When Tretyakov’s ground-breaking play, I Want a Baby, was banned by Stalin’s censor in 1927, it was a signal that the radical and innovative theatre of the early Soviet years was to be brought to an end. A glittering, unblinking exploration of the realities of post-revolutionary Soviet life, I Want a Baby marks a high point in modernist experimental drama.
Tretyakov’s plays are notable for their formal originality and their revolutionary content. The World Upside Down, which was staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1923, concerns a failed agrarian revolution. A Wise Man, originally directed by the great film director and Tretyakov’s friend, Sergei Eisenstein, is a clown show set in the Paris of the émigré White Russians. Are You Listening, Moscow?! and Gas Masks are ‘agit-melodramas’, fierce, fast moving and edgy. And Roar, China! dramatizes an actual incident in the West’s oppression of China, when a British gunboat captain threatened to blow the city of Wanxien to bits. Roar, China! was translated into many languages and produced in cities across the world.
These plays are not only stirring in their themes, they are also hugely significant in their construction. Tretyakov’s early plays led directly to Eisenstein’s highly influential theory of ‘the montage of attractions’, while later his ideas were crucial in the formation of Bertolt Brecht’s theory of epic theatre.
Academic and Soviet Theatre expert Dr. Robert Leach, who has translated five of the seven plays in this collection, will talk about the man whom Brecht called ‘my teacher’ and the extraordinary scope and versatility of this contemporary and equal of Eisenstein and Meyerhold, whose work has until relatively recently been neglected and overlooked. Robert Leach will talk about his ongoing research into Tretyakov’s life and work and his friendship and collaboration with Tretyakov’s adopted daughter, Tatyana Sergeyevna Gomolitskaya-Tretyakova, who survived the arrest and death of her step-father and the imprisonment of her mother in the Gulag from 1937 to 1955.
He will be joined by Stephen Holland, translator of the other two plays, and Ksenia Papazova, managing editor at Glagoslav Publications.
Stephen Holland will talk about his experience of translating I Want a Baby and Roar, China!
Ksenia Papazova will give a brief overview of Glagoslav Publications and their imprint.
There will also be a rehearsed reading of the central scene from I Want a Baby, when Milda attempts to seduce the building worker, Yakov.
In English
This is a Pushkin Club event and all are welcome
Robert Leach is an academic, a writer and a freelance theatre director. He has a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and has been Reader in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham and Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Edinburgh University.
His professional theatre work has included acting in USA and directing in Moscow, where he staged the Russian premiere of I Want a Baby in 1990.
He has written over a dozen books on the theatre, including Revolutionary Theatre (Routledge 1994) and Russian Futurist Theatre: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and he co-edited with Victor Borovsky A History of Russian Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 1999). He is also a poet, and five collections of his poetry have been published.
He has specialised in the work of Sergei Tretyakov and is currently engaged in writing a biography of Tretyakov.
Stephen Holland is a modern foreign languages, Further Education and TEFL teacher. He was first taught Russian in the 1960s at Wolverhampton Grammar School. He has a BA Combined Honours in Russian and Sociology from the University of Birmingham and an M.Phil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University. His postgraduate dissertation examined aspects of the Russian anthropologist S.I.Vainshtein’s work on the nomadic culture of Tuva, now renamed Tyva.
He is currently working on translations of Tretyakov’s poetry.
Ksenia Papazova is managing editor of Glagoslav Publications B.V., Tilburg, the Netherlands.
She is currently working on a PhD in Russian Studies from the University of Manchester on Print and Digital Culture in Modern Russia and is organising New Russias 2020 – the first UK festival dedicated to contemporary Russian culture from the 7th-9th February 2020 in Manchester.
She has an MA in Book and Digital Media Studies from Leiden University, a ‘Candidate of Sciences’ degree in Russian Literature from the Pedagogical Institute of the Southern Federal University of Rostov-on-Don and a specialist first degree from the Faculty of West-European and Slavonic philology at Rostov State Pedagogical University.
She has taught at universities in St. Petersburg and Rostov-on-Don and contributed to academic conferences in Vancouver, Manchester and Nottingham on verbal and visual paratexts in translation and interpreting studies.
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