Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp by Natalia Kuziakina (review)

612Comparative Drama translation, and what are the variant readings in other editions? In the 1988 Arabie edition of Mahfuz's play, there is a note on the stage setting and another on the division of the scenes: both were omitted from the English translation without explanation. In the case of Sa'dallah Wannus's The King is the King, the translators omitted a preliminary "Placard" that appeared in the 1983 edition: "a dramatized game to analyze the structure of authority in the regimes of duplicity and kingship." Again, no explanation of this omission. Both Wannus and Mahfuz, moreover, added materials to the end of their Arabic plays. Mahfuz explains his use of colloquial Arabic, with a postscript about the first production of his play and numerous excerpts and photographs documenting its reception in 1968. Wannus's essay is titled "Clarifications ," and like Mahfuz's demonstrates awareness of the effect of experimental theater on the audience. It is unfortunate that none of this material was translated in the present anthology, if only to remind the Western reader that the Middle-Eastern writer operates under the necessity of sometimes "clarifying" his work. Notwithstanding these editorial shortcomings, the translations are versatile and engaging. In the translation of Farag's play, there is an "Afterward" by the author which the translator did include. Modern Arabic Drama is accessible to students and scholars of modern Arabic and to general readers of comparative drama. Should a second edition be planned in the future, the inclusion of a bibliography on modern Arabic drama would be useful. NABIL MATAR Florida Institute of Technology Natalia Kuziakina. Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp, trans. Boris M. Meerovich. Russian Theatre Archives, 3. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. Pp. xviii + 170. $67.00 (casebound); $33.00 (paperbound). Rarely does a scholarly work reach beyond intellectual excitement; Natalia Kuziakina's posthumously published Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp does just that. In writing about labor camp experience in Russia's far north, she explains in her preface that she is fulfilling a promise made to herself when she was imprisoned at the age of thirteen (xvii). A former faculty member of the St. Petersburg Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinematography, she scrupulously researches her subject and objectively describes the fascinating theatrical activity in the Solovki Prison Camp from its founding in 1923 until its closing in 1939, but she also gives full attention to the remarkable influence exerted by theater during the 1930s within the many camps along the White SeaBaltic Canal area. Her personal promise, however, does not disappear. She tempers her scholarship through metaphorical language that brings Reviews613 what she knows experientially to life. Indeed, in spite of the inevitable paucity of research materials on the subject, Kuziakina has produced a remarkable history of Soviet camp theater that is filled with facts about productions, biographies, and insights into theater's importance in the labor camps. Prison documents were not only suppressed but destroyed, leaving the fates of most prisoners largely undiscoverable. Passing time and residues of fear distorted both the published memoirs and the personal memories of survivors . Prison newspapers of necessity reflected the party line and hence concentrated on convenient lies that turned the prison into a quasi-resort and ignored the realities of typhus, overwork, poor hygiene, and humiliation . Such subterfuge is best exemplified by George Bernard Shaw's visit to a camp at Bolshevo. The bedraggled, undernourished prisoners were rounded up and marched into the woods to hide, while well-fed guards donned prisoners' garb to show the visiting dignitary how happily Stalin's "inmates" lived (105). Such missing and misleading documentation means, as Kuziakina frankly notes, that "the historian lives, as it were, in a world gone deaf (xiii). Hence she calls her book not a history but a "historical essay" (xiii) in acknowledgment of gaps in the record. Kuziakina identifies two functions served by the theater at Solovki. First, it nourished the human spirit by counteracting in its small way the conditions of camp life that stripped inmates of their perceived humanity. Like artistic activity in the camps of the Holocaust, theater "unfurled the banner of humaneness" (xii) and joined the "everlasting battle against the...