevich-style black square on the front.1 I then learned that a black and white checkerboard floor was being laid down for a history department play to be staged a week before Fourteen Little Red Huts. Chance’s gifts can be oddly hard to recognize; it took me some time to realize that we could use this floor to good effect. As well as harmonizing with the costumes, the checkerboard provided a striking symbol for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, a black and white world in which everyone was considered either a loyal supporter of Stalin or a Trotskyist saboteur. And it was not difficult to make the floor seem part of Platonov’s original vision. The phrase bely svet occurs several times in the play. This is a common idiom, the Russian equivalent of “the whole wide world,” but the literal meaning is “the white world.” I only had to insert two extra words—chernaya byl’ (black reality)—in one passage of dialogue, immediately after an occurrence of bely svet, to make our floor seem a perfect reflection of Platonov’s text.
My main task was to provide an “empty space”—as Peter Brook titled his first book about the theater; inside this empty space, with luck, a coherent production might take shape. I gave little specific advice to the actors; for the main part, they arrived at their own interpretations of their roles. Not all of these were what I expected, but all were convincing. An empty space, however, can exist only inside defining boundaries; it was essential that I keep these in place. During one rehearsal, the reunion scene between Futilla, the collective farm chairman, and her husband, Garmalov, seemed to be turning into a jolly comedy. I had to remind the cast that Futilla was close to death from starvation. It is remarkable, however, how seldom I needed to intervene in this way; most of the time, Platonov’s vivid language—and there is not a sentence in which you cannot sense the rhythms and intonations of living speech—told the actors all they needed to know.
The history department had provided us with an eloquent floor; I myself had to provide a protective roof for our “empty space”—to prevent minor irritations from turning into dangerous flare-ups, to acknowledge the reality of problems while professing confidence that they could be solved. Two things kept me going through the inevitable difficulties. One was an underlying sense of goodwill from the cast; I treated them with respect and they responded in kind. The other was that I never ceased to be enthralled by the dialogue. No doubt I often said and did too little during rehearsals, listening intently but failing—sometimes simply from exhaustion—to come up with new thoughts of my own. There are times, however, when an interested listener is all that an actor truly needs.
The central role in the play is that of Bos. This 101-year-old Western intellectual is sometimes wise, sometimes silly, sometimes caring, sometimes brutal. He survives on a diet of chemical powders and milk, as if he has either outworn his humanity or never fully entered into it. In the first act he says wearily, “Boys and girls, children, make me a stick from a graveyard cross, so I can walk to the wretched beyond!” Soon after he says with real or pretend optimism, “We want to gauge the candlepower of the dawn you claim to have lit.”
This demanding role was played by Josefine Olsen, a twenty-five-year-old student from Sweden. At first, Josefine seemed simply competent and diligent, learning her lines with impressive efficiency. Gradually, however, her performance grew subtler and more multilayered—like the text itself. We agreed that, rather than being embarrassed by any difficulties she might have with pronunciation, she should incorporate them into her part; she was, after all, playing a man whose knowledge of Russian is imperfect. When she found long words hard to pronounce, I encouraged her to separate them out into their component syllables: bu-shu-yu-schi-ye pust-yak-ki (raging piffle); Ne ras-psikh-ov-yv-ai-tye men-ya! (Don’t you psycho-craze me!). This not only made it easier both for Josefine and for the audience; it also enabled us to emphasize that Bos is himself a student, a foreigner struggling to adapt to alien ways. I also suggested that when Bos is talking to himself, which he does several times, he should occasionally revert to English; Josefine added yet another layer of linguistic complexity by choosing to speak these lines in a German accent. As for the question of gender, Katya Grigoruk, who played Bos’s young girlfriend, said afterward that Josefine was so convincing as a man that she herself felt inspired “to be more feminine and flirty.” I initially assigned the role of Bos to Josefine simply because she volunteered for it and because I had already learned—as her literature teacher—to respect her intelligence and commitment. I find it difficult, however, to imagine a mature Russian man bringing so many layers of feeling and meaning into the role as this young Swedish female polyglot. Josefine was both young and old, both male and female; Bos, in her interpretation, was not only an extraordinary and impossible figure but also a representative of humanity as a whole, beyond age, sex, or nationality.
The Russian word for “palate” (nyobo) is cognate with the Russian word for “sky” (nyebo); a tongue is a language, words mirror the world, the dome of the mouth mirrors the dome of the heavens—and struggling with unfamiliar sounds can help an actor to adopt another persona and enter an alien world. There were memorable performances by at least two other non-Russians—by an Austrian postgraduate and by a young Polish girl who struggled more than most students with Russian pronunciation. I worried that I had made a serious mistake in casting her as Anton Endov, a fanatically Stalinist collective-farm worker who acts and speaks, according to Platonov, “with faultless precision.” Since there was no one appropriate for the role, I had thought it best to choose someone obviously inappropriate; blatant incongruity can, after all, generate considerable power. In the end my hope was borne out; Paulina’s vulnerability as she struggled with the verbal and physical demands of her part revealed the desperation that typically underlies the blind optimism of a fanatical believer. More than any other actor, she managed to embody what Geoffrey Hosking, writing about The Foundation Pit, once referred to as “the strange and tormented mixture of hope and despair by which many ordinary people must have lived during Stalin’s revolution from above.”2
I am grateful to have been allowed to direct Fourteen Little Red Huts in Russian; I regret, naturally, that I have never had the opportunity to direct the play in English. The aspect of Platonov I have tried hardest to reproduce—both in these translations and in my translations and cotranslations of his prose—is the sense of a speaking voice. Platonov himself has a remarkable ability to preserve the illusion of a speaking voice, or voices, even while the narrator or the individual characters are using extraordinary language or expressing extraordinary thoughts. Much has been written about Platonov’s distortions of language; not enough has been written about the subtlety with which—even in straight narrative—he reproduces the music, the intonations and rhythms, of living speech. If his command of tone and idiom were less perfect, his linguistic experimentation would by now seem self-conscious and dated.
If I had had the opportunity to hear actors repeat lines of my translation again and again, I am sure I would have felt that some passages needed still more revision. Nevertheless, I am confident that these plays live in English, and that they can be brought to life in theaters in the English-speaking world.
Robert Chandler