Sputniks On A Teacup

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30937, 18 December 1965, Page 12

Sputniks On A Teacup

IB V

ROGER COVELL,

in tht "Sydney Morning H*rol4”J .

THE sound of massed balalaikas gargling a tune of infinite n overwhelms the small train compartment, and jerks me out o P*

The knob I turned up during the night in the belief that it governed the heating turns out to have been a radio volume control.

I pull aside the window curtains of the Berlin-Moscow express, deep red velvet curtains of a kind that must have been in use in Czarist days. The Russian forest is flowing past: pointed, jutting darkness against a lightening grey sky. Except that it consists of pines and firs and birches and not at all of gum trees it is Australian in its size and sameness.

It is also almost more Russian than any scene in real life has a right to be. The balalaikas accompany an endless travelogue; mile after mile of flat, immemorial landscape. Peasant women in scarves and boots. Fur-hatted men breathing steam. The occasional houses are Russian-Australian farmhouses and groups of country cottages (dachas) of unpainted wood with an impermanent look seemingly inevitable in countries that can’t be neatly parcelled up and tamed. Like The Yukon Nearer Moscow light snow has been falling. The moist brown wood of small houses and lean-tos is trimmed with white; sharp white and dense brown: it might be an old photograph of the Yukon. The carriage attendant brings around black tea, Russian style, in glass tumblers cradled in silver mounts with extravagantly curving handles. The silver mounts and handles are of traditional design: their inset motif, in contrast, is sometimes a spired building of the Moscow University type, sometimes a circling sputnik. The sputnik on the silver tea-cup might be a summary of a traveller’s first impressions of Soviet arts and Soviet society: the endless and apparently increasing search for continuity between a romantically sprawling past and a technologically exact present. Forty-eight years after the October Revolution, after the earlier emphasis on class division, enemies of the people, internal hatred, the fabric of a seamless Russian or Soviet nationalism is being woven from a mounting sense of need and pride. Change Of Plans My colleague and I are here as guests, briefly examining a few aspects of Soviet music and theatre. The Union of Soviet Friendship Societies, our hosts, have prepared a tight, intensive programme for us; but they revise it at a moment’s notice, goodhumouredly ringing up important people for last-minute seats, patiently making detours from arranged journeys to satisfy a sudden new suggestion. We are not attempting instant political judgments, any more than we are undertaking to be good

i boys and mention only the things we like. But a play here, an opera or ballet there, a gallery or museum, a snatch of conversation or the look of a street all seem to confirm an impression that is certainly as much social as artistic.

Someone says to us after we have looked at one of the palaces of the old aristocracy: “We think our nobility knew how to live—and where.” He might be the first person to denounce anyone who lived like that today, but the pride in his voice is unmistakable. We wouldn’t be surprised—except that he is too polite—to hear him go on to say that their nobility were better, at least at high living, than ours: after what we have seen, we wouldn’t dream of arguing with him. Our street map of Moscow carries a note urging us to visit the Kremlin as (despite all its black memories of Tsarist oppression) “a living witness of the glorious history of the Russian State.” The present-day official users of the houses of preRevolutionary princes or Merchants tell us the history of their former owners with relish and even affection. These former owners were on the wrong side, no doubt, but they are also part of the tradition of grandeur in which every person in the Soviet Union is encouraged to take some vicarious national pride. Family Legend The extravagance and wealth of the old order now far enough away in time to be part of family legend, like the exploits of a scandalous but dashing great-uncle. Certainly the official view seems to be to encourage Soviet citizens to embrace all periods of history and not merely its “progressive” or revolutionary events. The most modern museum building in Moscow is devoted to a panorama of the Napoleonic battle of Borodino; and when, in Pokofiev’s opera‘‘War and Peace”—uneven (musically, neccessarily only ■« gallant sketch of the hovel, but brilliantly staged and performed at the Bolshoi—Marshal Kutuzov muses on his decision to leave "Moskva” open to Napoleon it is possible to sense in the theatre how closely feelings about that war and the last are identified. Our hotel, the Ukraine, on

Kutuzovsky avenue beside the Moscow river, is one of the smaller but still enormous architectural offspring or satellites of Moscow University that went up in the 1950 s. Its 28 floors and 1100 rooms mount through a series of heavy shoulder-pieces (each topped with large antiquestyled urns) towards a square tower and a slender spire. Architects customarily, and no doubt with good reason, regard this type of Moscow building as deplorable. It is a relic of Stalinist baroque, a child’s idea of splendour. Modern Buildings But in its own way it, too, deserves some sympathy as a search for continuity. Some or the newer Moscow buildings, such as the Hotel Aeroflot, are indistinguishable externally from the average glagswaUed structures of hundreds of other cities; and the shopping streets have begun to sport cafe facades designed in the dean transparent style of Scandinavian internationalism. These are handsome and undeniably much cheeper to build.

Yet the Hotel Ukraine and its companions grow their own aura after a day or two. With spires lost to view in morning mist or silhouetted like storybook palaces against the evening sky they are the buildings that give modern Moscow its special image in the memory. The links with past styles and ideas are usually much less crude, as well as bring more familiar, in the performing arts. There are occasional works of opera and ballet which are poster art, unsubtie and “popular” in the wont sense: the ballet “Spartacus,” for example, which we saw in Leningrad. We braced ourselves and told our host we thought it poor stuff; banal in conception, balietically hardly more than a series of elementary poses, tediously prolonged with mock sword-fights of the most puerile kind. We even added the perhaps needlessly wounding remark that Hollywood is much better at this kind of thing. Happy Hosts Instead of being affronted, our hosts seemed delighted: “We thought you bad good taste. Now we are sure of ft." And as proof that these are not isolated or daringly heretical opinions the official book on the BoMtt Ballet has little more to nay of "RwC cue” (it has been staged. In both Moscow and Leutagrtid as well as in other centres) than that It is a “grandfose pantomime.’'

We encountered nothing else, except most of the recent pictures in the Tretyakov Gallery of Russian painting, that suffers front comparable faults. Many of the productions are of an exquisite skill, a supremely

developed romantic •V’* gives a fundamental shtft to the overtones of “socialist realism"; and again the most powerful general impression is of the sense of continuity that unites preRevolutionary and postRevolutionary times. 70, Looks 50 The Chekhov Museum in Sadovo-Kudrinskaya street, Moscow, where Ch*** o * lived during the writing of his early play. “Ivanov, contains photographs preserving the setting and grouping of two or three acenes from the original production of Tnc Cherry Orchard.” At the Moscow Arts Theatre, where the original production took place, we were fascinated to_ witness a performance of The Cherry Orchard" which had similar groupings and an almost identical arrangement of

accnory. The illustrious Tarasova, who has played all the leading feminine roles in this play in her time. Is a glorious Madam Ranyevsky. though experienced followers of her career say she was more temperamentally suited to the part of Anya in her younger days. Tarasova is reputed to be 70, but she looks a ripe and lovely 50. Glebov is a matchless Fin and the whole cast literally faultless. The Anya la a beautiful young creature who can personify the world’s springtime in her smile and eyes, the Varya a touchingly dutiful . girl of melting likability. No doubt these two will also be playing Madame Ranyevsky in their old age. When the announcement of the sale of the house interrupts the party scene a sweet-faced girt in her best dress looks on in wide-eyed alarm, memorable though silent: she, surely, will be the next Anya in the royal line. Lasting Impression Theoretically, so powerful a sense of dynasty and tradition ought to produce a mechanical, perfunctory performance. In fact, the playing brims with fresh response and quick sympathy. Even though we had to supply the sense of individual speeches from memory we walked away from the theatre with the sobering thought that only another visit to Moscow or a miraculous accident would ever allow us to see so profoundly satisfying a performance of this play again. “The Cherry Orchard" has a background of dasa decay _ that makes it a logical sub- '* ject in a political sense for the highest energies of

Soviet artists. The same does not apply to Tchaikovsky’s opera “Eugene Onegin,” which is a poatByronic love story of purely personal significance and which retains, partly because of this and of the superlative merits of its music, all the popularity it had in an earlier age.