This is the first book to explore theater in Russia after Stalin. Through his work at the Moscow Art Theatre, Anatoly Smeliansky is in a key position to analyze contemporary events on the Russian stage and he combines this first-hand knowledge with valuable archival material. Smeliansky chronicles developments from 1953 and the rise of a new Soviet theater, highlighting the social and political events that shaped Russian drama and performance. The book also focuses on major directors and practitioners and contains a chronology, glossary of names, and informative illustrations.

This book chronicles the emergence of a national feeling in the theatres of Northern and Eastern Europe from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Using original documents and sources, including architects' plans, royal edicts, censors' reports, contemporary journalism, directors' blocking notes, memoirs and letters, this volume provides a chronological exploration of theatrical trends in eight countries. The documents reveal that in Denmark, Sweden and Norway the gradual development from royal patent houses and municipal theatres led to a genuinely public and Scandinavian...

The A to Z of Russian Theater is the only reference work in English devoted exclusively to Russian theater and drama. It provides information on the popular plays and playwrights while also offering information on many persons, works, and phenomena omitted from standard encyclopedias. Through the use of a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, an appendix, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on directors, stage designers, actors, plays, playwrights, concepts, theater buildings, and troupes, this reference provides an unrivaled account of Russian theater.

Konstantin Stanislavsky transformed theatre in the West and was indisputably one of the twentieth century's greatest innovators. His life and work mark some of the most significant artistic and political milestones of that tumultuous century, from the emancipation of the serfs to the Russian Revolution. Little wonder, then, that his correspondence contains gripping exchanges with the famous and infamous of his day: men such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Trotsky and Stalin, among others.

Laurence Senelick, one of the world's foremost scholars of Russian literature, mines the Moscow...

In this monumental work, Laurence Senelick and Sergei Ostrovsky offer a panoramic history of Soviet theater from the Bolshevik Revolution to the eventual collapse of the USSR. Making use of more than eighty years' worth of archival documentation, the authors celebrate in words and pictures a vital, living art form that remained innovative and exciting, growing, adapting, and flourishing despite harsh, often illogical pressures inflicted upon its creators by a totalitarian government. It is the first comprehensive analysis of the subject ever to be published in the English language.

A latecomer continually hampered by government control and interference, the Russian theatre seems an unlikely source of innovation and creativity. Yet, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it had given rise to a number of outstanding playwrights and actors, and by the start of the twentieth century, it was in the vanguard of progressive thinking in the realms of directing and design. Its influence throughout the world was pervasive: Nikolai Gogol', Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gor'kii remain staples of repertories in every language, the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavskii, Vsevolod Meierkhol'd...

A town ruled by a dragon and compelled to pay it tribute is rescued by Sir Lancelot, at a terrible price to himself. But the mayor and his son prove to be just as bad as the dragon, and Lancelot has to save the town again, this time judging it harshly.

Ghosts drift through Strindberg's haunted and haunting dreamscape where a student idealizes the inhabitants of a stylish Stockholm apartment building, only to discover that their lives, perhaps even life itself, may be a kind of hell from which salvation can only be achieved through suffering.