Brecht's Teacher

Brecht's Teacher ROBERT LEACH When the Soviet poet and playwright, Sergei Tretyakov, went into hospital in the summer of 1937 suffering from nervous exhaustion, Bertolt Brecht urged him to get well: A sick man's argument Is a thing to be laughed about. I But Tretyakov was arrested while in hospital, and two years later, in August 1939, executed as a spy. Brecht's shock was palpable, and he wrote a second poem, though this time he named no names: My teacher Tall and kindly Has been shot, condemned by a people's court As a spy. His name is damned . His books are destroyed. Talk about him Is suspect and suppressed. Suppose he is innocent?2 Fifty years later, the plays ofthis man who inspired Brecht and frightened Stalin enough for the latter to have him put to death are in danger of falling undeservedly into the void of the forgotten. Yet surely if Brecht called Tretyakov "teacher," the plays require re-assessment. Eight of Tretyakov's dramatic works are extant (apart from poems in dialogue form), and they fall neatly into four pairs: (I) dramatic sketches: the contributions he made to Spinball (The Versailles Tourists Who Bumped Into a Lalldmille), a review for some of Meyerhold's actors at the Theatre of the Revolution, jointly authored with the poets N. Brecht's Teacher 503 Aseyev and S. Gorodetsky in late 1922, never publicly performed; and The Immaculate Conception, a dramatic squib dealing with "the nativity of the Komsomol," toured by a group of Meyerhold's students to youth clubs and workers' clubs in 1923. (2) adaptations: Earth Rampant, adapted from Martinet's Night, presented at the Vs. Meyerhold Theatre, Moscow, on 4 March 1923, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold; and A Wise Man, adapted from Ostrovsky's Even a Wise Man Stumbles, presented at the First Workers Theatre of the Proletkult, Moscow, on 8 May 1923, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. (3) "agit" plays: Are You Listening, Moscow?! and Gas Masks, both presented by the First Workers Theatre of the Proletkult, both directed by Sergei Eisenstein, on 7 November 1923 and 4 March 1924 (the latter in a Moscow gasworks). (4) full length plays: Roar, China!, presented at the Vs. Meyerbold Theatre on 23 January 1926, directed by V. Federov and Vs. Meyerhold; and I Want a Baby, accepted for production by Meyerhold in 1927, but banned by the censors. By any standards this is an interesting output which deserves to be better known. Certainly it compares not unfavourably ""ith the work of the best playwrights of the early Soviet period - Mayakovsky, Erdman, Babel, Zamyatin - and we should be alerted to Tretyakov's significance as a playwright by the fact that all his plays were accepted for production by one or other of the giants of the early Soviet theatre, Meyerhold or Eisenstein. But it is as an original rather than merely an "interesting" oeuvre that Tretyakov's drama should be assessed, for through the eight plays there emerges a recognizable and significant dramatic form. Tretyakov's basic position was one ofcomplete, even aggressive, support forthe values - or what he took to be the values - of the new Soviet regime. These values, which certainly powered the revolution and the immediate post-revolutionary upsurge of altruism and heroics which characterized early Soviet society, centred in the conviction that every area of life needed to be re-evaluated and reshaped in the titanic struggle for a new. better, more honest way oforganizing society, away which would give respect and self-respect to every individual. It was the writer's duty, in Tretyakov's view, to patticipate actively in the re-evaluating and reshaping process: he was convinced that "the problem of the playwright is to lift the playgoer out of his equilibrium, so that he will not leave serene but ready for action."3 Flinging the mighty from their thrones, which was the "action" he believed the spectator should be readied for, is a complicated and exhausting business. It demands effort and understanding and commitment from the kind of people Tretyakov aimed to address through his plays, those who might be termed the "un-mighty," who formed the popular audience in...