Man From the USSR & Other Plays (32 page)

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Authors: Vladimir Nabokov

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The Soviet tragedies are in fact the last word in the cause-and-effect pattern, plus something that the bourgeois stage is helplessly groping for: a good machine god that will do away with the need to search for a plausible final effect. This god, coming inevitably at the end of Soviet tragedy and indeed regulating the whole play, is none other than the
idea of the perfect state
as understood by communists. I do not wish to imply that what irritates me here is propaganda. In fact, I don't see why if, say, one type of theatre may indulge in patriotic propaganda or democratic propaganda another cannot indulge in communist propaganda, or in any other kind of propaganda.

I don't see any difference because, perhaps, all kinds of propaganda leave me perfectly cold whether their subject appeals to me or not. But what I do mean is that whenever propaganda is contained in a play the determinist chain is drawn still tighter around the throat of the tragic muse. In Soviet tragedies, moreover, we get a special kind of dualism which makes them well-nigh unbearableâin book form at least. The wonders of staging and acting that have been preserved in Russia since the nineties of the last century, when the Art Theatre appeared, can certainly make entertainment even out of the lowest trash. The dualism to which I refer, and which is the most typical and remarkable feature of the Soviet drama, consists in the following: We know and Soviet authors know that the dialectical idea of any Soviet tragedy
must
be that party emotions, emotions related to the worship of the State, are above ordinary human or bourgeois feeling, so that any form of moral or physical cruelty, if and when it leads to the triumph of Socialism, is admissible. On the other hand, because the play must be good melodrama, in order to attract popular fancy, there is a kind of queer agreement that
certain
actions may
not
be performed even by the most consistent Bolshevikâsuch as cruelty to children or betrayal of a friend; that is, mingled with the most traditional heroics of all times, we find the rosiest sentimentalities of old-fashioned fiction. So that, in the long run, the most extreme form of leftist theatre, notwithstanding its healthy looks and dynamic harmonies, is really a reversion to the most primitive and hackneyed forms of literature.

I would not wish, however, to create the impression that, if I fail to be spiritually excited by modern drama, I deny it all value. As a matter of fact, here and there, in Strindberg, in Chekhov, in Shaw's brilliant farces (especially
Candida
), in at least one Galsworthy play (for instance,
Strife),
in one or two French plays (for instance, Lenormand's
Time Is a Dream),
in one or two American plays such as the first act of
The Children's Hour
and the first act of
Of Mice and Men
(the rest of the play is dismal nonsense)âin many existing plays, there are indeed magnificent bits, artistically rendered emotions and, most important, that special atmosphere which is the sign that the author has freely created a world of his own. But the perfect tragedy has not yet been produced.

The idea of conflict tends to endow life with a logic it never has. Tragedies based exclusively on the logic of conflict are as untrue to life as an all-pervading class-struggle idea is untrue to history. Most of the worst and deepest human tragedies, far from following the marble rules of tragic conflict, are tossed on the stormy element of chance. This element of chance playwrights have so completely excluded from their dramas that any denouement due to an earthquake or to an automobile accident strikes the audience as incongruous if, naturally, the earthquake has not been expected all along or the automobile has not been a dramatic investment from the very start. The life of a tragedy is, as it were, too short for accidents to happen; but at the same time tradition demands that life on the stage develop according to rulesâthe rules of passionate conflictârules whose rigidity is at least as ridiculous as the stumblings of chance. What even the greatest playwrights have never realized is that chance is not always stumbling and that the tragedies of real life are based on the beauty or horror of chanceânot merely on its ridiculousness. And it is this secret rhythm of chance that one would like to see pulsating in the veins of the tragic muse. Otherwise, if only the rules of conflict and fate and divine justice and imminent death are followed, tragedy is limited both by its platform and by its unswerving doom, and becomes in the long run a hopeless scuffleâthe scuffle between a condemned man and the executioner. But life is not a scaffold, as tragic playwrights tend to suggest. I have so seldom been moved by the tragedy I have seen or read because I could never believe in the ridiculous laws that they presupposed. The charm of tragic genius, the charm of Shakespeare or Ibsen, lies for me in quite another region.

What then ought tragedy to be if I deny it what is considered its most fundamental characteristicâconflict ruled by the causal laws of human fate? First of all I doubt the real existence of these laws in the simple and severe form that the stage has adopted. I doubt that any strict line can be drawn between the tragic and the burlesque, fatality and chance, causal subjection and the caprice of free will. What seems to me to be the higher form of tragedy is the creation of a certain unique pattern of life in which the sorrows and passing of a particular man will follow the rules of his own individuality, not the rules of the theatre as we know them. It would be absurd to suggest, however, that accident and chance may be left to play havoc with life on the stage. But it is not absurd to say that a writer of genius may discover exactly the right harmony of such accidental occurrences, and that this harmony, without suggesting anything like the iron laws of tragic fatality, will express certain definite combinations that occur in life. And it is high time, too, for playwrights to forget the notions that they must please the audience and that this audience is a collection of half-wits; that plays, as one writer on the subject solemnly asserts, must never contain anything important in the first ten minutes, because, you see, late dinners are the fashion; and that every important detail must be repeated so that even the least intelligent spectator will at last grasp the idea. The only audience that a playwright must imagine is the ideal one, that is,
himself.
All the rest pertains to the box-office, not to dramatic art.

“That's all very fine,” said the producer leaning back in his armchair and puffing on the cigar which fiction assigns to his profession, “that's all very fineâbut business is business, so how can you expect plays based on some new technique which will make them unintelligible to the general public, plays not only departing from tradition, but flaunting their disregard for the wits of the audience, tragedies which arrogantly reject the causal fundamentals of the particular form of dramatic art that they representâhow can you expect such plays to be produced by any big theatre company?” Well, I don'tâand this, too, is the tragedy of tragedy.

Books by Vladimir Nabokov available in paperback editions from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers

Lectures on Don Quixote

Lectures on Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature

The Man from the USSR & Other Plays

Footnotes

1 Â© Article 3b Trust Under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov; unfinished and unpublished novel.

Man From the USSR & Other Plays (32 page)

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