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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 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. 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. 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. 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.  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 actually 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 Soviet-approved 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 like-minded students to organize an unsanctioned theatre studio called “The Realists.” They only wanted to study forms of acting different from the official 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. 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. 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. Rumors about Efros’s talent soon 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.

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 diploma 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 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, each of whom rose to prominence in post-war Soviet Russia.

On March 6, 1953, Joseph Stalin died, either from a stroke or, legend has it, from poisoning by someone in his inner circle. By this time, Soviet-Russian culture had effectively become stagnant. 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.

Central Children’s Theatre

In 1950, the managing director of the Central Children’s Theatre (CCT), Konstantin Shakh-Azizov, invited Maria Knebel to join his directing staff. This event requires some context to understand its historical significance. In the West, a theatre is normally conceived of as a building where plays are produced. When speaking about a theatre in Russia, however, what is really meant is a company, an institution, a family. The difference is important. Similar to America’s highly influential Group Theatre (established in 1931 by Cheryl Crawford, Harold Clurman, and Lee Strasberg), Russian theatres have not only a history, but also a specific philosophy, a tradition, and socio-cultural resonance. Thus, when a Russian actor, director, or designer is seen to work at a theatre, by that very fact he or she becomes associated with its institutional identity. Moreover, institutional identity in Russian theatre is aggressively defended and protected. Thus, one could almost say that Russian theatres choose their actors, directors, and designers as much or more than actors, directors, and designers choose their theatres.

This was particularly true of the CCT, which was established in 1936 on what remained of Stanislavsky’s First and Second Studios and the so-called Second Moscow Art Theatre (MAT II). Stanislavsky established the First Studio in 1911 as a laboratory for the system of acting he was devising. In 1922, Michael Chekhov became director of this studio, where he was able to explore his variant of Stanislavsky’s system. In 1916, Stanislavsky established the Second Studio to develop a new generation of actors for MAT. In 1924, while Stanislavsky was on tour in America, Nemirovich-Danchenko merged both studios to form MAT II under Chekhov’s leadership. Four years later Chekhov was compelled to emigrate owing to creative differences with the authorities, but his successors continued to uphold his principles there in practice. In 1936 the government dissolved MAT II with the intention of eliminating any memory of Michael Chekhov and his idealistic theories. At that point MAT II’s facilities became the Central Children’s Theatre under the leadership of Natalia Sats, subsuming the Moscow Children’s Theatre, which she established in 1919 at another location. Two years later, Sats was imprisoned in the course of Stalin’s purges, but Shakh-Azizov steadfastly maintained the theatre’s high level of psychological realism as before.

Actress Maria Knebel was originally part of the Stanislavsky‘s Second Studio, and in 1924 she became part of the newly formed MAT II. When it ceased operation in 1936, she moved to the original MAT. In 1949, she was dismissed owing to artistic disagreements that were aggravated by the anti-Semitic atmosphere which surfaced powerfully after the war. Other theatres avoided Knebel as well until 1950 when Shakh-Azizov invited her to join the directing staff of the CCT. Five years later, she became artistic director. Shakh-Azizov knew that Knebel was part of the original MAT II, of course, and that his invitation would in effect return the CCT to its original heritage. This is precisely what happened. As a personal pupil of Stanislavsky, Knebel made a conscious effort to preserve, maintain, and disseminate her teacher’s principles in their unadulterated form. She also maintained her dedication to Michael Chekhov, albeit quietly because he and his theories were still proscribed by the government. Knebel never demanded exact repetition of her methods and was widely respected for her sponsorship of beginning directors. Recalling Efros from GITIS, where she supervised his final project, she traveled to Ryazan and invited him to join the CCT staff with her. Soon Knebel had assembled a company of exceptionally gifted actors and directors, many of whom had been rejected by, or chose to reject, the then Stalinist Moscow Art Theatre. Under Knebel’s leadership the CCT, formerly known as MAT II, rapidly developed into the center of advanced theatre life in Russia.

The 1950s proved to be a more important decade than anyone could have imagined. After Stalin’s death, a great awakening began to take place in major Russian cities. At the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, then president Nikita Khrushchev shocked the Party and nation with his revelation that Stalin was a criminal. Small groups of like-minded friends, called kompanii, awkwardly began to emerge, seeking to rediscover their native country, their history, and themselves. The newly available writings of Ernest Hemingway and other previously banned Western writers were becoming influential among the Russian intelligentsia. In 1957, Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble visited Moscow, introducing his novel epic-theatre style and modern European creative principles for the first time in the capital of Soviet Russia. Boris Pasternak completed Doctor Zhivago. The films of the socially conscious Italian Neo-Realists—Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Federico Fellini—opened up creative worlds that were unknown in Russia before this time. In contrast, ever since the Yalta Conference in 1945, the Cold War and its ideological tensions had put the whole world on edge. The USSR developed the atomic bomb, Boris Pasternak was denied permission to accept the Nobel Prize, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane was brought down near Russia’s industrial complex in Sverdlovsk, and Soviet troops suppressed reform movements in Poland and Hungary. But in spite of all the international political tensions, Soviet society internally was beginning to separate itself from its government and deep social changes were set in motion.

At the CCT, Efros worked with Knebel in addition to Oleg Yefremov, a recent MAT School graduate who would in time become the greatest actor of his generation. New playwrights began to emerge who sought to address the world of the post-war Soviet-Russian adolescent. Possibly they wanted to free themselves from the rigid censorship applied to plays for adults, or maybe they wanted to influence the post-Stalinist generation that was on the rise. Efros’s son Dmitry, who was born in 1954, would be one of their beneficiaries. In any case, Efros was the lightning rod that attracted and absorbed their powerful feelings and reactions. Events began to accelerate for Efros in 1954 with the play Good Luck! by Viktor Rozov, which was a major success with young people as well as adults and really launched Efros’s career? This was the first of a series of successful plays that brought together the young director with the new playwright, including In Search of Happiness (1957), Unequal Battle (1960), and Before Supper (1960). Efros excelled with pointed dramas of ordinary Russian life during the Thaw, when young people were “searching for happiness” in a brutal environment that was the legacy of Stalinism. He also directed new plays by Nikolai Pogodin, Alexander Volodin, Edward Radzinsky, and Alexander Khmelik. Khmelik’s play, Kolka, My Friend! (1958), was another turning point. Efros combined the energetic acting of students from the theatre’s affiliated acting studio with an expressive scenic design by Boris Knoblok that made use of a schoolyard gymnastic apparatus on a wide-open, almost bare stage. Critics said that authentic creative freshness radiated from the performance. As things transpired, this modest play for youth was to herald the demise of the entire moribund Soviet stage design aesthetic.

Another turning point occurred when Efros was invited to direct Anyone by Eduardo de Filippo at the Sovremennik Theatre. Galina Volchek, Oleg Tabakov, and Oleg Yefremov, actors from the Moscow Art Theatre School, founded the Sovremennik (Contemporary) Theatre in 1956. Their purpose was to reinvigorate the true original principles of Stanislavsky, instead of their later uninspiring embodiment in the service of Socialist Realism. So devoted were they to Stanislavsky that they collectively took a blood oath to follow his teachings to the letter. Yefremov went on to become Artistic Director of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1970, and Tabakov succeeded him in 2001. At the Sovremennik, Efros worked with actors who were fervently devoted to Stanislavsky’s system, especially to his important final work, Active Analysis. A short time later, Efros wrote The Director’s Work on the Production for the Central Publishing House of the USSR. Intended for amateurs, it was one of many similar books written from a government initiative requiring professionals to share their practical knowledge with a wider Soviet audience. Although it was composed as a manual and little resembles Efros’s mature writing, all the same it provided him with an opportunity to explore and explain his directing principles, which were based progressively more on Active Analysis.

Lenkom Theatre

At about the same time a series of international humiliations transpired for the USSR, commencing with the construction of the controversial Berlin wall in 1961 and the public relations disaster of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Under Khrushchev, Soviet science and technology had started to show signs of competing successfully with the West. The USSR successfully tested its first ICBM; Russia launched Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite; and Russian Yuri Gagarin became first human in space. The Soviet Union was developing into an international power. On the other hand, by the early 1960s Soviet agriculture and domestic industry were in serious trouble, and Khrushchev’s authority within the Party was in decline. In 1963, he introduced an assortment of measures to shore up his position, among them a declaration of the end of the cultural Thaw. Nevertheless, in a bloodless takeover by CPSU leaders, Khrushchev was ousted from his position of power in 1964, and was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev as first secretary of the CPSU. Thus began the re-Stalinization of USSR, leading to the so-called “era of stagnation.” Russia’s rigid economy increasingly deteriorated, cronyism began to bloat the Communist Party, and the socio-political climate became increasingly pessimistic. Nobel Prize laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn was forced to leave the country, while Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuri Daniel and other progressive writers were given prison sentences for publishing their works abroad. Maria Knebel retired to a teaching position at GITIS, and the previously forward-thinking Central Children’s Theatre began to fall apart. “Generation Nyet” seemed to be putting an end to the Thaw generation.

This was the cultural climate in 1964, when the position of Artistic Director at the Lenin Komsomol (Lenkom) Theatre became available. Yuri Lyubimov was at that time a promising young director from the Schukin Theatre School (affiliated with the Vakhtangov Theatre). His graduation project, Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan, had successfully combined the principles of Brecht, Meyerhold, and Vakhtangov. The government offered him the Lenkom post, but he turned it down. Then Efros was appointed Artistic Director of the Lenkom, an action that contributed to the final dismantling of the CCT. Komsomol is an acronym for the Young Communist League, and part of this theatre’s mission was to produce political plays. Efros was known to be apolitical, but the theatre was in poor shape, and so with little to lose in 1964 the Minister of Culture appointed him to head it. In due course, Lyubimov was appointed to head the similarly rudderless Taganka Theatre. The authorities had assigned Efros and Lyubimov to these neglected theatres in order to mollify the more progressive members of the public who were still sympathetic to the ideals of the Thaw generation. The political strategy was to keep two liberal and talented directors under control, but events turned out very differently.

The average Lenkom audience was older than that of the CCT, of course, and more conservative culturally as well as politically. When Efros arrived, he found a company that was dispirited from years of neglect and from the absence of any organic artistic credo. Efros definitely had a credo. He brought to the Lenkom the same passion for sharp contemporary themes and subtle psychological truth in acting that he was famous for at the CCT. Moreover, now he had his first opportunity to work with experienced actors, among them were the previously unknown Olga Yakovleva, Lev Durov, Alexander Shervindt, and Nikolai Volkov, whose careers blossomed after Efros arrived. He began with plays written by some of the same Thaw-era playwrights that had become familiar at the CCT, such as Alexei Arbuzov (My Poor Marat, 1965), Edward Radzinsky (104 Pages about Love, 1964; Shooting a Film, 1965), Viktor Rozov (Wedding Day, 1964), and Samuel Alyoshin (Everyone Gets What He Deserves, 1965). The themes were socially intelligent as before, but now the subjects were adults in positions of professional responsibility: young married couples, factory managers, parents, and teachers—the Thaw generation grown up. Unexpectedly, the sleepy Lenkom came back to life. Audiences that had seen Efros’s work at the CCT when they were younger began to attend the new Lenkom to see what was happening there.

Efros grew together with his audience. One more turning point came in 1966 when he directed The Seagu l, his first play by Anton Chekhov. It was an open challenge to the established interpretation of Chekhov’s plays. Instead of being guided by the traditional quiet approach of the Art Theatre, Efros’s interpretation was starkly modernist in style and emphasized the maliciousness of the characters’ betrayal of Treplev. The sharp atmosphere of hatred and mutual

hostility revealed a particularly modern sensibility—one that was until then largely the province of Western European culture—which replaced the time-honored Chekhovian lyricism. The production provoked an outcry from the old guard, particularly the Moscow Art Theatre. Efros followed this with Mikhail Bulgakov’s previously banned work, Molière, or The Cabal of Hypocrites, about Molière’s struggle with Louis XIV and the Church over Tartuffe. Both plays were major successes with Moscow audiences. However, Efros’s avant-garde approach to Chekhov and his provocative choice of Bulgakov’s attack on government censorship did not go unacknowledged by the authorities. He was criticized mercilessly in the official press, and in next to no time he suffered his first heart attack. He was 42 in 1967.

At the end of his third season Efros was dismissed as Artistic Director of the Lenkom Theatre for “ideological deficiencies…such as not providing the correct direction in the formation of the repertory.” It was one thing for Efros’s productions to be taken off the stage; it was another thing altogether to be ousted from his own theatre. To many it recalled the days when Stalin deprived Vsevelod Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov of their theatres. Of all the major directors of the post-Stalinist period—Georgy Tovstonogov, Yefremov, Lyubimov, and Efros—only Efros endured such a humiliation. In actual fact, from the beginning at the Lenkom he had incurred the displeasure of government officials because he did not include the expected political plays in the theatre’s repertory. There were also green room conflicts with senior members of the Lenkom company who were not cast in leading roles as before. Another difficulty was the presence of anti-Semitism within the company itself. Efros was a director and artist, not an administrator or politician, and the partisan issues involved with running a theatre company were simply beyond his capacity to deal with. Unending troubles of this kind, along with the scandal of The Seagu l and Molière, and whispering campaigns to key government officials, ultimately led to his dismissal. Lyubimov, Yefremov and Zavadsky tried to intercede with the authorities on his behalf, but it was no use.

Malaya Bronnaya Theatre

At this juncture, Alexander Dunayev left his position as Artistic Director of the Central Soviet Army Theatre to become Artistic Director of the Moscow Dramatic Theatre on Malaya Bronnaya Street, where he invited (or was instructed to invite) Efros to join the artistic staff there. As a concession to Efros’s demotion, he was allowed to take some of his favorite actors with him from the Lenkom company. It was a strange twist of fate. The Malaya Bronnaya Theatre was originally home of Alexander Tairov’s Chamber Theatre and later Solomon Mikhoels’s State Jewish Theatre, for which Marc Chagall painted one of his famous frescoes. Its Jewish company, starting with Mikhoels, had been liquidated under Stalin. The theatre existed under different names and missions  after that, becoming the Moscow Dramatic Theatre in 1964. It is a charming little theatre, located in the pleasant Moscow neighborhood of the Patriarch’s Ponds, the setting for Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita. On the other hand, the theatre’s reputation at the time was poor. Efros was assigned a small unheated office, where he had to wear a sheepskin coat to keep warm in the winter. At least he had an ally in the gentlemanly and benevolent Dunayev. In the course of time, two separate companies co-existed at the theatre: Efros’s and Dunayev’s. Aside from actors Lev Durov and Mikhail Kazakov (who also directed occasionally), neither director used actors from the other’s group. For the next eighteen years Efros’s plays made the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre into one of the most popular dramatic venues in Moscow.

Efros began his new position with a radical interpretation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which offended traditionalists, was excoriated in the official press, and was promptly removed from the repertory. After the second scandal over his controversial readings of Chekhov, Efros tried not to disturb the government any further. He began to turn to less contentious, though not less distinguished, productions, many of which were drawn from the classic repertory. Among his most successful plays during the next decade and a half at the Malaya Bronnaya were: Kalabashkin the Seducer by Edward Radzinsky (1968), The Happy Days Of An Unhappy Man by Alexei Arbuzov (1969), Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (1970), Tales of the Old Arbat by Alexei Arbuzov (1970), The Outsider by Ignatii Dvoretsky (1971), Brother Alyosha by Viktor Rozov (from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1972), Don Juan by Molière (1973), Marriage by Nikolai Gogol (1975), Othelo by William Shakespeare (1976), A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev (1977), The Veranda in the Woods (1978), and The Theatre Director (1984) by Ignatii Dvoretsky.

Although Efros’s home remained at the Malaya Bronnaya until 1984, by 1971 his official standing had recovered to the point where he began receiving invitations to direct elsewhere, too. He directed nine productions for Central Television, seven for All-Union Radio, four movies for Mosfilm, and several plays at other theatres, including the Mossoviet Theatre, the Moscow Art Theatre, the Taganka Theatre, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and the Toen Theatre in Tokyo. His productions of Gogol’s Marriage and Turgenev’s A Month in the Country won the Grand Prize at the Duisburg Theatre Festival in the Federal Republic of Germany. He also found time to write two more books: The Joy of Rehearsal (1975) and Profession: Director (1979). In 1975, at age 50, Efros suffered a second heart attack.

Some of these events warrant more attention here because they indicate how gestures of solidarity on the part of Efros’s colleagues corresponded to his “rehabilitation” by the Soviet government. For example, his 1973 television production, A Few Words in Honor of Molière (from the biographical novella  Molière by Mikhail Bulgakov and the play Don Juan by Molière), starred director Yuri Lyubimov as the embattled Molière. In 1975, Oleg Yefremov invited Efros to direct The Evacuation Train by Mikhail Roshin at the Moscow Art Theatre— significantly, as part of the official observances marking the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War (WW II). Other plays Efros directed at MAT were Tartuffe (1981) and The Living Corpse by Leo Tolstoy (1982). In 1976 Efros received the state award, “Honored Artist of the USSR.”

In 1981 Yuri Lyubimov found himself delayed abroad during an international tour and asked Efros to fill in for him by directing a play at the Taganka Theatre. Lyubimov’s theatre was built on the principles of Vakhtangov, Meyerhold, and Brecht. Thanks largely to Lyubimov’s exciting directing style, it had become one of the most important theatres of its era, both in and outside Soviet Russia. Efros was the first guest director in Taganka history. He wanted to direct The Cherry Orchard, but doubted the authorities would approve on account of their objections to his previous interpretations of Chekhov’s plays. Nevertheless, Lyubimov managed to obtain permission for him. Starring Alla Demidova as Madame Ranevskaya and the famous balladeer Vladimir Vysotsky as Lopakhin, The Cherry Orchard turned out to be a major success for Efros. His lyrical interpretation did not entirely meet with Lyubimov’s approval, however.

In 1977, Alvin Epstein, the newly appointed Artistic Director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, was in Moscow on an official cultural visit. He was impressed by Efros’s production of Gogol’s Marriage and invited him to revive it in Minneapolis with American actors. Efros had never been permitted to travel outside the Soviet Bloc and was surprised when he learned the invitation was approved. The following year, Efros also directed Molière, or The Cabal of Hypocrites by Mikhail Bulgakov at the Guthrie Theatre. When Epstein was unexpectedly removed as Artistic Director, the Guthrie Board of Directors invited Efros to succeed him, but he declined. Back home, as if newly inspired by his American experiences, Efros directed two works by American writers Tennessee Williams (Summer and Smoke, Malaya Bronnaya Theatre, 1978) and Ernest Hemingway (Islands in the Stream from the novel of the same name, Central Television, 1980).

Taganka Theatre

While Efros was directing at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre, important events were changing the course of life in the USSR, first in one direction, then in another. In 1968, the first Moscow-New York commercial airline service started, linking PanAm and Aeroflot. The same year, Soviet troops forcefully put down a reform movement in Czechoslovakia. The first US-USSR cultural exchange occurred in 1970. Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971 and was deported in 1972. Richard Nixon traveled to Moscow in 1972 for the first summit talks, which led to the joint Apollo-Soyuz space mission in 1975. Physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov won the Nobel Peace Prize this year, too, but his visa to attend ceremony in Sweden was denied, and in 1980 he was exiled. Other human rights advocates, including Anatoly Sharansky, found themselves imprisoned in 1978, and in 1979 Soviet troops advanced into Afghanistan. Sixty-four countries boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The USSR imposed martial law in Poland in 1981 to suppress the “Solidarity” reform movement led by shipyard worker and future President of Poland, Lech Walesa. Meanwhile, four different men in succession led the USSR: Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982 and was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who died in 1984 and was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who died in 1985 and was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, who introduced the era of “perestroika” (economic restructuring) and “glasnost” (political openness).

In this shifting political environment, Yuri Lyubimov was usually expert at walking the line between private dissent and public compliance. But while he was on tour in Europe in 1983 he apparently made a mistake. The exact circumstances are unclear, but it was something to do with a negative comment he made in the western press about the Soviet government’s prohibition of two of his productions. The outcome was that the Soviet authorities dismissed Lyubimov from his post as Artistic Director of the Taganka Theatre and even stripped him of his citizenship. Offers to head the Taganka subsequently went out to directors Mark Zakharov, Nikolai Gubenko, and even Alexander Dunayev, but after consulting with Lyubimov, each of them declined.

Meanwhile at the Malaya Bronnaya, ever since the assignment of a Soviet functionary as the new managing director in 1978, Efros’s internal standing had begun to grow unstable. The situation was complicated. Dunayev was certainly the Artistic Director, but Efros set the artistic policy and was the source of the theatre’s success. The new managing director, on the other hand, had influential connections with the government. He knew how to obtain good apartments and other perquisites, not only for himself, but also for his friends in the company. It was said that Dunayev reigned, Efros was the star, but the managing director ruled. This troika system worked satisfactorily for awhile, but before long the managing director grew discontented with what he perceived as his diminished status. He began to incite the neo-Stalinist and anti-Semitic factions in the company against Efros. It was alleged that Efros was growing too popular, that he traveled abroad too much, that he was absent from the theatre too often, that he was unfairly invited to direct other theatres, and that he invited actors from other theatres to appear in some of his productions, thus depriving Malaya Bronnaya actors of desirable roles. What was worse, only Efros’s productions filled the theatre, which remained virtually empty whenever anyone else directed. The result was escalating green room flare-ups with senior actors and even disagreements with Dunayev, who had been his ally for nearly eighteen years. Efros’s office was moved to the fourth floor, next to the CPSU headquarters. He had to climb four flights of stairs (with a weak heart) to get to his office, and then listen to the anti-Semitic invective coming from the CPSU office in the next room.

Finally, due to “intratheatrical conflicts,” the authorities transferred Dunayev to the Hermitage Theatre (he died one year later) and offered Efros the vacant Taganka position. Following meditations and long delays, including passionate discussions with family, friends, and colleagues—but apparently not with Lyubimov—Efros accepted the post. A storm of opposition followed from the theatre community, in which Efros was severely, if unfairly, vilified. After all, Efros was a friend and admirer of Lyubimov. He promised to preserve Lyubimov’s plays in the repertory. He even signed a petition by the Taganka actors appealing for Lyubimov’s reinstatement and agreed to relinquish his post if Lyubimov were allowed to return—“I support the return of Lyubimov to the theatre if Yuri Petrovich wants this.” Nevertheless, many accused him of blatant careerism, or worse: conspiring with the government to destroy Lyubimov’s career. For that matter, it was inevitable that the Taganka Theatre would split into factions for and against Efros. The same thing probably would have happened to any new director that followed in the footsteps of the talented and charismatic Lyubimov. Efros’s health had been problematic for some time, and his controversial position as new leader of the huge and virtually unmanageable Taganka company proved to be incredibly stressful. Someone even vandalized Efros’s car and cut up his trademark sheepskin coat, leaving an anti-Semitic slur. It was like the circles of hell, one colleague remarked.

Hoping that the Taganka actors would forget their prejudices after they had a few successful plays behind them, Efros sought refuge in work. He began with At the Bottom (aka The Lower Depths) by Maxim Gorky. He told actress Olga Yakovleva, “Do you know why I want to produce At the Bottom at the Taganka? Because at the Malaya Bronnaya I felt like I was “at the bottom” and the actors at the Taganka without Lyubimov also feel like they are “at the bottom.” Following Gorky’s play, Efros directed War’s Unwomanly Face from the novel by Sergei Alexeivich and A Lovely Sunday for a Picnic by Tennessee Williams. Efros took the company on tour to the Belgrade International Theatre Festival, where At the Bottom and The Cherry Orchard won the Grand Prize. Next came One-and-a-Half Square Meters from the story by Boris Mozhayev, then The Misanthrope by Molière. Under the circumstances, some felt the latter play was probably an autobiographical catharsis for Efros. He also wrote another book, Theatre Novel, Continued.

The end approached in 1986, when his mother died, and after that the death of his father a few months later. Early the next year, on the evening of Tuesday, January 13, Efros died of a heart attack at his apartment. He was laid to rest in Novokunzevskoye Cemetery. His pending productions of Members of the Society of Cactuses by Ignatii Dvoretsky and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen were left uncompleted. Bolshoi Theatre scenographer Sergei Barkhin designed Efros’s headstone, which is a plain white marble block engraved with a small proscenium arch.

The rest is public history, if not a familiar story. Within a few years, the Berlin wall fell, communist regimes across Eastern Europe collapsed, and in 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disbanded. Five years after Efros’s death, the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum in Moscow presented an exhibition of his productions. In 1993, the Russian Theatre Agency organized a conference in St. Petersburg devoted to Efros. Scholars and critics examined his work, several of his films and television productions were shown, and some of his former actors staged revivals of a few of his plays. In 1993, the Russian Theatre Fund published a collection of Efros’s major books, including The Fourth Book, a compilation of his unpublished notes. At home, Efros’s standing continues to grow even today. In 2000, forty-six actors, writers and critics contributed to publication of The Theatre of Anatoly Efros: Reco lections and Articles, and the same year Vagrius Publishers re-issued selected passages from Theatre Novel Continued and The Fourth Book under the title Anatoly Efros-Profession: Director. In the summer of 2005, Moscow television’s Culture Channel commemorated the 80^th anniversary of Efros’s birth with a retrospective of his filmed plays, films, teleplays, and a full-scale documentary of his life and work.

Legacy

What was distinctive about the creative work of Anatoly Efros? In a culture widely recognized for the quantity of its artistic output, Efros was unusually prolific: 68 plays (not including revivals), 4 films and 2 screen plays, 13 television productions, 7 radio plays, and 5 books, in addition to scores of articles and essays written for Russian newspapers, journals, and magazines. He also taught directing at GITIS regularly for over twenty years.

As the title of his book shows, the rehearsal process was Efros’s passion. Indifferent preparation, shoddy workmanship, insensitive treatment of actors, insufficient professional play analysis, recycled interpretations of the classics, and time-serving careerism were widespread in Soviet theatre (and, sorry to say, not infrequently in the West, too). Efros aimed serious criticism at such working conditions. He believed in the theatre, in its material relationship with the public, its unique creative advantages over film, its idealism, and the interdependent nature of its work. Efros shows why in Russia theatre at its best is not merely a job or even a profession; it is a calling, almost a religious vocation.

Yuri Zavadsky indicated in his preface to Efros’s first book that Efros was not disheartened over failure. Disappointment seemed to recharge his creative energies. He never stopped thinking about his plays after they opened, and he was continually interested in developing and enriching his ideas from play to play, rehearsal to rehearsal. Much of his writing forms a kind of gestation period for the developmental stages of his work. These gestation periods are particularly interesting because they illustrate the way a director’s thoughts can grow, or ideally could grow. Besides, this process of carefully thinking through future productions, of how a director organizes aesthetic impulses into plain words, is an artistic act in itself. Looking over Efros’s shoulder while he thinks about his plays on paper is an educational experience of a special kind.

Efros always strove for thematic unity and clarity in his work and was passionate about the intellectual reception of his plays, about their semantic arguments, if you will. Unlike Brecht, he never sought directly to depict socio­political ideas from the stage, and he never engaged in direct modernization of classical plays. His vision was like Brecht’s, however, because it was always in the present. In his plays there was always the latent feeling of a debate about contemporary issues. In Efros’s hands, classical playwrights became as accessible as their modern counterparts, and modern playwrights seemed to be unintentional historians of their time. He was constitutionally incapable of putting on a play as it was done in the past. “I can direct only as I feel myself today,” he said. His guiding principle could have been that of the Italian Neo-Realists, above all Federico Fellini, for whose films he had a deep regard: “Today, here, now.”

The classics were Efros’s specialty. He felt an attraction to the fundamental human problems presented there. He combined the inner experiences found in Chekhov, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Molière, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Turgenev with the experience of contemporary society and his own personal experience. Among Russian directors Efros was undoubtedly the best interpreter of the classics, and one of his most important successes was Romeo and Juliet. He was fascinated by the play, reworking it in different media over the years. The context and craft of Romeo and Juliet illustrates the “search for happiness” that characterized both himself and his era. Romeo and Juliet forms the “through-action” of The Joy of Rehearsal and informs its spirit.

 

Efros’s nuanced explication of Shakespeare will be of special interest to Western readers. It’s almost as though a writer who has gone out of fashion has been rediscovered. Efros’s creative intelligence reached a higher level from which Shakespeare tells us something new. Such thinking has always been present in Shakespeare’s work, of course, but Efros felt compelled to look at Shakespeare with fresher eyes because the old ones could only see what they were accustomed to seeing. “Shakespeare was born into the world,” he remarked, “to release millions of people from…artistic constraints.” Efros renewed the spirit ofcontemporary life in Shakespeare, which permits us to perceive the sharper meanings latent in his plays.

For Efros, theatre was a reflection of the condition of the individual in society. Within this general theme, persistent motifs were the characteristics and behaviors of the educated classes, especially writers and artists. This militantly artistic viewpoint of his often got him into trouble with the Soviet cultural authorities as well as with his more pragmatic colleagues. Undoubtedly, however, it also led to the rebirth of the status of those theatres where he worked: the Central Children’s Theatre, Lenkom Theatre, Malaya Bronnaya Theatre, and probably the fading Taganka Theatre, too, if he had not been put out of action there by internal dissent and death. The point is that Efros had a definite point of view that defined him as an artist. Out of this came plays that resonated with audiences and helped them deal with the perilous times in which they lived. Efros’s work championed idealism in a political environment characterized by hopelessness.

Efros advocated nuanced psychological truth in acting. In all probability, he would rather have been accused of hyper-psychology than create predictable, colorless, or unexciting productions based on past models. Understandably, the name of Stanislavsky appears prominently in his writing. We know a great deal about Stanislavsky, but not much about his successors, of whom Efros was one of the most important and influential. He was devoted to Stanislavsky and indebted to the role the Stanislavsky System played in his work, yet he was not slavishly attached to past practice. He promoted an enlightened, progressive second look at Stanislavsky’s principles, particularly the process of Active Analysis that occupied Stanislavsky’s final years. Because the original Stanislavsky System had been vulgarized by the Communists, both its founder and his principles had lost considerable credibility in the profession at home. Nevertheless, Efros defended the fundamental importance of Stanislavsky’s principles as the foundation for a genuinely creative life in the theatre. For Efros, commitment to Stanislavsky meant the difference between merely professional acting or directing and creatively interpreting, as an artist should do.

Efros struggled against the practice of static acting, what he called “radio acting,” in which actors stand practically motionless on stage and speak their lines to each other almost as if standing before microphones. His solution was to instill his plays with a special type of physical liveliness that illustrated the inner lives of characters through virtually continuous movement. He called this process “psychophysics,” and he based it on his belief that theatre should be similar to dance, with the same plasticity of movement and physical expression of relationships among its characters. He believed that every inner thought and feeling should be expressed by external means. Inner development according to the   Stanislavsky   mode,   of   course,   but   outer   movement   as   well.   As   a consequence, his performances were constantly in motion, often to the point where the staging seemed about to fall apart. Psychophysics also extended to scenic investiture.

Starting in 1958 with Kolka, My Friend!, his plays employed scenery that was abstract, neutral, and unlocalized; scenery that encouraged freedom of movement in the actors within a carefully structured stage environment. Anatoly Smeliansky compared Efros’s staging to chemistry’s “Brownian motion,” that is, the random motion of small particles suspended in a gas or liquid, because his actors seemed to be dynamically suspended in the space of the stage. Of course, this was a carefully calculated impression. Efros liked to compare the freedom apparent in his staging with the role of improvisation in jazz, his favorite form of music, which depends on freedom within the mutually self-imposed limits of the basic melody.

“The director is a poet, only he does not deal with a pen and paper, but composes his verses on the platform of a stage, working with a large group of people…. He is a person who is not afraid of loneliness, and a person who is in love with the craft, the actors, the pupils and the teachers.” This was how Efros defined the main features of his profession. But he was not only a poet on stage. The Joy of Rehearsal is the soliloquy of a poet, as well as a professional treatise and a manifesto of the creative life. Efros writes explicitly about his aesthetic ideals in those sections devoted to rehearsal craftsmanship, but his ideals are also latent throughout the explications of his plays.

To many observers, his talent was extraordinary. Anatoly Smeliansky, Rector of the Moscow Art Theatre School and Associate Artistic Director of the Moscow Art Theatre, used one of Efros’s favorite images when he said, “In the course of a quarter of a century his art was a kind of cardiogram of our own stage. The ‘peaks’ and ‘valleys’ of his productions were seen as our pulse, which either had sufficient or insufficient heart.” Efros’s leading actress, Olga Yakovleva, said: “Efros was a world-class master. Now [i.e., after the collapse of Communism] that we have an opportunity to compare his performances with those brought to us by international celebrities, we can see that his were stronger, brighter. All of them (even the unsuccessful ones) contained something new that no one had done before; they always made a sharp point and spoke about today’s era…” Actor Alexander Zbruev said that Efros’s “lessons were unique and his rehearsals were so infectious that all of us had only one desire: somehow to get closer to what he offered. To us he displayed the highest level of achievement, a level we hardly thought possible to possess.” Actress Vera Glagoleva said: “Efros’s performances were fireworks, fireworks of art, especially the actor’s art.” Oleg Yefremov, Artistic Director of the Moscow Art Theatre (1975-2000) gave what is perhaps the definitive portrayal of Efros: “He was a magician, and everything he touched became magic.”

 

Efros’s reputation continues to grow over time, and few Russians today doubt that he was a master artist of the highest order. It is my hope that The Joy of Rehearsal and his other writings will help English-speaking readers understand why this is so.

James Thomas

Wayne State University