Introduction Anatoly Efros belongs to that special group of Russian artists, writers, and intellectuals that created the era between 1950 and 1980 in Russia known as the Thaw. Set in motion by the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the Thaw was a many-sided phenomenon. Politically, it inspired the work of rebuilding socialism by restoring the ideals of Lenin from their Stalinist distortions. In other spheres, the Thaw inspired more practical goals. It witnessed the rebirth of artistic freedom after a long period of ruthless censorship; a desire to rediscover authentic Russian culture instead of its Communist surrogate; attempts to escape from desiccated Marxist ideas and stereotypes in art and literature; and a belief that imaginative work was really possible once again. Above all, the Thaw brought about a need to think, live, write, and create honestly, without waiting for instructions from the authorities or being afraid of censure afterward. From a theatre perspective, the Thaw was a second golden age in Russian theatre. It was time when the theatre thought of itself both as a symbol and an agent of national issues and, more important, was capable of living up to this role. It was a time when no one expected the theatre to be easy and unobtrusive what Bertolt Brecht called culinary theatre because the expected manner of entertainment was unmistakably intellectual. Above all, it was a time when the theatre was widely considered to be the center of reflection about ideas of significant public importance. Of all the artists who created the Thaw generation, Anatoly Efros was undoubtedly one of the most gifted and influential. But he was more than that. His life and work organically coincided with the hopes and dreams of that entire exciting era. Early Years Anatoly Isaevich Efros was born July 3, 1925, in Kharkov, Ukraine. His mother was a technical writer and his father a designer in the aviation factory there. How Efros became interested in the theatre was always one of the curiosities of his life. His mother and father were not theatergoers. Even
2 THE JOY OF REHEARSAL when productions from Moscow came to Kharkov, the family seldom attended. Regardless, Efros indicated that ever since childhood he loved the theatre, was fond of stories and books about Stanislavsky, the famous Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), and its legendary productions. 2 Efros was thirteen in 1938 when Stanislavsky died; eighteen in 1943 when Nemirovich- Danchenko died. During World War II (in Russia, The Great Patriotic War ), Efros worked as a lathe operator in an aviation factory in Perm, Siberia. After the war he went off to Moscow where he began his study of acting at the Mossoviet Theatre Studio under Yuri Zavadsky. 3 Artistic family trees are a crucial factor in the Russian theatre, and it was widely known that Stanislavsky and Yevgeny Vakhtangov had personally trained Zavadsky. Though Zavadsky was undoubtedly a prominent figure, at that time everyone in the arts was obliged to work, teach, think, and even create strictly according to Marxist dogma. 4 The Communist Party began to assert its authority over the arts summarily after the Revolution. In 1917, the People s Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment was formed to control the influence of the arts. In 1919, all the theatres including MAT were nationalized. In 1923, while the main part of the MAT company was touring the USA, severe censorship commenced in Russia. 5 Starting in 1932, every artist had to join the Union of Soviet Artists, a decree that in effect created a Ministry of Communist Culture. In 1934, by means of a doctrine called Socialist Realism, the government assumed absolute control over all the arts. Socialist Realism was based on a deceptively simple premise. Since all art is a reflection of reality, therefore all art must be realistic, and realistic art in a Soviet country must by definition be filled with the spirit of Communism. Throughout the Stalin era, the catchphrase of Socialist Realism Realism in Form and Socialism in Content! was almost as widely known as Workers of the World, Unite! Stanislavsky s System, because of its alleged affinity with Socialist Realism, was expropriated by the Communists; his approach was declared the official Soviet theatre aesthetic; and Stanislavsky himself was unwittingly canonized. The hollowness of Socialist Realism was apparent to any real artist, of course, and consequently it became obvious to those who wanted to notice such things that the practice of the respected Stanislavsky System was gradually being drained of any genuinely creative stimulation and replaced by a hollow imitation. 6 Thus it was not long before actors and directors who were serious about their work began to lose respect for the Sovietapproved version of the Stanislavsky System. By 1946 Socialist Realism had been the norm for over a decade, and the practice of the Stanislavsky System had become hopelessly compromised. It was this rigidly orthodox environment that encouraged Efros and several likeminded students to organize an unsanctioned theatre studio called The Realists. They only wanted to study forms of acting different from the official
ANATOLY EFROS 3 line promoted by the government, but unfortunately at the same time the cultural authorities were launching one of their periodic attacks against formalism, aestheticism and groups of bourgeois cosmopolitans, in other words, against dissent in any form. Consequently, when Zavadsky found out about the Realists, he prudently quashed the experiment before any political fallout could develop. 7 He concluded that Efros was too intellectual to be an actor at his studio any longer. In 1947 Efros either transferred or was transferred to the Directing Program of the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatre Arts (GITIS), where Zavadsky was also on the faculty. Once again, artistic family connections were to play an important role. Nikolai Petrov, who had studied directing with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1909, headed the directing faculty at GITIS. 8 Moreover, Maria Knebel, Alexei Popov, and Mikhail Tarkhanov, who were former students of Stanislavsky, Michael Chekhov, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Vsevelod Meyerhold, also taught on the directing faculty. In fact, Knebel was one of the last personal pupils of Michael Chekhov and Stanislavsky. As a consequence, though Efros was not directly involved with the Moscow Art Theatre, he nevertheless developed important connections with its major figures and their personal students. Their influence on his artistic development cannot be overestimated. At GITIS, the Realists surreptitiously continued their search for a new type of citizen-actor that would be suitable for the environment of post-war Russian society. Soon rumors about Efros s talent spread among students and teachers in the other programs. Efros had a special aptitude for working with actors and a partiality for deep psychological penetration of character. His work also exhibited an unusual kind of expressiveness and a lively improvisational quality. Incidentally, it was at GITIS that Efros first got hold of the patronymic, or middle name, Vasilevich. In Russian conversation the polite form of address employs a person s patronymic, which is the father s first name, along with the normal first name. Thus, in formal conversation Efros was Anatoly Isaevich, which literally means Anatoly, son of Isaac, with its distinctly Jewish associations. His school chums gave him the new patronymic as a joke because of its obvious reference to Anatoly Vasilevich Lunacharsky, the Minister of Education for whom GITIS was named. Later on, when Efros s professional career began in earnest, he chose to go with this distinctly Russian patronymic. 9 In spite of Efros s reputation as a young director with a promising future, after GITIS his career lost its initial momentum. He directed at only two theatres in Moscow the Transport Workers Theatre (where he directed his graduation project) and the Ostrovsky Theatre neither of which were considered particularly good at the time. He was never interested in politics as such and did not join the Communist Party. Thus, his attempts to secure a
4 THE JOY OF REHEARSAL permanent post with a better theatre were obstructed by government insistence on party membership as a prerequisite for the best assignments in Moscow. Moreover, anti-semitism was almost certainly a contributing factor as well, as it would be for Efros throughout his career, unfortunately. In 1952, Efros joined the directing staff of the Dramatic Theatre in Ryazan, a military city with a population of half a million located 120 miles southeast of Moscow. He directed four plays there in 1952 and five the following year, including classics by Alexander Ostrovsky and Lope de Vega. He also directed plays by writers whose work directly reflected contemporary life. Among them were Konstantin Trenyov, Nikolai Pogodin, Andrei Makayenok, and Alexander Korneichuk, who rose to prominence in post-war Soviet Russia. On March 6, 1953, Joseph Stalin died, either from a stroke or possibly from poisoning by someone in his inner circle. By this time, Soviet-Russian culture had effectively become stagnant. 10 This was nowhere more apparent than in the realm of theatre. Uniformity in repertoire and acting style, and the absence of genuine social relevance, had reached the point where it was hard to tell one theatre company from another. Yet ever since the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, this feature had been (and is today) a special characteristic of Russian theatre companies. Thanks to enforced Stalinization, however, a fossilized version of the Stanislavsky System in the service of Socialist Realism had been the only permissible model since the mid-1930s. The Moscow Art Theatre had grown to become the great, if declining, cultural showcase of the Communist Party. After Stalin s death, the comparatively moderate Nikita Khrushchev became leader of the USSR, and the path was cleared for the so-called cultural Thaw. The designation was taken from Ilya Ehrenberg s novel, The Thaw (1954), which compared the atmosphere of the post-stalin period to a climatic Thaw. Significant changes began to take place. Western ideas slowly started to penetrate universities and professional institutes, influencing Efros and a whole generation of Russians. Over time, thousands of political prisoners incarcerated under Stalin were released. Many formerly proscribed Jewish writers were rehabilitated, and exiled Jews were allowed to return, though serious prejudice and discrimination continued. Within a matter of months, theatre companies begin to develop their own styles, previously banned works were resurrected, and new productions were introduced. Stalin s death had another unintended consequence. Arrangements for his public funeral obliged Efros to delay for two weeks his marriage to Natasha Krymova, a student colleague from GITIS who was also a member of the Realists.