ANTI-RELIGION

Waipa Post, Volume 45, Issue 3208, 26 July 1932, Page 6

ANTI-RELIGION

POET-LAUREATE'S PLAY

Demyan Byedny, who is a sort of unofficial Soviet poet laureate, and whose jingling rhymes have made him the most widely read among contemporary Soviet versifiers, has now. written a coarse and violent anti-re-ligious sketch, entitled "How the Fourteenth Division Went Into Heav--en," which is being shown every night in Moscow's leading music hall, writes the London Observer's correspondent. While the Soviet atheist organisations have always recommended the stage as a suitable propaganda agency, this is the first specifically anti-religious play which has been given for a long time before large audiences. It begins with a representation of the Russian and German armies moving against each other, while on each side wave the cross and invoke divine aid. Then the scene shifts to a Russian village where the priest is depicted as a thorough-going hypocrite and speculator, who robs an old woman the last communion to her. Heaven, in the later episodes of the sketch, is represented as a combination of a cabaret and a ruthlessly policed State; the personages of the Trinity, St. Peter and the Archangel Michael are caricatured and shown carousing with Rasputin. The Fourteenth Division of the Russian army comes into Heaven en masse, because it has been completely annihilated by a German land mine. ,