Talk: Sergei Tretyakov and His Plays

Pushkin House invites to join the talk about Sergei Tretyakov – famous Russian writer, playwright, and poet.

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 the 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.

In English