Glasnost Menagerie

The history of Williams in Soviet criticism begins well before the history of Williams plays on the Soviet stage. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia as a result of the October Revolution of 1917, a new culture and art had emerged, shaped by Marxist-Leninist theories of class struggle, the nationalization of private property, and atheism. In 1934, the government banned all forms of artistic expression other than socialist realism. Through the efforts of Stalin’s cultural policy, the Soviet theater’s wide range of dramatic techniques and approaches was reduced to one offering, which was unified and obligatory for all Soviet theaters. All other approaches, regardless of the author’s poetics, were lumped together as formalism and condemned.

While The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were embraced around the world almost immediately, the USSR was hostile ground for foreign playwrights, even those whose works, like Williams’s, were ripe for Marxist interpretation. The two groundbreaking plays’ entry into major US theaters coincided with the onset of the Cold War, at which point Soviet theater was not only excluding foreign plays but beginning to strictly regulate domestic works as well. Soviet stages were dominated by new plays that condemned “groveling before the West” and denounced American imperialism.

The prominent Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov’s description of what he saw in New York theaters on an overseas trip in 1946 serves as an example of the Stalinist party line. His account, entitled “The Power of Money,” reports:

Editions and productions of Williams’s plays may have been long in coming to the USSR, but awareness of the works and their acclaim was not. The playwright’s name appears for the first time in Soviet criticism in October 1947, in the short space between the success of The Glass Menagerie and the explosive debut of Streetcar.

The three earliest critical pieces belong to the authoritative critic and translator Mikhail Morozov (1897–1952), considered one of the founders of Soviet-era Shakespeare studies. Like nearly all Soviet critics of the 1940s through the 1960s, Morozov did not see Western productions or film adaptations of the Williams plays he analyzed but instead judged the plays by the texts themselves, which he and other critics—those who could read English—managed to acquire from Western sources.

In 1947 in the newspaper Soviet Art, Morozov published a long article about contemporary North American drama titled “At the Mercy of the Dollar,” which presented The Glass Menagerie as an example of the failings of US drama writ large.

Morozov was writing at a time when the government and many Soviet audience members expected straightforward realism in the look, sound, and feel of a performance. In contrast to many Western viewers, Morozov immediately noted The Glass Menagerie’s conscious choice to eschew the naturalistic representation of reality—what Williams’s production notes explicitly dismiss as “the straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks,” which “corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness.” The divergence from realism appeared to anger Morozov. In an article titled "Two Cultures," he writes:

In 1948, Morozov published "The Cult of Brut Force," an article about A Streetcar Named Desire in Soviet Art. For all his objections, Morozov’s opinion of Stanley would have been (and still is) shared by many, and his understanding of the choices Stella and Blanche represent in Williams’s play is persuasive:

With the onset of the Khrushchev thaw in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the tone of publications dedicated to Williams began to change noticeably. The literary critic and American studies specialist Raisa Orlova (1918–1989), a pioneer in the USSR’s reevaluation of modern American literature, would later describe herself as having done everything possible to make his works known in the USSR. Writing with her husband, the literary critic Lev Kopelev, in 1960, she defended Williams’s particular brand of realism:

Even the less realistic, more experimental elements in the plays were gaining traction. The Soviet literary critic Georgy Zlobin, creator of the first and most popular Russian-language translation of The Glass Menagerie (1967), described as “romantic” the plays’ non-realistic elements, which Morozov had decried as illusory and phony.

In 1967, the first Russian-language collection of Williams’s plays—The Glass Menagerie and Nine Other Plays, compiled by Vladich Nedelin (1924–1986), who also translated Streetcar—was published in Moscow, finally making the playwright’s works broadly accessible to Soviet readers.

Nedelin’s afterword to his collection shows the degree to which opinions of Williams had shifted. Describing Streetcar as “a drama of human intolerance,” he wrote:

After the publication of Nedelin’s collection, Williams’s plays began to be staged in the provinces. Not everyone welcomed the productions, and various party officials and critics would voice their disapproval for years, but eventually Moscow’s Mayakovsky Theater undertook the first major production of Streetcar, which debuted in 1970, directed by the noted Soviet director Andrey Goncharov. Though Blanche’s final descent into madness was replaced with a happy ending in which Mitch saves Blanche, the production retained the play’s “primitive force.” For all its rudeness, cruelty, debauchery, and Western decadence, the production would run for more than seven hundred performances over more than two decades.

Interestingly, Soviet critics picked up perhaps earlier than others on the plays’ divergences from the realism and naturalism for which Williams was often celebrated in the West. In doing so, the Soviet reviewers, even while denigrating his work, positioned Williams as a playwright worthy of note and, consciously or not, paved the way for his eventual popular success on Russian-language stages.

Stage and film actor Maxim M. Gudkov teaches acting at St. Petersburg State University, where he has directed productions of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly Last Summer, and Orpheus Descending, among other plays. A scholar of US theater and of US-Russian stage relations, he is author of more than eighty academic articles. All Russian translations are the author’s.