Abstract

Joanne Ledger Boris Ravenskikh's Staging of L. N. Tolstoi's The Power of Darkness: Some Echoes of the Avant-Garde During the Thaw· The Thaw years of the period 1953 to 1957 provided the historical context for some innovative theatrical productions by Russian directors who had learned their craft in an earlier phase of liberation, in the positive and dynamic cultural milieu of revolutionary Russia. In 1952 Iurii zavadskii, who had been a student of a talented director of the 1920s, Evgenii Vakhtangov, produced Lermontov' s Masquerade, while Nikolai Okhlopkov, a former student of Meyerhold,l staged The Thunderstorm (1953) and Hamlet (1955). Other notable productions were L. S. Bub'en's The Lower Depths (1955) and A.V. Efros's Good Luck! (1955).2 Significantly, this same period also witnessed a new interest in staging Tolstoi's dramas. For example, in 1950 V. Kozhich staged The Living Corpse at the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad, in 1951 M. Kedrov produced The Fruits of Enlightenment at the Moscow Art Theatre, and in 1956 Boris Ravenskikh produced his interpretation of The Power of Darkness at the Malyi Theatre in Moscow. Ravenskikh's production of The Power of Darkness sparked a controversial debate in the pages of the journal Teatr in the