I T is practically impossible to write a chapter on playwrights at work unless one uses it as a springboard from which to dive off into one’s opinions about the playwrights and their finished products, for when it comes to the actual process of writing a play, that is something about which dramatists seldom can or are willing to talk, and the rules of cpurtesy which may allow an observer to sit in a darkened corner of a rehearsal hall forbid him to look over the shoulder of a laboring playwright as he sits at his desk.
This book is concerned with the theatre and not with drama—a distinction in terms which I think is clear to all; I understand drama to be a branch of literature. But I do find that I have several ideas about playwrighting in Russia, some of them arising out of a study of method, and some of them merely desultory comments on the Soviet theatre and drama which come to my mind when I think about the playwrights of Moscow and the role they have to play in the creation of a new culture for the masses. I shall start, however, at the point where the playwright has finished his play and has emerged from his study, for my description will be of the role he plays in production. Farther than that into method I cannot and would not wish to go. But before I begin, let me deliver myself of one observation.
I seem to have arranged this section of my book in a
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series of descending climaxes. The great strength of the Soviet theatre lies in its actors and its regisseurs. Stage design is a weaker allied art, and when we come to play- wrighting, we have reached the low point of the Moscow theatre. Of all the artists of the theatre, the dramatists are the least able for their task.
I submit such a statement with the parenthetical warning that it is but my own lay opinion. However, when a Soviet theatre director publishes in a Soviet stage journal a statement like the following, it should strengthen my report. Amaglobely, director of the Maly Theatre, writing in Theatre and Dramaturgy, has said, "Soviet dramaturgy, in spite of its tremendous achievements, is as yet a dramaturgy of insignificant forms, of insignificant people. . . . Our demand is that the heroes of our plays must stand abreast with the heroes of the age. The fact that Soviet dramaturgy lags behind the Soviet theatre has been acknowledged by all.” He goes on to say that this backwardness is chiefly technical and not at all ideological, but I believe that the dramatist who cannot find satisfactory dramatic expression for his ideas is but a polemist who should be writing tracts, not plays.
With the playwright, as with the designer, is the situation of the individual artist at work with the collective of artists. What is the relationship?
The modern Soviet dramatist has much less authority in the production of his play than the American who writes for the professional theatre and sells his work in New York. The latter—if he is an established playwright, and sometimes even if he is not—has an important voice in the casting of his play; often his contract may allow him to veto a producer’s or director’s choice of actors. He attends rehearsals regularly where he is sometimes a constant help, sometimes a constant hindrance, to the director. He has an opinion about the settings and costumes which he
does not fear to voice. The playwright wields a power in American stage production, a power which is not ended when he lays down his pen.
The Moscow dramatist (poor fellow!) is kept in his place. His contribution to the production is literary and stops at that. When his play is accepted by a theatre, the author entrusts to it all matters pertaining to its production. The theatre casts the play by such methods as its internal organization requires, it chooses what regisseur and designer it pleases, and sets to work to produce the play in whatever manner it sees fit. In the early stages of production the author may be invited by the theatre to attend a series of round-table discussions with the director and cast so that he may elaborate the meaning of passages or lines, but as often as not director and cast may disagree with him about' interpretations and choose their own meaning! In any case the theatre is anxious to hear the author’s remarks only when they are concerned with the literary side of the production or when they have to do with the psychology of characterization. If he wishes to attend later rehearsals, it will be only so that he may satisfy his own curiosity as to what is happening to his play.
One reason why American playwrights attend rehearsals so constantly is that there are usually many manuscript changes to be made during the period of rehearsing and the author is wanted to supply new lines or scenes or to give his consent to cuts and transpositions. This very rarely takes place in Moscow productions. While the director is at work on the play before rehearsals begin, he may be in close touch with the author and at that time the form of the play is set. A few more changes may take place during the first few weeks of rehearsal at these round-table discussions. Many of these changes may be ordered by the actors who find lines inconsistent with
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their ideas about the characters, and they may suggest phrasings of their own to substitute. The actor in Moscow has a much louder voice in script revisions than the actor in New York. After this, the script remains unaltered until the last week or so when final cuts may have to be made. These and whatever changes are made during other rehearsals are made by the director at his own discretion and the author is rarely consulted. If, and this seldom happens, a major revision in the script must be made during the period of active rehearsal, the director takes this up with the author, shows him what is wrong, explains what he wants, and asks the author to provide it. It behooves the author to do so, for if he does not, the director will doubtless do it himself!
Naturally the attitude of a theatre and the play’s regis- seur toward the author will be based upon the author’s experience and prominence. Much fewer liberties are taken with the scripts of the better playwrights, and much more weight is given to their opinions, particularly about the literary and psychological problems of their plays, than is the case with unknown and inferior craftsmen. Unfortunately there are many of these latter. The American playwright is a power in production because he knows the theatre and what it can and should do to make his play live most effectively. He understands his medium; the majority of Soviet playwrights do not.
The Moscow dramatist faces another situation which the New York dramatist does not, and it offers a more flattering reason for his slight participation in the actual production of his play. This is the simultaneous production of it in various theatres. When the American dramatist sells the rights of his play to one producer or organization, he knows that no one else will be able to produce it for the time being. The Moscow writer, having no rights to sell, may turn his play over to as many different theatres
as are willing to take it, and it is not an uncommon occurrence for a good play to be in rehearsal at two or three different theatres in the city at the same time. And concurrently with the productions of it in preparation in Moscow, his new play may be in rehearsal in Leningrad and one or two other places. The author, therefore, would really have more than he could do if he tried to have an active hand in all the productions.
Premieres, incidentally, have therefore not the same significance in Russia that they have in America. The Moscow critic is as much interested in seeing what a particular theatre has done with a play as in finding out what the play itself is. The critics are thus rather theatrical critics than dramatic critics; the interest shifts from play to performance, much as it might if Gilbert Miller, the Theatre Guild, Sam Harris and the Theatre Union all announced that they would produce Sidney Howard’s next play in the same season, each of course with a different cast and different director. This, in turn, has its effect on the theatre’s attitude toward the manuscript, and is one reason for the small amount of rewriting which takes place. Since no one producing organization has the exclusive rights to a play, and since each must stand ready to have its interpretation compared with the performance of it at other theatres, it is less apt to make changes in the body of the original text, and is more apt to concentrate on its method of staging, leaving the script alone.
This attitude does not seem to hold, however, in the production of the classics. Each theatre makes its own arrangement of the text, and this is offered as its original contribution to the play as much as the style in which it is done. This is particularly true of classics in other languages than Russian, which have had, at all times in the Russian theatre, adaptations rather than literal translations. The adapting process has broadened in recent years
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when the Soviet theatre has tried to draw from classics ideas to suit its own dogma—when, for instance, it changes “The Spanish Curate” by John Fletcher from tragedy to comedy by altering the text of its last act.
Meierhold has been the outstanding Soviet producer to change his manuscripts to fit his own ideas. Whether it has been a foreign or a Russian classic or a modern play, Meierhold has rewritten the text with such freedom that he has often claimed, when it was done, that he was the “author of the spectacle” and has so appeared on the program. He has done this for several reasons. First, because temperamentally he is satisfied with nothing which does not bear the mark of his own creation. Just as he must tell the actor how to act, the designer how to devise his backgrounds, the musician what music to compose, so he must tell the author how to write his play, and if the author has been dead a hundred years or so and cannot heed Meierhold’s advice, then he must needs take on the task himself.
It is not only to satisfy what appears to be his own egoism that Meierhold revises the plays which he presents. He does so because almost no dramatists exist or have existed who have created both the ideas and in the form of theatre which he wants. Since he has been considered the chief advocate of a drama based on Revolutionary ideology, he would be expected to turn to Revolutionary dramatists for his material. But they are new and inexperienced authors who write in a realistic vein, and he wants something which will be more symbolic or stylized and also more poetic. He has to take then either the writings of the past which in form may suit him, and readapt them to the ideology of the Revolution or the writings of the present (and some writings of the past) and arrange them so that they will suit his own non- representational stylizations. He has done both and he has
been harshly rebuked by foreign critics for his "desecrations.” I fail to see what else he could have done under the circumstances.
This talk of the classics brings me to another point: it is possible to see in Moscow nowadays a greater number of productions of classics and a greater proportion of classics to modern plays than one can find in any other theatrical capital of the Western world. A study of the official affiches of the Moscow theatres during the season of 1934-35 re " veals performances of plays or dramatizations of the works of Balzac, Beaumarchais, Dickens, Dumas, Fletcher, Goldoni, Gozzi, Hamsun, Moliere, Schiller, Scribe, Shakespeare, and the Russians Chekhov, Dostoyevski, Gogol, Gorki, Griboyedov, Ostrovski, Pushkin, Tolstoy.
Why are the Moscow theatres giving so many classics? Of all cities in- the world, we should expect Moscow to be the first to turn her back on the past. Certainly Dumas, Goldoni and their compatriots among the ageless in art were not Communists and wrote not for a proletarian audience. I think there are two reasons, the first (which supports my original contention about modern playwriting) is that the theatres feel that much of the recent Soviet dramaturgy is weak, that it does not call forth their best efforts. They seek something worthy of their stature and not finding it in the new plays, they turn to the old. They want significant forms and significant people on their stage, as Amaglobely says; the classics give them that and the Soviet writers very often do not.
The second reason is that the theatre in Moscow is aware of its educational obligation to the people. It considers that the classic dramas of the world should be known to the people. Many of its audience have had sketchy educations and have read very little classic drama. In any case, the theatre believes that the people should come to know great plays through seeing them performed and not through
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reading them in schools. The American theatre and the other European theatres have no such sense of educational obligation. Perhaps it was shame which prevented the writer from confessing to any Russian in Moscow that two-thirds of the classics of English, French, German, Italian and Scandinavian literature which he saw there he was seeing for the first time.
2
The task which Soviet dramatists have faced during these seventeen years has been a constantly changing one. The Marxian theatre demands that art and the currents of life should never flow in separate channels, that the class struggle must have constant representation in the theatre. The current of life and the nature of this class struggle have changed so radically and so rapidly within Russia that the dramatists have had to be constantly on the run to keep up with it. I think that the continual ideological readjustments which they have had to make are one reason why they have made such little real technical progress. I can best show you what these readjustments have been by reviewing the Revolutionary theatre’s history.
In the movement of the Revolution during the past eighteen years, one may observe roughly two great phases. The first was a period of destruction which began with the overthrow of the Tsarist monarchy by the Bolsheviks in 1917, which continued during the period of Civil War when the Communist Party was besieged by opponents, White Russians and Allied Interventionists, and which may be said to have continued further through the years of the New Economic Policy, NEP, instituted by Lenin in 1921 as a temporary concession to capitalism and private ownership in his combat against them both. The second phase, which slightly overlaps the first, is the period of
construction, which takes definite form in the First Five Year Plan, inaugurated in 1928, and is continued in the Second Five Year Plan of January, 1933.
The first eight or ten years devoted to the annihilation of tsarism and capitalism were years of bloodshed and civil war, of famine and starvation, of plague, years of internal dissention and sabotage. Physical necessities of life were not available, no food, no fuel, no clothes. Out of this chaos the Communists reared the structure of the Five Year Plan. The famine was over, active resistance had lessened and the government now turned its attention to the long and difficult process of reconstruction. The newly created state must rehabilitate its resources and its industries. The successful accomplishment of this Plan imposed a tremendous responsibility upon the Communist Party. Staggering goals had been set up and the country was pressed to the limit of its capacity and endurance to reach them. Life during the years of the First Five Year Plan was as racking—in a different way—as it had been in the years that had just passed. Factories worked at maximum speed. The tension was great and the tempo of life made for the nervous exhaustion of not only the leaders but all workers, for of all Europeans the Slavs were least used to the rigors of heavy industrialism.
When the Second Five Year Plan, devised to build up the "light industries” and so to raise the personal standard of living of the population, got under way in 1933, life began to relax to some extent. Cultural development and the achievement of certain refinements began to be emphasized. The agrarian problem was on the way toward solution, capitalism was "liquidated,” the socialist state seemed assured, and people looked at the future with renewed hope, made stronger by the sight of visible comforts and of the progress appearing around them. They felt that their crisis was behind them; the ideals for which
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they had fought seemed more tangibly realizable than ever before. There was an impetus for action.
Shortly after the Revolutionary government was established the theatre was brought under its control and made a part of the Commissariat of Education. The Communist Party from the beginning realized the importance of the theatre which in Russia is the closest of all the arts to the people. It appreciated that the theatre could be an invaluable agent in interpreting its purpose to the masses. It realized further that the theatre could serve the masses as well as the Party, and that eventually it could express the masses. To accomplish this, however, the theatre would have to change. Either its imperialistic and bourgeois outlook must be "converted” so that it would cease to be an anachronistic remnant of the abolished society in the new proletarian state, or else the theatre must be wiped away entirely and a new form of dramatic expression created that would harmonize with the new heaven and the new earth.
The history of the theatre since the Revolution is the history of this change in its form and function. The change follows significantly close to the line of progress of the Revolution and it may be divided into three periods which roughly correspond to the three periods of Revolutionary history. 1 First came a period of about ten years marked by the struggle to determine whether the existing theatre should be converted or "liquidated.” The radicals demanded its destruction, the conservatives struggled for existence.
That the government did not accede to these demands for destruction is largely due to the influence of the first People’s Commissar of Education, Anatol Lunacharski, a
1 1.e., destruction, reconstruction, later reconstruction. For this division of the theatre’s history I am indebted to P. I. Novitski of the People’s Commissariat of Education, who has suggested it.
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wise and discerning leader. While upholding all the principles of Marxism, he yet felt the vital importance of maintaining cultural unity with the past. He insisted that the artistic heritage of Russia should not be destroyed but rather that it should be preserved and made available to the people so that it might thus become a part of their education. In this way the meaning of Marx-Leninism could best be interpreted. He believed that in time these theatres could come to an acceptance of the Marxian interpretation of art. Thus it came to pass that these old theatres were not liquidated, and the task of converting their policies into a form which would not be contradictory to the principles of the proletarian Revolution was begun. This was of course the only wise procedure, for in its academic theatre Russia possessed an inherited artistic treasure the like of which no other nation at that time could boast.
The pursuit of such a policy, however, did not mean that Lunacharski did not encourage the Revolutionaries in the theatre as well. He admitted the need for an immediate response and immediate assistance from the stage, and he saw no reason why a new theatre should not come into existence even if the old were retained. It was this new theatre that Vsevolod Meierhold championed, and for it playwrights were called upon to produce an agitational drama which would enthuse the people to the cause of the Party, would keep that enthusiasm at war-time pitch. It was, in fact, a war-time drama. It was concerned with the military activities of the moment, and it was also concerned with damning the capitalist, both as he remained in Russia and as he was without, and with showing what scoundrels all people in Russia were who for any reason opposed the Revolution. It exaggerated, with much use of the grotesque, the sins of the petit-bourgeois and crudely stirred up as much class hatred as possible. For this sort of task nothing very finished was required of the
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playwrights. The audience in those early days had little appreciation for the finesses of literary style; anything which agitated the masses was acceptable.
In 1927 began the second period in the history of the Soviet theatre. This coincides with the beginnings of the socialistic reconstruction of the Soviet Union. At a congress held to discuss the problem, Lunacharski presented a plan which had as its two-fold object the acceleration of the development of the socialistic element in the theatre and assistance to the new revolutionary theatres. All the energy of the creative life of the U.S.S.R. was then being devoted to strengthening the basis for the establishment of a new life and the theatre was an essential means of communicating the visions of it. The nature of the theatre, therefore, underwent a change during this period: it ceased to be agitational and turned propagandist. It paid less attention to satirizing and condemning the old and more to depicting the new.
Lunacharski, however, meant more than this by the development of the socialistic element in the theatre; he meant that the theatres themselves must come to a more accurate understanding of the meaning of socialism in order to be able to meet the demands of interpreting its new life. In many cases the artistic temperament had found stimulation in presenting agitational plays and in devising new and revolutionary art forms, but the artistic intelligence had not yet grasped the meaning of the principles involved. The next five years were devoted to solidifying the socialistic doctrine within the theatre.
In appreciating the second aspect of Lunacharski’s program it is necessary to understand that a great number of young Revolutionary theatres had sprung up during the preceding decade. It was important to the Party that these new theatres, if they were to continue, should develop along sound doctrinal and artistic lines and should not be
simply the expressions of a period of artistic inflation. A certain amount of guidance seemed necessary. For the accomplishment of this two-fold program, therefore, the government, through the agency of its Commissariat of Education, tightened its authority over the theatre. The natural result of this was a comparative loss of freedom and for several years there was imminent danger of standardization. It was during this period that the application of dialectic materialism in every field became such a fetish. It was no doubt carried too far.
The subject matter of the plays of this period reflected the absorption in material progress toward which the Soviet Union was bending all its energies. Plays were written about collective farming and factory management, about the construction of railways and farm tractors. To sit through a play written on one of these subjects is an exceedingly boring way to spend an evening if one is not a Bolshevist farmer or factory manager, and foreigners have come out of Russia with tales about the dull plays with which the Soviet theatre is beset. With such criticisms of Soviet drama I have no sympathy (mine are based on other faults which I shall presently point out). The foreign observer fails to realize that because machinery and the things created out of it are an old story to him, they can have romance for anyone else. The Russian saw a whole new world of experience opening up with the introduction of the tractor and the expansion of the railroad—a world in which he would share. He found these new and strange machines and the talk about them fascinating. Machinery and the expansion of industry and agriculture in their country was a matter of life and death to the Bolsheviks in the 1920’s, and quite naturally their theatre talked about such things. Grant that Russia from 1925 to 1933 was absorbed in mastering technics, grant next that the theatre is justifying its existence in a Marxian
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state only when it follows the line of life, and you must accept a dramaturgy that is concerned with these same technics.
But the time came, as we have seen, when the drive for industrialization was relaxed a little, and at about the same time, on April 23, 1932, to be exact, the government issued a new decree, with the passage of which the theatre entered upon the most recent stage of its development. This decree was designed to give more freedom to artists, authors and other intellectuals. "The privilege to build socialism must be shared by all creative artists’’ was the way the Communists put it. There was to be more extensive development of its own set of creative principles within each theatre above and beyond the ABC’s of Marx- Leninism. In taking this step the government seemed to have been motivated by the belief that the theatres now understood the required dogma, that the artists themselves were now personally converted to the Marxian principles— an accomplishment for which the preceding five years are significant—that the academic theatres had lost their reactionary character, and that the art of the theatre could be safely trusted to evolve along self-determined lines.
Once again the theatre follows the line of development of the Revolution. The buoyant optimism that succeeded the strain and stress of the First Five Year Plan, and the relaxation of the tempo of life are reflected in the theatre. The theatre can become less propagandist^ and can almost entirely cease to be agitational. It can begin a new phase. Now the human element becomes important. The playwrights write about the new man as well as the new machine.
The cultural development of this new man is emphasized. The art of living, now that people have more time for it and more material benefits to assist its florescence, must be cultivated. Their new philosophy and their new
ethics which the Bolsheviks have been spreading since the first days of the Revolution, but in crude fashion, must now receive fuller and deeper attention. After fifteen years the Soviet Union has created an intelligentsia of its own prepared to discuss these problems with a public which has after fifteen years arrived at a point where it can understand the discussion. The Russian Revolution has reached a critical period—a time when the masses have passed out of the blind acceptance of childhood’s faiths into an inquisitive adolescence. Its guidance is a much more subtle task. The playwrights are among those called upon to assume this guidance.
The theatre in its most primitive stages has always been close to religion. It was out of the Dionysiac rites that Greek drama sprang. The medieval miracle, morality, and mystery plays of the Roman church gave the impetus to secular drama in western Europe. In Soviet Russia a new civilization is being undertaken without religion, and so the theatre is asked, not to interpret a theology to simple folk, but to take religion’s place, and not only to teach the socialist doctrines which are to supplant Greek Orthodoxy, but also to admit the problems which its acceptance involves.
The theatre meets this with the new "socialistic realism.” Its purpose is to relate the man to the building of the state. This relationship of the individual to society is one of the profound problems of socialism. It requires the maturest kind of thought to undertake an analysis and an explanation of the psychological issues involved. That is why Soviet drama has taken so long to be adequate to the task and has for so long been occupied only with the external aspects of the problem. With the relationship of individual to mass must come the relationship of individual to individual. For a long time this relationship was disregarded as all the emphasis was placed on the new idea of man in
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society. Now it is beginning to be appreciated that the two may be associated and that a third problem exists as well: the relation of a man to himself. All these relationships it is the duty of a church to unfold and to relate one to another and explain to the people. But where there is no church, other organs must undertake it, and so it comes about that the theatre in Soviet Russia turns philosophical. So it comes about, too, that the theatre makes a swing back toward psychology.
It was thus that Alexander Afinogenov, one of Russia’s leading young playwrights, explained to me this recently assumed duty of the Soviet dramatists, and it explains his own attitude toward the art of the theatre. He writes plays about the new man and his inner and his outer conflicts, as well as about the applications of the more philosophical aspects of Communist doctrine. His plays are a little like dramatized sermons, to be sure, but since there is no other pulpit from which sermons may be preached, their presence in the theatre is more pardonable. His writing does show a tremendous advance in thoughtful probing of the problems of the mind and spirit of man in the socialist state than did earlier plays.
3
Now for my accusation that Soviet playwrighting is weak. I have made it plain that my objection is not with the subject matter as such. The theatre may be didactic so long as it is artistic. I do not mind if Soviet dramatists write about collective farmers and factory managers and engineers and their work, if that is what the people need and want—so long as they write with imagination and intelligence and make these men and their problems interesting and convincing. But this the Soviet author fails to do.
His chief fault lies in his play construction and in his characterization.
The Soviet playwright has no idea of unity and concentration of material. His form is usually episodic and there is little inner cohesion among the episodes. He works too diffusely, using a dozen scenes and two dozen characters when his story would be much more forceful if told in a third as many scenes and by a fourth as many characters. And with this diffuseness there comes a good deal of repetition which eventually loses its effectiveness. Plots, also, are at the same time both too complicated and too simple. They are too complicated because as often as not the writer is trying to tell two or three stories at once, which is all very well in itself perhaps, but which requires knowledge of the art of subordination, or at least of how to connect them all together, which the Soviet playwright has not mastered. The plots are too simple because in the great majority of cases one can foretell the outcome of a play by the end of its first act, and that is something which should not be.
In characterization the Soviet dramatist also falls down. His chief trouble is that he tries to paint his people only in black and white, and in maneuvering them around so that one man may seem only virtuous and another only vicious, he has forgotten the truths of psychology. That is one reason why the Moscow Art Theatre has been unable to stage so many of these new plays—there have been only cardboard heroes and villains to enact. Afinogenov, Pogodin, Bulgakov, Gorki of course, and some few other Soviet dramatists are working to give more reality to stage people and the move is away, I am happy to report, from these stereotyped characters. If socialistic realism accomplishes that alone, it will have helped blow Soviet dramaturgy away from the doldrums which threaten it.
As long as this new realistic style and this didacticism
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persist to the exclusion of all other dramatic expressions, what becomes of romance in the theatre? Of course, I realize that it is not the mere presence of realism which accounts for the absence of romanticism. The latter has been systematically discouraged from the start because in its search for an escape from the realities of life it is just what the Party disapproves of in art. But paradoxically, I believe, that romanticism is perhaps one of the realities of life; at any rate I believe that the U.S.S.R. is in need of just that today. My observation of the people in Moscow leads me to think that they hunger for romanticism (some consciously and many unconsciously), and that they suffer from a prolonged overdose of dialectic materialism. In the Soviet Union, certainly more than in any other country, the people can afford to take a little time for romancing.
It is one of the proudest boasts of the Soviet theatre, and quite justified, that it does not share the bourgeois theatre’s mania for the drama of sex psychology. An interest in the theme of romantic love is another matter, however, and I have every reason to believe that Soviet youth is as healthily romantic as the youth of any other country. If I am mistaken and it is not, then I don’t see why it should not become so. Let a Moscow theatre produce "Romeo and Juliet” not as a social tract emphasizing the theme of feudal family hate, but for the poetry that is in it and for the exaltation of young romantic passion that is there. Let every Young Communist go to see it, and the Soviet Union would still not crumble away the next day. Romanticism—not to be confused with sloppy sentimentality —should be allowed a place by the side of socialistic realism in the Soviet theatre.
If Soviet playwrighting lags behind the rest of the theatre in finish of technique and in breadth of expression, we must remember that drama in Russia has been a very
recently practiced art. There are not the great antecedents stretching back to the sixteenth century which English drama has, nor to the seventeenth century which the ,t French drama has. It has been only within the last hundred
years that Russia has had any body of dramatic literature at all. The theatre is one of the earliest of all the arts to be practiced in a young civilization. Dramatic writing is one of the latest and most sophisticated arts. Perhaps that is as good a reason as any why miming and movement are so highly developed in the new proletarian civilization and why dramatic literature is still so crude. He who is willing to allow Soviet Russia time to prove its case must likewise be willing to give its playwrights time to come of age.
CHAPTER EIGHT