The Icon and the Axe

These remarkable allegories, for all their popularity among the younger generations, are still primarily the work of older men. In the Stalin era fables and legends had the value of providing remote locations and a new "Aesopian" language with which to talk about vital questions. Others of the older generation used children's tales or "Eastern fables" as media in which serious ideas could be discussed with relative safety. Sergius Mikhalkov, an established writer of children's stories and author of an allegorical satire written in 1952, The Crayfish, which was daring for its time, composed an extraordinarily pointed poetic fable about the legendary Khan Akhmet. This cruel, one-armed ruler wanted his portrait painted, but killed the man

who portrayed him with only one arm for insulting the state, and killed a second who represented him with two arms for "lacquering over" reality. A third painter found the key to survival in this eminently Stalinesque situation by painting the terrible khan in profile.49

Schwarz, the master of dramatic fables, wrote almost all his plays during the Stalin era, though he was understandably not widely produced till after the dictator's death. Schwarz kept himself alive largely by writing for the movie and puppet theaters-the latter providing for him another outlet for Aesopian commentary on Soviet society. His fabulous world combines elements from Russian folklore and the Yiddish theater with the tales of his beloved Andersen in an effort to keep alive "the spirit of music" that had animated the culture of early-twentieth-century Russia. His first book, The Tale of an Old Balalaika, published in 1925, told of a balalaika in search of words for its music. His entire dramatic career can be seen as an attempt to provide those words for the fading but still unextinguished music of a rich culture.

The distinctive new feature of the post-Stalin stage was the increasing success of problem dramas on contemporary themes in pushing out older Russian classics and propagandists melodramas from theatrical repertoires. In the late Stalin era, for instance, Ostrovsky and Gorky tended to be the most frequently performed dramatists. By the early sixties, however, their works received less than one tenth the number of performances in Moscow that they had been given in the last year of Stalin's life.50

The harsh official criticism of Zorin's Guests just after Stalin's death encouraged aspiring dramatists to be more oblique but at the same time more many-sided in their critiques of Soviet society.51 The popular and gifted young playwright Volodin ridicules a Young Communist League organizer in his Factory Girl, and tells in intimate, unheroic terms of an old love broken up by long years of absence (presumably in a forced labor camp) in his Five Evenings. A virtual catalogue of new thematic material is introduced into the play Everything Depends on People, which includes a suicide of despair, and a sustained on-stage dialogue between a scientist and a priest in which the latter scores more than a few telling debating points.

Zorin's new play of 1962, By Moscow Time, presents the now-characteristic juxtaposition of an old-style party official with a young reformer anxious to press de-Stalinization to the limit. The latter decides that the old man must go because "he is not a town, you can't just rename him." Another play of the same year, More Dangerous than an Enemy, works this juxtaposition of the good worker and the bad bureaucrat into a farcical, almost Gogolesque plot. Staged appropriately enough by Akimov, the play

depicts the battle of wits between evil party leaders and the good scientific workers in a provincial institute dedicated to the study of yoghurt. When the managers hear a rumor (ultimately proved false) that Moscow is about to launch a new campaign to rid the USSR of fools, they make great efforts to arrange to pin this label on their subordinates-only to be outfooled by the scientific workers after a series of episodes faintly reminiscent of a Damon Runyan story. Aksenov's Always on Sale of 1965 is both more inventively fantastic and more bitingly contemporary in vernacular language and satirical thrust than these earlier plays, and may be the harbinger of more interesting drama yet to come.