Soviet Theatre during the Thaw: Aesthetics, Politics and Performance by Jesse Gardiner (review)

Reviewed by: Soviet Theatre during the Thaw: Aesthetics, Politics and Performance by Jesse Gardiner Greer Gerni Soviet Theatre during the Thaw: Aesthetics, Politics and Performance. By Jesse Gardiner. (Cultural Histories of Theatre and Performance) London: Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama. 2023. x+218 pp. £80. ISBN 978–1–350–15062–1. In fewer than two hundred pages, Soviet Theatre during the Thaw fills a large gap in mid-twentieth-century Soviet theatre scholarship. Its author details how Soviet theatre returned to its avant-garde origins, arguing that this shift destabilized Stalinist hierarchies of aesthetics and genre. Jesse Gardiner's vivid Introduction situates the reader in the theatre districts of Soviet Moscow before meticulously laying out the complex web of political, cultural, and performance history leading up to the Thaw era (roughly, 1953–64). Gardiner borrows Jacques Rancière's idea of dividing art-making into 'regimes' rather than time periods 'as a framework to understand the changing practices and discourses of theatre in the Soviet Union' (p. 11). Rancière's framework serves throughout this monograph to sift the entangled relationships of art and government. In the final chapter, Gardiner enforces Rancière's argument that politics 'is itself a form of theatrical spectacle because it consists in the staging of a reality that has not yet been achieved' (p. 169). The book moves through the unachieved reality of Khrushchev's Thaw, paying special attention to the revival of the avant-garde, increasing nostalgia for 1920s values, and the dismantling of the genre hierarchy in theatre. A series of detailed case studies highlight the ever increasing ideological distance between Moscow's Kremlin and nearby theatres. Six chapters organize and dissect the theatrical events of the Thaw which, Gardiner argues, ultimately contributed to transforming the relationship between the Soviet people and their government. By focusing on the Stalin-era hierarchy of genre and the resulting devaluation of the avant-garde, the first chapter, 'Soviet Theatre under Stalin', introduces those political and artistic systems dismantled during the Thaw. The second chapter, 'Leningrad in the Shadow of the Other: Akimov at the Lensoviet Theatre, 1952–5', uses director Nikolai Akimov's trilogy of satirical productions to illustrate how the divide between realism and theatricalism began to soften. Gardiner pinpoints the premiere of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's End Page 288 Shadows (Teni (1865), the first of Akimov's trilogy), on 27 November 1953, as the point when the Thaw began in theatre. He argues that this play called for the artist's right to independence, thus challenging the strict confines of Stalinist Socialist Realism (p. 7). Akimov's three productions exemplify three major Early Thaw changes in production: critique of the regime, deconstruction of Stalinist aesthetics, and revival of the avant-garde (p. 75). Chapters 3 and 4 continue to illustrate changes in production through revivals of earlier Russian works. Each case study in these two chapters questions the relationship between director, playwright, and play (and its genre), demonstrating the greater fluidity of expression in Russian theatre. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the impact of new plays and new theatres, paying special attention to the creation of Moscow's Sovremennik Theatre in 1956 and its staging of fairy tales by Evgenii Shvarts. Gardiner points out that these productions of Shvarts's plays, previously banned under Stalin, contributed to 'de-Stalinization through "carnival laughter"' (p. 169). From the Introduction, which works both as a who's who of early twentieth-century Russian theatre and as a crash course in Soviet politics from the revolution through the Thaw, to the Epilogue detailing the Thaw's legacy of nuanced, mixed-genre drama, Gardiner's book provides authoritative detail on the direct relationship between theatre and politics and how this affected Soviet culture. With so many artists mentioned only briefly, Gardiner opens the door for further English-language scholarship on Thaw-era theatre. Greer Gerni University of Missouri Kansas City Copyright © 2024 The Modern Humanities Research Association