Revolution strikes the eye

John Willett

• Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde by Constantin Rudnitsky, translated by Roxane Permar
  Thames and Hudson, 320 pp, £40.00, April 1988, ISBN 0 500 01433 7
• The ‘Golden’ Twenties: Art and Literature in the Weimar Republic by Bärbel Schrader and Jürgen Schebera, translated by Katherine Vanovitch
  Yale, 271 pp, £25.00, April 1988, ISBN 0 300 04144 6

For anybody interested in the history of the modern Russian theatre, particularly its visual aspects, the publication of Dr Rudnitsky’s handsomely illustrated book is an event. Based at the Moscow Research Institute for Art History, the writer is an established authority who has already published two books on Meyerhold in the USSR, and was enterprisingly commissioned by Thames and Hudson to write the present work for English-language readers. In the past two decades a handful of good studies of Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and Granovsky have been published in the West (notably the works by Edward Braun and Béatrice Picon-Vallin): but nothing on quite this scale has appeared for many years – perhaps not since Joseph Gregor and the historian René Fülöp-Miller produced their Das Russische Theater in Vienna in 1928. The subject is still astonishingly rich, and if it has lost something of its original shock effect for our theatres, it gains greatly by the author’s presentation of many of its less well-known figures and aspects, along with the new material which he prints.