Pathway to Japanese Literature

“Lately, Soviet films are finally starting to make their way over here, aren’t they?”
“Storm Over Asia was even utilized in Ennosuke’s campaign launch, creating quite a stir.”
“That must be considered a masterpiece over there as well, of course?”

“Well, of course.”
“When it was first released at Moscow’s excellent Korosu cinema, it was splendid.”
“The accompaniment was specially composed music.”

The truth of how imperialism and colonies were interrelated had been grasped with magnificent artistic skill by Pudovkin.

However, interestingly enough, several months later when they went to Paris, there it was—“Storm Over Asia” playing at a prominent cinema on the Champs-Élysées.
It was an autumn evening with rain falling.
When they entered and looked, the title was in English.
Moreover, since France was a Catholic country, they had largely excised *Storm Over Asia*’s most ironically amusing scenes—such as an imperialist general decorating a drooling infant lama with medals while bowing obsequiously—along with all anti-religious sequences.
In the warm, plush seats, so-called chic Parisian middle-class men and women and American women who had come to spend money sat lined up, watching *Storm Over Asia*, which they had bought from the Soviets and gutted of its substance.
When farmers in French Indochina rebelled, the French government scattered poison gas from stylish airplanes and killed them.
“That’s why they don’t permit screening something like *Storm Over Asia* in its original form.”
“In Japan too, works like that and *Torukshibu* have been ‘ideologically guided’ and cut, haven’t they?”

“Just because it’s a Soviet film doesn’t mean viewers can welcome it unconditionally.”

I believe people consider that quite thoroughly when viewing them.
“I’ve heard film production in the Soviet Union follows planned methods—is that true?”

“From iron and coal to wheat and even consumables like shoes, the Soviet Union plans all production systematically.
Even artistic productions like films are generally planned in advance—how many to make per year and what types to produce.”

“What about the theater side?”
“Same as with cinema?”

"The Art Department of the People’s Commissariat for Culture establishes a budget specifying how much money from that year’s funds will be allocated to theaters. The budget gets distributed to each theater. That’s how they manage—as a side note, in the Soviet Union, even for the All-Russian Federation of Writers’ Organizations, the Art Department of the People’s Commissariat for Culture maintains a massive subsidy budget to improve writers’ technical skills and living conditions. Even painters don’t face troubles like those seen in Japan these days—where both big and small bourgeoisie have started tightening purse strings—because their social organization differs. The People’s Commissariat for Culture coordinates and manages this too."

“Doesn’t that seem stifling?
Plans.
Plans.
And you know, someone—I forget who—who actually went to the Soviet Union said that whether it’s films or plays there, they’re all just propaganda and not entertaining in the slightest.
You’d be sick of them after seeing just one or two.
You’re too pro-Soviet anyway.
You’ve never once criticized them, have you?
Tell the truth!
Is it boring?
Fact.—”

“That’s how it goes with numbers—there are bound to be some boring or foolish ones.
It’s no different from how even in the esteemed Communist Party, if you look at each member individually, you’ll find unpleasant folks.”

“But here’s the thing. There are all sorts of things that are boring or foolish.”
“Their artistic technique is clumsy, and the themes they tackle are flimsy and dull.”
“That’s truly boring.”
“They are objectively boring.”
“However, there is another situation in which they are deemed boring.”
“That is when viewers either fail to comprehend Soviet art’s clear class character or subconsciously resist it.”
“The Soviet Union is a Soviet state of proletarian peasants, intellectual workers—in other words, the working people.”
“With the proletariat at the forefront, they are earnestly striving to build a socialist society.”
“All art naturally and actively reflects the real lives of such people.”
“The Soviet Union is opening a completely new page in the history of world art.”

Therefore, for those who are class enemies and live with interests diametrically opposed to what the proletariat aims to achieve, there are bound to be countless cases where Soviet theater holds no appeal.
They might not just find it uninteresting—they could even be tormented by it.
"Hahaha.
Those foreigners are only watching operas at the First National Opera and Ballet Theater—formerly the Bolshoi Theater.
*Lohengrin* and *Carmen*.
*Eugene Onegin*, *The Queen of Spades*.
*Sadko* isn't scary, you see."

Hmm.
So there are still theaters performing classical works like that?
They haven't discarded the classics after all.

I think Soviet theater can roughly be divided into three categories.
The first group is the First National Opera and Ballet Theater.
Stanislavski's Opera Theater.
Danchenko's music theater company.
The Moscow Art Theater, world-renowned for Chekhov and Gorky.
Like the State Academic Maly Theater—a venue that preserves pre-revolutionary traditions and still plays a vital role in guiding the next generation of young Soviet theatrical technicians.

The second group consisted of theaters that had existed since before the revolution, currently staged plays by Soviet writers, and followed the line of the proletariat and its party—yet lacked any particularly distinctive purpose.
This category included the Satirical Theater, Korsh Theater, and others.

The third group consists of homegrown new Soviet theater companies.
Proletariat’s First Workers’ Theater.
MOSPS Theater.
“Working Youth” Theater.
Blue Shirts Theater.
Revolution Theater.
Meyerhold Theater.
Sempérante Theater.
There are three children’s theaters in Moscow that provide healthy entertainment and enlightenment for proletarian children.
These theater companies deserve attention both for the extensive and direct social relevance of their repertoire content and for their ardent exploration of new styles.

Moreover, the Soviet Union had a vast number of mobile theater troupes.
In Moscow alone, there were fewer than forty.
Large workers' clubs had affiliated theater troupes.
Even in small clubs, the Soviet proletariat there had theater study groups alongside various science and political study groups.

The Soviet Production Expansion Five-Year Plan exerted a significant influence on theater as well.

*Are they planning to expand the theaters as well?*

—The construction of new grand theaters.
A plan to manage all Soviet theaters through cooperation between trade unions, the Central Collective Farms, and the Art Department of the People’s Commissariat for Culture.
And that, until now—as had been the case before the revolution—the main theaters were concentrated around the so-called Theater Square near the Kremlin, north of the Moskva River (the former central area).
They aimed to relocate them across the river—where factories clustered—closer to sites of production.
And there were plans to not limit the season from autumn to the end of spring but to perform plays year-round.

The influence of the Five-Year Plan was not limited to such changes in management methods. It transformed the very substance of Soviet theater in general. The implementation of the Five-Year Plan had altered every aspect of Soviet citizens’ lives. In daily life, various new construction-related issues were being reexamined from a class-based perspective. To put it simply—when did collective farm organization become a concern for all Soviet citizens? From late 1928 onward. When were Udarnik groups organized within factory offices to boost production efficiency, and when did their members begin gaining experience in fierce struggles against counter-revolutionary elements across disparate locations? This too began in 1928–29.

In Soviet theaters, there was not a single one that did not reflect this new life, albeit to varying degrees.
The 1930 repertoire had changed drastically.
Compared to three years ago.

—...

Social life and art are firmly in step, striving to advance together.

So for instance, in the spring of 1930, there unfolded a delightful and picturesque scene.
It was spring.
The sun glinted brightly as the snow began to melt.
The Chernozem region surrounding Moscow, the Volga region, Siberia, and the North Caucasus region.
Spring sowing season had arrived at every collective farm across those areas.
From urban factories, volunteer labor brigades assisting rural areas pulled on rubber boots, shouldered hemp sacks, boarded special trains, and fanned out in all directions.

At the same time, art volunteer corps and theater labor volunteer corps were organized.
The idea was to scatter cultural illumination across the vast Soviet expanse alongside agricultural tractors.
Writers, painters, film workers, theater workers—all departed, but being thorough technicians, they refused to waste even the trains transporting them.
They adorned third-class train exteriors with vibrant placards and paintings, assembling so-called propaganda trains that rolled hundreds of versts across the land.

Collective farms had clubs.
There, through puppet shows, improvisational theater, and other means, they artistically presented current social issues to the peasants.
At the same time, they conducted research from a professional standpoint on what types of plays were welcomed and demanded in rural areas.

“Just hearing about it sounds rather decent.”
“The difference is too stark compared to making films or staging plays while being employed by companies that only care about profit.”
“But what about censorship?”
“They’re quite strict, aren’t they?”
“At the Tsukiji Left-Wing Theater, police officers get dispatched to sit there poring over scripts line by line.”
“Aren’t they handling it that same way?”
“That’s the sort of rumor going around.”

—……The rumors are indeed taking hold.

—A lie?

The Soviet proletariat and their Party are not paranoid.
They are striving to fully bring out the talents of all human beings.
However, the Soviet Union is currently living through a unique historical process.

The Soviet Union was in an intense phase of socialist construction. In pushing society forward toward its ultimate objectives, there were things that proved necessary and useful, and those that did not. These had to be rigorously distinguished and handled accordingly. This was obvious by any common sense. Wasn't that right? Therefore, it was only natural that meticulous attention was paid to film and theater repertoires that directly appealed to and influenced mass sentiment. This process was carried out systematically. There existed a Central Repertoire Censorship Committee that studied each theater's programming. And then decided.

But I must stress one thing—this was not Japan’s Home Ministry Censorship Division. It was a committee comprising renowned theater practitioners, actors, writers, playwrights, painters, and cultural specialists.

Would even club theater study groups be regulated through that system?

“That’s a different matter. As for the clubs’ [theater study groups], the MOSPS Theater—the Moscow Regional Trade Unions Soviet Theater—is responsible for them.”

“I see. By the way—tell me, are authors in the Soviet Union still considered authors? What are their salaries like, I wonder? … Do things like so-called bit players and stagehands—those in lower-tier roles—still exist there?”

In the present-day Soviet Union, pre-revolutionary technicians still remained in every sector of production.
The same held true for theater.
Among these veteran artists, some appeared to continue carrying an actorly temperament that had seeped into them over the decades preceding the revolution.
Yet despite such lingering traits, the veteran artists actually working on stage differed entirely from Danjuro or Niza.
They were not operating independently of socialism.
Even bit players and stagehands stood as fellow members of the art labor union alongside these veterans.
You’ve heard of this, haven’t you?
The Soviet Government granted two types of honorific titles—“People’s Artist” and “Meritorious Artist”—to artists with past distinguished service, thereby according them preferential treatment. Among Moscow theater troupes alone, there existed approximately eleven People’s Artists.
Meritorious Artists numbered over forty.

For example, take Luzhsky of the Moscow Art Theater—while his roles resembled those of a Western-style comic relief actor, before the revolution he had lived in a grand mansion behind Albert Square.
At the time of the revolution, his mansion appeared to have been temporarily confiscated, but he was immediately granted another mansion in recognition of his past contributions—entirely provided by the government.
Now Luzhsky lives comfortably in that splendid house with its spacious front garden.
Painters, writers, or scientists who have made truly valuable contributions to Soviet culture all receive such treatment.

Even so, the difference between veteran actors and the members of the MOSPS Theater and "Theater Labor Youth" Theater was entirely a historical disparity.

Since their foundations were fundamentally different, whether we speak of MOSPS or TRAM, the actor-theater workers were all people who had truly worked in factory workplaces. The majority were Komsomol members. Groups like TRAM had even adopted a communist lifestyle in their daily lives. In the Soviet Union, there existed an established standard that might be termed the standard form for theaters—the same "Red Corner" as found in factories and government offices; "Library Department," "Discussion," "Study Groups," and regular meetings. Each theater was required to have a committee system to manage these. The "study groups" always conducted specialized artistic research in parallel with studying the political curriculum. Therefore, their acting also differed from that of the old guard. I heard a rumor that the late Mr. Osanai Kaoru came to Moscow for the tenth anniversary celebration of the Revolution, saw various plays, and ultimately declared that the Moscow Art Theater was the only one with skilled actors. In a certain sense, this was true. However, there were also problems.

Modern Soviet communist youth, young farmers, students, workers.
Regardless of gender, their brightness and new synthetic capacity for thought—evident even in their grasp of matters like art's relationship to society—were qualities that small theaters' "Meritorious Artists" could not replicate through humor, pacing, or any other means.
They could not capture this atmosphere even when mustering their full forces.
Their fundamental qualities as actors differed in temperament.
In 1919, the First Congress of Art Workers had convened and established wage standards.
The art workers' union had joined the industrial union federation.
In 1927, they revised various methods of wage allocation and were now implementing them.

Unlike in Kabuki, there was naturally no feudal secret wage system. So to speak, even art workers' salaries in the Soviet Union were paid at state-fixed rates, just like bread.

“Then of course, there must be clearly defined minimum wages as well.”
“Not bad... So roughly how much income do they have?”

“I told you that earlier, didn’t I?”
“I explained that each theater operates under its allocated budget.”
Here again, that budget came into play.
Soviet theaters were divided into approximately five groups according to their budgetary scale.
In Group 1 theaters—those with monthly budgets exceeding 20,000 rubles and wage funds of 15,000 rubles—first-class actors received between 350 and 500 rubles.
Art workers’ qualifications were divided into eight grades, with those at the bottom tier in such theaters earning seventy-five to eighty-five rubles.

“Hmm.”
“What about technical staff like stage directors, choreographers, and lighting technicians?”

“Stage directors fare quite well: six hundred rubles in Group One theaters, three hundred in Group Five.”
Artists handling set design received two hundred fifty to five hundred rubles.
Choreographers earned roughly one hundred to two hundred fifty.

“What about the lower-tier workers?”
“Those people working only backstage... That’s what matters.”

Indeed. That was paid under a different wage standard. The types of theater labor were classified into three categories. There were ten grades of worker qualifications, and they received only the amount obtained by multiplying the base wage for their type of labor by the percentage corresponding to their qualification grade.

Because they were members of a trade union, even unskilled workers receiving around fifty rubles were protected by unemployment insurance and other benefits. They could also utilize rest homes. If they had to undergo paid medical treatment, it was half price. Moreover, in the Soviet Union, rent was set to be paid as a percentage commensurate with one’s monthly salary.

“Is that so!”
“That’s quite something!”
“Do workers in every industry pay rent using that method?”

“Look! You’ve gotten worked up too, haven’t you?”

“Hmm.”

“Of course someone like you—a pen-pushing banker—would be like that.”

“Hmm.”
...

“You’re groaning awfully hard, aren’t you? With this single example, it’s clear I’m not doing socialist propaganda. The reality of socialism teaches everyone. It’s about how it differs from capitalism.”
——

"Now that it's come to this, we can't just let it slide," he pressed on. "But tell me – even those theaters must get their operating funds mainly from ticket sales, right?"

"That's correct," I replied.
"But not entirely.
Soviet theaters don't exist to line Shochiku's pockets.
They're fundamentally built for public enjoyment and cultural advancement.
That's why every theater daily reserves a fixed number of seats – some at half-price, others free – for trade unions and the Red Army troops, with students included depending on the venue."

Moscow’s May Day—with its vibrant energy and sea of red flags rippling across the city—seemed determined to showcase its spectacle alone, yet the following day, May 2nd, stood as a holiday. A necessary respite after the fervor. The streets still wore yesterday’s festive garb. Workers and citizens ambled in clusters of three or four, crimson floral pins adorning their chests. The lingering dust from the previous day’s commotion felt almost appropriate now. Sunlight fell across placards posted at theater entrances shuttered for daylight hours: “Today opens exclusively for you workers”—the trade unions were distributing tickets from every Moscow theater among the laborers. On that May 2nd, tens of thousands of workers roamed leisurely by day and filled playhouses by night. Could this truly be called insignificant?

……Don't get me all worked up.—What was it usually like, I wondered.
Were the plays always packed with worker audiences?

It depended on the theater.
Once statistics had been released showing that audiences at the MOSPS Theater consisted of up to ninety-eight percent workers.
Satirical theaters—those accused of maintaining the deplorable practice where actresses paraded across stages like mannequins in costumes replicated verbatim from Parisian fashion magazines—stood at sixty percent.

Soviet theaters had always faced one major difficulty.
The issue was that theater buildings were outdated and small.
In the past, that had been acceptable.
Because only those with money could see them.
Nowadays, this posed a problem.
They had to share art with as many workers as possible and lower the price of each individual ticket as much as possible.
Theater buildings were constructed contrary to this purpose.
The inclusion of large theater construction plans within the Five-Year Plan was only natural.

“How much does it cost?”
“The tickets... —”

“It depends on the venue—fifty kopeks to six or seven rubles.”

“There must be price tiers in between, but that’s steep.”

“Steep indeed.”
“The Soviet Union openly acknowledges this.”
“That’s precisely why they’ve been working tirelessly to reduce costs.”
‘Do not allocate funds to stage sets.’
They ordered Meyerhold not to expand production teams needlessly—but given his notorious perfectionism, as you know, he inevitably poured resources into stage designs regardless.
He absolutely would lavish funds on stage sets.
Reportedly, this earned him an official reprimand once.

Speaking of Meyerhold, I recalled that Eisenstein had been arrested in America after slanderous rumors were spread about him. I wondered how much those film directors earned... A touch of gossip-mongering, perhaps...

"Wait—let me bring out my treasured figures. This one’s substantial."
"It’s said to be seven hundred fifty rubles."
"Do take a look at the film actors’ earnings while we’re at it."
"For leading roles, three hundred to six hundred rubles."
"And about one hundred fifty rubles for minor episodic roles—"

“It’s an old story, but Pudovkin once played the lead role in the film *The Living Corpse*.”
“He was also the director himself, right?”
“So how does that work?”
“So that would make it around one thousand something rubles for both roles?”

“Well, who knows how that works.”
“I’m not sure.”
“In such cases.”
“But here’s another story—when Eisenstein was filming *Battleship Potemkin*, there was this decrepit old priest carrying a cross.”
“When the mutiny broke out, the priest got chased off by brave sailors—there’s a scene where he tumbles down from the bridge.”
“Since it’s Eisenstein we’re talking about, he actually went and found some truly ancient, shriveled-up priest.”
“But when it came time to roll down from that height, they realized his bones might snap.”
“With the real one, you see.”
“So Eisenstein threw on priest robes himself—‘I’ll do the falling!’—and just tumbled right off. That’s how it went.”

“An example where he even tumbled down free of charge.”

“Ha ha ha ha—that’s refreshingly straightforward.”
“Now, returning to theater matters—laborers belonging to trade unions can attend at half price.”
“What do foreigners like you do?”

“You go to the theater box office.”
“And buy tickets for that day or advance tickets.”
Around 1928, information desks at major ticket outlets would sometimes act as intermediaries in ticket sales, charging a fee of fifteen or twenty kopeks per ticket.
That practice no longer exists nowadays.

“No discount?”

“None.”
Thus, when they first went, they were taken aback by the high prices and bought seats far from the stage.
They could see the performance but couldn’t catch the dialogue.
In the end, they relented and gradually moved to seats closer up.

“Can’t you make a phone call and have the tickets delivered?”

They didn’t do that.

There was something like this.

The theaters were scattered throughout the city, so going around to each one to buy tickets proved quite a hassle.
It took an awfully long time.
The hours for selling advance tickets varied.
Even so, they couldn't obtain them on that day.
They heard from someone that behind the State First Opera and Ballet Theater, there was a place selling advance tickets for various theaters collectively.
When they went to look, sure enough, it was there.
Men and women formed a line that spilled out beyond the narrow entrance, waiting quietly in multiple layers for their turn.
Typically, play schedules covering ten-day intervals were posted in public areas, but there they had already put up a program extending twenty days ahead.
When they saw that, they felt happy.

Finally pushing through the crowd, stretching up to examine the program, jotting down the ones they wanted to see in their notebook, they stood in line for about an hour. The ticket windows were high because they were designed for the average large-bodied Soviet citizen. Chibi stretched up to reach it and, while being hurried along from behind, recited the desired theater dates and seat row numbers.
“They’re sold out.”
“That’s only the second-to-last seat in the third floor.”
After finally reaching the point where they could buy tickets for two venues through such efforts, the ticket window woman said:
“Please present your notebook.”
I don’t understand—it’s not like theater tickets require a bread and meat ration booklet.
“What kind of notebook?”
“It’s the trade union notebook, you know.”
“I’m not a trade union member.”
“Do you have any kind of notebook?
…But…”
The ticket window woman was being kind.
Because she had asked that way, Chibi said “Yes” and handed it over.
Great Japan’s foreign passport!

“Were you carrying a passport around?”

——Ah.
Then the woman laughed and said, “Oh well.”
A large worker-like man who had been looking down on this scene from behind said, “Exactly! That’s a kind of notebook too.”
I burst out laughing.

“Did you get the tickets?”

“I sure did!
And at half price.”
……I hadn’t realized that place was a ticket agency exclusively for trade union members.

“Did you see any plays in Paris too?”

“I saw them.”

“What about in Germany?”

—"I saw them."

—"How do they compare to Soviet theaters in terms of interest?"

—"In German theater, while their mechanical techniques excel and their theatrical history shares close ties with Soviet theater, there was nothing that particularly astonished me. I actually wanted to be astonished, but I didn’t encounter anything of that sort. I saw things like Reinhardt’s modern rococo tendencies and Piscator’s technical mastery backfiring to produce anti-socialist effects."

“Did you see the Grand Guignol in Paris?”
“Isn’t that famous? Do they have things like that in the Soviet Union?”

“It’s fortunate they don’t have it. I was shocked precisely because it was so dreadful. It wasn’t astonishing, wasn’t frightening, wasn’t beautiful, and wasn’t sordid. They flaunt thoroughly banal so-called abnormal psychology and sexual urges through the most inept plots.”

“What about revues?”

“There are Soviet-style revues.”

“What about operettas?”

“There are.”
“But they’re still Soviet-style.”

“…Since we’re on the subject, how about telling me your impressions of the plays you saw—like the Moscow Art Theater if it’s the Art Theater, MOSPS, and others?”

“Well, I’m just an amateur.”
“…But if you’re interested, would you look through this notebook?”

“You’ve really stuck them all in here.”
“There’s a whole bunch… Are these all tickets from plays you saw in Moscow?”
“What’s this?”

“Ah, I cut out the theater advertisements that appear daily in Izvestia as samples and kept them.”

“What’s this first-class thing here, printed in such large letters?”

“Vega——……It’s a horse racing advertisement.”

“Do they have horse racing too?”
“Did you go there?”

“I went and came back freezing.”

“Do they invest money in it?”

“They do.”
“Because the purpose is horse breeding improvement; the horses run with two-wheeled carts attached.”

“I know asking you about horse racing won’t get me anywhere.”
“Oh, what’s this?”

Every theater had its own wall newspaper.
Like factories, government offices, and schools.—It was a photo of a theater wall newspaper exhibition.

“Hmm.”
“This whole notebook looks like a theater diary.”

“In the Soviet Union, history progresses at a truly rapid pace.”
“Wait four or five more years—I think even theater will have changed considerably.”
“Wouldn’t that be fascinating?”

How did a foreign amateur who loved the Soviet Union view its theaters from 1928 to around 1930?——

First National Opera and Ballet Theater

Ballet "The Football Player"

By Gurzhumov

Chinese Revolution and China's Beautiful Daughter.

Several years had passed since *The Red Poppy*—a ballet themed on imperialism and militarism—was introduced as a new Soviet ballet.

When Soviet citizens saw a newly arrived foreigner, they would always ask first:

——Did you see *The Red Poppy*?

Yet once you had seen that, Soviet ballet truly exhausted its stock of new works, forcing you to watch the old-fashioned *The Sleeping Beauty*.
——Hadn't it already been thirteen years since the revolution in the Soviet Union?
And still——did ballet's current state demonstrate the conservatism of the National Opera and Ballet Theater?
Or did it mean no worthy creators of dance dramas had yet been born in the Soviet Union?

The so-called Russian ballet had enjoyed worldwide fame.
It was strange that while Soviet society as a whole was advancing at a rapid tempo toward socialism, ballet failed to reflect that movement at all—

The working masses shared this sentiment.
Thus when the production of the new ballet *The Football Player* was announced in the Five-Year Plan’s second year, it met with widespread anticipation.

“How was it?”

“As you know, it’s something entirely new after all.”

“Well, did you manage to see it?”

“Hmm… Just take a look for yourself.”

Indeed.—
While the plot involved an illicit romance between a football player and a cleaning woman who was a female Communist Youth member, entangled with non-class-conscious petty bourgeois (meshechane) young man and woman, how did this arrangement fundamentally differ from the traditional configuration of a prince, princess, and beard-faced samurai harboring unrequited love?
The prince was merely replaced by a footballer wearing a Soviet-made black-and-yellow striped jersey; the life sentiments of the new Soviet proletariat remained unaddressed.

However, at the square in front of the football stadium—Albert Square—where all sorts of street vendors had gathered along the thoroughfare, there was this fragment of vivid daily life: the moment they spotted a policeman approaching from afar, they would scatter like spiderlings in an instant—at this sight, there was no one who could help but laugh.

However, in a comical twist, this most vivid episode’s scene was actually the least ballet-like part throughout all three acts of *The Football Player*. There wasn’t a single dancing vendor. Old women carrying baskets of eggs and newspaper vendors clattered across the vast stage of the First Opera and Ballet Theater from right to left, kicking up dust as they rushed in—nothing more. They were played straight. And so one couldn’t help but laugh.—

There, even the ballet technique that would intuitively convey the fresh Soviet social life of the present and future was lacking. Both the football player and the young woman worker with a broom danced in an entirely classical ballet style—they were disciples of Anna Pavlova. The Komsomol girl still rose onto her toes like the swans of old ballet, took those quick little tip-tap steps, and sharply extended one leg.

The Komsomolets and Komsomolka—mere in their uniforms—chased each other surreally, performed their toe dances culminating in trite happily-ever-afters; as for the final Five-Year Plan ballet adaptation—it stood beyond redemption.

What do you think symbolizes the Five-Year Plan?
Five women wearing bizarre veils.
As these five women twisted through their antiquated dance—like fate’s own messengers—an agricultural tractor and several dancers emerged from the depths of the stage.
They joined in and began to dance.
The tractor’s appearance clearly intended to symbolize rural collectivization.

Next, a mechanical waterfall began crashing down with a thunderous roar.
A silver-clad woman fluttered out.
She performed a solo dance—this, one must understand, represented Soviet "electrification."

When the lighting changed abruptly, the waterfall was instantly ablaze with the radiance of flames.
A man in flame-colored attire darted about everywhere.

“Oil! Oil!” A voice rang out from the audience as if solving a riddle.

Iron, coal.
Five or six male dancers in black costumes half-heartedly mimicked biomechanics.

But do not be startled, gentlemen—throughout this final act, there existed this unimaginable fact: a large crowd of about two hundred people in white shirts—identified in the program as sports youths—stood neatly arranged on platforms of varying heights, remaining motionless whether the waterfall cascaded or the oil blazed, not a single foot stirring until at last the curtain fell.
Surely this imitated American grand revues flooding their stages with showgirls.

The First National Opera and Ballet Theater, dating back to 1776. Now, "Blue Shirts"—it was neither an imitation of theater troupes nor of Meyerhold. Unique training and techniques had to be utilized. However, the collapse evident in *The Football Player*'s staging was something that demanded rigorous self-criticism from GOTOBU. That two hundred "youths" were used merely as standing figures—as nothing more than scenic substitutes—revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of art's essence in socialist society, transcending questions of stage direction competence. Did they comprehend how this casual waste of human energy for cheap spectacle effects proved bourgeois theater troupes' antiquated practices still lingered within GOTOBU's staging philosophy? It was precisely this organic deployment of crowds serving thematic purpose that had made the Moscow Art Theater's *Armored Train* succeed—and yet—

Generally speaking, when in Japan, opportunities to see opera were exceedingly rare.
Since one usually only listened to excerpts of opera music on records, the beauty of the music as such struck one intensely, yet only in isolated fragments.
Even Russian operas that came from places like Harbin—people paid exorbitant sums to listen to them.

Upon coming to Moscow, I was able to hear grand productions of *Boris Godunov*, *Sadko*, and *The Demon* from the stage, and saw various ballets as well.
Then, I came to hold a different perspective towards opera and ballet than I had when in Japan.

In general, traditional opera had already ceased to be an art form closely suited to Soviet life.

I had thought that if opera was uninteresting, one couldn’t comprehend Western music.
But having heard operas in Moscow and Berlin—including those at La Scala, which were so noisily discussed—I discovered that it would not be a mistake to say the operatic form itself was becoming a thing of the past, containing elements we found tedious.

When one reads the letter that Wagner—who both birthed opera and nurtured it into such a grand scale—wrote to German Emperor Wilhelm I, the doubts we hold today about opera become clear.

In his later years, Wagner wrote to the emperor that music was an effective means to easily govern the populace and thus secured imperial patronage for opera’s flourishing.
He promoted it as a policy of keeping the people ignorant.
Moreover, by 1930, the sensibilities of the very bourgeois society that birthed classical opera were already crumbling away from their interest in it, shifting toward revues and light music.
The fact that opera and ballet steadily fail to discover new forms while stagnating thematically—yet revues provided by more modern American entertainment capitalists after World War I expand flashily—is an inevitable cultural phenomenon of bourgeois society entering its period of collapse.

In the Soviet Union, opera was treated from the clear perspective of being a legacy of the past.
Soviet new musicians were thus given the significant challenge of how to utilize this vast heritage and develop new forms befitting the sensibilities of a socialist society.

Even at the First National Opera and Ballet Theater, during the long intermissions of operas, one could often see Soviet citizens—both men and women—taking out books to read.

In the ballet *The Football Player*, we were shown a typical example of such mishandling, but one thing that impressed me about Soviet opera was how theatrically crowds were utilized on the operatic stage as expressions of collective power.

This became immediately clear when compared to the stage crowds of La Scala’s *Carmen*.

GOTOBU too lined up large crowds in colorful spectacle on stage—empty scarecrow-like displays—but toward the central scene of an act unified the movements of hundreds of people through lighting to maintain emotional expressions and postures strictly aligned with the theme. They were used to support the protagonist and add depth to the stage effects. This organized the chaos inherent in opera’s grand bustling stages to great effect. Even in *Boris Godunov* they achieved freshness through new stage devices and skillful handling of the crowd-chorus.

When I saw La Scala’s Carmen in Berlin, I was astonished at how carelessly that so-called “La Scala” handled its crowd. Although they sang in chorus, the men and women of the crowd were utterly disjointed in mood and focus—as if declaring, “Yes, my role is merely to sing like this.”

In Kabuki, crowds were utilized solely for plot exposition, with the so-called “locals, a few people” noisily clamoring—the crowd never coalesced into a compelling force. The fate of the masses was not taken into account.

Soviet theater, forged by the Revolution, clearly replaced in its expressive forms the "clustered human masses" of the past with "collectives of volitional people."

In both GOTOBU's operas and ballets alike, I had thought this autonomy would govern their handling of chorus-collective coordination.

*The Football Player* informed us of the opposite.
The executives of GOTOBU remained unable to break free from the individualism and overemphasis on the individual inherent in bourgeois stage art.
At GOTOBU, under senior "People's Artists" like Kriger and Geritsel-Sobinov, there existed a multitude of newly established stars or those aspiring to become stars.
They displayed a marked eagerness to impress the audience with “themselves” by utilizing the forms of past ballets and operas whenever the opportunity arose.
(As a result, the audience here had come to hold the most personal favoritism among the many theatergoers in Moscow.)
The football player rushed onto the stage clutching the ball, and suddenly a voice called out.
—“Smolitsov!”
“Smolitsov!”)

In *The Football Player*, they failed to break free from the tiptoe dancing technique of the GOTOBU group and were unable to fully eliminate the individualism of this prima donna soloist.
The climax of the third act—the expansion of Soviet production, the advancement of socialism—Ura!
By the end of 1929, the daily lives of Soviet citizens were bathed in a new light.
This was a crucial scene that should have unified and uplifted the audience through the fervent, blazing power of encouragement directed toward these developments.
And yet, how did they express it?
They expressed it in a manner entirely contrary to what was necessary—they thought.
It was the climax.
There, hmm... Who should dance with whom? Whom must we have dance here?
But before the roaring waterfall, they ended up merely having a water spirit dance while waving a silver veil, with several fire spirits leaping about.
The Soviet Five-Year Plan—a colossal will, plan, and realization to harness nature’s potential for human happiness—and the united efforts and will of the Soviet masses dedicated to its completion were not expressed on the climactic stage; they were reduced to nothing more than the span of a veil waved by a single star dancer’s hand.

In the contemporary Soviet Union, a scene where two hundred muscular youths—dressed in sports shirts and loincloths—stood idly lined up on a platform with arms crossed, merely observing oil and coal chunks haphazardly bouncing about, utterly failed to evoke any empathy from the audience.
Rather, it made one feel irritated.

In the row in front of us was the Moscow correspondent from Dai-mai.
During the intermission, he turned to us and

“What do you think?”

he asked.

“Well…”

“They dance quite well.”

And he mentioned that Kriger and his group of seven had recently finalized plans to depart for Japan.
It was said to be something like a reciprocal gesture for Kabuki having come to Moscow.

“Kriger is a ‘People’s Artist’ after all, so he must be excellent.”

I believe that what the Japanese masses await from Soviet art is not merely something "well-understood" or honorary titles.

What connection could exist between Kriger performing classical ballet forms on stages like the Imperial Theater—where tickets cost seven or eight yen apiece—and Japan's proletariat encompassing two million unemployed?

(Later, this plan was canceled.
The reasons remain unclear.
However, it appears there was also a reassessment that Kriger's artistry leaned too heavily on classical traditions.)

Three Nights at the Meyerhold Theater

1

Among Soviet Russian theater troupes, the Meyerhold Theater was the next most widely known throughout the world after the Moscow Art Theater.

In Japan too, productions replicating Meyerhold Theater works such as *Roar, China!* and *D.E.* were staged.

*Roar, China!* had considerable propaganda effect.
Not only did it make clear both the power of imperialist nations colonizing China and the state of China’s laboring people, but Meyerhold’s young actors excelled at imitating Americans and the British.
Whether it was their tone of speech or their gestural mannerisms, they were skillful.
Along with the biomechanics that had been introduced from the beginning, this was indeed one of the Meyerhold Theater’s distinctive features.

Even in *Roar, China!*, the naval officers of imperialist nations were portrayed with such realism that one couldn't help but feel indignation alongside the Chinese proletariat at their tyranny.

The Meyerhold Theater possessed a vigorous research spirit as a whole.
Looking at Meyerhold’s work from when he returned to Moscow from Southern Russia immediately after the Revolution, became chairman of the Theater Department of the People’s Commissariat for Education, and gradually carried on up to today, this could be clearly stated.

The Meyerhold Theater’s groundbreaking new production of Gogol’s *The Inspector General* sent shockwaves through Soviet theater troupes.
A similar attempt with *The Sorrow of Wisdom* ended in failure.
It was not merely out of curiosity that Meyerhold undertook these endeavors.
This was an attempt to thrust the monumental content of the nineteenth-century *The Inspector General*—in Soviet sound and Soviet form—into the social self-criticism of the Soviet proletariat engaged in socialist construction.

Indeed, seeing Meyerhold’s *The Inspector General* for the first time proved startling.
The final scene ostensibly concluded with the conventional "collective astonishment" tableau.
Yet Meyerhold refused to lower the curtain there.
Immediately afterward, the mayor descended into madness.
Shrill whistles pierced the air in rapid succession.
Tight-fitting costumes burst forth.
Red placards cascaded down to engulf the stage; actors leapt from the platform and careened through the audience seats, shrieking like imps as they scrambled about—then vanished abruptly. When the stage relit, there they stood: through cinematic flashback technique, the familiar figures of the mayor’s wife, postmaster, and entourage had returned to their original positions, petrified in rigid doll-like poses of collective astonishment.

Oh? Was this real? But that shift felt too abrupt. Something seemed off. They're mannequins—the moment this realization struck, the stage plunged into darkness, leaving spectators with a sensation as though seared by flames.

"The Inspector has come!"
"The Inspector has come!"

A shrill whistle!
Another shrill whistle!

The impression—alongside the figures of the mayor and his wife frozen mid-astonishment like mannequins, and the postmaster among them—remained with an intensity so searing it induced a headache.

"The Inspector has come!"
"The Socialist Inspector has come!"
A shrill whistle!
More shrill whistles!
And one felt how this type of crowd—those who froze in shock at such an inspector's arrival—had been entirely fixed into mannequins, both as a class and as archetypes.

Meyerhold has not repeated in any other script a climax as impressive and intense as that in *The Inspector General*.

In *The Inspector General*, they constructed a fan-shaped sloped platform on the main stage that rose higher and narrowed in width toward the rear.
Across this morbidly dim yet intensely illuminated narrow platform stage—where Khlestakov moved in lavish attire to create a densely concentrated atmosphere for the romantic scenes with the mayor's wife and daughter—Meyerhold demonstrated his signature style. When Khlestakov, wearing Lloyd glasses, paced back and forth brandishing his cane en route to the mayor's residence, Meyerhold boldly spanned the stage with a copper-bronze railing, rigorously aligning the moving figures along a single strong axis—a masterstroke far from ordinary.
Yet in the climactic scene—where real elements abruptly appeared before shifting to what seemed entirely real, though the human-connected parts remained bizarre—one could understand why Meyerhold possessed such an unconventional appearance even in photographs.

Motionless mannequins.
Cold mannequins.
It was Meyerhold alone who employed the dramatic effects of such elements on a grand scale and with 100% technical mastery.
(While the Okame mask was utilized by Eisenstein in the film *October* in an extremely ideological manner...)

And yet, what a contrast between the bottomless decadent sensuality that permeated Meyerhold’s *The Inspector General* and the pastoral cheerfulness of love’s expression—the uproarious nonsense—in Ostrovsky’s *The Forest*.
The contrast between the dark, violent pressure of *D.E.*—as if smeared with black lacquer—and the hewn-stone-like force of *Roar, China!* reveals that Meyerhold is no ordinary talent.

*The Auspicious Husband* was set in a flour mill shed, but the two windmills behind the shed did not spin solely to grind flour.
As the dramatic tension on stage intensified, the large red windmill swung into motion atop the stage, serving without fail as a dynamic visual expression of surging emotions.—

Meyerhold had once been part of the Moscow Art Theater. After leaving there—in the early 1900s, when Gorky was just beginning to work as a novelist and Chekhov was still alive—he wandered through parts of Russia. Chekhov too appears to have sensed Meyerhold’s talent. In a letter addressed to someone, Chekhov wrote in his characteristically private manner: “I want to let him discover his true path.”

What struck us as profoundly significant was that this simple yet weighty statement by Chekhov remained, even for Meyerhold of today, a question yet to be decisively answered.

Stanislavski—who had been at the Moscow Art Theater around the same time and was considerably older than Meyerhold—had established realism at the Moscow Art Theater and demonstrated the potential for steady development in works such as *Armored Train*. As a "People's Artist" of the Soviet Union, he stood as an already accomplished director. Among the Soviet audience, there were likely none who sensed elements of instability or unknowns in the current Stanislavski and worried about what might become of him in the future.

Meyerhold, too, was a "People's Artist."
The Soviet Union had awarded him its highest title in recognition of his exploratory efforts in theater both before and after the Revolution.
Yet in Meyerhold’s case, this title did not serve as any material to anchor his talent to a fixed place.

Meyerhold’s prodigious talent.
That was a fact not merely fully grasped by Soviet audiences but recognized worldwide.
He remained perpetually experimental and daring in new endeavors.
This too became evident when examining his body of work from 1921 through 1928-29.
It could be said that Meyerhold’s defining characteristics were concentrated in precisely this aspect.

However, there remained one thing that was not yet clearly understood by anyone.
That was the problem of how the Soviet Five-Year Plan—alongside the ever-advancing reality of socialist society—and the distinctive artistic characteristics Meyerhold identified as unique to his understanding of art (= extreme stylization, Constructivist-inspired eccentricities, exaggeration, and a kind of morbidity) would mutually develop in relation to labor.

The Five-Year Plan for Production Expansion increased Soviet output at an astounding rate of tenfold to sixtyfold while socializing 92% of industrial production and 65% of agricultural production.
This signified socialist advancement across all fronts of social life.
With the commencement of the Five-Year Plan, by 1930—its second year—the relationship between Soviet production and literature had grown closer than at any time since October.

The cultural level of Soviet workers, peasants, and general laborers engaged in production had risen remarkably, and through the practice of production, the dialectical materialist creative method had come to be established as the general artistic method.

In a pamphlet compiling several of his speeches titled *The Reconstruction of the Theater*, Meyerhold ardently spoke about the tasks of Soviet theater during this period of reconstruction.

“The theater has a new mission.”

“The theater must undertake work that serves to strengthen the audience’s will to combat Oblomovism, sexual mania, and pessimism through its performances.”

Even if the Soviet Union lags behind Berlin and New York in the number of theaters, the quality of its audience is entirely different.
Soviet audiences, particularly the younger generation, through art education in clubs, have conscious demands for theater as a class weapon that foresees future development.

Theater, as belonging to the people building a socialist society, demanded performances that consistently provided impressions resonating with real-life emotions. The audience desired to clearly grasp for what purpose this play was being performed and how it had resonated in their own hearts. In other words, they sought to ascertain what the director and actors—who were staging this production so that they might truly view it as their own—were attempting to convey.

The director and actors were expected by the audience to act, think, present problems, critique them, and discuss together with them on stage.
And since it was theater, it demanded that the stage itself act precisely upon the audience’s emotions and sensibilities.

Meyerhold emphatically argued that during this historically significant period of socialist reconstruction in the Soviet Union, "stage beauty" had to be re-examined for plays aimed at the Soviet masses to succeed in these two aspects.

"The slogan 'Drive beauty from the stage!' has long existed in the Soviet Union."
It was a phrase uttered in opposition to bourgeois theater’s decadent practice of extravagant spending on grandiose stage sets and actresses’ costumes.
Meyerhold, too, banished old bourgeois-style aesthetics from his Constructivist stage with its stark contrasts of light and shadow.

What mechanisms were at play in Meyerhold’s successful stagings of *D.E.*, *The Forest*, and *The Auspicious Husband*?
What splendid costumes could there have been?
In *D.E.*, there was only a brown wooden fence and several wooden screens.
The characters adhered to a unified palette of white and black.
The stage of *The Forest* featured a wooden bridge with one audaciously long and beautiful line, a small gate painted on wood, and a tin teapot.
With a *clang*, *clang*, a tin plate was struck to produce a jarring noise; there was merely a single swing.
The young Aksyusha and Pyotr, clad in silver-gray cotton outfits, swayed on that swing to the strains of an accordion, enacting a vivid and joyous love scene that would linger in memory.

The Second Art Theater, Vakhtangov Theater, Kamerny Theater, and Satire Theater repeatedly went too far with ornamentation for ornamentation’s sake in staging and costumes for costumes’ sake.
At the Meyerhold Theater, there was almost no experience of such waste, except for one instance where they perhaps overindulged in stage design.

In his current re-examination of "stage beauty," Meyerhold had not retracted his original declaration.
Stage devices as components of dramatic expression must not receive more treatment than necessary was his assertion.
Meyerhold maintained that Soviet theater stages must possess the beauty of a sturdy Ford automobile - one thoroughly engineered through precise assembly.

Regarding this point, a single highly nuanced and intriguing observation was made.

Indeed, automobiles possessed a beauty of practicality.
They had no unnecessary screws in their overall structure nor any superfluous accidental protrusions.
Every part was something necessary for an automobile to be an automobile.
But Meyerhold!
“Are you speaking about automotive beauty from the consumer’s standpoint—viewing them, savoring their body aesthetics, enameling them in favored colors—or are you grasping that beauty from the producer’s standpoint that prioritizes engine development above all?”

In what relation did proletarian art—which was acquiring a dialectical materialist realism alongside the Five-Year Plan—and Meyerhold’s stylization, tinged as it was with a certain gimmickry, along with its attendant exoticism and exaggeration, develop? What relationship existed between the lived reality of culture that contemporary Soviet masses actually felt and the distinctive features of the Meyerhold Theater, which was meant to be both its theatrical expression and inspiration? The reason Meyerhold’s "true path" had not yet been clearly determined lay there.

2

*The Bedbug*

*The Bathhouse* by Mayakovsky

These two were the first scripts related to the Five-Year Plan that Meyerhold successively staged during the 1928 and 1930 seasons.

*The Bedbug*—the insect itself—was by no means a rare creature in contemporary Soviet life.
Just like bedbugs, drinking, smoking, bureaucracy, and suicides stemming from love affairs were by no means rare.

The second part of *The Bedbug* was set in Soviet society fifty years later.
As a relic of the previous era, a single bedbug continued to exist as a specimen.
Onto the stage appeared a giant artificial bedbug.

Bureaucrats, too, were nowhere to be found in Soviet society after the Five-Year Plan—even if one wished to see them.
Finally, Prisypkin—the central character from Part One—was kept as a specimen in the natural history classroom.

In Soviet society fifty years later, all major events were to be resolved through radio voting.
Prisypkin—a toxic bacillus of bureaucracy and philistine tastes for the clean socialist society—had been discovered in a state of suspended animation, but how should they dispose of him?
In the end, through a radio resolution across the entire USSR, he was revived, trial-bred as a rare specimen under strict confinement in a cage, while a masked socialist professor of the 1970s explained to male and female students the peculiar habits of bureaucratism—such was the plot.

This five-act, nine-scene comedy was written by Mayakovsky—the poet of the "Left Front"—during the era when the Soviet Union, at the outset of its Five-Year Plan, was undertaking large-scale efforts to eradicate bureaucracy and oppose alcoholism for the sake of labor discipline.

Meyerhold—how did he realize his "tasks of Soviet theater during the reconstruction period" through the works of this Left Front poet?

The theme was indeed the struggle against bureaucracy that the Soviet masses had fought through their labor—Meyerhold’s direction did not bore as one watched from act to act provided they did not resist its comedic exaggerations.

But what passed for socialist social life in 1970s Soviet society—beginning with fantasies of nationwide radio resolutions—gave everything an air of unreality.
In other words, this critique presented as belonging to Soviet society fifty years later utterly lacked any necessity or concreteness rooted in facts developing from 1929’s realities.
It felt as though only a mechanical negation of 1929’s negative aspects was being performed.
Soviet 1929 could never be reduced to bedbugs and bureaucracy alone.

And yet which Soviet worker could have imagined that after ten Five-Year Plans had been implemented，society would become a world where a single bedbug and one bureaucratic philistine remained preserved as natural history specimens！
(At a time when imperialist nations occupied most of the globe，desperately defending their interests.)

Meyerhold，collaborating with author Mayakovsky，attempted to demonstrate socialist society’s culture in 1979 by introducing various machines onto the stage．
Even here，it lacked authenticity．
That people living under socialism favored machinery was evident．
Yet there emerged no vivid，truthful expression of machines as scientific tools—machinery intimately connected with production and daily life，which an advanced proletariat ought to have mastered．
What these portrayals conveyed foremost were machines as playthings，objects of fascination．
In this sense，they even embodied an ironic critique of contemporary mechanization．

In *The Bathhouse*, Mayakovsky asserted the emergence of a Soviet Edison from among worker youth, the rejection of petit bourgeois tastes and blind worship of foreign capitalist nations, and finally socialism’s victory—arguing that only in socialism’s “bathhouse” could humans truly be cleansed.

Meyerhold directed this six-act play using a distinctive revolving stage and biomechanics.

1930 became a year when theaters across the Soviet Union adopted revolving stages.
This development likely owed something to Japanese Kabuki's visit to the Soviet Union in 1928.
For *The Bathhouse*, Meyerhold engineered a circular aperture of fixed diameter into the stage.
The central hub remained stationary.
A broad surrounding ring bearing multiple scene elements rotated seamlessly through full revolutions.
At key moments, this ring would spin rapidly through one or two turns, realizing Meyerhold's signature dramatization of mass psychological intensity.

The movements of Chudakov—a proletarian master inventor clad in work clothes—and his several comrades were always rhythmically unified in a comprehensive manner, while the machine invented by Chudakov did not take shape upon the stage.
The existence of the machine was suggested solely through the gestures of the inventor and his comrades as they joined hands and carried an object with great care, heaving-ho as if it were heavy.

In the climax, a welcoming airplane arrived from the socialist country’s capital.
The airplane was said to be parked at a very high place, like the rooftop landing pads of future America, and remained invisible from the spectator seats.
Led by the woman envoy Svoboda from the central government—who had descended from above in silver and red flight suits—Chudakov’s team climbed step by step higher and higher up the scaffold assembled at the center of the stage toward the airplane.
The philistines and anti-socialist individuals who tried to cling on and board the socialist capital were—amid a deafening roar and billowing smoke—cleanly hurled down from the scaffold to beneath the stage by some scientific force.
Before one knew it, the airplane soared off toward the socialist capital, and the play came to an end—such was the conclusion.

Mayakovsky’s yearning for and love of scientific power are expressed even more directly in *The Bathhouse*.
Indeed, the development of Soviet science was more essential than anything for socialist production and construction projects.
From agricultural tractors to airplanes—of course—and extending even to the potential of the powerful inventions being developed somewhere by Comrade Chudakov, these were undoubtedly the concerns of the entire conscious proletariat of the 1930s.

The Soviet Union was buying machines from America and Britain.
The revolutionary proletariat knew.
The Soviet Union was receiving guidance from American engineers at the Gigant State Farm for the time being—to enhance socialist production technology and eventually cease importing even a single tractor from abroad.

In *The Bathhouse*, Mayakovsky boldly satirized both foreigners unsympathetic to Soviet construction projects and the obsequiousness of cultural liaison guides who groveled at any foreigner wearing fine woolen coats.

Mayakovsky’s heart—one that loved the Soviet Union, ardently desired its development, and longed to depict it in his plays as vividly as if seeing it before his eyes.
Meyerhold’s will—his attempt to capture through his direction the so-called “beauty of a well-assembled Ford.”
Both are understandable.
The two were testing their talents within the Soviet historical circumstances of carrying out the Five-Year Plan.

However, regrettably, none of them could be said to have succeeded.
The author and the director joined forces, only to slip once again into imaginary and ideological fantasies of socialism and science.

For Soviet workers who strove with their bodies and minds to build socialism—swinging hammers in workplaces and driving tractors—this play felt irritatingly off-target: too fantastical, lacking any substance connected to today's reality, its theme utterly devoid of realistic force.
Truly, it was a work imagined at a desk, a play directed in a model-like manner through concepts.
The hot flames spilling from the stage and igniting the audience—Meyerhold's own most crucial theatrical element, the "capture of emotion"—utterly failed.

I saw *The Bedbug* just a few days after Mayakovsky's suicide.

I saw Mayakovsky lying in the coffin placed in the hall of the All-Russian Writers' Union Council Club during the farewell ceremony.
His face with its strongly set jawline, the red flag enveloping the body, the roses laid upon the chest.
These would be photographed and preserved on some page of Soviet Literary History.
While moving in line through the solemn crowd of mourners that extended beyond the gates, passing by the coffin's foot, I saw something unexpected.

The tip of the foot clad in Mayakovsky's boot had accidentally protruded from the red flag, turned abruptly this way. It was an utterly ordinary black leather ankle boot. There was only one thing about this boot that was not ordinary. It was the iron rivet fixed to the sole of that large, ordinary Soviet boot.

To secure the edge, rivets are ordinarily driven into the heel of the boot. In the boots worn by Mayakovsky's corpse, the rivets were firmly driven into the very tip of the toe; worn down, they gleamed smooth and glossy.

The blazing lights of the grand hall vividly illuminated the red flag covering the body of poet Mayakovsky, who, though unable to keep pace with it himself, had trusted in Soviet power and the victory of socialism until the very end and took his own life.
At the same time, they glinted off the two small rivets at the tip of his scuffed boots.
How many among the thousands of mourners paused to consider the meaning of these two small rivets that seemed to epitomize his entire life?

It was an old memory from some time past.
I once read words by a kendo master who admonished himself: "One cannot become a true practitioner until the front edge of their clogs wears down."

The rivet driven into the toe of Mayakovsky's boot—to his future!
Onward!
It spoke with utter honesty of his life spent striving to push even further to the forefront of a Soviet society that was itself relentlessly advancing.

Crushed by the mold of his unique talent—a mold from which he had failed to liberate himself—and driven to suicide, he must have shouted “Long live!” toward the triumph of Soviet culture surging forward, even as he transcended himself and lived out his identity as a class artist.
I felt that way.

Therefore, even regarding the ideological collapse evident in *The Bedbug*, before it could make me feel contempt, it first made me acutely aware of the fierce tempo of Soviet society's developmental strides.

For author Mayakovsky, *The Bedbug* and *The Bathhouse* were the final punctuation marks in his artistic leap. However, for director Meyerhold, it marked the first step in work that should advance alongside the Five-Year Plan.

How will he now reorient his extraordinary talent toward reality and grasp the realism required for authentic proletarian theater? How will he seize anew machinery, science, and production—how will he capture what he terms "the beauty of Ford"—from within the proletariat's constructive actualities? Here lies a great unknown.

Around the same time as Mayakovsky’s works, proletarian poet Bezymensky’s *The Shooting* was staged at the Meyerhold Theater.

As the Soviet Five-Year Plan was realized, udarniks for increasing production efficiency were organized among factory workers.
Centered around communist youth of both sexes, non-party activists spontaneously gathered.

At production sites, the class struggle waged by these udarniks for socialist construction became an inseparable historical fact of the Five-Year Plan.
Bezymensky transformed into a verse play the struggles, sacrifices, and victories experienced by newly organized udarniks at a tram manufacturing factory.

The one who directed this production was not Meyerhold himself.
It was a collaborative effort by Zaitchikov, Kozhikov, and two or three others.

Compared to Meyerhold's own usual direction, it appeared far more realistic with a rough-hewn weightiness, giving a stage impression akin to that of the Revolutionary Theater.
As it was a verse play, the dialogue was in poetry, but it gave the impression that it would take considerable time for the young actors of the Meyerhold Theater who performed in *The Shooting* to master the recitation method with articulation as clear as that of the Moscow Art Theater's actors.

As a verse play, Bezymensky’s production was raised as an issue in Soviet proletarian literature across various circles.

In a different sense than Mayakovsky, the fact that its grasp of social phenomena lacked dialectical thinking became the central point of debate. The shock troopers were without exception Soviet-style paragons of virtue. The saboteurs were thoroughgoing villains through and through. Between these two archetypes lay only a mechanical application of Marxist opposition—not a single instance of true Bolshevik-style engagement with concrete villains, no appeals to wavering workers in their workplaces, no benevolent guidance. The reality of workplaces asserted that things were never so simplistic.

This criticism is accurate.

However, *The Shooting* was at least the first work to center on the udarnik.
The Meyerhold Theater was also the first to stage, with realistic themes, the newly emerged social phenomena brought about by the Five-Year Plan.

The Meyerhold Theater’s auditorium had crude plank-board chairs.
A single rod was forcefully inserted through their legs, securing about ten chairs each to prevent movement.
As I was watching from around the sixth row—though I should clarify that the Meyerhold Theater lacked a smoothly descending curtain for intermissions—when the actors withdrew from the stage, leaving only the tram manufacturing factory set remaining on stage, the author Bezymensky came out to address the audience.

A large forehead.
His fingers were slender and supple, and he had a receding chin.
Bezymensky emerged wearing a suit with a mouse-gray flannel collar.
And then he delivered the following greeting.

"Today—March 10, 1930—both *Pravda* and *Izvestia* were writing on their front pages about the glorious sixtieth birthday anniversary of Comrade Ryazanov, one of the Soviet Union's most meritorious Marxists and director of the Lenin Institute.
We, the Soviet proletariat—workers engaged in constructing production and culture—rejoiced wholeheartedly to have such a contemporary among us.
Fortunately tonight, in this theater’s audience seats, Comrade Ryazanov was witnessing our humble effort: the performance of *The Shooting*.
On this commemorative occasion, I wished to request Comrade Ryazanov to say a few words—"

Bezymensky, having finished speaking in his well-honed, resonant voice—flexible from years of poetry recitation—bowed from the stage toward the audience below.

Applause.
Applause.
The audience, excited, continued applauding without cease.
The spectators in the back stretched upward trying to see Ryazanov.

The direction in which Bezymensky had bent forward was not far from my seat.
When I peered carefully through the shoulders of those seated in front, a single bald head—still retaining white hairs at the back—flushed red and quietly sank into its seat.
Ryazanov had been in the third row.

Bezymensky bent forward two or three more times, inviting him onto the stage, but Ryazanov did not move.

Giving up, Bezymensky raised his hand, silenced the unabated applause, and began to say what he wanted to say.

"This verse play is a historical work written during the earliest phase of the Five-Year Plan when only thirteen udarnik groups had been organized in Moscow. If there are shortcomings，they are primarily due to such objective circumstances．And I condemn *Literary Vanguard*，the organ of the Russian Proletarian Writers' Union，for remaining silent about this work for ten whole months．"

Bezymensky was eloquent.
However, in the seat next to mine, a young woman who appeared to be a party member was watching the performance with a male companion.
The man was considerably older, wearing a black rubashka and sporting a gold wristwatch.
Holding the woman’s hand in his own, he paid no heed to what Bezymensky was saying from the stage and whispered to her.

“Hey, let’s postpone it by a day.”
“I’ll send a telegram over there for you.”
“—”

“No, it’s no good. Impossible.”

“You’re not alone in this—things will work out. Come on, let’s postpone it, just one night!”

“No good!”
“Absolutely no good!”

On stage, Bezymensky was still speaking.
When I suddenly looked ahead, Ryazanov—his white hair hanging down—took out a snow-white handkerchief and wiped his bald head.

Had he broken into a sweat…?

I involuntarily smiled.
[March–April 1931]