Director of ProductionTechnical Director
Production Stage ManagerShops SupervisorCostume Designer
Scenic DesignerCostume Shop Supervisor
Technical SupervisorPublicity Coordinator
Prop MasterSet Shop Crew
Costume TechniciansCostume Crew
Michael RamsaurRoss WilliamsAlison DuxburyPaul StrayerConnie StrayerMark GuirguisBirgit PfefferKenny McMullenMandy KhoshnevisanChristina ChaoMichele Cash, Mollie Chapman,Joseph Frega, Melisa Hill,Chienlan Hsu, Chris Junge,Margaret Lee, Becca Thal,Alexei Syssoyev, John WhiteMindy Lieu, Katie FuruyamaJennifer Beichman, DeMara Cabrera,Megan Cohen, Kristen Del Rio,Anna Kerrigan, Emily Livadary,Alida Payson, Linda Serrato
special thanks
Davey Hubay, Larissa Rhyzhik, Toby Holtzman, Galina Leytes, StanfordUniversity, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, Center forRussian, East-European, & Eurasian Studies, Taube Center for JewishStudies, Division of Literatures, Cultures, & Languages, Hoover InstitutionLibrary and Archives, Institute for International Studies, Stanford HumanitiesCenter, Irwin T. & Shirley Holtzman, The Leytes Foundation.
Mariawill run
without anintermission.
There will begunshotsonstage
during theperformance.
To receive emails about future productions, send an email [email protected] and write “subscribe performance-announce.”
Department of Drama
production staff
Photographyand
Videotapingare Prohibited.
MARIAby Isaac Babel
translation by
peter constantine
adapted for the stanford stage by
Gregory Freidin
directed by
Carl Weber
February 19–21 and 26–28 at 8pm
February 29 at 5pm
Pigott Theater
Stanford University
The Stanford Department of Drama 2003–2004 Presents:
photo credits:Davey Hubay • Alexey Smirnov
There will besmokingonstage
during theperformance.
upcoming from the department of drama...
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, directed by Matthew DaubeMar. 3–6 at 8pm, Mar. 5 at 10:30pm & Mar. 7 at 2pm. Nitery Theater, Old Union
Set DesignMark Guirguis
Sound DesignAdrian Coburn
DramaturgyGregory Freidin
Kathryn Syssoyeva
Costume DesignConnie Strayer
Lighting DesignAndrew M. Reid
Stage ManagerLisa Vargas
Assistant DirectorAssistant Stage Managers
Light Board OperatorSound Board Operator
DresserMakeup
Run Crew
Kathryn SyssoyevaEli PetersonLisa RowlandMalika WilliamsStephanie FriedmanEan DeVaughnJennifer Rose CarrPallen ChiuYana KesalaMeghan Dunn
DirectorCarl Weber
Mariaby Isaac Babel
translation by peter constantine
adapted for the Stanford Stageby Gregory Freidin
Staff
Turntable Controls By: Systems West
powers against Hitler. By the spring of 1939, Stalin had decided to switch sides andseek a deal with Nazi Germany. Whether by coincidence or intent (we shall neverknow), Babel was arrested on May 15, 1939, soon after the pro-German Molotovreplaced pro-Western Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. Seven monthslater, Babel was convicted of the preposterous crime of spying for France and Austriaand for belonging to a “Trotskyist terrorist organization.” He denied the chargesthroughout the investigation and during the trial, but he was shot in the Lubyankabasement the next day. His personal archive, confiscated during the arrest, hasnever been recovered despite his official exoneration in 1954.
A s of this writing, the play has had successful runs in Italy,Czechoslovakia, and both East and West Germany in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.In 1979, it was adapted for and shown on BBC television. In 1990, it appeared on thetheater stage in London Old Vic’s. In 1994, it was finally staged in Russia by MikhailLevitin in his Moscow theater “Ermitazh.” Why Maria has not generated any stagehistory in the US is whole other story.
—Gregory Freidin1 “Khodya” (Chinaman), 1923.2Victor Shklovsky, “I. Babel: A Critical Romance,” Lef 2 (1924):153.3 The Cheka, or the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression
of Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, was founded by decree in December, 1917,and continued under various names all throughout the Soviet period (GPU, NKVD,MVD, KGB). The security services of the post-communist Russia, the FSB, still considerthemselves part of this unbroken tradition.
4 In 1937, Shchadenko (1885-1951), was appointed by Stalin DeputyPeople’s Commissar of Defense to head the all-important Personnel Department ofthe Red Army.
5 Vsevolod Ivanov’s Armored Train 14-69 (1927), K. Trenev’s Liubov’ Yarovaya(1926), and Vs. Vishnevsky’s Pervaia konnaia (1930), and of course, Mikhail Bulgakov’sThe Days of the Turbins (1927), which after Stalin’s personal intervention becamethe mainstay of the Maly Theater repertoire.
Photos of Maria Denisova are from the catalogue of the Denisova Exhibitionat the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow. The Committee on Culture of the City ofMoscow and V.V. Mayakovsky State Museum. Pictures of Civil War Petrograd arefrom the Sokolov Album at the Hoover Institution Archives. Other photographs arecourtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives. Cover photo by Davey Hubay.
Food for the production was generously donated by:
650.941.9330225 San Antonio Road, Ste. 3Mountain View, CA 94040(Safeway Plaza at California St.)
European Deli & BakeryAuthentic Russian Food
Corporate/Private Party Cateringwww.BestRussianFood.com
SAMOVARSAMOVARSAMOVARSAMOVARSAMOVAR
Isaac Markovich Dymshits
Bishonkov (a cripple)
Yevstigneich (a cripple)
Viskovsky
(a former captain of the guard)
Filip (a cripple)
Lyudmila Nikolaevna Mukovnina
(daughter of General Mukovnin)
Katerina Vyacheslavovna Velzen (Katya)
(a live-in relative of the Mukovnins)
Nikolai Vasilievich Mukovnin
(a former general in the Czar’s army)
Nefedovna (the Mukovnin’s nanny)
Sergey Hiliaronovich Golitsyn
(a former prince)
Kravchenko
(a former Czarist officer, now in the Red army)
Madame Dora
Inspector
Policeman
Drunk in Police Station
Kalmykova
Red Army Soldier
Agasha (a janitor)
Andrei (a floor polisher)
Kuzma (a floor polisher)
Aristarkh Petrovich Sushkin
(an antiques dealer)
Safonov (a worker)
Elena (his wife)
Nyushka (a young woman from the country)
. . . . . . Zack
. . . . . . James Poskin
. . . . . . Matthew Griffin
. . . . . . Kyle Gillette
. . . . . . James Lyons
. . . . . . Audrey Dundee Hannah
. . . . . . Rachel Joseph
. . . . . . Thomas Freeland
. . . . . . Kathryn Syssoyeva
. . . . . . Michael Hunter
. . . . . . Tim Youker
. . . . . . Ana Carbatti
. . . . . . Dan Gindikin
. . . . . . Eli Peterson
. . . . . . Brad Rothbart
. . . . . . Holly Thorsen
. . . . . . Daniel Sack
. . . . . . Mandana Khoshnevisan
. . . . . . Edward Drapkin
. . . . . . Justin Liszanckie
. . . . . . Barry Kendall
. . . . . . Andrew Hendel
. . . . . . Emily Fletcher
. . . . . . Lisa Rowland
Cast(In order of Appearance)
simultaneously by two Moscow companies (the Vakhtangov Theater and the JewishState Theater, where it was to play in Yiddish) and one in Leningrad.
But on December 1, 1934, the world changed. The assassination of SergeyKirov, the Leningrad Party Secretary and a rising member of the Politburo, abolishedthe rules of the game and signaled the beginning of a new wave of repression.Staging a new play by an author as controversial as Babel became too risky foranyone to venture. When Maria was published in April, 1935, in the premier theaterjournal, it appeared carrying its own ball and chain. Running parallel with the textof the play was a patronizing and discouraging review by the arts editor of Pravda,Isai Lezhnev. The reader’s eye could conveniently skip from the play’s dialogue,printed on the upper part of the page, to Lezhnev’s droning critique below wherethe reader could learn quickly whether Babel had overdone it on sex and underdoneit on the class approach (Lezhnev though he had done both). But the stringentreviewer left a glimmer of hope. Citing the author’s private communication andsome of the play’s details suggesting that Maria was part of a sequel, Lezhnevadvised Babel, if he wished to see his Maria on stage, to tone down the sex and toclarify his ideological stand in the upcoming Maria II. For awhile, Babel tried to oblige,though apparently without much success, or enthusiasm. The project was simplyabandoned, sharing the fate of Babel’s earlier plans to produce a peacetime sequelto Red Cavalry.
Busy with his lucrative assignments for the Soviet film industry, Babel nowfocused his efforts in the literary arena on preserving his legacy—negotiating neweditions of his writings, with a few new or unpublished stories—all in the chokingatmosphere of brutal ideological diktat and mounting mass terror. Gorky’s passingin 1936 made Babel more vulnerable than ever. As his friends and colleagues weredisappearing, all he had to protect him was his visibility among the anti-fascist circlesin the West, especially France—for as long as Stalin hoped for an alliance with Western
Babel , just after his arrest in May 1939
A Note from the Director
combines the psychological depth, and therefore the ambiguity, of a Chekhovplay with the grotesquery of the avant-garde satire a la Mayakovsky’s Bath Houseor Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera. Babel was aiming at a new kind of theater,
anticipating SamuelBeckett’s Waiting forGodot by some twodecades.
A series of para-doxes posed by the playdestined it, sooner or later,to run afoul of the Sovietcensor. Babel was awarethat Maria, as he wrote tohis mother, did not toe the“general line.” Indeed,the play ends before thewoman worker gives birthwith enough said to makethe outcome of her
pregnancy—a common allegory for the revolution— to appear uncertain.Nevertheless, and in 1933-34 not unreasonably so, he had great hopes for Maria asa stage success and, more important, as a work opening a new period in hisdevelopment as a writer. He also hoped that it would put an end to the rumors—nodoubt, known to Stalin—that Babel’s diminished output signified his unwillingness totake part in the construction of the Soviet Stalinist legend.
Thematically, Maria was a play following the fashions of the late 1920s andearly 1930s and echoed what was by then a Soviet classic, Alexei Tolstoy’s novel,Sisters, part of the trilogy entitled Road to Calvary (Khozhdenie po mukam, henceBabel’s Mukovnin). Several civil war playswere successfully produced and enjoyedconsiderable critical acclaim. Armored Train1469 by his old friend and now the husbandof his former lover, was a runaway success.In short, Babel had every reason to believethat Maria might do the same service forhim.5 His earlier play, The Sunset (1928), hada mixed reception and premiered inMoscow in 1928 while he was in France. Thistime, he took great care in orchestrating hiscome-back in order to maximize the play’svisibility, not to mention the income fromadvances. He had parts of the playpublished early in 1934 in Moscow andLeningrad and gave public readings atvarious venues, feeding the excitement andpaving the way for the play’s future triumphon stage. For awhile, everything proceededaccording to plan. Maria was beingconsidered, perhaps even rehearsed,
Babel at work, 1933.
Babel with daughter Nathalie, in Paris, 1933.
It was in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was erected, that I firstencountered a text by Isaac Babel, a slim paperback titled Budyonny’sReiterarmee (Red Cavalry in English translation). Reading these short stories,I was immediately caught by the power and scope of Babel’s vision, theway he captured the events described in their complex reality, in theirambiguities and abrupt turns from horrifying cruelty to the grotesque and,often, farcical behavior, as he had witnessed it all while serving with theSoviet cavalry during the Polish campaign of 1920.
When a few years later, in 1964, an at the time completely unknownplay, Maria, received its first ever production in Italy and, soon after, inGermany, I got hold of the German translation and rediscovered whathad fascinated me in Babel’s cavalry stories. There was, in addition, theamazing dramatic structure he had created to unfold his narrative of anodd assembly of people who, caught in the turmoil of 1920 civil-warPetersburg, are swept way down, or up, from their previous station in Russiansociety. It was the combination of vibrant, colorful, often controversialcharacters and Babel’s particular epic, one might say: film-like, dramaturgythat made me keen on staging the play. By then, I was living and workingin America, and I tried to interest producers and regional theaters in Babel’sdaring text — a rather naïve attempt, I must admit. Since there was noEnglish translation yet available and I could only describe the play andexplain what made it so fascinating to me.
When Gregory Freidin approached the Drama Department and askedif we would stage one of Babel’s two plays for the conference “The Enigmaof Isaac Babel” that he planned for 2004, there came at last the occasionto explore in production the many aspects of Maria that had captivatedas much as puzzled my imagination since I first read the text forty yearsago. I hope that our audience will understand and share my fascinationwith Babel’s play and the way he makes us watch women and men whoare trapped in a world of rapid and cruel change, while they try to negotiateevents beyond their control that might either destroy or lift up their lives.
—Carl Weber
Babel’s second play, Maria, is setin Petrograd in the winter-spring of 1920. Thiswas the third year of the Russian Civil War. Theold regime began to collapse under thepressure of WWI early in 1917; the tsarabdicated in March; in November, theBolsheviks seized power, provoking the CivilWar when they dissolved the electedConstituent Assembly in January of 1918. Forthe Bolsheviks, Russia was “the weakest link inthe capitalist chain,” and they forced the CivilWar in order to ignite the revolution in the moreadvanced Western countries, therebyspeeding up the triumph of socialism all overthe world. This goal remained elusive, andalthough the Soviet Union became anindustrial superpower somewhere along theway, the means employed in pursuing it ledto death, privation, and destruction on ahistorically unprecedented scale. Whathappens to the Mukovnin family in the play is an early part of this story.
Babel did not have the benefit of historical hindsight. When he was writingthe play in 1933, the socialist experiment in Russia still had some luster, especially ifseen against the background of the economic crisis in the West, fascist dictatorshipin Italy, and Hitler’s ascension to power by constitutional means in the depression-ravaged Germany. Seen in this light, Soviet Russia could still be seen as a promising,if grossly imperfect, work in progress, and the world-famous Soviet author IsaacBabel—however intelligent, informed, and skeptical (and he was all of these)—hadpowerful reasons to hedge his bets, including the flow of royalties he received as aSoviet author. Maria, then, was very much a product of its uncertain time, and it isfilled with the ambiguities and ambivalences, refracted through the prism of Russia’srecent history.
Yet, Babel went to some lengths to make Maria chronologically precise: itsaction is dated by the references to the beginning of the Polish campaign in thespring of 1920, the subject of Babel’s famous Red Cavalry (1926). In the formerimperial capital, this third year of the civil war was remembered for its being theharshest, coldest, and most brutal. As the Civil War unfolded, the Bolsheviks abolishedall forms of private commerce and much of money economy, substituting for themWar Communism, a universal rationing system that gave them full control. Before
Isaac Babel’s Maria
sharply with its other motifs—thesterility of economic rationality,of greed, despair of people leftbehind, and darkness. It is thiscontrast and its deep am-bivalence that accounts for theplay’s overall message and itsintegrity. The otherworldly Mariadoes not redeem her loved onesdespite their innocence andtheir pleas. The strange gift shesends them in place ofredemption—a pair of boots—may be seen as a hint to themto pack and be off. One candiscern here echoes of Babel’sown thoughts on his own and hisfamily’s emigration.
Babel did not return to Russia until September, 1933, but the manuscriptof the play preceded him there, as it traveled in the pocket of none other thanMaxim Gorky—after Stalin, the most important patron of Soviet literature and thearts. Gorky himself had a mixed reaction to the play. He praised it at first, whenBabel read it to him in Sorrento, but having looked at the manuscript found the playtoo ambiguous, too grotesque and parts of the dialogue, convenient fodder foranti-Semitism. No manuscript of Maria has survived, and we do not know if Babelhad taken Gorky’s criticism to heart. But perhaps, Gorky missed the point. The play
Babel, in 1922
Maria Denisova, in 1920, during her armyservice and after three bouts of typhus.
Chronology of Russian/Soviet History:
1904-1940
1904 Russo-Japanese War1905-07 The First Russian Revolution1914 Russia enters World War I1917 February Revolution (overthrow of Nicholas II); October Revolution (Bolsheviks seize
power from the Provisional Government)1918-21 Civil War and War Communism1921 New Economic Policy (NEP)1924 Lenin dies; Stalin begin his ascent to power1929 First Five-Year Plan (industrialization and collectivization of agriculture)1932–33 Famine in the countryside1934 USSR joins the League of Nations; assassination of Sergei Kirov1936 First Show Trial; adoption of the Stalin Constitution1937-38 The Great Terror1939 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact; German and Soviet armies occupy Poland; in
response, Great Britain and France declare war on Germany; World War II begins1940 Conviction and execution of Soviet cultural and political leaders, including Isaac
Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Mikhail Koltsov, Nikolay Ezhov, Betal Kalmykov (357people in all)
1941–45 Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union and is eventually defeated1953 Stalin dies. Beginning of de-Stalinization and rehabilitations of the victims of terror.
long, life became reduced to its barest minimum, and even that could hardly besupported by the meager, starvation rations. Black market burgeoned, crimeproliferated. Petrograd—an abandoned capital since 1918, when the newgovernment moved to Moscow—was sinking into a state of nature. In the winter,giant snow drifts covered the city, in the spring, young grass was breaking out throughthe cobblestones on Nevsky Avenue, and side streets were being transformed intofields of weeds. Class and status distinctions had vanished, and aristocrats,revolutionaries, poets, and black-market dealers were thrown together in this freezingpit of a Russian Apocalypse.
Although some saw redemption in man’s return to a primeval state, manywere crushed under the rubble of the old regime. Life was laid bare and lost allpretenses to civilization (in the winter, indoor plumbing froze, and the city was coveredby excrement). All that mattered were the instincts, the will, and the wits of the menand women inhabiting the sub-arctic Hobbesean world.
As a writer, Babel was in his element, a witness to raw nature breakingthrough the cracks of one of civilization’s most beautiful shells.
Night has no mercy. The wind slashes and cuts youdown. The dead man’s fingers are feeling through St.Petersburg’s the icy innards. A crimson sign of thepharmacy shines frozen at the street corner. Thepharmacist’s head with parted hair is dropped to oneside. The frost has seized the ink-stained heart of thepharmacy. And its heart has given out. Nevsky isempty. Ink bubbles are popping in the sky. The time istwo o’clock. It’s the end. The night has no mercy.1
So ran one of his stories datelined “Petersburg, 1918.” Written fifteen years later,Maria echoes these words with uncompromising starkness. It is in this world—the
Well-placed veterans of thePolish campaign of 1920 would haveeasily understood that the eponymousprotagonist of the play, MariaMukovnin, had a transparent prototypein the person of Maria Denisova. Shewas a famous Odessa beauty and theoriginal inspiration—Giaconda—forMayakovsky’s great love epic, Cloudin Pants. A modern, independentwoman with strong leftist convictions,she spent years studying sculpture andart in Switzerland from which she wasexpelled in 1919 as a politicalundesirable. Back in Russia, she joinedwhat was to become Budenny’s FirstCavalry Army where, not unlike Babel,she worked for the Political Departmentmaking posters and conductingpolitical education classes among theranks during the Polish campaign. Mostimportant for Babel’s rehabilitationscheme, during this time Denisova metand soon afterwards married EfremAfanasievich Shchadenko (“AkimIvanych” in the play). Shchadenko wasthe Red Cavalry’s number three man,after Clement Voroshilov and SemyonBudenny, and like them, he wouldclimb to the highest ranks of the Soviet
armed forces, accelerating his careerduring Stalin’s Red Army purge.4 Theunalloyed pathos of the Polishcampaign that all of a sudden entersthe play through the character of Mariawas intended, among other things, asan olive branch, offered withoutfawning to the Red Cavalry trio.
There is little doubt that Babel’sconciliatory message reached itsintended addressee, and perhapshelped to lift some of the clouds thathad been gathering around him in themid-1930s. But it would be a mistake tosee in this “auxiliary message” of Mariaan artistic compromise. The revo-lutionary, romantic pathos of the Polishcampaign serves a key constructivefunction in the play as it contrasts
Schoolteachers selling their belongings in the street, 1919.
Steel Was Tempered. Story “Trial”is published. Finishes a play orscript about the civil war heroKotovsky. Wife Evgeniia Ezhovacommits suicide. Sends amessage to Malraux asking to berecalled to France; Malrauxdeclines. Signs contract for anedition of collected works. Writesthe script for the film based onGorky’s “My Universities.”
1939 Writes a script for a film “The OldSquare” about a falsely accusedindustrial manager. Arrest and non-stop 72-hour interrogations. Babel“confesses” and then repeatedlyrenounces his confessions, enterspleas to have the casereconsidered—all in vain.
1940 January 26: Babel is tried incamera, pronounced guilty ofspying for France and Austria andbelonging to a terrorist Trotskyistorganization, and sentenced todeath. January 27: Babel is shot.
1954 Babel is officially exonerated.1955 Babel’s Collected Stories, with an
introduction by L. Trilling arepublished in NY.
1957 Selected stories, with anintroduction by Ilya Ehrenburg, arepublished in Moscow.
Babel, late 1920s.
Number 86, Nevsky Prospekt
nocturnal world of a dying metropolis—that the action of Maria is set to unfold.
L ike much ofwhat Babel has written, theplay has powerful auto-biographical overtones.Some are on the surface.Maria Mukovnin’s letterread in Scene Five echoesBabel’s masterpiece, RedCavalry, based on hisservice with Budenny’sCossacks Army. Lessapparent, but clear tosome of his friends, the playis rooted in Babel’s sojournin St. Petersburg-Petrogradin 1918–19. He lived then in
a hotel at Nevsky 86, where much of the play’s action takes place, as the haunt ofthe play’s Jewish entrepreneur and Babel’s namesake, Isaac Dymshits. His friendVictor Shklovsky recalled his this period in 1924:
Babel lived at Nevsky 86. He lived in a hotel and livedalone. Others came and went. The house maidscleaned after him, tidied the rooms, took away thenight buckets with food leavings floating in them. Babellived his life, observing unhurriedly the hungry lecheryof the big city. His own room was clean. He’d tell methat nowadays women often gave in before sixo’clock, because trams stopped running soonafterwards. No, he was not merely a cool observer ofwent on around him. But it did seem to me that Babel,before going to bed, would put a full stop and signevery lived day—as if it were a short story. The craftand its instrument left their imprint on the man.2
In those days, Babel combined successfully, if incongruously, a career of a translatorfor the Petrograd Cheka with that of a staff writer for the anti-Bolshevik but socialistpaper New Life. The Cheka, as the Bolshevik called their political police3, hunteddown the enemies of the new regime and black market operators, like the play’sIsaac Dymshits and Captain Viskovsky, while the journal, edited by his loyal patronand literary godfather, Maxim Gorky, criticized the inhumanity and brutality of thatsame regime (until Lenin closed it down in July, 1918). Babel the writer who couldjuggle these opposites and draw from them what he needed for his art. The seedsplanted during his residence at Nevsky 86 bore their fruit in Maria.
encouragement, he wrote the first fulldraft of Maria in the space of twoweeks—“a Herculean task,” as hereported to his mother. Whatever else itmay have been, Maria was also Babel’s“return ticket.” Back in September, 1932,he was grudgingly given permission—by Stalin himself—to travel to France fortwo months, ostensibly in order to collecthis wife and daughter and bring themback to the USSR. He had nowoverstayed his allotted term by fivemonths, lending credence to the rumorsthen rife in Moscow that he wasplanning to settle abroad for good.Whether or not he had entertained suchplans seriously, by the time Babel arrivedin Sorrento, he had decided to go backand felt it in his interest to havesomething new and substantive to showfor his overextended absence.
In part, then, Maria was conceivedas a conciliatory gesture intended forhis old and increasingly powerful critics,the blustering Red Cavalry CommanderSemyon Budenny and those who stoodbehind him: Klement Voroshilov, whoreplaced Trotsky as People’s Commissarof Defense, and, ultimately, theiromnipotent patron, Joseph Stalin.Neither Budenny nor Voroshilov, whoaspired to command the armed forcesof the red empire, could forgive Babelfor presenting them in his Red Cavalryfor who they were—brave and giftedleaders of a rag-tag Cossack army, butin the end, l ike their charges,uneducated, thick-skulled, and crude.Although they were Stalin’s trustedmilitary aides since the civil war, theyranked pretty low in sophisticationamong the Red Army’s top brass, andBabel’s Red Cavalry, with its successand popularity abroad, was for them apublic relations disaster. Babel, who hadno interest in participating in politicalcontests, had tried to mend fencesbefore but never in such an elaboratefashion as he did in Maria.
Antonina Pirozhkova. Babel leavesfor Paris after Stalin grudginglyapproves Babel’s request to travelto France.
1933 Publication of Stories and RedCavalry (8th edition). Works on afilm project about Azef and writes ascript of Red Cavalry for Pathé.Visits Gorky in Sorrento and therewrites his play Maria. Returns toParis via Rome and Florence.Returns hurriedly to Moscow,penniless. Speaks publicly aboutItalian fascism, travels to theCaucasus to write a book about therepublic of Kabardino-Balkaria andits collectivized agriculture.
1934 Travels to the Donbass region tostudy industrialization. Maria isrehearsed in Moscow butproduction is delayed. Continues towork in dramatic form whilepublishing several new stories.Stays at Gorky’s estate outsideMoscow, involved in preparationsof the First Congress of SovietWriters. Meets André Malraux.Declares himself “practitioner of theart of literary silence” at the Writers’Congress. Babel’s speech isreprinted in Pravda.
1935 Maria is published. André Malrauxand André Gide demand thepresence of Babel and Pasternakat the anti-fascist congress in Paris.Speaks at the Congress, travels inFrance and Belgium beforereturning to Russia. Babel andPirozhkova establish a household.
1936 Begins collaboration withEisenstein on the film BezhinMeadow. With Malraux and MikhailKoltsov travels to the Crimea tovisit Gorky. Writers’ Union awardsBabel a dacha in Peredelkino.Mourns Gorky’s death. Travels toOdessa to participate in theshooting of Bezhin Meadow.
1937 Daughter Lydia is born to Babeland Pirozhkova. The BezhinMeadow project is denounced inPravda and the film is destroyed.Works on the special Gorky issueof USSR In Construction. Babel’sfriends in the military disappear inthe purge. Publication of “DiGrasso,” recollections of MaximGorky, and “The Kiss.”
1938 Works in Kiev on the film script,based on Nikolay Ostrovsky’s How
1924 Babel’s stories appear in theMoscow journals LEF and RedVirgin Soil, beginning Babel’sfame. Moves permanently toMoscow. Attacked by SemyonBudenny for “defaming” the FirstCavalry Army.
1925 Works in film, collaborates withSergey Eisenstein on the script fora film Benya Krik, based on hisTales of Odessa. Romance withTamara Kashirina. Babel’s sisteremigrates to Belgium; his wife,Evgeniia, leaves for France.Publication of “Story of MyDovecote” and another story of thechildhood cycle.
1926 Publication of Red Cavalry (soontranslated in German and French)Kashirina and Babel have a son,Mikhail. Babel writes Sunset, hisfirst known play. Babel’s motheremigrates to Belgium.
1927 Films Benya Krik and WanderingStars, released. Breaks withKashirina, leaving her his Moscowflat, rejoins his wife in Paris in July,finishes scripting the film ChineseMill (1928).
1928 While Babel is in France, Sunsetis produced successfully in Bakuand Odessa and unsuccessfully, inMoscow. Babel returns to Russiain October and travels in the Southof Russia.
1929 American edition of Red Cavalry.Gorky compares Babel to NikolayGogol and comes to Babel’sdefense when Budenny goes onthe offensive. Babel’s daughterNathalie is born in Paris toEvgeniia Babel.
1930 Babel settles in a village outsideMoscow. Critics begin to speak ofBabel’s “silence” as a writer. Babelis accused—falsely—of makinganti-Soviet statements whileabroad and succeeds in provinghis innocence. 4th edition of RedCavalry.
1931 Publication of two more“childhood” stories, one new taleof Odessa, and one story aboutcollectivization of agriculture.Resumes his friendship withGorky.
1932 Babel’s new apartment in Moscow.Publication of four new storiesincluding “The Journey” and “Guyde Maupassant.” Romance with
Maria Denisova, c. 1914
Autobiographical elements donot end there, and Maria should be seen inlight of Babel’s works and days in thedecade that preceded its composition. Inthe 1920s and early 1930s, he was becomingincreasingly controversial even as his famein Russia and abroad was growingunabated. Much has beenwritten about the pressuresBabel had to contend withto conform to the partyline in the arts or thebrutal threats ofSemyon Budenny. Buthe was subject tostresses of anothersort as well. Hiscomplicated per-sonal life—thelogistics of supportinghis mother inBrussels, his loverand mother of hisfirst child, TamaraKashirina, in Moscow,his wife and mother ofhis daughter Nathaliein Paris—required a lot ofenergy and imagination.What’s more, they involvedunrealistic and unrealizedcommitments to publishers andfilm studios, and the impossiblefinancial schemes he had to resort toin order even to begin to discharge what hethought were his obligations. By 1932, therewas also a budding romance with AntoninaPirozhkova... Isaac Babel was torn betweenthe life of duty, which required calculationand maximizing his earning power (he sawthis as his Jewish self, the play’s IsaacDymshits), and the life of art and romance(which he treated as his Russian soul, oneembodied in the play’s character of Maria).
The entire play is electrified by thecurrents flowing from these two thematicextremes. One pole is the pure capitalistrationality of Isaac Dymshits, the resident at
Babel’s old Petrograd address; the other isthe pure romance of the revolutionembodied in the play’s Maria Mukovninwho, like the young Babel, served in RedCavalry in the Polish campaign. The two arelinked through the person of Maria’s sister,Lyudmila (literally, “pleasing to people”), a
clumsily calculating victim of herown schemes. These two polar
opposites and the figure thatmediates them may be seen
as a melancholy auto-biographical meditation
of a man—a writer anda public figure—in crisis.Almost forty and stillunable to make achoice in his personalor public life, torn byconflicting demandsof both, Babel washaunted by thethought of never againbeing able to repeathis spectacular feat ofthe mid-1920s, when
the publication of RedCavalry and Odessa
Stories (1923-1926)brought him to the apex of
fortune and fame.
There areindications that
Babel may have conceived the play late in1929 or early in 1930, around the tenthanniversary of the First Cavalry Army, whenpolitical pressure on him to redeem himselfin the eyes of Budenny increasedconsiderably. Around that time he obtainedcommissions, and advances, for this playfrom two theaters, but for one reason oranother Maria remained on the drawingboards. Everything changed when hearrived at Gorky’s villa in Sorrento in April1933. There, away from his family andenjoying Gorky’s famous hospitality and
Isaac Babel:
A Chronology
1894 Isaac Babel (Bobel) is born inOdessa, Russia’s third largest city,to Feyga and Manus Bobel, amodest entrepreneur.
1899 Babel’s sister, Mera, is born.1905–11 Attends Odessa’s Nicholas I
Commercial School, studies violinwith P.S. Stolyarsky, learns French,English & German, becomes anavid reader, tries his hand atwriting, and frequents theater andopera.
1911–16 Studies economics and businessat the Kiev Commercial Institute,meets future wife EvgeniiaGronfein.
1913 Publication of Babel’s first knownstory, “Old Shloyme.”
1914 Receives a temporary exemptionfrom military service for reasons ofhealth; drafts his story “AtGrandma’s.”
1916 Completes studies at KievCommercial Institute, enrolls as alaw student at the PetrogradPsycho-Neurological Institute.Meets Gorky, publishes two storiesin Gorky’s journal Letopis, writesfor the Petrograd press.
1917 Charged with pornography by theold regime that soon collapses;volunteers for the Romanian front,travels to Odessa and Kiev.
1918 Works as a translator for thePetrograd Cheka, writes forGorky’s anti-Bolshevik New Life,organizes food procurementdetachments in the Volga region,works for the People’sCommissariat of Enlightenment.
1919 Returns to Odessa; works for theState Publishing House; marriesEvgeniia Gronfein.
1920 With identity papers issued in thename of Kiril Vasilievich Lyutov,joins Semyon Budenny’s FirstCavalry Army as a correspondentfor the army newspaper RedCavalryman for the duration of thePolish campaign.
1921 Publication of “The King” (Tales ofOdessa) in an Odessa newspaper.
1922 Travels in Georgia and theCaucasus, writes for a Georgiannewspaper.
1923 Publication of Red Cavalry storiesin an Odessa newspaper.
Number 86, Nevsky Prospekt
nocturnal world of a dying metropolis—that the action of Maria is set to unfold.
L ike much ofwhat Babel has written, theplay has powerful auto-biographical overtones.Some are on the surface.Maria Mukovnin’s letterread in Scene Five echoesBabel’s masterpiece, RedCavalry, based on hisservice with Budenny’sCossacks Army. Lessapparent, but clear tosome of his friends, the playis rooted in Babel’s sojournin St. Petersburg-Petrogradin 1918–19. He lived then in
a hotel at Nevsky 86, where much of the play’s action takes place, as the haunt ofthe play’s Jewish entrepreneur and Babel’s namesake, Isaac Dymshits. His friendVictor Shklovsky recalled his this period in 1924:
Babel lived at Nevsky 86. He lived in a hotel and livedalone. Others came and went. The house maidscleaned after him, tidied the rooms, took away thenight buckets with food leavings floating in them. Babellived his life, observing unhurriedly the hungry lecheryof the big city. His own room was clean. He’d tell methat nowadays women often gave in before sixo’clock, because trams stopped running soonafterwards. No, he was not merely a cool observer ofwent on around him. But it did seem to me that Babel,before going to bed, would put a full stop and signevery lived day—as if it were a short story. The craftand its instrument left their imprint on the man.2
In those days, Babel combined successfully, if incongruously, a career of a translatorfor the Petrograd Cheka with that of a staff writer for the anti-Bolshevik but socialistpaper New Life. The Cheka, as the Bolshevik called their political police3, hunteddown the enemies of the new regime and black market operators, like the play’sIsaac Dymshits and Captain Viskovsky, while the journal, edited by his loyal patronand literary godfather, Maxim Gorky, criticized the inhumanity and brutality of thatsame regime (until Lenin closed it down in July, 1918). Babel the writer who couldjuggle these opposites and draw from them what he needed for his art. The seedsplanted during his residence at Nevsky 86 bore their fruit in Maria.
encouragement, he wrote the first fulldraft of Maria in the space of twoweeks—“a Herculean task,” as hereported to his mother. Whatever else itmay have been, Maria was also Babel’s“return ticket.” Back in September, 1932,he was grudgingly given permission—by Stalin himself—to travel to France fortwo months, ostensibly in order to collecthis wife and daughter and bring themback to the USSR. He had nowoverstayed his allotted term by fivemonths, lending credence to the rumorsthen rife in Moscow that he wasplanning to settle abroad for good.Whether or not he had entertained suchplans seriously, by the time Babel arrivedin Sorrento, he had decided to go backand felt it in his interest to havesomething new and substantive to showfor his overextended absence.
In part, then, Maria was conceivedas a conciliatory gesture intended forhis old and increasingly powerful critics,the blustering Red Cavalry CommanderSemyon Budenny and those who stoodbehind him: Klement Voroshilov, whoreplaced Trotsky as People’s Commissarof Defense, and, ultimately, theiromnipotent patron, Joseph Stalin.Neither Budenny nor Voroshilov, whoaspired to command the armed forcesof the red empire, could forgive Babelfor presenting them in his Red Cavalryfor who they were—brave and giftedleaders of a rag-tag Cossack army, butin the end, l ike their charges,uneducated, thick-skulled, and crude.Although they were Stalin’s trustedmilitary aides since the civil war, theyranked pretty low in sophisticationamong the Red Army’s top brass, andBabel’s Red Cavalry, with its successand popularity abroad, was for them apublic relations disaster. Babel, who hadno interest in participating in politicalcontests, had tried to mend fencesbefore but never in such an elaboratefashion as he did in Maria.
Antonina Pirozhkova. Babel leavesfor Paris after Stalin grudginglyapproves Babel’s request to travelto France.
1933 Publication of Stories and RedCavalry (8th edition). Works on afilm project about Azef and writes ascript of Red Cavalry for Pathé.Visits Gorky in Sorrento and therewrites his play Maria. Returns toParis via Rome and Florence.Returns hurriedly to Moscow,penniless. Speaks publicly aboutItalian fascism, travels to theCaucasus to write a book about therepublic of Kabardino-Balkaria andits collectivized agriculture.
1934 Travels to the Donbass region tostudy industrialization. Maria isrehearsed in Moscow butproduction is delayed. Continues towork in dramatic form whilepublishing several new stories.Stays at Gorky’s estate outsideMoscow, involved in preparationsof the First Congress of SovietWriters. Meets André Malraux.Declares himself “practitioner of theart of literary silence” at the Writers’Congress. Babel’s speech isreprinted in Pravda.
1935 Maria is published. André Malrauxand André Gide demand thepresence of Babel and Pasternakat the anti-fascist congress in Paris.Speaks at the Congress, travels inFrance and Belgium beforereturning to Russia. Babel andPirozhkova establish a household.
1936 Begins collaboration withEisenstein on the film BezhinMeadow. With Malraux and MikhailKoltsov travels to the Crimea tovisit Gorky. Writers’ Union awardsBabel a dacha in Peredelkino.Mourns Gorky’s death. Travels toOdessa to participate in theshooting of Bezhin Meadow.
1937 Daughter Lydia is born to Babeland Pirozhkova. The BezhinMeadow project is denounced inPravda and the film is destroyed.Works on the special Gorky issueof USSR In Construction. Babel’sfriends in the military disappear inthe purge. Publication of “DiGrasso,” recollections of MaximGorky, and “The Kiss.”
1938 Works in Kiev on the film script,based on Nikolay Ostrovsky’s How
long, life became reduced to its barest minimum, and even that could hardly besupported by the meager, starvation rations. Black market burgeoned, crimeproliferated. Petrograd—an abandoned capital since 1918, when the newgovernment moved to Moscow—was sinking into a state of nature. In the winter,giant snow drifts covered the city, in the spring, young grass was breaking out throughthe cobblestones on Nevsky Avenue, and side streets were being transformed intofields of weeds. Class and status distinctions had vanished, and aristocrats,revolutionaries, poets, and black-market dealers were thrown together in this freezingpit of a Russian Apocalypse.
Although some saw redemption in man’s return to a primeval state, manywere crushed under the rubble of the old regime. Life was laid bare and lost allpretenses to civilization (in the winter, indoor plumbing froze, and the city was coveredby excrement). All that mattered were the instincts, the will, and the wits of the menand women inhabiting the sub-arctic Hobbesean world.
As a writer, Babel was in his element, a witness to raw nature breakingthrough the cracks of one of civilization’s most beautiful shells.
Night has no mercy. The wind slashes and cuts youdown. The dead man’s fingers are feeling through St.Petersburg’s the icy innards. A crimson sign of thepharmacy shines frozen at the street corner. Thepharmacist’s head with parted hair is dropped to oneside. The frost has seized the ink-stained heart of thepharmacy. And its heart has given out. Nevsky isempty. Ink bubbles are popping in the sky. The time istwo o’clock. It’s the end. The night has no mercy.1
So ran one of his stories datelined “Petersburg, 1918.” Written fifteen years later,Maria echoes these words with uncompromising starkness. It is in this world—the
Well-placed veterans of thePolish campaign of 1920 would haveeasily understood that the eponymousprotagonist of the play, MariaMukovnin, had a transparent prototypein the person of Maria Denisova. Shewas a famous Odessa beauty and theoriginal inspiration—Giaconda—forMayakovsky’s great love epic, Cloudin Pants. A modern, independentwoman with strong leftist convictions,she spent years studying sculpture andart in Switzerland from which she wasexpelled in 1919 as a politicalundesirable. Back in Russia, she joinedwhat was to become Budenny’s FirstCavalry Army where, not unlike Babel,she worked for the Political Departmentmaking posters and conductingpolitical education classes among theranks during the Polish campaign. Mostimportant for Babel’s rehabilitationscheme, during this time Denisova metand soon afterwards married EfremAfanasievich Shchadenko (“AkimIvanych” in the play). Shchadenko wasthe Red Cavalry’s number three man,after Clement Voroshilov and SemyonBudenny, and like them, he wouldclimb to the highest ranks of the Soviet
armed forces, accelerating his careerduring Stalin’s Red Army purge.4 Theunalloyed pathos of the Polishcampaign that all of a sudden entersthe play through the character of Mariawas intended, among other things, asan olive branch, offered withoutfawning to the Red Cavalry trio.
There is little doubt that Babel’sconciliatory message reached itsintended addressee, and perhapshelped to lift some of the clouds thathad been gathering around him in themid-1930s. But it would be a mistake tosee in this “auxiliary message” of Mariaan artistic compromise. The revo-lutionary, romantic pathos of the Polishcampaign serves a key constructivefunction in the play as it contrasts
Schoolteachers selling their belongings in the street, 1919.
Steel Was Tempered. Story “Trial”is published. Finishes a play orscript about the civil war heroKotovsky. Wife Evgeniia Ezhovacommits suicide. Sends amessage to Malraux asking to berecalled to France; Malrauxdeclines. Signs contract for anedition of collected works. Writesthe script for the film based onGorky’s “My Universities.”
1939 Writes a script for a film “The OldSquare” about a falsely accusedindustrial manager. Arrest and non-stop 72-hour interrogations. Babel“confesses” and then repeatedlyrenounces his confessions, enterspleas to have the casereconsidered—all in vain.
1940 January 26: Babel is tried incamera, pronounced guilty ofspying for France and Austria andbelonging to a terrorist Trotskyistorganization, and sentenced todeath. January 27: Babel is shot.
1954 Babel is officially exonerated.1955 Babel’s Collected Stories, with an
introduction by L. Trilling arepublished in NY.
1957 Selected stories, with anintroduction by Ilya Ehrenburg, arepublished in Moscow.
Babel, late 1920s.
Babel’s second play, Maria, is setin Petrograd in the winter-spring of 1920. Thiswas the third year of the Russian Civil War. Theold regime began to collapse under thepressure of WWI early in 1917; the tsarabdicated in March; in November, theBolsheviks seized power, provoking the CivilWar when they dissolved the electedConstituent Assembly in January of 1918. Forthe Bolsheviks, Russia was “the weakest link inthe capitalist chain,” and they forced the CivilWar in order to ignite the revolution in the moreadvanced Western countries, therebyspeeding up the triumph of socialism all overthe world. This goal remained elusive, andalthough the Soviet Union became anindustrial superpower somewhere along theway, the means employed in pursuing it ledto death, privation, and destruction on ahistorically unprecedented scale. Whathappens to the Mukovnin family in the play is an early part of this story.
Babel did not have the benefit of historical hindsight. When he was writingthe play in 1933, the socialist experiment in Russia still had some luster, especially ifseen against the background of the economic crisis in the West, fascist dictatorshipin Italy, and Hitler’s ascension to power by constitutional means in the depression-ravaged Germany. Seen in this light, Soviet Russia could still be seen as a promising,if grossly imperfect, work in progress, and the world-famous Soviet author IsaacBabel—however intelligent, informed, and skeptical (and he was all of these)—hadpowerful reasons to hedge his bets, including the flow of royalties he received as aSoviet author. Maria, then, was very much a product of its uncertain time, and it isfilled with the ambiguities and ambivalences, refracted through the prism of Russia’srecent history.
Yet, Babel went to some lengths to make Maria chronologically precise: itsaction is dated by the references to the beginning of the Polish campaign in thespring of 1920, the subject of Babel’s famous Red Cavalry (1926). In the formerimperial capital, this third year of the civil war was remembered for its being theharshest, coldest, and most brutal. As the Civil War unfolded, the Bolsheviks abolishedall forms of private commerce and much of money economy, substituting for themWar Communism, a universal rationing system that gave them full control. Before
Isaac Babel’s Maria
sharply with its other motifs—thesterility of economic rationality,of greed, despair of people leftbehind, and darkness. It is thiscontrast and its deep am-bivalence that accounts for theplay’s overall message and itsintegrity. The otherworldly Mariadoes not redeem her loved onesdespite their innocence andtheir pleas. The strange gift shesends them in place ofredemption—a pair of boots—may be seen as a hint to themto pack and be off. One candiscern here echoes of Babel’sown thoughts on his own and hisfamily’s emigration.
Babel did not return to Russia until September, 1933, but the manuscriptof the play preceded him there, as it traveled in the pocket of none other thanMaxim Gorky—after Stalin, the most important patron of Soviet literature and thearts. Gorky himself had a mixed reaction to the play. He praised it at first, whenBabel read it to him in Sorrento, but having looked at the manuscript found the playtoo ambiguous, too grotesque and parts of the dialogue, convenient fodder foranti-Semitism. No manuscript of Maria has survived, and we do not know if Babelhad taken Gorky’s criticism to heart. But perhaps, Gorky missed the point. The play
Babel, in 1922
Maria Denisova, in 1920, during her armyservice and after three bouts of typhus.
Chronology of Russian/Soviet History:
1904-1940
1904 Russo-Japanese War1905-07 The First Russian Revolution1914 Russia enters World War I1917 February Revolution (overthrow of Nicholas II); October Revolution (Bolsheviks seize
power from the Provisional Government)1918-21 Civil War and War Communism1921 New Economic Policy (NEP)1924 Lenin dies; Stalin begin his ascent to power1929 First Five-Year Plan (industrialization and collectivization of agriculture)1932–33 Famine in the countryside1934 USSR joins the League of Nations; assassination of Sergei Kirov1936 First Show Trial; adoption of the Stalin Constitution1937-38 The Great Terror1939 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact; German and Soviet armies occupy Poland; in
response, Great Britain and France declare war on Germany; World War II begins1940 Conviction and execution of Soviet cultural and political leaders, including Isaac
Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Mikhail Koltsov, Nikolay Ezhov, Betal Kalmykov (357people in all)
1941–45 Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union and is eventually defeated1953 Stalin dies. Beginning of de-Stalinization and rehabilitations of the victims of terror.
A Note from the Director
combines the psychological depth, and therefore the ambiguity, of a Chekhovplay with the grotesquery of the avant-garde satire a la Mayakovsky’s Bath Houseor Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera. Babel was aiming at a new kind of theater,
anticipating SamuelBeckett’s Waiting forGodot by some twodecades.
A series of para-doxes posed by the playdestined it, sooner or later,to run afoul of the Sovietcensor. Babel was awarethat Maria, as he wrote tohis mother, did not toe the“general line.” Indeed,the play ends before thewoman worker gives birthwith enough said to makethe outcome of her
pregnancy—a common allegory for the revolution— to appear uncertain.Nevertheless, and in 1933-34 not unreasonably so, he had great hopes for Maria asa stage success and, more important, as a work opening a new period in hisdevelopment as a writer. He also hoped that it would put an end to the rumors—nodoubt, known to Stalin—that Babel’s diminished output signified his unwillingness totake part in the construction of the Soviet Stalinist legend.
Thematically, Maria was a play following the fashions of the late 1920s andearly 1930s and echoed what was by then a Soviet classic, Alexei Tolstoy’s novel,Sisters, part of the trilogy entitled Road to Calvary (Khozhdenie po mukam, henceBabel’s Mukovnin). Several civil war playswere successfully produced and enjoyedconsiderable critical acclaim. Armored Train1469 by his old friend and now the husbandof his former lover, was a runaway success.In short, Babel had every reason to believethat Maria might do the same service forhim.5 His earlier play, The Sunset (1928), hada mixed reception and premiered inMoscow in 1928 while he was in France. Thistime, he took great care in orchestrating hiscome-back in order to maximize the play’svisibility, not to mention the income fromadvances. He had parts of the playpublished early in 1934 in Moscow andLeningrad and gave public readings atvarious venues, feeding the excitement andpaving the way for the play’s future triumphon stage. For awhile, everything proceededaccording to plan. Maria was beingconsidered, perhaps even rehearsed,
Babel at work, 1933.
Babel with daughter Nathalie, in Paris, 1933.
It was in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was erected, that I firstencountered a text by Isaac Babel, a slim paperback titled Budyonny’sReiterarmee (Red Cavalry in English translation). Reading these short stories,I was immediately caught by the power and scope of Babel’s vision, theway he captured the events described in their complex reality, in theirambiguities and abrupt turns from horrifying cruelty to the grotesque and,often, farcical behavior, as he had witnessed it all while serving with theSoviet cavalry during the Polish campaign of 1920.
When a few years later, in 1964, an at the time completely unknownplay, Maria, received its first ever production in Italy and, soon after, inGermany, I got hold of the German translation and rediscovered whathad fascinated me in Babel’s cavalry stories. There was, in addition, theamazing dramatic structure he had created to unfold his narrative of anodd assembly of people who, caught in the turmoil of 1920 civil-warPetersburg, are swept way down, or up, from their previous station in Russiansociety. It was the combination of vibrant, colorful, often controversialcharacters and Babel’s particular epic, one might say: film-like, dramaturgythat made me keen on staging the play. By then, I was living and workingin America, and I tried to interest producers and regional theaters in Babel’sdaring text — a rather naïve attempt, I must admit. Since there was noEnglish translation yet available and I could only describe the play andexplain what made it so fascinating to me.
When Gregory Freidin approached the Drama Department and askedif we would stage one of Babel’s two plays for the conference “The Enigmaof Isaac Babel” that he planned for 2004, there came at last the occasionto explore in production the many aspects of Maria that had captivatedas much as puzzled my imagination since I first read the text forty yearsago. I hope that our audience will understand and share my fascinationwith Babel’s play and the way he makes us watch women and men whoare trapped in a world of rapid and cruel change, while they try to negotiateevents beyond their control that might either destroy or lift up their lives.
—Carl Weber
Isaac Markovich Dymshits
Bishonkov (a cripple)
Yevstigneich (a cripple)
Viskovsky
(a former captain of the guard)
Filip (a cripple)
Lyudmila Nikolaevna Mukovnina
(daughter of General Mukovnin)
Katerina Vyacheslavovna Velzen (Katya)
(a live-in relative of the Mukovnins)
Nikolai Vasilievich Mukovnin
(a former general in the Czar’s army)
Nefedovna (the Mukovnin’s nanny)
Sergey Hiliaronovich Golitsyn
(a former prince)
Kravchenko
(a former Czarist officer, now in the Red army)
Madame Dora
Inspector
Policeman
Drunk in Police Station
Kalmykova
Red Army Soldier
Agasha (a janitor)
Andrei (a floor polisher)
Kuzma (a floor polisher)
Aristarkh Petrovich Sushkin
(an antiques dealer)
Safonov (a worker)
Elena (his wife)
Nyushka (a young woman from the country)
. . . . . . Zack
. . . . . . James Poskin
. . . . . . Matthew Griffin
. . . . . . Kyle Gillette
. . . . . . James Lyons
. . . . . . Audrey Dundee Hannah
. . . . . . Rachel Joseph
. . . . . . Thomas Freeland
. . . . . . Kathryn Syssoyeva
. . . . . . Michael Hunter
. . . . . . Tim Youker
. . . . . . Ana Carbatti
. . . . . . Dan Gindikin
. . . . . . Eli Peterson
. . . . . . Brad Rothbart
. . . . . . Holly Thorsen
. . . . . . Daniel Sack
. . . . . . Mandana Khoshnevisan
. . . . . . Edward Drapkin
. . . . . . Justin Liszanckie
. . . . . . Barry Kendall
. . . . . . Andrew Hendel
. . . . . . Emily Fletcher
. . . . . . Lisa Rowland
Cast(In order of Appearance)
simultaneously by two Moscow companies (the Vakhtangov Theater and the JewishState Theater, where it was to play in Yiddish) and one in Leningrad.
But on December 1, 1934, the world changed. The assassination of SergeyKirov, the Leningrad Party Secretary and a rising member of the Politburo, abolishedthe rules of the game and signaled the beginning of a new wave of repression.Staging a new play by an author as controversial as Babel became too risky foranyone to venture. When Maria was published in April, 1935, in the premier theaterjournal, it appeared carrying its own ball and chain. Running parallel with the textof the play was a patronizing and discouraging review by the arts editor of Pravda,Isai Lezhnev. The reader’s eye could conveniently skip from the play’s dialogue,printed on the upper part of the page, to Lezhnev’s droning critique below wherethe reader could learn quickly whether Babel had overdone it on sex and underdoneit on the class approach (Lezhnev though he had done both). But the stringentreviewer left a glimmer of hope. Citing the author’s private communication andsome of the play’s details suggesting that Maria was part of a sequel, Lezhnevadvised Babel, if he wished to see his Maria on stage, to tone down the sex and toclarify his ideological stand in the upcoming Maria II. For awhile, Babel tried to oblige,though apparently without much success, or enthusiasm. The project was simplyabandoned, sharing the fate of Babel’s earlier plans to produce a peacetime sequelto Red Cavalry.
Busy with his lucrative assignments for the Soviet film industry, Babel nowfocused his efforts in the literary arena on preserving his legacy—negotiating neweditions of his writings, with a few new or unpublished stories—all in the chokingatmosphere of brutal ideological diktat and mounting mass terror. Gorky’s passingin 1936 made Babel more vulnerable than ever. As his friends and colleagues weredisappearing, all he had to protect him was his visibility among the anti-fascist circlesin the West, especially France—for as long as Stalin hoped for an alliance with Western
Babel , just after his arrest in May 1939
Set DesignMark Guirguis
Sound DesignAdrian Coburn
DramaturgyGregory Freidin
Kathryn Syssoyeva
Costume DesignConnie Strayer
Lighting DesignAndrew M. Reid
Stage ManagerLisa Vargas
Assistant DirectorAssistant Stage Managers
Light Board OperatorSound Board Operator
DresserMakeup
Run Crew
Kathryn SyssoyevaEli PetersonLisa RowlandMalika WilliamsStephanie FriedmanEan DeVaughnJennifer Rose CarrPallen ChiuYana KesalaMeghan Dunn
DirectorCarl Weber
Mariaby Isaac Babel
translation by peter constantine
adapted for the Stanford Stageby Gregory Freidin
Staff
Turntable Controls By: Systems West
powers against Hitler. By the spring of 1939, Stalin had decided to switch sides andseek a deal with Nazi Germany. Whether by coincidence or intent (we shall neverknow), Babel was arrested on May 15, 1939, soon after the pro-German Molotovreplaced pro-Western Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. Seven monthslater, Babel was convicted of the preposterous crime of spying for France and Austriaand for belonging to a “Trotskyist terrorist organization.” He denied the chargesthroughout the investigation and during the trial, but he was shot in the Lubyankabasement the next day. His personal archive, confiscated during the arrest, hasnever been recovered despite his official exoneration in 1954.
A s of this writing, the play has had successful runs in Italy,Czechoslovakia, and both East and West Germany in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.In 1979, it was adapted for and shown on BBC television. In 1990, it appeared on thetheater stage in London Old Vic’s. In 1994, it was finally staged in Russia by MikhailLevitin in his Moscow theater “Ermitazh.” Why Maria has not generated any stagehistory in the US is whole other story.
—Gregory Freidin1 “Khodya” (Chinaman), 1923.2Victor Shklovsky, “I. Babel: A Critical Romance,” Lef 2 (1924):153.3 The Cheka, or the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression
of Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, was founded by decree in December, 1917,and continued under various names all throughout the Soviet period (GPU, NKVD,MVD, KGB). The security services of the post-communist Russia, the FSB, still considerthemselves part of this unbroken tradition.
4 In 1937, Shchadenko (1885-1951), was appointed by Stalin DeputyPeople’s Commissar of Defense to head the all-important Personnel Department ofthe Red Army.
5 Vsevolod Ivanov’s Armored Train 14-69 (1927), K. Trenev’s Liubov’ Yarovaya(1926), and Vs. Vishnevsky’s Pervaia konnaia (1930), and of course, Mikhail Bulgakov’sThe Days of the Turbins (1927), which after Stalin’s personal intervention becamethe mainstay of the Maly Theater repertoire.
Photos of Maria Denisova are from the catalogue of the Denisova Exhibitionat the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow. The Committee on Culture of the City ofMoscow and V.V. Mayakovsky State Museum. Pictures of Civil War Petrograd arefrom the Sokolov Album at the Hoover Institution Archives. Other photographs arecourtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives. Cover photo by Davey Hubay.
Food for the production was generously donated by:
650.941.9330225 San Antonio Road, Ste. 3Mountain View, CA 94040(Safeway Plaza at California St.)
European Deli & BakeryAuthentic Russian Food
Corporate/Private Party Cateringwww.BestRussianFood.com
SAMOVARSAMOVARSAMOVARSAMOVARSAMOVAR
Director of ProductionTechnical Director
Production Stage ManagerShops SupervisorCostume Designer
Scenic DesignerCostume Shop Supervisor
Technical SupervisorPublicity Coordinator
Prop MasterSet Shop Crew
Costume TechniciansCostume Crew
Michael RamsaurRoss WilliamsAlison DuxburyPaul StrayerConnie StrayerMark GuirguisBirgit PfefferKenny McMullenMandy KhoshnevisanChristina ChaoMichele Cash, Mollie Chapman,Joseph Frega, Melisa Hill,Chienlan Hsu, Chris Junge,Margaret Lee, Becca Thal,Alexei Syssoyev, John WhiteMindy Lieu, Katie FuruyamaJennifer Beichman, DeMara Cabrera,Megan Cohen, Kristen Del Rio,Anna Kerrigan, Emily Livadary,Alida Payson, Linda Serrato
special thanks
Davey Hubay, Larissa Rhyzhik, Toby Holtzman, Galina Leytes, StanfordUniversity, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, Center forRussian, East-European, & Eurasian Studies, Taube Center for JewishStudies, Division of Literatures, Cultures, & Languages, Hoover InstitutionLibrary and Archives, Institute for International Studies, Stanford HumanitiesCenter, Irwin T. & Shirley Holtzman, The Leytes Foundation.
Mariawill run
without anintermission.
There will begunshotsonstage
during theperformance.
To receive emails about future productions, send an email [email protected] and write “subscribe performance-announce.”
Department of Drama
production staff
Photographyand
Videotapingare Prohibited.
MARIAby Isaac Babel
translation by
peter constantine
adapted for the stanford stage by
Gregory Freidin
directed by
Carl Weber
February 19–21 and 26–28 at 8pm
February 29 at 5pm
Pigott Theater
Stanford University
The Stanford Department of Drama 2003–2004 Presents:
photo credits:Davey Hubay • Alexey Smirnov
There will besmokingonstage
during theperformance.
upcoming from the department of drama...
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, directed by Matthew DaubeMar. 3–6 at 8pm, Mar. 5 at 10:30pm & Mar. 7 at 2pm. Nitery Theater, Old Union
